I think that's the first time I've ever been in a buffista dream. Also, I'm totally going to start telling people they're going to heaven for stuff.

When I was growing up, my best friend's neighborhood was the place to be. Tons of kids roaming the street. Late night games of hide and seek. Open door policies at just about everybody's house. I remember we had dirt wars at construction sites.

I also spent a lot of time up at the high school with Dad during football season, playing on the tackling dummy or the bleachers. I also thought watching game film was fun because I knew the people in the movie.

Then of course there was all that time spent at my grandparents roaming the woods by ourselves. K just let Beau spend his first weekend away from her, and while she was fretting over her mother watching him closely enough, I reminded her that we pretty much were left to our own devices down at the lake. She told me that that wasn't a good example and that we were lucky we aren't dead. I suppose she has a point. We were scaling and gutting our own fish before we were 10, plus they let us go wild with power tools.

Lastly, I only recently got a dishwasher, but it is much more convenient. I would rather give that up than the cell. Mr. Jane and I are almost never at home at the same time, so it's nice to be able to reach each other when we get a second. I love the DVR, but it's less useful than the Tivo we had with DirecTV. I miss dual channel recording.

Oh, Cindy, we can write ya a book. In fact, we already did, for Dana.

Raleigh is a much smaller city than Boston. It sort of has suburbs (Cary=Containment Area for Relocated Yankees, Apex, Fuquay-Varina), but lots of suburban neighborhoods that are actually in Raleigh (=North Raleigh). Very sprawly, especially to the North. Lots of new developments - the whole region was mostly built since 1980. Good schools in North Raleigh, Cary is renowned for them. A realtor could tell you more. Raleigh had has such growth that they are going to mandatory year-round schools in some areas because they can't build schools fast enough to keep up with the kids.

Durham and CH/C are smaller than Raleigh but also older and more funky and have more of a community feel. mr. flea commutes from central Durham to Raleigh and it's 20-30 minutes depending on traffic. This is considered a long commute, for the region - those of us from the northeast laugh and laugh.

I miss the northeast like crazy down here - the weather, the shore, the landscape and trees. But it's a decent place to live, and lots cheaper than Boston.

Do they live right in the city, or in a suburb? What are the Raleigh suburbs?

They live within the Raleigh city limits, but just barely, way on the eastern side of town. It's about a twenty-minute ride from their place to downtown. It was pretty much country when they moved out there about 6 years ago. The tobacco farm that borders their backyard is still there but the rest of the area has been very built up.

There are little stores and the girls' (brand new) elementary school where my SiL also teaches within a couple of miles of their house but the roads are really too busy, and there are no sidewalks to speak of, for them to walk much of anywhere outside of their development. But there is supposed to be a big, multi-use city park built within safe walking distance of their house in the next couple of years.

When I was 10 we moved to Reston, which is one of those planned communities. It was an interesting place to grow up in. [link]

You can actually see my mom's place in the Lake Anne Center photo. I think the best thing about it was that when it started in the '60s, it attracted people who dug the modern architecture and the slightly radical ideas behind it, so it was a self-selecting group of cool people. For example, it had a high amount of mixed marriages, as it was one of the only communities near DC where black or mixed-race couples could not only easily get a mortgage but they would feel comfortable. Good to grow up in that kind of environment.

My biggest problem with the planned communities is that the houses tend to all look either exactly or very much alike, which I find unsettling.

The grandparents' houses were always fun on visits. Both of them lived on small family farms, but Gramma Moran's place was larger, with more out buildings and farm equipment than Grandpa Astrom's (all he had was a small barn with some tractors in it). The dairy equipment (which was still there even though they had sold the cows back in the late '50s) at Gramma's was really neat, and my great-uncle boarded his old horse Dolly in the dilapidated stable until I was about 7, when she died. The chicken shed was there until I was in junior high or so, but had been cleaned out years earlier. It was still a cool place to hang out--a little octagonal building.

We'd always play hide-and-seek at Gramma's with limits on where to hide (otherwise, they'd be looking forever!), and the apple trees were perfect to climb up (one of them had a notch about three feet off the ground that was the ideal first step up into the tree--the others were more difficult). On top of it all, the attic had lots of cool things stored up there, including old school papers of my mom's (she did a really critical analysis of McCarthy in 1953 when she was only 14--her liberal side came out early!) and a really neat victrola that my cousin convinced Gramma to give to him (jerk--everyone wanted that thing!!).

I'm curious about it because the concepts seem good, but a) I'm wondering about the implementation and b) is there any residual weirdness from everything being under one corporate entity's control?

The important question is, does Raleigh have any decent comic book stores?

My major annoyance with Jacob was that he had seen the entire season of Dr. Who already, and he made sure that you knew it. It was very "I'm so-very-clever" to my mind and a bit condescending.

VERY much so. With a double-helping side order of "unnecessarily pretentious".

Oh, Cindy, my Mainer coworker has a UCC church in Durham that I think you'd like. Also, if you'd like to email or call me on the phone at some point, we can do that.