Leaving the Midwest...

The mountains are calling again... it's time to go. Matt and I moved to the Indianapolis area about two years ago from Charlottesville, Virginia. He had just received his PhD in Spanish literature from UVa and took a position as an assistant professor at Wabash College, located in west central Indiana and one of the last three all male colleges in the country. I'm a librarian and found work at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. As we left Charlottesville, the Blue Ridge gave way to the hills of West Virginia. Beautiful and old mountains... I'd come to love the mountains as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal back in the mid-90s. Matt is a native of Utah and was raised by the Wasatch Mountains. Through West Virginia and on into the Ohio Valley, the land slowly becomes an ironed-out flatland full of soy and corn as far as the eye can see. And interstates. Indiana, the "Crossroads of America" - connecting Louisville to Chicago, Cincinnati to Champaign-Urbana, Columbus to St. Louis - check out a road atlas, it looks like an octopus landed on Indianapolis. The state motto, "The Crossroads of America", as if nobody stops there... but we did. Our ship landed in Lebanon, Indiana... a sleepy little Indiana county seat with a beautiful courthouse and affordable Victorian homes. We came with our cat, Leona, who got lost in the attic on day one. She has been joined by the brothers Juan and Marcel. Exhausted from unloading, Matt and I took a break for dinner and walked to a little Chinese joint on the courthouse square. Sitting down, we looked into each others' eyes and were suddenly confronted with the reality of our situation... "Oh my god! What have we done!!" I think tears were shed a little bit. I believe day three was July 4th, so we walked down to watch the Lebanon Independence Day Parade, standing in front of the First Baptist Church. Wow. Were we so naive then? It seems so long ago. We even got the local librarian to notarize an affadavit of domestic partnership so that Wabash would extend benefits to me. It was like spotlighting a deer, handing it a piece of paper and saying, "Sign here please."

So now we're calling this our "Peace Corps Indiana" experience and heading out west to Denver/Boulder. I'll be at the government publications library at CU-Boulder and we'll live in Denver to start out. We'll be out there in a couple weeks and look forward to the mountains and to being in a city where we can walk to the public library, coffee shops, light rail...

I started knitting a few years ago when a friend got breast cancer and I wanted to make something for her. So I knitted a purple hat. Then friends were having babies and I started in on baby blankets, sweaters and hats. I finally knitted an adult sweater for Matt last year, which turned out really well. My latest project, which I just finished a couple days ago is a set of six placemats knitted from four colors. I found the pattern in a book Matt's mother gave me called Knitting Year-Round, published by Better Homes and Gardens.