it's sooo close!

So the day after I posted about craving fall, I could *feel* it. It's almost there. It felt so good to curl up in my blanket when I got into bed, and while I was walking from my car to class, I thought I might be a little more comfortable with a sweatshirt on. I got home from work early, and so Adam and I went for a walk through the neighborhood with the Big Dog. I have a hard time not being 5 years old when I walk through my neighborhood. Bear in mind, this is the neighborhood I WAS 5 years old in - I lived there from age 0-18, lived in Wisconsin for 6 months, then came back. Then I lived in Signal Hill/Seal Beach/Long Beach for about 1 year while I was 21/22, then moved back there, went to Alaska for 4 months when I was 23, came back there for a few months, then Adam and I moved to Huntington Beach where we lived for about a year, and now we are back in Los Alamitos, one street over from my parent's house, where I grew up.

It is fantastic, let me tell you. I skip through the streets, I know where the cracks are, I know which houses I like to walk by and which I don't (there is a gray house on our street where the 'witch' lives and a house with a weird ornate gated front patio that I always pictured Jayne Mansfield's cult from Witch Baby to live in and so I never walked by since I didn't want to be snatched by sugar-coma'd crazies), I used to pretend that the very clean, square blue house was the house that Jane went to in Half Magic when she stopped being a part of their family... I've actually been inside many of the houses in that tract - when I was little all of my friends were from there. I'd even been inside the house we're living in before - I knew the landlords when I was younger. There has been a lot of remodeling in the neighborhood - the houses are definitely getting bigger, and there are two boats in two driveways, and yes, some of the sidewalk cracks have been fixed. But for the most part it's the same. I can remember walking the same streets and feeling driven to desperation with the need to get OUT, thinking that I lived somewhere like Edward Scissorhands, and how could I keep surviving somewhere like that? Now I am back, and I love it. One more piece of evidence that I am no longer 14 years old.


Annnnyways, Adam and I took Rommel and went for a walk, and I skipped and grinned and Adam smiled to see me goofy and we talked to the people in their front yards and smelled the smells and pointed out features of houses that we liked and then I got back and went to class and then went to Sprouts (my new favorite grocery store), and then came home and cooked, a lot!

I made stir fry and soup, so of course I am now craving enchiladas. I've been insanely hungry today.