How do you like where you currently live?

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You wake up, look around... what's your TAKE on what you see?

[AArdvark]

It gets better here every year! The only way I'm leaving is horizontally

THE
LAST HOME
ON THE
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I've told this story before and told it to be people in person, so please be kind if you have already heard it.

I used read about true crime before I went to bed. One of the fugitives I'd read about in the hope that maybe they would one day catch him was the East Area Rapist, otherwise known as the Original Night Stalker. He had a crime spree of murder and rape in the mid to late 1970s in Sacramento, California. In April of 2018 I was reading some forums before going to bed and there was buzz because people that worked for a police department in California had let it leak that []they had caught him.[/i] They had caught him! He was probably in the top three when it comes to mysterious people whose identity I never thought we'd learn in my life time. Up there with the murderer of JonBenet Ramsey, the skyjacker D.B. Cooper and whoever the person was that originally pissed in Bruce's cereal.

Well, learning this news I had to shake my beautiful wife awake. She had been in a content slumber for some time. Babe. Babe!! They caught him! They caught the Original Night Stalker!

You and the rest of America can finally sleep safely!

She nodded and went back to bed.

---

Fast forward to February of 2019. I was asleep and my wife was looking at properties for sale. We had been living in downtown Denver for four years. We had turned a house that probably should have been condemned into a home. It was where I proposed to her, where we said goodbye to four of our pets and where the act of turning a dump into a nicely livable space meant the value of the home (along with the normal rise of Denver real estate) meant where we living was worth a lot more than we bought it for. It was on this day that she woke me up and showed me pictures of a beautiful home west of Denver, a place that is kind of in a forest and kind of on a mountain and certainly away from the qualities of a large North American city and all it entails.

We visited it and bought it and it's the best place I've ever lived. I've been lucky as each place I have moved to while living on my own has been nice and had nice qualities and I've never felt I've necessarily "downgraded" but where we are is truly beautiful. A few too many "earthy" tones as I look out the window to be honest, but other than that I can't complain.

[Flack]

It's tough justifying living in Oklahoma to people who haven't been here, much less live here. From an outsider's perspective, there seems to be more reasons to leave than to stay. We've got tornados, we've got a high unemployment rate, and we've got a lot of poverty. There's no mass transit. If you like wide-open spaces, trees, lakes, and wind, Oklahoma's not bad. If you like mountains... not so much. If you don't like surprises during elections, it's great.

Oklahoma is nearly 70,000 square miles and has 4 million people. There's no grid lock and barely any 5 o'clock traffic. I-35, which reaches from Canada to Mexico, goes through Oklahoma City -- so does I-35, which runs from California to North Carolina. A lot of things are made here and a lot of things are shipped through here, which contributes to the low cost of living. Houses and rent run approximately 1/2 the national average. Most of the people I know have at least 1/2 acre of land. Many of the newer suburbs have 1 and 2 acre lots. Being in the center of the county means we have every kind of restaurant. It's easy to get here, and to travel from here.

I've been to all 50 states, so I'm not dumb. There are so many wonderful places to to see and live. I love visiting them but it only takes a week or so for me to start missing home. Other places are too expensive, have too many people, too much traffic, too much noise. I was born in Oklahoma and I'll probably die here.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, the times I have visited it has been amazing. I think if I got ejected from Colorado - say, perhaps, a "loser leaves town" steel cage match with James Holmes, my list would be:

1) New Mexico
2) Oklahoma
3) Ngggggggh probably one of the Dakotas or Montanas.

I cannot stress enough how nice a lack of traffic is. We went into downtown Oklahoma City on like a Friday night when Vark was in town and you had front row parking outside of the Mexican place we visited on JOE CARTER LANE. I would actively avoid restaurants in downtown Denver because parking was so terrible. (I ended up using the spot I parked in for work a lot of times when we were just downtown doing things, to be fair.)

And Oklahoma has plenty of lush, green grass and open areas that we don't get out here since we don't got no water. It's a fine place to live.

[Tdarcos]

And Oklahoma has plenty of lush, green grass and open areas that we don't get out here since we don't got no water. It's a fine place to live.

No kidding that Colorado is short on water. All yo have to eo is look up a couple ofv Supreme Court cases on Wikipedia: Kansas v. Colorado and Wyoming v. Colorado, where Colorado has been taking too much water out of rivers running between it and other states. In fact, with Kansas there have been seven lawsuits, Colorado has been a bit too thirsty and probably should start importing water, the way California does from the Colorado River (and California has been sued nine times by Arizona over water too.)

I should know, I wrote all three Wikipedia articles about state water lawsuits before the Supreme Court.

[AArdvark]

Of course you wrote them

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

And Oklahoma has plenty of lush, green grass and open areas that we don't get out here since we don't got no water. It's a fine place to live.

No kidding that Colorado is short on water. All yo have to eo is look up a couple ofv Supreme Court cases on Wikipedia: Kansas v. Colorado and Wyoming v. Colorado, where Colorado has been taking too much water out of rivers running between it and other states. In fact, with Kansas there have been seven lawsuits, Colorado has been a bit too thirsty and probably should start importing water, the way California does from the Colorado River (and California has been sued nine times by Arizona over water too.)

I should know, I wrote all three Wikipedia articles about state water lawsuits before the Supreme Court.

Colorado is not short on water.

[AArdvark]

Because they've been stealing water from Kansas and Wyoming all these years. I read it on Wikipedia.

THE
THIRSTY FOR
KNOWLEDGE
AARDVARK