It's been a cold, wet winter - there have been days that I've had to put the top up on my convertible. The Chamber of Commerce never mentioned rain and fog in the relocation pamphlets; I want my money back.

According to the NWS site, we're ahead of normal for rainfall for the last six months - that's a good thing indeed.  The surrounding hills are - well, somebody has to say it. They are green. Actual green, as in "the color of plants that contain water and perform photosynthesis". There is grass everywhere - sprouting up between the cacti and the creosote bushes.

Green is a nice thing, when it's unusual; when it's always that way, you never notice it. In fact, I never noticed it when I lived in Alabama; it wasn't until I moved to Arizona that I noticed how green things were went I went back East. In fact, the first time that I traveled back to the Southeast after moving to the West, I noticed three things - green grass, black people, and cigarette smoke. I had forgotten about all three of them - in Tucson, nobody smoked, there weren't any black people, and grass was a cultivated crop that grew in very small areas in backyards (hidden away from the neighbors, of course - if you had a lawn in Tucson, then you needn't bother running for office. Nobody would vote for you).

If you look at the bottom right corner of the above photo, you'll see our new house-number sign, painted on the curb; that's so that the pizza folks can find us. It's helpful to have those numbers out there - although I'm awfully glad that my pizza-delivery days were over before I moved to Anthem. All of the houses here look the same; my father-in-law refuses to drive anywhere, because he's certain that he'd never find his way back.

Take a stranger from the great Heartland, and drop him in Anthem - where everything already looks the same anyway, where there are no landmarks or corner stores, where everything is designed to conform and nothing is allowed to stand out - and then cover everything with fog. That's a prescription for getting lost. I can see why Bud wouldn't want to leave the house.