Six Years

Six years of these things flying over our house and sometimes landing almost right in our back yard. And every time, we still grab the camera.

This past weekend marked our sixth anniversary of moving to this house and this town. Both felt pretty foreign and strange, both the town & the house, back in May of 2004.  And now both feel like home. Home.  

Recently a local friend said, "if not for the kids, I probably wouldn't live here," and I was quick to agree. In fact, I'm usually the one to start conversations with that line myself.  But following that train of thought leads to a lot of confusion, begging the question, "well, then where WOULD you go?"  For all of its insular claustrophobia, this town offers clean air, strong breezes in the late afternoon, excellent schools and a sense of community that is often occasionally suffocating to me personally, but truly remarkable in this day and age, in the context of the big picture. 


Do I sound a little conflicted? Six years in, I still am, fer shur.  Growing up in several towns around L.A. and Orange counties, I felt like I knew what "suburban" meant, for isn't L.A. just one big sprawl of suburban communities, after all?  Then I moved here, and understood that THIS is the Suburbs, with a big 'ol honkin' capital letter.  Most days here are good. Many are great.  And in the end, I'm still mighty grateful that more urban areas such as Long Beach, San Diego, and greater O.C. are only about an hour away.


A little slideshow of the family room, to mark the course of the years: 

I took this picture on one of our walk-throughs of the house, when it still belonged to the original owners.  Our house is about 10 years old this year. This is all their stuff, and that's not the lighting --  that's peach paint on the walls.

And here's my first take on painting the room,  a neutral cream, and this reddish cinnabar color.

Another view. Note the slipcoverd sofas. Urgh, they usually looked like unmade beds. I guess I never learned how to properly tuck them.

A new sectional, and a new paint color. Very warm! Especially when it was 97 degrees outside, which it pretty much stays from July through October.  I liked this color during the day -- but at night, it became Bright Yellow School Bus.  I hated looking at it every night. 

 

Which bring us to here, pretty much. (There is more art keeping that lonely one company now.) As I've said before, it's really difficult to take an accurate shot of this color. It fades out in pictures, but I love it -- a bright, warm, modern green. Note how much more lumpy broken in the sectional looks now. 

But here are a couple of shots that truly gauge how much things have changed around here since we moved in.  Back then, it was just me and the mister and this cute little thing: 

And now we are this: 

 

But as long as we're together, it's always Home.  (Awww.) 

(But true.) (And another shot of the green paint.) 

And hey, check it out up there on top: I got my very own URL!