House Cleaning

Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of activity on this blog for the past month or two. But it's actually good news because we finally sold our vacation house (not really a vacation house, just a fancy way of saying we were paying two mortgages after we moved)! The contract had been signed in early May which meant that I spent two months staring out the window wondering how it would fall apart. Even now with a fistful of cash, I keep thinking a hand will reach out from the ground and take if from me.

And so ends an era in the lives of St. Pauli Girl and myself. With that in mind, I decided to clean up the blog a bit. The first change was the background image. Originally it was a photo of mountains in New Mexico. That didn't seem fair so I changed it to an image which better describes where we now live. The image is a “haboob” which happens several times a year in these parts. Granted the background doesn't do the image justice, so you can click on the “haboob” link on the right side for a live action video of a haboob.

We now live in a more urban area in west Texas which means fewer snakes, less yardwork, fewer meth addicts, and less gunfire but more haboobs. St. Pauli Girl has successfully transitioned back to Professor Pauli Girl. It's a bigger town but have no fear, I am still the real America.

I have removed a lot of the restaurant references because I never wrote as much about it as I thought I would. But there's a wealth of stories to mine from there should it become necessary.

When we closed our restaurant in 2009, we saved three of the most expensive bottles of wine. We opened one on 1/1/2010 for good luck and learned that even really expensive wine won't necessarily change your luck. We opened the second one in March 2012 when we sold our first restaurant effectively getting out of the restaurant business altogether. Finally, we opened the last bottle this past weekend to celebrate the sale of the house and the end of an era.

At one point, St. Pauli Girl asked, “What are you most looking forward to?”

“Being able to walk around without having to constantly look at the ground for snakes and scorpions and being able to use 'haboob' in everyday conversations.”