Moving to Who-Ville

So the truth is, the place we're moving into isn't the place we chose at all. We had a house all picked out--it wasn't perfect and some things weren't in as good condition as we would have liked, but the neighborhood was perfect and I was charmed by the breakfast bar and the tiny fenced backyard. The landlord even reacted favorably to my page-long list of repair requests. But in the process of making those repairs, and ELEVEN DAYS before my current lease expired, he decided that since the previous tenants cats had done so much damage, he didn't want this guy living there.

Obviously, we don't travel without him.

That left us in a crunch (read: complete, blind panic). We really wanted a house, but I'm nothing if not a realist and that just wasn't likely to happen in the handful of days I had to find a place and still give us time to get moved.

The girl at the one and only local property management company had a few townhouses and duplexes to show me, but I was having a hard time changing gears and I only agreed to look at them because I had visions of homelessness. Or, worse, having to renew my current lease and stay in The Wrong Town for another year.

At the very last place we looked, I saw this in the courtyard:

I'll admit that The Grinch was never my favorite Dr. Seuss story (even before Jim Carrey got at the character) and I really wanted my own yard, but who doesn't want the Whoville Christmas tree in her front yard? (Save your breath--if you claim that you wouldn't I won't believe you.)

Fair warning to my new neighbors: we will be decorating that tree. Yes, I did say "we".

So it's not everything we wanted, but it's in the place we call home. And the child who sometimes laments that we don't live near her grandmother in rural Indiana has this outside her bedroom window:

And she was so eager to establish that "I live here now" that she settled right in and announced, "I'm sitting in my living room. I took my shoes off."

And, you know, tiny people incapable of malice are going to gather in my yard and sing on Christmas morning.