Friday Five: Love the One You're With

For this week's RevGals Friday Five, Kathrynzj posted something quite timely for me:

"...name five things you like about where you are living now... and as your bonus - 1 thing you don't like."

Timely because tomorrow, I'm packing the car and officially beginning life back in our home state. My new job starts Monday. The Alpha and I will live apart until the house is sold and we find one there that suits us.

So the answers to this Friday Five would be very different if I played a day late. But, living in the present, here we go:

1) I like having The Alpha with me. I'm not happy about him hanging out here, with me hanging out there (albeit with the dogs, at his parents' house... it's some consolation). So I just added Billy Joel's "You're My Home" to my iSuperPhone's iThing, which should help me maintain the appropriate amount of melancholy during this temporary separation of unknown duration.

2) The congregation we've called home these past 10 years. Last Sunday I said goodbye to the band and choir. And yea, verily, that sucked, even though it went as well as it could've and it created great memories. I scheduled a Wednesday night diversion this week, the first week I wasn't supposed to be at practice. After I got home from the dinner, I received a text message from a fellow bandmate... "Leaving rehearsal- it's official: we miss you." *sigh...* I miss them, too.

3) Our house. We've worked pretty hard on it. We've made lots of changes in 10 years. It feels like ours now, even when it's all clean and neat for real estate showings and we have to hide the towels we actually use instead of drying our hands on the ones hanging up.

4) The convenience of living near a big city.

5) The friendships we've built here, and which we hope to preserve across the distance.

And, for the bonus... I think, in the interest of making the separation easier, I'll list more than one thing I don't like: The traffic. The shifting soil. The governor. The way developers keep bulldozing over unspoiled land to build strip malls, even though existing storefronts stand empty. The air pollution. I could go on.