Are You Where You Want to Be?

Today, I'm picking up on an idea put forth by Eric in his blog yesterday: Are you happy with where you're living now? As he says, "It's pretty interesting to ask why someone lives somewhere. More often than not, there's a really engaging story behind it."

OK--I'll bite. At the moment, I'm quite happy with where I'm living now. I really enjoy my house, I'm no more than five hours from anyone in my immediate family, the majority of my closest friends are here, and I really like what I'm doing for a living. Sure, it gets ridiculously hot in the summertime (though not yet this year *knocks wood*), there's no topography to speak of in this part of town, and--most importantly--there could be a much bigger jazz scene. But I'm not sure that I could live in some of the places that do have such a scene (I loved my visit to NYC in January, but it's über-expensive, and I'm not sure that I'd like to raise a family there; I've heard much the same about L.A.), so at the moment, I'm trying to bloom where I've planted myself, and when my band comes out of hibernation in the near future, we'll try our hand at adding to what scene there is here.

So are you where you want to be right now? Why or why not?

Opening the gates of to Hell: A family in Australia is upset that a local Catholic school initially refused to admit their son because of the family's last name--Hell. (If it were my family, I would have changed it a long time ago--to something like Heller or Helling--just to avoid going through...well, hell, for having a name like that.)

There's a bad movie in this somewhere: A lakeside area in China has become overrun with two billion mice after a recent flood of the Yangtze River.