Leaving Alpena

We're leaving Alpena. We're moving the household and NewPages World Headquarters downstate. As we go through this process, I'll be writing about yet another experience of moving. Yet another... It used to be that I moved once year, sometimes more frequently. When I was in college, I rarely stayed in the same place past the lease. And after college, well, old habits are hard to break. There always seemed to be a better deal, a better neighborhood, a new romance, one breaking up - whatever the case may be. Even here, it was one year in a rental, and then buying a home, where I've been probably the longest of all - five years. Six years in Alpena.

Six years.

And in those six years: Bought a house. Ended a relationship. Started a new one and got married. Got a new cat, a new dog and a tank of fish. Stopped racing triathlon and marathon, got hurt, got fat, and am slowly beginning to add exercise back into my regular schedule (having a dog helps!). Six years of living and learning, and now I'm ready to put it behind me.

Each day, I run through the mental list of things I'll miss about Alpena, and things I won't miss. Today:

Things I Won't Miss About Alpena

Mosquitos (I have over 40 bites on my legs alone and have to take Benadryl because I react so violently to them - swollen welts up and down my legs.)
Swamps - we live in one, hence the mosquitos.
Being two and a half hours from the nearest major bookstore, restaurants, microbreweries, shopping, university and family.
Being five hours from the nearest cool museum.
No decent literary arts events.
The smell of the pressboard plant.
Flats - no decent hills for miles.
Several of my "colleagues."
Being the organizer instead of the attender of events.
Shoveling snow in two driveways.
Our quarter acre yard, complete with flower bed - I hate yardwork.
Brown Trout Festival - the biggest festival event of the year, and at the center of it all, the beer tent; sorry, but looking at fish on ice as a main summer event is, in a word: mundane. Hence the beer, I suppose.
Deer hunting stories.
Bear hunting stories.
Ice fishing stories.
"No, we don't have it in stock, but we can order it for yous."
Yous.

Any others I could add to this?