Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It's amazing how the twists and turns of life are sometimes -- well, most times, to be realistic -- completely unexpected and, though welcome, also traumatic.

My wife's company rewarded two years of her hard work two days ago with a promotion, effective one week from today. That's the great part. The traumatic part comes into play thusly: the promotion entails moving the family, in the space of a single week, one hundred twenty miles down the road to Syracuse, New York.

Leaving Buffalo is sad enough; leaving Buffalo basically with no notice whatsoever is utterly shocking. And it's more than a bit scary, as I really know nothing at all about Syracuse. A move is hard enough; a move to a place that us pretty much completely unfamiliar is quite scary. (And there's the fact that my wife and I have always maintained that if and when we ever moved away from Buffalo we would head west, not farther east.) We spent the last two days there apartment hunting (we seem to have found one), and the town seems fairly nice. It's got a Borders and a Barnes&Noble, so I won't go completely crazy. I was dismayed to find that there is no Target there, but then I was relieved to find that the first Target in Syracuse will be opening sometime next month. (Which means they will be hiring....hmmmmm.....) I also find myself worrying that life in Syracuse won't be as fulfilling as life in Buffalo; Syracuse is one-half Buffalo's size, and I'm also afraid that the Great Lakes character that I love so much about Buffalo -- hell, about the entire Great Lakes region, from Buffalo to Cleveland to Chicago to Wisconsin and, stretching the definition a bit, to the Twin Cities -- will be absent. These fears will, I hope and expect, be laid to rest as I explore my new "home". At the same time, though, I suspect that it will be a long time before I can refer to Syracuse as "home" without the quote-marks.

(If I have any readers from Syracuse, feel free to let me know what's great about your city!)

(And because of the immediacy of the move, this will be the last post to Byzantium's Shores for at least five days, and maybe as much as a week. If disaster strikes, it will be ten days before I'm writing here again -- but I don't expect it to be that long.)