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

Syracuse is in the Final Four. The locals seem very excited by this, as well they should be. Of course, since one week from today I will no longer be a local, I'm not really able to get caught up in it. Alas....I like it when the local teams do well.

The feeling is sort of similar to last fall when we moved. I was all set to vote in Buffalo's various elections, since I knew the issues and candidates, but then we moved a few weeks before Election Day. I ended up not voting at all, because I wasn't able to register in the new district, I certainly wasn't going to drive 130 miles back to the old district, and I'm pretty sure I missed the absentee deadline (which I'm not sure I would have exercised, anyway, since I had no idea that I'd be moving back six months later). I did feel a few pangs of guilt about not voting the night the Democrats' grand strategy -- which was apparently jointly designed by Michael Dukakis and The Amazing Kreskin -- failed utterly, but I consoled myself that as it turned out, the races in Central New York were not even remotely in doubt.

Anyhow, it's strange to note the degree to which I never really came to feel that I lived in Syracuse; the overwhelming sensation was of a six-month jaunt -- like a Rhodes Scholar's trip to Oxford or something like that.