What I'll miss

♦ The scent of sagebrush in the air.

♦ The many, many clear nights when I could step out to the park a few blocks away and marvel at a star-strewn velevet-black sky.

♦ Amanda at The Alibi and the fact that she would hand-squeeze lemons for our Saturday night vodka sours. Bless her.

♦ The fact that it was 99 percent safe to run outside late at night, and that the 1 percent of danger came not from rapists and murderers, but from porcupines and foxes.

♦ The sight of the Snowies.

♦ The four-hour drive home.

♦ Erin, Robert, Joe, Josh, Justin, Sholty, Angela, Christa, Rachel, Cindy, the crew at SREFC and most of the Boomerang staff.

♦ My huge, huge, HUGE closet in my rather spacious apartment. And my kitchen table/storage surface/filing space.

♦ My sweet next-door neighbors and their kids.

♦ Late-night chats, sandwiches, coffee, etc. with other crazy Laramie insomniacs at their offices, in the park, at their homes ...

♦ Night Herron Books, Nu2U, Altitude, Coal Creek, Jimmy John's (they don't have one where I'm going ... sad), Fat Burrito, the Front Street Tavern, the martinis at Tommy Jack's, the cherry chicken salad sandwich at Jeffrey's, the Thai Pie and the spinach turkey cranberry salad at Grand Avenue Pizza ...

There are a lot of things I WON'T miss. At all. But it might be considered ungracious to list any of them here.

I'll just say that there still haven't been any regrets over my decision to leave, that I'm super-excited about where I'm going, what I'll be doing, what I'll be near and the life I hope I'll have after I've left Wyoming. It's time. It's definitely time.