Grades were due at 9 this morning, and almost everyone is gone. When first applying for my MA, I wasn’t just picking a school. I was picking a town where I thought I could LIVE. I didn’t pick a town like Phoenix with raging heat and stressful highways. I picked a mountain town, a train town with lots of nice little restaurants and bars—lots of stuff for us to DO. The same thing applied to my MFA selection. Of course, the main thing was for us to return to the South, but we also picked smaller towns with personality.

Milledgeville might be a little too small for Derrick’s taste (and even I think we’re too far from an airport for regular Vegas getaways), but I like this town and I’m glad that we’ve made our home here. I like our comfy house. I like my regular weekend shopping routine of Walmart, Big Lots, and Dollar Tree. When we’ve wanted to do something a little different, we’re in reasonable driving distance away from tons of cool museums, my two favorites so far being the Laurel & Hardy Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Aviation in Warner Robins. We’ve spent weekends away in Chattanooga and at Jekyll Island. A 6 hour driving radius around Milledgeville has TONS of opportunity.

Here’s your backstory: After my sophomore year of college, I moved out of the dorms and into a house. From that point on, I either took summer school classes or worked at the gym during the summer. I would go home for like a week, but that was it. Only about half of my friends went home for the summer—most of them still dorm-livers. Summer was still filled with lots of parties and movie nights.

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