Yes, this news story was a bit of an eye-opener. So it’s only one of those specialty stories by a specialty media outlet, but still; how very nice to know that I had the good taste and good fortune to wind up living in San Antonio. Whooda thunk it? Apparently we scored really high on clean air and water, reasonable housing costs and diversity, whatever the heck that means – possibly the ready availability of breakfast tacos, the food of the gods, at some divey little outlet on every block of every major street in town, and being able to buy bottled cajeta . Why, yes indeedy, we are diverse, and some of the neighborhoods are being gentrified at a pace that would warm the cockles of a real-estate investor’s heart. My dear late friend Dave advised looking toward wherever the gays are moving in and rehabbing. By his estimation, that would be Mahnke Park and Government Hill, around the fringes of Ft. Sam Houston. Umm, yes – despite all that you might have heard to the contrary, this part of Texas is diverse. They’re just not about doing it in the road and frightening the horses, k’?

Part of the charm – and there is considerable charm, once you can get past the incredibly awful summer heat – is that San Antonio is a small town, cunningly disguised as a city. I swear that everyone is only two or three degrees removed from everyone else. It seems to be a very tight set of interlocking circles, and once you become a member of two or three of them then you are linked to everyone that all the people in your various circles are linked to, and so on and so on. I wish I could play this a little better, because I would probably sell more books that way, but still, it is amazing how you can put out a call for help and have so many people just pop out of the woodwork. Last year, I needed to become acquainted with the workings of an 1836 Colt Paterson revolver – and lo and behold, within a couple of days I was getting a briefing session with the only owner of a replica pair in the whole of San Antonio. (Note to self – must remember to tell this nice person when the Adelsverein Trilogy will be available, and to include a thank-you in the book notes. Yes, there will be notes and a laundry-list of people and institutions who have helped me incredibly with the whole project!)

The walk with Weevil and Spike – or rather the usual round of them dragging me around the neighborhood at a brisk pace this morning only made me realize again that this is a very nice place to live; the sky was a clear rain-washed blue and it was cool, much cooler than we normally have a right to expect for May. Recent rains have made everything green, everyone’s garden looks lovely, even those gardens of neighbors who don’t usually fuss with their garden. There are some houses for sale, but no more than usual – and I expect that a lot of them will be snapped up in the summer PCS season. Yes, that is another sort of diversity; having military rotate in and out, and for a lot of them to retire here. I had read somewhere or other that just about every Korean restaurant along Harry in the vicinity of Fort. Sam was started by an Army spouse. This sort of phenomenon probably also counts for the Vietnamese restaurants and the British tearooms.

And if I needed any more proof of the fact that San Antonio is a very nice and upcoming place to move to, I have only to look out the kitchen window. They have put the frames, roofs and siding on two more houses that I can see, in the new development that took up the segment of the green-belt along Nacogdoches road. Every Sunday that we take the dogs around through the new development (which is called Rose Meadows, BTW – even though there aren’t any roses and hardly any meadows left!) a house or two more is finished, a house or two more is sold and a house or two more is moved into.

Hopefully by nobody who will be such an idiot as the one who abruptly cut in front of me from the center turn-lane on Perrin-Beitel just below the turn-off for Nacogdoches. Yeah, you in the beige Toyota Corolla. We got all the idiots we can handle – can you please learn some basic courtesy or go back to where you came! Thanks a bunch, sweetcakes – You’ll make San Antonio an even better place to live, in either case. We have a reputation to keep up, now.