Where I Call Home

The Sweet Shoppe Blog has a challenge this week to tell about the place where we live and how we came to live there. I have lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma, for almost 30 years (aackk!). I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I was going to school at the University of Nebraska at Omaha when I met my husband, who had just finished his master's degree at Oklahoma State University. We met on New Year's Eve, 1976, through mutual friends (a long story for another post).

Anyway, we hit it off immediately, and he started visiting me for long weekends about every 2-3 weeks. It didn't take long to decide that a long distance relationship wasn't what we wanted, so I moved to Stillwater in May, 1977, and we got married in August.

When I first moved here, the idea was that I would finish college (I had 2 years left) and then we would move. But when I finished my accounting degree, my husband had been looking for jobs (his degree was in biology and he wanted to work in fisheries). Jobs in his field weren't easy to find. He had been working as a technician at OSU in the department where he'd gotten his masters, and a few months after I graduated, I got a job in the accounting department at OSU and he got a more permanent job at Langston University (about 20 miles from Stillwater). We thought that we would stay a couple more years (so our resumes would look better) and then move.

When we decided to have a child, we decided that Stillwater would be a pretty good place to raise him. And we thought that when we retired we might move. Well, I haven't worked outside the home since 1992, and my DH retired in 2002, and we're still here. I'm not sure we'll ever leave now. We bought our first home in 1981, and then bought land and built our second home (where we still live) in 1989.

Here is a layout of our home:

Credits: Morning Bloom Kit by Lauren Grier, available at Sweet Shoppe Designs

Fonts: Times New Roman and Artistamp Medium

Misc: Circle by Dianne Rigdon from Art Inspiration Collection Kit, available at ScrapArtist

Sketch by Rachael Giallongo (InLoveWithDOTS) at The Digichick