From the desert.

We've arrived in Tucson and are fully acclimating to the retirement community. I'm working on my old guy shuffle. L has dyed her hair blue. And the Sunday paper has already been read.

It's actually a really nice paper. One story revealed a drunken Santa rampage among the kiwis. Another reviewed a book about sprawl, which seems odd, as I am in the midst of it at the moment. A ride through town yesterday revealed a very un-dense town center (but that's just a first impression). The book (or maybe the review) seemed to rely heavily on a census analysis that reveals LA to be much more dense than NY or Chicago. I'm sure you can get that analysis, but knowing that just earlier this week I plugged my former address into this cool tool and found 555,000 people living within 3 miles, but only 87,000 near my parents, I want to take a closer look for myself. The LA MSA is really, really big. So is Chicago, but it also has fewer people overall I believe.

Anyway, the review did make one nice point: critics of sprawl often make moral arguments against people that choose to live on the edge. That's true to an extent. I get a little worked up about it sometimes myself. But then I thought of it another way: folks that choose to depend on a single family house and multiple cars per family have had the urban infrastructure designed for them around that choice. Because of that design, my preferred lifestyle is physically impossible in many, many areas.

So there.