A-List Aspirations - Fantastic article from Hank Steuver of the WaPo about the Trouble with Sacramento (with thanks to Mike Stebbins for sharing it with me). The author does a great job of summing up many of my mixed feelings about adopted home of Sacramento. It's definitely got some positive factors in its favor: good job base, affordable housing market, improving downtown. But there's always that nagging feeling about Old Sacramento being a rundown wreck, the restaurant choices being Chili's or Applebees and the fact that we get the amateur high school touring company of Broadway shows three or four years after they've debuted.

"Sacramento, you see, is one of those cities -- a medium-size, C-market, farm-team paradise with a brand-new convention center just waiting to host your regional funeral directors convention, your maxillofacial surgeons conference, your annual training session. It's the kind of city that hangs its hopes on redoing downtown...any inferiority complex is supplanted by a striving, a sense of longing to be a better place."

Don't get me wrong, we're no Topeka, but the relative closeness of San Francisco will forever leave Sacramento feeling like the awkward stepchild of the California family. It can be difficult for me to tow the line of moral superiority (being from Southern California) while also trying to settle in and feel at home in Sacramento. So now you see my moral dilemma as a resident of the capital of the Golden State. Maybe that's why the getaway flights to San Diego and Burbank on Southwest are so popular...