I'm Famous! (locally)(sort of)(well no, not really)

A month or so ago, Josh and I attended a city council meeting that was going to discuss rezoning the street behind our house to allow for general office buildings rather than its current status of single-family residential homes. There are four or five plots of land that are vacant where old houses had been removed so long ago that no trace of them still stands. A developer wanted to buy up the properties but only if he could then build office buildings, which would reduce the size of our neighborhood and increase traffic along one of the only exit routes out of our neighborhood.

I hadn't planned to speak at the meeting but there seemed to be so few people there to protest the rezoning decision, so I volunteered to speak. There's a three-minute time limit on individual citizens' comments, so I was very brief. I explained that we purchased our home because we love the neighborhood and inviting more traffic into our neighborhood reduces the safety and beauty of the area we are so in love with. Despite my and a handful of others' pleas against the development, the city council members voted to move forward with the rezoning and I was pretty devastated. So our beautiful little neighborhood just got reduced by one full street.

While it's not the end of the world, it does add a new safety concern to my life. My children can't play in their backyard with public buildings just on the other side of it. (Technically the office buildings would be built on the far side of the street behind our house, so our backyard would still share a fence with another house, but for how long?) I deem it an inevitability that the houses up and down that street will all eventually fold to commercial construction and I'll be forced to live against a backdrop of businesses and strangers. Boo...

Anyway, this doom and gloom is certainly a bit hyperbolic and will dissipate somewhat over time. Josh and I got some frozen yogurt after the disappointing meeting to temper the bad news (why is ice cream so effective?!) and then we moved on with our lives.

But then Josh found this little nugget in our local paper:

Sorry for the sideways picture. For some reason, I can't make it rotate.

If you squint at the tiny print, you can see that one Camille Bowman is mentioned and slightly misquoted. I'm famous! I'm also totally saving the paper...because we're using newspapers to clean windows in our neighborhood as a Young Women's activity this summer. Can't wait to show my girls that their church leader happens to be a total celebrity before we crinkle the paper up and use it to smear Windex across dirty glass. Those fifteen minutes of fame go by quick, my friends!