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Rich Hanson
Blog

02/16/2015
President's day 2015
I am sitting in our apartment in Boston's North End looking out over the mounds of snow after successive snow storms. Last entry on this very occasional content update is from May 2009 as we were preparing to return to the east coast from a two year stint in Tucson AZ. Never quite got back to update this blog.

Our stay in Philadelphia last 4 enjoyable years in two Old City apartments. The last was a great loft. Old City was an interesting neighborhood, fairly quiet during the week. But come the weekend it was club central. Coming home late on Friday or Saturday was sometimes an adventure as the party people were everywhere. Still it was a good place to live. Close to subway. Easy to get anywhere in the region.

The Philly area had a active music scene which we took full advantage of. We went in every direction to hear local, regional and national acts. Between Tin Angel, World Café Live, Burlap & Bean, Steel City, Sellersville Theatre and many more there was always shows to go to.

Things were cruising along nicely until Charming Shoppes my employer for 10+ years was bought by Ascena Retail. By itself not a tragedy but as part of a corporate reorganization Ascena was moving my job to Columbus OH. Not somewhere I really wanted to go. Luckily an opportunity with another company came up.

While contemplating what to do when the job with Charming / Ascena ended I got a call about taking a job with Orchard Brands based Massachusetts. We could live in Boston and I could reverse commute to work in the suburbs. So once again we packed our things and started a new adventure in a new city.

In exploring neighborhoods in Boston we discovered the North End. The North End is and old Italian enclave where much still remains of the original. It probably has more Italian restaurants then the rest of Boston. It has mix of all sorts of people living here. Plus it is a prime tourist attraction. On summer weekends there are people everywhere. Our apartment overlooks Salem St, one of the primary streets, and we can watch tourist and residents go by all day long. If you like being in the middle of the full urban experience this is a great place to be.

And music … the Boston area has more music then any place we've been. There are shows available almost every night if we had the time and money. As it is we get to two or three shows some weeks.

So here we are almost two years after moving from Philadelphia six years since Tucson. We are very happy with our latest move. How long will we stay in Boston? Who knows, at this point we don't see us moving out of the area anytime soon or perhaps ever. But then we've said that before.

Until next time (whenever that might be).
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