Lorena and I struggle a little right now with a decision about where to live. We have thought about heading up to Seattle to be closer to Kelly. We went up there last week to see her. Washington is a beautiful and amazing state. Seattle is a beautiful and amazing city. We love all the water of the Puget Sound. There are lots of good restaurants and stores. There are lots of reasons to move to Seattle, but there is the down-side, too. The politics of Seattle are not quite as crazy and deeply immoral as the politics of Portland, but they are pretty crazy and immoral and they have that nasty little anarchist thing going for them, too. Kind of like Eugene, but bigger. We definitely could live there, but we could live a lot of other places.
We actually took the train from Vancouver to Seattle and then an Uber from the train station to Kelly’s apartment. The whole trip was an absolute joy. We actually think we could live happily anywhere from Vancouver up past Seattle and anywhere on the Sound. The tax situation is profoundly better in Washington than Oregon and so is the economy. Still, we have mixed feelings. We really are Oregonians heart and soul. Well, that and Mexican. Everyone we asked said the Mexican food was horrible throughout Seattle, but I cannot believe that is entirely true although I have to admit it would have been very gracious to call the Mexican food we ate Friday night even mediocre.
We are truly up in the air on all this. We have thought it would be good to have at least a half acre and maybe even an acre or two. But we also think, “Why would we do that?” I ran into this article that talks about saving money in economically hard times. It struck a chord with me. We, personally, are not even close to being on hard times, but the article was compelling–it surely feels like economic hard times could arrive to the whole country very quickly. Add to that the fact that Kelly and Christian will probably not stay where they are much longer than it takes them to finish their degrees–maybe 3-4 years, and we are even more trepidatious about this decision of what to do. We want to be as close as is reasonable to our kids.
We are thinking about it. We have decided to keep looking and expand our thinking to include smaller houses on smaller lots in places where we can walk to grocery stores, schools, restaurants and the like. Lorena has always said she could be happy just about anywhere as long is she is less than fifteen minutes from a Costco and twenty minutes from a Trader Joe’s.
Betty Blonde #417 – 02/19/2010
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