Spring has arrived. We see a lot more deer in the yard this time of year. The greenness of the vegetation is something to behold–it only gets this green west of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest. That deep, deep, Douglas fir shade of green unsurpassed anywhere in the world. It feels good to be here.
Category: House and home Page 3 of 12
I thought this was a nice picture of my brother-in-law, Lauro, the artist. We have several of his pieces in our house and hope to get more. Right now, he is doing something about which I am very envious. He found an old house in a very beautiful setting in the Mexican countryside that is also close to a town with all the services (Internet, grocery shopping, great restaurants, etc.). The house is old (over 100 years) and was in very bad shape when he bought it. He is methodically turning it in to an atelier. He has been taking pictures of the entire process. It will have living space, entertaining space, a modern kitchen, a beautiful fireplace, and other features. When he finishes the building he will attack the grounds. It is really going to be something when he finishes and he designed it all himself.
This deer came by just now, stood there for a long time eating grass, chewing her cud, and looking in the window. I actually moved around quite a lot, but she did not seem to mind. After awhile she sauntered off.
Lorena and I are trying to figure out what to do next now that neither of the kids will be in the Pacific Northwest. After the weekend party, Kelly told us we should not move away. She wants to have a place to come to that feels like home.
Kelly, stuff like this visitor, our men’s breakfast once per month and a slew of other make it harder to think of leaving.
We love our house here in Centralia. It would be a difficult thing to give up. Competing with our love for our house is that the very reason we moved back out west was to be closer to family. Now, Kelly is on the verge of moving away, probably to Maryland and Christian is probably less than six months away from graduating and we have no idea where he might land. In the meantime, Lorena is only a few classes away from finishing her Associate degree at the community college. We are hopeful that within a year or so we will have a sense for what will be our next step. We expect that, like just about everything other big move, we will be where God wants us to be. Sometimes we could only see that from hindsight, but it seems clear that was the case virtually every time.
It continues to snow hard here at the house. We have been stuck here since Friday and do not expect to get back to normal until at least Wednesday. Fortunately, we have everything we need to eat and keep warm and the electricity and internet have not failed (yet), so we can go along in a semi-normal mode of operation. I am able to work here like nothing happened. It is certainly beautiful.
We had an amazing beautiful snow starting this afternoon. Right now there is about six inches on the ground and it is still coming down. Lorena took this picture from the upstairs window looking out at the entry. It is really beautiful. We really hope the electricity stays on. Our understanding is that more snow will fall in this storm than normal falls in Western Washington for the whole year. It is certainly beautiful at night, but we can hardly wait to see how it looks during the day. In the mean time we have started a fire in the wood stove and are just enjoying the view.
Lorena took this picture a couple of days ago after a fairly light snow. Every time I think about selling the place we have a new event that makes me thing we would be crazy to leave. It is GORGEOUS up here where we live. We have our fireplace going now–still learning how to use the thing properly and big plans for the house (still). We do not know what will happen in the future, but we do know the kids will not be in Washington or even anywhere close. We do know that we are going to have to make another move or even several more moves before this is all over. Maybe the move will be just to down-size, but probably the move will be to get closer to family, whether that be Lorena’s family in Mexico or Kelly and Christian up here in the US.
It is snowing lightly again here in Centralia and it is very cold (for this part of the world) so I am working on my wood stove fire maintenance skills. I am way past the “getting the fire started stage” and on to the more difficult skill of maximizing warmth while maximizing burn time and minimizing wood consumption.
Lorena and I have so much joy with our wood stove right now, we are considering a wood burning fireplace rather than a gas one. It smells good, it is easy to do once one gets the hang of it and it really is better once you get the hang of it. I cannot believe I am actually saying this, but we like it a LOT!
The picture does not really do it justice, but it is a beautiful, snowy day in Centralia. The snow was not supposed to start until tomorrow, but right now it is actually coming down pretty hard. The temperature is five or so degrees above freezing so this is definitely not going to stick. I just looked at the forecast and now it says it should continue snowing through the night, but not get much colder the 33 degrees. That is a fine thing and means we will get the beauty of the snow, but not the hassle. This is the perfect weather for programming!
Now that the downstairs office is painted and we have our new lighting installed, we decided we would clean out the area around the wood stove and fire it up. I figured there was about a fifty percent chance we would fill the room with smoke and have to use the fire extinguisher to put out the fire, but it all worked perfectly. We plan to start using the wood stove more because it really heats up the whole room. It surely changes the atmosphere of the room to have a fire burning there.
The main office area of the office in the basement has been being painted over the last week or so. I have been relegated to the dining room table. When I moved back down and was shuffling things around, I found the the lights Gene made for the bean sorting project. I am going to get them sent off to him so he can start sending me some images. We might get lucky and have our original setup work, but I think that is pretty unrealistic. We will definitely have to make modifications quite a few times until we get the whole lighting designed tweaked to the point it works with the falling beans. That is not to mention the fact that we have not even started at all on the mirror setup to see both sides of each bean.
This is the normal view I see from my easy chair. The chair is a Barcalounger, just like the one my dad used for the entire time I lived with him. The one where all of us kids rifled to find spare change that dropped there from his pockets. The view is about average for a winter day–not as good as some days, but better than others. Lorena chose this chair and bought it for me along with a matching couch for the living room. Even though the view from the chair is spectacular and we love the house and everything about it, we are thinking about a change. We are not sure whether we will do it or not. It largely depends on both my work and where the kids land. More importantly, it is about where we might be a help. This is a hard thing to know and balance. It makes me want to be more sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
Kelly is at the start of a new chapter in her life that will feature several months of chaos followed by something pretty big. The first step is to move to short-term housing for a few months. I have been sworn to secrecy on the rest. So, über-kid-helper Lorena is up in Seattle right now helping her pack. Tomorrow, I will go load up her sofa, her bed, some other furniture, and a bunch of boxes to haul down to Centralia for storage in our garage until she makes her move to the next (actually, very) big thing. I can hardly wait to be able to talk about it because it is a big deal.
The sun is shining in Centralia. The pure steam coming from the coal fired generation plant on the left side of this image and one cloud above Mt. Rainier is all that is in the vast expanse of sky behind the house. We are very thankful to be here in Centralia right now. We love our house, I love my work, there is a path toward retirement that might be a little rocky, but God is in control of all that–I have a lot of faith that I will get what I need and it might not be the easy path that is what I want, but it will be better to be out of my hands and in the hands of God than planning my own path.
One thing that has become evident over the last months (maybe years) on which I need to operate, is that it is not good, not scriptural even, to engage with people of bad faith or bad will. The good news is that there are a lot of people of good will and good faith–not perfect by any stretch, but of good will and good faith. So, after doing an inventory of the things in which I am currently involved, I have decided I will work on one and possible two of five projects. All of them are worthy projects, but the people involved in the one or two are people in whom I have confidence. The other three or four, not so much. Life is too short and I do not have so many years left to invest in projects with people of dubious motivation. It is not that I am such a great prize myself, but I want to be.
It is great to be back in Centralia for at least three weeks. We read in the newspaper there would be a brilliant full moon (there was) coupled with serious meteor showers (there might have been, but we were in bed. Still the views were spectacular. This picture does not really do it justice. We had made arrangements for our lawn service to get rid of the vegetation and put a layer of gravel on our “RV pad” which is just really another driveway parking area that terminates above the house. More than anything it was just great to be home.
A day after we arrived (today) I found my wallet was missing. What a joy. Fortunately, no one had been using the cards, but unfortunately we had to cancel everything and only found out an hour ago that we have one card that still works until the other stuff is replaced sometime in January. All good, though–with the best “bank” in the world (Sunset Science Park Federal Credit Union–I HIGHLY recommend them), the internet and some nice customer service people, everything is canceled and on its way except the drivers license which I don’t really need so much anyway. Lorena squires me around Washington and I take Uber’s in Boston.
Christian captured this picture of our Bald Eagles yesterdays. This is the first time they landed on a tree other than the one with a dead top. They soared around in circles for four or five minutes, settled in only for a few minutes, then flew away. We have finally decided we need to get a Nikon F mount to T thread adapter so we can take better pictures. Christian took this one by just holding his camera up to the telescope after removing the eyepiece. It is better than the images we got by snapping shots through the eyepiece with our cellphones, but it is still not so great.
Lorena took two pictures with her Pixel 2 camera and the software automatically stitched them together. We thought it was pretty cool.
It was really nice to get back to Washington this morning (at 11:30) even though we had to drive through a rain storm filled with a couple of bad wrecks and construction on the freeways. We were pretty tired when we got to bed at 1:30 AM, but were, as always, grateful and amazed when we woke up this morning to a spectacular fall view with the leaves changing out into the distance from the deck. I have to turn around and go back to Boston in a week, but even that is getting better. I found out that I have earned “Lifetime Platinum Elite” status at the hotel where I stay, because I spent so much time in a hotel in Prescott, Arizona when we lived in Raleigh. That means they will give me high priority in reserving a room along with a few other perks. In addition to that, I am five flights from that same kind of special status on the airline I currently use to get to Boston. That means that after the first of the year, I will start getting bumped to first class sometimes and I will able to get on the plane before everyone else. Not so bad, but it will be even nicer when I do not have to fly to a far away place every other week.
We had a power outage for about an hour this afternoon starting at about 3. We have been so busy lately that if we had not had one, we would not have seen our eagles. And, this is the first time we have been able to take a half-way decent picture ourselves through Bob’s telescope. The backdrop for the picture is, of course, Mt. Rainier, with the diagonal white stripe at the center top of the image being the slope of the mountain. We really need to stop and smell the roses more frequently. This is life affirming stuff.
I got this for Lorena for our anniversary and am putting it up here to see if she actually reads my blog or just SAYS she does. The reality is, she has wanted one of these things for many, many years. My hope is that she is going to make me some homemade bread and even some egg bagels. Also, I have a feeling that this will be a big draw for Kelly to come home. It comes on Tuesday and I will report back whether Lorena sees this before the thing arrives. She USED to read my blog every day, but after 26 years, my shtick has admittedly gotten a little stale.