Shifting sands, part 2

The sun is setting earlier every evening; we are wearing shorts in 60 degree weather; we laugh at jokes about introspective feeling people from Seattle; we’ve stopped taking pictures of beautiful scenes because there have been so many; and we will be closing on a house on Friday (house #2, the one with the view.) This morning, we pulled the trailer into Larrabee State Park, our last campground for the summer. We start hosting here on Wednesday, and will stay until the end of August. Next stop: 2219 Niagara Drive, Bellingham, WA 98229.

I’m including some beautiful shots I took when we drove up to Artist’s Point on Saturday to view Mt. Baker. It’s about an hour drive east from Bellingham, and it was Lynne’s idea to go there Saturday evening after another week of house buying negotiations and decisions. I have a stack of realtor paper work sitting next to me, which includes the 38 page problem list from the house inspector on the first house that we wanted to buy (Cedar Hills Drive). Somewhere in that stack is the distilled list of just those items that we asked the sellers to fix, and somewhere else is the very short list of the items that the sellers agreed to fix. The sellers’ disappointing response motivated us to go out and look at houses again (yes, back to the drawing board).

One of the houses that we asked Ken to show us was one that we had been watching from Kentucky since last spring because it has a spectacular view of Bellingham Bay. It’s also the first house that we drove up to see the first day that we were in Bellingham. The asking price of this house reflects the reality of real estate prices over the last year and a half. The owners started asking a high price in May of 2008; they reduced it to by 10% this spring after a year on the market; last month they reduced it another 10%. We offered them cash to close in six days if they would take 75% of their original price. That’s when we took the drive up to Mt. Baker, not knowing the response. We stopped in at a great Italian restaurant for dinner on the way home. The offer expired at 9:00 p.m., and when we checked email at 9 and found that they hadn’t called Ken (our realtor), we thought, “Back to the drawing board…” We were out of cell phone range at the campground. It turns out that the owners called Ken at 10 p.m. on Saturday night to counter, which we coolly turned down on our way to church (Unitarian) on Sunday morning. During church, I leaned over to Lynne and said the compromise number I though we should pay and she said yes with her eyes. That’s the price they accepted on Sunday afternoon.

So what convinced us to give up the Swainson’s thrush, the cedar forest and the NW charm of the first house? The house on Niagara is on one floor, is slightly larger, is close to the center of town and also close to Whatcom Falls Park. In the end, I think we wanted to be more in the swing of things, we wanted one floor and we are enchanted by the view. The house has 3 giant Grand Firs in the front yard. The house is a fixer upper, which is a pleasure for us both (OK, maybe we are a rare breed. The Re-Store in Bellingham is awesome, too). We are lying awake at night discussing how to get the yucky urine soaked wall to wall carpet out as soon as possible, whether it matters that the Grand Fir root in the crawl space warrants any action, what to do to build a laundry room and add a cabinet to the master bathroom, and where to put the cobbler’s bench. Winnie asked me to say that she has been a very good dog, an excellent dog, through all this time of driving, camping, and moving, and that in the end, she is not getting a very big yard. She says, yes, she can play some on the deck, but really, she needs some good stuff to sniff and some rabbits to chase and at least a letter carrier to terrorize, but she will accept good long walks in the park. Lynne adds that we will still have deer in the front yard and she might enjoy their droppings.

We have a month to accomplish what we can on the new house before we move in. Lynne has gone to Mt. Vernon today to interview for a per diem home health nurse position. As far as the house, I am thrilled to have “a bird in hand,” (although please know that I believe birds are happier in the bush.) I have applied for two jobs but I haven’t heard from either of them, and I have a couple more to apply for.

I hope you all will like the guest bedroom and the deck and the view and the peaceful but convenient setting of our new house. We should have it looking good, so let us know when you’re coming to visit. I send love to you all from both of us, and Winnie.

Shifting sands and the essential question

Not the physical terrain, but our lives feel like shifting sand to me now. Tonight we are back at Birch Bay State Park, after being at Larrabee State Park for the weekend, and Thursday we are going east to Silver Lake County Park, closer to the Mt. Baker wilderness.

We are doing a remarkable job of living together in this trailer (a modern studio apartment on wheels), taking turns for who stands up since we can’t both be moving around at once, heating up water on the stove whenever we need to wash dishes or ourselves, being careful not to run the battery down when we are camping in a site without utilities, and fitting everything we wear and eat into the overhead cabinets or storing them under the bed or kitchen seats.

You can see the limits of this situation when we are trying to apply for jobs. I brought along an outfit to use for job interviews, but we don’t have an iron or ironing board, let alone electricity. We don’t have Internet access in the campground, so we have been imposing on our Bellingham friends, Kay and Leslie, for wireless access, or going to the public libraries. We each made a file of important papers to bring with us on this part of the trip, so stuffed in with our bird books, road atlases and Scrabble game is my file with transcripts, birth certificate, health insurance papers, a file called “Books to Read”, and a folder called “Job prospects.”

This week, I did apply for a job and the process required writing and printing a cover letter (did it in the Ferndale library), getting three letters of recommendation (emailing my Eastern Standard Time references at 2:15 p.m. when I know they have gone home for the day), sending Lynne out to the camper to find my transcripts and my good clothes. I have another application (at Western Washington University) to finish this week. Lynne applied for a per diem home health nursing job until her nurse practitioner license gets processed. Meanwhile, we are out of range from the cell tower at Larrabee and we found we could pirate the wireless internet at the little camp store/ Laundromat that is just outside the Birch Bay State Park entrance.

I vacillate between the fun of being on vacation and the realization that we have to stop being on vacation. I think we would rather walk down to the beach each night to watch the sun go down than deal with home inspections and looking for work. We are facing an important question: are we beach bums at heart?

We have made it to the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship for two Sundays now, and we both are happy with what we find there. Last Sunday, we missed because of the Pride parade and celebration, the highlight of which was the Rainbow City Band, a GLBT marching band from Seattle, complete with flag wavers, who performed and danced Michael Jackson tunes. This event was our first exposure to the at large gay community with all its variations, from drag queens and leather dudes (I’d include a back view of that crowd but this is a family blog) to young tattooed student types, roller bladers and nondescript middle aged women and men like us. We stayed long enough to hear the mayor of Bellingham speak, and watched a little local entertainment. This week, we also went to a Tai Chi inspired exercise class at BUF and we both loved it. I also jumped into Lake Padden after we had taken Winnie for a walk and had a wonderful long swim in the lake, my first swim in this time zone.

I am missing all of you and at times I’m feeling a little lonely. We chat it up with everyone we come in contact with, (dog owners on the beach, the people around us at church, the customers waiting for fish sandwiches at the Farmer’s Market…) It isn’t hard because most people are open and friendly. Still, we have the hard work of establishing friendships ahead of us, and I know that it just takes time. I appreciate your emails more than ever, and hope that you know how much your friendship means to us. (We did get an exciting phone call that Julie may fly out to visit this fall and David and Ross have promised the same.)

Love to you all.

Sky

Looking and finding

The house hunting roller coaster ride of hopes and disappointments appears to be complete. Yesterday, at the end of our sixth day of searching, we signed a contract to buy the house at 1067 Cedar Hills Avenue in Bellingham. We spent the week climbing in and out of our realtor Ken's leather seated BMW. The process seemed like walking down the beach turning over every stone, asking "Is this the one?"

The prime neighborhoods in Bellingham, quiet blocks of Craftsman bungalows peppered with a few Victorian houses and some 1960s low budget construction are out of our price range. These neighborhoods are easy bike riding distance to Bellingham Bay and all the cool stores downtown (the coop, good restaurants, lots of coffee shops). Ken tried, but everything in our price range would require even more work than we would tackle, or was impossibly small.

We tried the suburbs next, looking at 1980's ramblers (ranches) on quiet streets with views of the Bay or Mt. Baker or the Canadian mountains, and had we acted a day sooner, we would have gotten one of those at a good price. The thrill of chasing that house was immediately followed by disappointment. Another bid had gone through the morning that we were going to write our own. Back into Ken's BMW. Ken has lived here for 30+ years and was very helpful in pointing out the good aspects of every house, while steering us away from bad neighborhoods and 0verpriced houses. He also (with our prompting) regaled us with stories about his house overlooking Chuckanut Bay where he lives with his partner and their nine golden retrievers. We now know more about breeding and owning Goldens than I thought there was to know. Someday when we are sitting on a porch overlooking a spectacular NW landscape, you can ask us how his champion dog, Andy, has managed to impregnant 400 girl dogs. Or you might not want to know...

We looked at about 25 houses in person, and numerous others online. By mid afternoon of our first full day of looking, we had found only one promising house but had rejected it because it was on a busy street. I was feeling very discouraged. To get to the very last house on our list, we drove east beyond the city limits into the lower levels of Galbraith Mountain above Whatcom Lake. Tears came to my eyes when we got out of the car. To the left of the house is a
creek on the edge of the forest (owned by the city of Bellingham) that covers the top of Galbraith Mountain. Two huge western red cedar trees tower over the edge of the property, and beyond them, a trail leads off into the woods. The lot is almost 1/2 an acre. The first thing that I heard was the song of several Swainsen's thrushes, which you normally hear only in deep tall NW woods. What I didn't hear is any traffic noise; I am swayed as much by the quietness up there as by the house. Yesterday when we were back for our second look, a deer walked across the back yard.

When you see the house at 1067 Cedar Hills Avenue, you will say, "That's perfect for Sky and Lynne". Its a split level with a cabin feeling, cedar posts at the base of the stairs, a high window over the entryway, a skylight in the bathroom, a peaceful deck off the dining room, 3 (smallish) bedrooms (including a guest room for our visitors), a large basement "family room" and an attached two car garage with lots of storage. After about 5 minutes, Lynne and I looked at each other and said, "We are interested." We made a 90% offer on Tuesday. Two anxious days later, the owners turned us down and countered with too high a price, so we were back in the BMW the next day. I'm leaving out the emotions of the whole process--arguments over whether to go with the high price, tears over whether we will ever find a house, discouragement over coming all this way and not finding the perfect house...I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

We've seen lots of high priced houses, bad houses, noisy houses, small yards and houses painted entirely white with the popcorn look on the ceiling for a quick flip. It was looking like a long summer in the camper when we got the surprising call from Ken on Friday night that the owners of the Cedar Hills Avenue house agreed to our original offer. This news is something to celebrate, because the amount that we are paying for this house is less than our proceeds from selling Raintree. We will be able to buy the house outright, and still have some money to do some upgrades. So here we are on Sunday morning, lolling around and feeling like we've worked hard and we can go back on vacation. Our closing date is August 11th.

I'm also leaving off that every day this week started with a long walk along Birch Bay with Winnie (at our campground), that the high of 77 degrees (a heat wave) and cool breeze under completely sunny skies is spoiling us, that we are enjoying being around Kay and Leslie and Kay's 20 month old (perpetually moving) grandson.

This brings us to the subject of employment--the next task on the list. We will enjoy the Pride parade and celebration today, and tomorrow, get down to work looking for work.

We think of you all often. We found a great restaurant down on the boat docks last night that we hope to take you all to, and we love hearing from you.

The new and the old

I've traded the familiar for the new. Here I am at Birch Bay State Park on the north west coast of Washington, close to the Canadian border. Instead of Kentucky's oak and maples and cardinals, now I'm sitting under the tall Douglas fir and western Red Cedar trees, listening to the Swainson's thrush's rising song above me, zipping up my hoodie on July 5th, and wondering how the next chapter of this adventure will turn out.

We have had fantastic blue skies and warm (80 degree) temperatures since we got to Bellingham. We were able to spend a peaceful day with Sheryl and Lucina, driving further up the coast so that when we looked north, the Canadian mountains defined the horizon and when we looked east, we saw snow covered, silent and grandiose Mt. Baker. We had a visitation from a pair of Bald Eagles, perched at the top of a snag along the shore of Semiahmoo peninsula. We were all transfixed, and spent more than an hour watching and photographing them as the eagles ignored us completely but kept keen eyes focused on their hunting territory. Where are the eagle pictures? Lucina will email me the best ones, and I'll find an adapter to download mine.

We said two more goodbyes this week, as poignant as any, when Alan and Grace headed out for Canada (on Thursday) and Sheryl and Lucina headed back to Seattle (on Friday) and then home.
Yesterday we once again inflated our orange double kayak and put it out to sea with our old Lexington friends, now Bellingham residents, Kay and Leslie. We paddled and floated around Birch Bay, whose shore is just a minutes walk from this campsite. They bought their kayaks in Lexington many years ago and learned on the Elkhorn, so our time together is multi-leveled: a Lexington beginning brought together again in north western Washington. They couldn't be more helpful and welcoming, offering us that precious commodity: friendship, spending July 4th with us, and doing things like letting Winnie stay at their house when we drove into Seattle and letting us recharge our laptop, cellphones and camera batteries. Kay and Leslie have a NW style craftsman house in a quiet neighborhood; its a welcome respite.

Poor Winnie has been traumatized by the fireworks that have been going off for three days. I take her for a long walk in the morning along the shore while the revelers are still in bed. Once the bang of fireworks starts (like around noon), she won't come out of the camper. At night we close all the windows and door and turn the radio on and give her 1/2 a tablet of Dramamine to help her cope with the frightening noise. I'm very glad that this 4th of July is over.

Today (Sunday), Lynne and I were on our own and started out the day going to the BUF, Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship. We both liked everything about it--good music, good thoughts, good feeling, except the Power Point sermon which seemed more like a college lecture on the psychology of religion. He had some funny slides...The regular minister is gone for the summer, so we will go back and take this week's experience with a grain of salt. We also drove around Bellingham looking at neighborhoods and houses for sale, with disappointing results, and topped it off with a longer than expected walk alongside our favorite city park, Lake Padden. We took the "dog off-leash" trail, not realizing how high dog owners were expected to climb through the forest and how far we were expected to hike. When we returned 90 minutes later, all three of us were panting.

Tomorrow we meet Ken, our realtor, for the first time. We actually have been corresponding with him from Lexington since January, when Whitney, our realtor, contacted him for us. (She chose him because he raises golden retrievers and he's gay.) He has plans to drive us around Bellingham and give an overview of neighborhoods.

Its been hard to find a connection to the Internet. I am thinking of you all and keep expecting to see you at the end of the summer, and then realize...oh right, we are Bellingham residents now. We are choosing a house with our guests in mind, so make sure to make your plans to come visit now!
Love,
Sky