Clark Lake Park Revisited

This morning I had another jaunt down to Kent for yet another appointment to have my teeth drilled.  Following the drilling procedure, I dropped off our hybrid a few blocks away at Saggu, the Punjabi -owned car shop which deftly services the hybrids owned by all the Punjabi taxi drivers who reside in Kent. (There is an error code associated with our hybrid battery, and this is our second or third attempt to have it decoded.) Then I wandered through my old haunts on foot to Clark Lake Park to await Jared's and the kid's arrival in the Chevy to retrieve me, once everyone was awake and fed. 

It was jarring to walk on my old familiar neighborhood routes, no longer familiar....a tree taken out, new paint, a changed gate, an added fence...but more jarring still: bits of woods meeting their end at the bulldozer's blade: eleven houses going in here, thirty there...and a playground gone, replaced by the YMCA.  The constant change churned along when we lived there, too, but having been absent more than three years, I have not kept pace with the breathless development of a once-wooded Native area, turned White farm town, turned diverse urban center.

The park was so peaceful in the cool sunshine, and I was flooded with memories as I wandered the 126 acre oasis in the middle of suburbification.  Second growth forests, water, rolling meadows (recovering from agriculture) with stunning mountain views...  I kept remembering toddler Anne, a person I can otherwise barely imagine any more.  

Here's where she pulled the little wooden wagon on a string. 

Here's where she'd run back and forth under the shady trees and look at the giant, seething ant hill on hot days.

Here was our favorite cherry tree in June where we brought and filled a little basket with sweet delights.

Here is where we picked the native and seedy black berries.

Here is where Anne would climb up into the tree in her "house."

Here is where Jared would hold Anne off the edge of the board walk and tease her about dipping her into the lake.

Here is where we watched the ducklings swimming.

Here is where we stood and laughed at the coyotes howling at the emergency sirens.

Here is the little hill that felt so hard to climb when I was pregnant.

Here is the place where we watched a family have photographs taken on a beautiful Spring day, much like today.

Here are the mole hills Anne brought her little shovel to dig in.

Here is where my mom found herself in the middle of a highway of tiny, newly hatched snakes on a summer visit.

Here's where I photographed the view towards Mt. Rainier every morning for a week at 8 am in varying weather conditions.

Here is where we buried the tiny life miscarried five and a half years ago.

Here is where I stopped to nurse little Anne.

Here is where we found some plums and watched the ants on the bench.

Here is where Anne and baby Lazarus found a geocache treasure and hid it again.

Here is where there is a seep in the hillside and the trail is always muddy but in the driest weather. 

Here is where we would stand to watch the cows.

Here is where we would throw bits of grass into the water and watch the birds.

Here is the tree where the bald eagles made their nest.

...I have been back a few times, usually in a hurry... but today was pure enjoyment...and big feelings of nostalgia and regret.  For five and a half years, I walked and ran and watched Anne, then Lazarus, play in that park nearly every day, and it was my touchstone.  When we were buying our house, there were a very few non-negotiables on the list: at least two bedrooms, a place to teach, parking for students, and... easy walking distance to Lake Clark Park.  Sadly, that last one didn't work out, and I miss my daily landscape.  I still go out walking every day in my new neighborhood, but I haven't found somewhere to replace my addiction.

My Tiny "Corner" of the Planet

Last evening around 9:00 pm we were finishing up dinner in the back yard.  It was not dark yet, but certainly dusky.  In the large plum tree which hangs over the fence from the neighbor's yard, a beautiful, perfectly groomed creature woke up, stretched, and climbed down the trunk onto our large junk pile.  He watched us but did not seem afraid of us, not even Nutmeg or my toddlers.  We watched him, too, in awe.  He is a large raccoon.  I have the feeling he has been watching us in the evenings for some time as it has been light so late, and knows we are no threat to him.  He poked around in the pile for a bit, then went straight to his watering hole - a large tarp folded around leftover roofing material, which collects and holds water with each rain.  He sniffed around in the short grass in front of the shed where Nutmeg had been sitting for some time.  He decided to wander into the open shed, and Jared walked over to tell him he didn't want to get stuck in there for the night.  Our beautiful friend exited the shed and went underneath to explore there.  After a while, he crossed the yard again, climbed up the gate, and then walked the top of the fence along the alley until he was out of sight, off on his evening mission of whatever it is raccoons do - finding some meals and socializing with others of his species?  We watched him in awe and are so glad he is here!  In our yard, which was quite sterile when we moved in, and has now progressed to European import meadow, we have only ever seen insects, small invertebrates, the occasional visiting cottontail, crows, small songbirds, an occasional visiting opossum, a rare visiting squirrel, and sometimes an exploring rat invader come from the next door neighbor's attic (I can see the rat family's egress from our back patio table - they come out at night, and I have seen a little rat face poking through a knothole in our fence, or a rat scurrying in the plum tree or junk pile.  Rats are not native.)  Now we are privileged to have a raccoon for a neighbor! 

In other news...

We are underway with Furniture Tetris, and have done some of the big jobs already - Jared has started teaching (online) this week in the garage remodel.  Lazarus and Anne have moved into the front bedroom.  We have seating for more than two people in our living room.  Laurel has her own little toddler bed.  Shed clean-out has begun.  There is lots more on this project to keep us going for the whole summer, I am sure.  For example:  hemming the curtains in the kid's bedroom, finding a Craigslist dresser for Laurel, migrating all the file drawers and boxes from various locations around the cabin and shed to the newly reinstalled bookshelf in my room, "seasoning" the chalkboard paint in the new studio, painting the trim, moving the upright piano to its new corner, finishing up the DIY coatrack for that space, going through more boxes in the shed, adding more wall-top bookshelves, hanging up our framed pictures, finding some industrial shelving for our little dining/mud room/laundry/kitchen annex to put all the bulk bins on, getting a dumpster for the enormous junk pile, etc.  You might get the idea, but somehow this list makes the project list sound smaller and tidier than it feels to me.

With our family spread into two bedrooms now and all of the teaching moved to the outbuildings (minus daily morning group class online, which requires the use of our living room spinet - it has been tuned in the last century, unlike the new donor upright in the new studio, which needs a full servicing, new strings and everything, before it is useful in teaching), our cabin feels much larger.  It is sort of a freeing feeling.  At the same time, it feels as small as it is - we cannot "grow" here anymore without some unforeseen creativity or a house addition.  However, I have been blessed during the years of my adult life to live in some places where I saw the creativity of neighbors in small spaces.  I think especially of our apartment complex in Kent, where the majority of our neighbors had come here from abroad and were ready to make do with whatever they could.  We were all in two-bedroom/one-bath units with one living room, a small kitchen, a couple of closets, and a tiny porch.  (Our cabin has the same square footage as those apartments.  But we have the massive blessing here of a yard, unlimited street parking, and the outbuildings.) Our family of two, then three, then four, hosted an exchange student and taught lessons in our small place.  Our next-door neighbors on one side were a couple plus an elementary-aged son and teenaged daughter.  Our upstairs neighbors changed a few times, and usually had three generations in the unit.  Our other upstairs neighbors were a family of four plus the wife's sister and her two kids.  And our next-door neighbors on the other side were three related couples with four children between them - one family sleeping in each bedroom and the third in the living room.  Our neighbors across the parking lot from us were a family of four, which grew to five.  So I have no illusions about what is required for space that one might get from looking around at suburban America and all the home decor magazines....

There has been a lot of painting this spring.  The garage studio: one layer of primer.  A layer or two of white on the ceiling.  Two layers of yellow on the walls.  Three layers of chalkboard paint over that.  And the fence along the alley is now held up on the outside by a thick layer of paint - leftover from a project our professional painter neighbor did.  He often has extra paint from a project which doesn't match anything, and he gives it away.  I will have to acquire some more for the inside of the fence, which is currently held up by... toothpicks.  If it has enough paint holding it up, we won't have to replace it for a few years.  Also, we need to scrape and paint the exterior of the cabin.  The shed needs some more painting, and the studio building will need exterior paint after we finish replacing the rotten bits of siding.  I also have not painted our mudroom, although it has been on my list for two years.  So that's plenty of work to keep everyone busy.

Also, I have gone wild with the garden this year.  Last May I used some leftover landscaping bricks to build a kitchen garden off the edge of our patio and I migrated the few things we had been growing in the pre-existing, nearly decayed-into-the-ground garden box out by the garage to the garden box.  This year I wanted to buy some seeds (a desire which I had begun to plan to indulge in before lockdown and victory gardens).  Our kitchen garden has a number of perennial herbs as well as rhubarb, but there was still space for a number of seeds.  And then everyone went wild with victory gardens, such a happy thing!  My brother built his, and filled it with starts.  When he ran out of space, he brought me his extra starts, which filled the rest of our kitchen garden.  So I determined to rehabilitate the old garden space for my seeds.  I planted it with flowers, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, squash, and pumpkins.  More of the seeds took than I imagined.  Plus we had some really exciting volunteers from the compost in addition to a few ancient seed packets I threw in pots to see if they would germinate.  So now I am filling up our driveway with pots of tomatoes and squashes and pumpkins and greens and flowers, and it is really quite astounding.  I am collecting neighbor's cast off nursery pots and buying potting soil and I am having so much fun.  I loved plants as a child when we had a very large, semi-wooded backyard, but I have had no reason to engage much with plants when I spent most of my adulthood in various apartments with little access to nature.  Now I am spending a lot of time replanting and watering and weeding and admiring, and it is very happy.

Some Firsts from the Weekend

In all the years I've lived five miles from an Ikea, I've never been.  I realize that for some of you this is sacreligeous.  I have leafed through a catalogue a bunch of times.  Anyway, I decided to stop by on the way to my friend's house last Friday to get a new shower curtain we needed.  If you have trouble in big box stores, they ain't got nothin' on this enormous cavern of a big box.  We had some fun touring the show room, and I especially enjoyed the 840 square-foot house mock-up, as we live in the exact same size of house with the same set of rooms (different layout, of course.)  But in the end, it took us an hour to actually make it to the shower curtain aisle, pick up our shower curtain and find the check out.  The maps are useless, because they want to keep their floor plan flexible to maximize how much stuff you have to look at and want to buy before you can find the escape route.  So there was an experience to check off the bucket list....

On Friday at my friend's home, I also had the chance to watch two 15-minute Quaran lessons she taught to neighborhood families.  I had never watched a Quran lesson before, and to those Western Christians who are used to Bible lessons or studies, this is a bit different.  There is a certain amount of ceremony.  Women's and girls' heads and arms are covered, the beginners Quran is kissed, and unwrapped from it's special cloth, and it is carefully laid on a cushion on the floor, which teacher and pupils crowd around.  For most Muslim's the Quran is only truly the Quran in Arabic, although they can read a translation to find out the gist of what it says.  My Muslim friends don't speak Arabic; they are Farsi/Dari speakers.  My teacher friend is patiently teaching them how to say the Arabic alphabet and how to pronounce the words.  They believe they are to faithfully read a bit of the Quran in Arabic each day.  Additionally the young students practiced reciting Sura 30, which is one of the daily prayers, again in Arabic.  It was so fun to watch how gentle and persistent my friend was in teaching her young pupils while holding her baby.  She teaches Quran lessons almost every evening, because she is home and has the time, and she likes to serve God.

Friday night I also had my first chance to think about "private yacht".  I had never given more thought to the phrase than to imagine, correctly, that it is some type of boat.  My brother had the opportunity to join a long-time friend of his on their new boat in the Carribean over New Years, and being the fantastic photographer and story-teller he is, we enjoyed part one of his experience from afar. 


On Saturday night, Jared and I left the kids with one of our babysitters and headed off to a Seattle Symphony concert, which we do several times a year.  Here were the firsts of this concert:

1. First time to hear a piece written by Lili Boulanger.  I am familiar with her sister Nadia, who was a very well-known French composer and one of the most important composition teachers of the 20th century.  We heard a nine-minute tone-poem written by Lili a few months before her early death at the age of 25.  Quite a piece!  There are a number of her works up on YouTube for your perusal.

2. First time to hear the Elgar Violin Concerto live.  I grew up listening to a recording, but of course, things are SO different in real life.  The violinist was Vilde Frang, and it was stunning.  I wish I could have heard it again directly after the first time through.

3. First time to hear Rachmaninov Symphony No. 3.  I couldn't place it beforehand, but I was sure that once I heard it I would recognize it.  But not at all.  I had never heard it before.  It's in a later style, not quite a lush as his earlier music; very interesting and beautiful.

'Twas the Night After Christmas...

...when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, only Feathers the cat purring...

So I had time to finally write a blog.  It has been nearly two months since I have written, a sad record to have set.

As alluded to in the second-to-last post, we bought a house.  "A gem in the rough" as the sellers' agent described it. 

Can I just tell you that between October 27th and December 2nd, we were pretty much hanging by threads?

In list format, here is everything that went down in those five weeks and one day...

• Closed on house
• Reinspected it on our own to determine attack list for making it livable in the one month between closing and last possible move date and determine what furniture we would have to offload ahead of time
• Two week-long work visits from Jared's parents in which incredible amounts of work was done.  I don't know how we could have done this without their help.  They have lots of experience with house-fixing, and they have an incredible amount of energy.  What can I say?  Hire them if you every need help.
• Jared working on the house every morning and coming home to teach while I managed packing and cleaning and children pretty much solo on the home front and taught full time
• Packing the apartment into boxes
• Cleaning out the apartment (how can stuff get SO dirty???)
• Tore out chimney from former fireplace and '70's wall-to-wall mirrors
• Took out baseboards, interior doors, and door frames/trim
• Temporarily removed gas living room stove and its base
• Temporarily removed three ceiling-mount light fixtures
• Re-sheetrocked the ex-chimney wall
• Re-sheetrocked the ceilings in the living room/dining room/hall/two bedrooms
• Taped and floated such
• Sanded
• Taped and floated again
• Sanded again
• Taped and floated again
• Sanded again
• Applied primer
• Applied texture
• Applied primer
• Painted kitchen cabinets (took three coats)
• Tried for days to strip paint off of five interior doors before giving up
• Pried up random parquet floor on top of older wood floor by the front door
• Removed hardware from no-longer-in-use window treatments around the house
• Rebuilt floor and frame of bathroom closet
• Cut down new wood flooring to 1942 size and covered hole in floor left by chimney demolition
• Rented huge randomized orbital sander
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with medium grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with heavy grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with medium grit

• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with fine grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with very fine grit
• Cleaned stripped floors with vacuum, tack cloth, and then floor cleaner.  And then cleaned them some more.
• Rolled and painted on sealer
• Rolled and painted on first finish coat
• Rolled and painted on second finish coat
• Rolled and painted on third finish coat
• Approximately 5,000,000 trips to the hardware store (I may have exaggerated, but for the record a trip to the hardware store with a 1-year-old and a 4-year old counts the same as three solo trips.  So you can do your own math.)
• Called to get the electricity switched over
• Called to get the gas turned on - had to wait for water to get turned on first.
• Called to get water turned on.
• Called again to get gas turned on - and wait for a visit from a technician
• Waited for behind-schedule sewer repair so we could use toilet and sinks...
• When it was finally done, more negotiating with realtor and plumbers to get new sewer line attached to house drain pipe so we could use toilet and sinks...
• Measured the size of the hole under the house.
• Got bids on and ordered seven cubic feet of coarse gravel to fill it in
• Had the gravel delivered and built a chute to get the gravel from the driveway into the hole under the house
• Worked a lot of man hours to actually move the gravel from point A to point B in cramped conditions
• Fixed the post which held up the front corner of the roof overhang
• Copious amounts of cleaning in the new house, especially after all the sanding
• Attached address numbers to the front of the house
• Change of address with the post office
• Attempted to get the internet switched over the day of the move so that we could have our Skype lessons on Day 1.  It failed, but the Skype students were sick that day anyway...
• Scoured Craigslist for rugs to put on the wood floors and drove around the Eastside to look at them.  
• Bought moving boxes and tape
• Picked up some more from Linda
• Rented a truck for the right day (which was hard to predict until about four days out)
• Order floor finishing stuff via Linda's Amazon Prime account
• Ran out of checks so spent time running to the bank for cash for a variety of needs
• One day I left the apartment for literally eleven minutes (to put a flower on the baby's burial spot) while the kids were asleep and Jared was teaching, and Jared ended up getting sick and his student found our neighbor and when I got back the ambulance was on its way, and we ended up with what turned out to be an unnecessary long evening in the ER where I drove back and forth with the kids three times and had to schedule make-up lessons... (He was fine.  If I had only been home during those few minutes!)
• I was the primary organizer of two big group concerts (one in Federal Way and one in Tacoma) which involved lots of emails between the venue and myself, all the different students and myself, and my co-teacher and myself.  Involved getting attendance numbers, rehearsing all the music, figuring out part divisions and program order, chairs and music stands, call time, driving directions, and costume....
• I was the primary organizer of three solo recitals (two in Auburn and one on Fox Island) which involved determining repertoire, working out accompanists, setting program order, sending order off to my typist, contacting venues again, and communicating with students about attire, call times, rehearsals, and reception food, and showing up with the printed programs, paper goods, accompaniment parts, and instruments.  The Fox Island venue ran into a problem the night of the recital when we had fifteen minivans parked out front and families standing around in the dark in long coats waiting to go in, so we had to be quick about our wits and move our recital spontaneously back to the house where we teach in Gig Harbor.
• On the same day as one of the Auburn recitals, I also had a student present his Book 1 recital at his home in Gig Harbor, so I drove there to accompany him with the kids in tow and get back in time to manage the solo recital.
• Our studio joined forces with some other studios for a big double-header Christmas concert in Maple Valley, and I rehearsed our group class for it, helped my students learn new music for it, and passed on communications from the organizing teacher.
• Anne broke her cello in half at our group class on Halloween, so she had to switch over to violin performing for three solo recitals, the second group concert, and the Christmas concert.
• Everyone in our family had a cold, except Jared had two.
• There was teething.
• Panicked trying to find babysitters for random bits of my days off so I could help Jared with the house prepping.  It was intense, and thankfully several people came through for me.
• Oh, and the day of our move... it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  We finished refinishing the floor around 4:15 on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, after lunch at Linda's, which meant we could start putting furniture down at 4:15 on Sunday.  So the Thanksgiving week, we taught Monday at the apartment, and then went crazy the rest of the week.  Sunday morning we got the truck and loaded in most of the boxes and little stuff.  Jared took it up to the house and one of my work study families helped unload it into the garage.  Meanwhile my dear Afghan neighbor took the kids for the day, and her husband and another Afghan friend helped Jared load.  I'm telling you, if you ever need strong, helpful guys, meet some Afghans!  Before we got the furniture loaded, it turned out my brother had a few more furniture items he needed to move so Jared went and helped him with that while we had the truck.  Then the amazing Afghans then got our furniture loaded after dark.  Jeffrey and Linda came to the house and helped unload (which we desparately needed) and brought dinner from our favorite Indian place.  (Have you ever tried to move a piano?  Ours is only a spinnet that we got from Freecycle, but that thing weigh at least 400 lbs.  Quite a physical and engineering challenge.) We had the furniture in the house by 10:30 pm and then we brought the cats in (who had been sitting in cages in the moving truck for a couple of hours), had dinner, and went to bed.  And we were up and ready to teach by 10:00 am the following morning in our new location.  During my first lesson, Jared put up curtains in place of three absent room doors by using a power drill to screw in eyelets, tying in picture wire, and then using cafe curtain clips to hang up queen size sheets from our collection.  So we have "privacy" on the bedroom, bathroom, and teaching room for now...
• In the few days following the move Lazarus was a bit out of sorts and acquired the nastiest looking bruise I've ever seen on an ear.  And then another nasty bump on the forehead.  And also threw his one paci that we could find down one of the vent holes in the floor prompting another trip to Lowe's to find new vent covers.  And then the final day of our lease Jared was trying madly to clean out our apartment and one of our cars wouldn't start so he had to take the one with the carseats in it, and I was home alone at the new place with the kids teaching some make-up lessons when Lazarus pulled the modem off a shelf and sliced his toe open and there was blood EVERYWHERE, and I had to cancel the rest of the evening of teaching, and the amazing Big Anne came with a loaner car and took my Anne home with her and I sat at urgent care with Lazarus for a couple of hours until the doctor was ready to glue his toe back together.  
• So anyway, the following day we had to have the battery and alternator replaced on the car.
• And also then the modem broke due to its fall, and my phone charger broke just because, and Jared had to go out and get replacements.
• And also the disc drive on our computer broke, due to Lazarus throwing the computer off the table.  But Merry Christmas to us, it suddenly started working again yesterday...

I'm sure I missed a few things there, but anyway, life has calmed down a lot, and we no longer feel like we are hanging by threads.  We still have quite a bit of work to do on the actual house, and lots of unpacking.  But there has been a lot more work done in the last few weeks (work on insulated the ducts under the house, more painting on walls and ceilings, putting in our washer and dryer, more curtains here and there, fixing an electrical problem with the dining room light, reinstalling the gas stove in the living room, acquiring pads for the rugs...) and we are getting settled in.  And we got a rare white Christmas here, as we didn't get organized to visit Texas in time, although we will be there for New Year's.  Eventually... we'll have enough stuff done on the house that we can start on converting the garage to teaching studios, and believe me, that is going to be a HUGE project.  Not ready to think about that yet!  I am enjoying my two weeks off work immensely.  Doing house stuff, fighting with our former rental company about bogus charges (I tell you, that apartment is the gift that never quits giving), PLAYING with my kids, and sleeping.

Anyway, in case you wondered what we've been up to, that is the summary version.  Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Joyous New Year to you, and I hope to be back on the blogging bandwagon a bit more in the coming months.

Moving Along

If any of you have been following Seattle real estate, you'll know that the market has gone absolutely and verifyibly nuts.  Granted we're WAY out in the burbs, not in the Seattle city limits, but it's nuts out here, too.  Just for fun, I did a little internet research to see what our price range could get us in Rochester, the cheapest place we've lived for four years.  Just one example... a gorgeous 3700-square-foot turn-of-the-century home on two acres with mature landscaping and trees in a desirable suburb, which also has a separate mother-in-law home on the property.  What the same amount of money gets us out in the Seattle burbs is JUNK.  Here's a fun one we looked at for about the same price as the Rochester one listed above: bank-owned 1100-square foot 1960's house two blocks from a huge and noisy motor race track where drunken fans show up on your lawn during the weekends amidst the deafening and constant roar of engines.  The real estate tag line said, "This one is perfect for commuters - only 30 miles from Seattle and 25 miles from Tacoma."  Evidently that was the BEST thing they could say about the property.  Anyway, I tell you all this, not to garner any sympathy, because I LOVE living here, but to give you the kind of background you might need to understand the story I am about to tell.

Having sold our Alabama condo in July a year ago, we were ready to embark on finding a more sustainable living situation here.  We met an incredible realtor back in February through a loan agent who was recommended to us by another family.  We first went out house shopping on March 5th, and made an offer on this short sale home the following day.

If you are not familiar with short sales, it is a situation where the owner has more debt than the current value of the home, so they are hoping to sell the house where the mortgage-holding bank accepts a loss, rather than awaiting the inevitable foreclosure.  It can happen if someone buys the house when the market is really high and is forced to sell when the market is much lower.  Or it can happen when the owner somehow ends up owing on something else huge, too, and they can't afford both things.

Anyway, the home we made an offer on is only a mile and half from our apartment, has a lovely, large, fenced yard with a couple of trees, a covered back patio, three bedrooms, a bonus room and a freestanding garage out back which could eventually be converted to teaching space.  It is on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood.  So there is a lot of potential.  That's the good about it.  The bad - well, hoarders lived there, so we actually couldn't see a ton of the property.  The house was up to the brim with stuff, but the back porch and garage were so full of *stuff* - including multiple industrial refrigerators!? - that we couldn't really see much about the condition of the house.  And there were several junked cars parked in the back yard, possibly impacting the condition of the septic system.  And it is definitely a "starter" neighborhood.

But we made the offer.  It was the best thing we had seen for our needs at that point.

With a short sale, you will have to wait MONTHS to hear a yea or nay from the owner's bank.  So you sit and wait.  Which we did.  But we also kept looking.

Then a house I walk past almost every day on the way to my favorite city park came on the market in May.

It had been empty for as long as we have lived here, and it was bank owned.  Pluses of this home: split level, three bedrooms, TWO bathrooms, TWO extra basement rooms, TWO-car garage, lots of parking, great neighborhood, nice trees, big back deck, AND so close to the park.  Minuses - needed beaucoup de work.  Our realtor estimated that if we were VERY thrifty, buying all the supplies on sale, and doing all the work ourselves, it would easily be $15K just to make it livable.  We were ready to take action.  It was on a five-day online auction, and there was no inspection contingency allowed.  We waited until day four of the auction and checked the bidding.  And it had gone OUT of our price range.  So we didn't enter the fray.

(As an after note, clearly a flipper bought it, because it is back on the market now, listed as a four-bedroom, and at nearly twice the list price of when we looked at it.)

Then in June, another house a few blocks from that one which I also walk past on the way to the park came up.

This one was also going to a five-day online auction, although it was currently lived in (not by hoarders, but certainly by *collectors*).  This listing provided a detailed pre-inspection report for our perusal.  Our realtor sent me all the documents on the house while I was visiting in Texas, and my poor parents nearly died looking at the horror of its condition online.  Anyway, we did go have a look at it when we returned to Seattle a couple of days later, and it had some great plusses - three bedrooms, two bathrooms, separate living room and dining room, big fenced yard with nice trees, outbuilding, and a HUGE two car garage which could make a pretty incredible studio or two.

Again, we waited until day four of the auction, and again it was OUT of our price range.  Done.

A week or two later I drove by "our" short-sale again, and I really started feeling I didn't like the neighborhood in terms of having students show up there.  Not like it was unsafe.  But a lot of it is run down, and it didn't seem like a lot of the houses were being cared for.  Not the sort of place you dream of when you are looking for quality music instruction.

Then the next week, the bank said "No" to the short sale on some really strange technicality that both our agent, and the owner's agent (who ONLY does short sales) couldn't quite understand.  We were right back where we started, which was absolutely nowhere.

Very shortly thereafter, I was walking through my favorite town-home development a couple blocks from us, where an unprecedented five three-bedroom/two-bathroom/one-car-garage homes had sold during our fruitless search through all the neighborhood junk.  And I was lamenting not having jumped on that bandwagon.  Initially I hadn't, because we and our realtor thought we could find something suitable and freestanding in our price range.  Which only matters because of all of our music noise and the number of people looking for parking for lessons.  And I noticed that a three-bedroom place was getting new carpet on a Monday.  My this-house-is-going-on-the-market-soon radar went up.  A few days later, a sign appeared in the window by the front door saying that this HomePath property (*means it is owned by Fannie Mae) was not on the market, and all questions could be directed to thus-and-such agent.

I called our realtor, and she called the agent, asking if we could submit an offer before it went on the market, asking when it would be up for sale, and what the list price would be.  The answers were "no", "don't know", and "don't know."  We walked by it nearly every day and waited.  And then it came on the market suddenly one afternoon in August and our realtor called us.  The asking price was at the VERY TOP of our price range, because they'd fixed it up really nicely - granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and everything.  And we made an offer, and it was a multiple offer situation, and we had no room to escalate, and it was gone.

I felt frustrated, and as I am prone to do under the circumstances, I was ready to take action.  I printed out two maps of the Seattle region.  I located all of our students' homes on one map, and I located all the Suzuki teachers I could find by zip code on another map.  The first map had an obvious purpose in showing us how to sustain our current business, and the second map told us where there were enough students to support multiple teachers.  These two maps had one little bit of overlap - North Renton/Newcastle.  We had already looked up there, but you have to know that as you travel north from where we are, the housing prices go up, and up, and up.  We were already scraping the bottom of the barrel down in south Kent.  We had looked at a couple of places in the Renton Highlands area when we started our search, and they were big fat no's.  One was a funny little bank owned house in a peculiar field of houses and trailers on a weird and winding network of dirt roads (not gravel - actually just dirt, aka mud), which you reached by making a scary left turn off a big multi-lane highway.  It was nearly tucked under a bridge, and had a septic tank issue and backed up to a river, putting it in a flood plain.  It was sort of like a place you might stay at summer camp.  Interesting, but absolutely not what we were looking for.  The other was an Airstream trailer on a horrible corner lot, also in a flood plain, which had been cut open and added on to, and it already had several offers on it.

So I started a search in earnest up that way (sadly thinking of leaving my favorite park behind), and I came up with a cute 1942 house with a mostly-finished basement in a neighborhood of 1942 houses, and a three-bedroom condo just off a major roadway.  We looked at both of them the first full day they were on the market.  The house was promising, but it already had a cash offer we couldn't compete with.  The condo was also very promising.  It was a corner unit, and the inside was very nicely redone.  Two of the bedrooms were only on outside walls, and they immediately said "teaching studios" to me.  The complex was quiet, and looked like it had a lot of kids.  And mature trees.  There were basically two concerns with it.  First of all, the parking was a bit tricky, although we could buy an extra spot a block away for $50/month.  And second of all, the exteriors of the buildings were horrifically depressing.  They were an unfortunate accident of 1980's experimental architecture, and I sort of felt sick to my stomach looking at them.  But, we talked it over, and persevered, and decided we should make an offer.  Intellectually it was the right thing to do, and put us in fantastic proximity to future student flow.  That evening I opened up the computer to email our agent to ask her to put in an offer for us, but I just decided to glance at the listings before I wrote to her.

And then I saw it.  There was another 1942 house in that same neighborhood (built by Boeing during the war just up the hill from one of its plants for the influx of workers.)  Being sold "As Is" but very charming.  Only 840 square feet, including the addition that had been put on at some point.  BUT it had a large one-car garage plus an attached shed in the back yard  My studio space monitor went on.  We went up and looked at it the next day, and we decided right away to make an offer.

Our agent souped up our offer to the maximum in every way.  She delivered it to the seller's agent in person the next day.  She told the agent all about us and what we wanted to do with the house.  She suggested the agent should have the sellers review and accept our offer right away without waiting the posted week for all the offers to come in.  The agent said no, they'd wait the week.  So we sat around waiting.  One day later, our agent heard personally from the seller who told her that she herself was a music teacher and really liked us, and while they needed to wait and look at everything for the financial perspective, she hoped we could get the house.  It also turns out she had lived in the house for six years when her two children were small, and she liked the idea of our two children living there.  The following day we wrote her a letter telling her how much we liked the house and what we would like to do with it again, and enjoying our connection as fellow music teachers and parents.  A week later on the evening of the offer review date, we got a call saying they had accepted our offer.  We were not the highest of the six-plus bidders, but we were high enough, and we had waived the inspection contingency via a pre-inspection, we had bid WAY up from the asking price, and we had asked our amazing loan guy for an expedited closing.  The closing was set not quite four weeks out for September 19th.  Everything felt so Providential.

Now, there has been a bit of a known issue with the sewer line which runs from the house to the main in the street, and many of the houses in the neighborhood, due to their age, have had similar problems.  Our agent had already talked to the people who had been snaking out that line twice a year for the last twelve years, and a city official who was in charge of sewer stuff.  It looked like it would be manageable.

A week before the closing, the underwriter for our loan mentioned they had a concern about the sewer condition, so our agent jumped on it and started doing everything she could to get it taken care of for us.  She got the video footage of the sewer scope the owners had done in May, which prompted them to have some intrusive roots trimmed.  We paid to have a new sewer scope done.  And... it appeared that the line was now completely blocked by roots or more possibly, completely collapsed.  Do you know how much sewer repairs cost?  I did not.  They start at about the price of a brand-new Honda Civic.  It turned out that the owners now had an unsaleable house on their hands unless they were to start over and only accept cash offers, or we would have to work together on this and come up with a solution.  We and the owners decided pretty easily how to work out the pricing on such a repair, but getting bids which the underwriting could approve was much harder.  There were weeks of phone calls back and forth between our agent, our loan guy, Jared, and contractors.  Contractors would come out to the house to make bids *when they felt like it.*  They each had different sets of concerns, so in the end the bids we received were wildly different prices and were like comparing apples and oranges.  We kept signing extensions to the buying contract, not sure if we'd ever get closure.  Twice things were looking so bleak that our agent thought we should give up on the house and wait for something else.  Wait, of course, was the operative word, because she and I kept up our search this whole time, and there was NOTHING else popping up in our price range which would meet our needs.  The market just kept going up and up, and we were getting left behind.

But finally, the whole thing has gotten itself worked out.  The house closed on Friday, and we got the keys.  Jared's dad is going to show up Monday morning to help Jared start on the work that needs to be done before we can move in (there is a lot - to make it safe and functional.)  We are going to be moving the week of Thanksgiving, and there is likely going to be a lot of DIY in the next few months and maybe years as we work on getting the house to be quite livable.  Not to mention a huge jumble of lesson rescheduling.  As we will be TEN miles away from our current home, it will impact quite a number of people's timings with their lessons.

The pros of this house - fenced yard, bigger laundry area and bathroom, a nice-sized fenced yard, the aforementioned garage which will become two studios at some point, the storage room, plenty of parking with TWO driveways, a paved alley behind the house just right for bicycling, two blocks from a playground, and it is quite cute.  And NORTH from here.  Cons of this house - far from Lake Clark Park and Jeffrey and Linda's new place, pretty much everything is much smaller- bedrooms are smaller, and the kitchen is MUCH smaller, less closet space, needs a lot of work over time, but most of all, we'll miss this neighborhood and our wonderful neighbors.

I am in full-blown clean-out mode and have already offloaded two pieces of furniture, as well as broken appliances, and various bags of random stuff to Goodwill and Value Village, and I'm advertising things on Craigslist bit by bit.  We've packed lots of books and CDs over the last few weeks, and are trying to get this show on the road in the little gaps of time between everything else.  Our poor cats have no idea what is coming.

Hoppin' Mad

Yesterday morning I was out for a walk with the kids when we happened upon some fences down the street where there is often graffiti.  It gets painted over and then more appears.  I don't know what most of it is - is it gang related?  or just some high-schoolers trying to be cool?  I'm guessing the latter.  This time I saw one marking which made my blood boil. 

I will not have such cowardly things in my neighborhood threatening my friends and neighbors.  I don't care if some kid thought it was a joke.  Not funny. 

I remembered an article I read last year.  One paragraph said: "Take responsibility for the face of the world.  Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate.  Do not look away and do not get used to them.  Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so."

Between violin lessons, this lady gathered up her skirts, stuffed her two children into the stroller, collected a canister of paint from the closet as well as a paint brush, and she marched right back down the street.  She and her daughter covered up that nasty thing, and she intends to keep her eye out on that spot for any reappearances.  She will obliterate them immediately.

Research Booth

Five summers ago, I was talking to a dear friend on the phone during our last weeks in Birmingham.  I was standing with my little, beat-up silver flip phone in the bedroom we used as an office in our quiet upstairs condo in the woods, when she mentioned that some Christian friends of hers were going camping for the Festival of Tabernacles.  That resonated with me, and I filed it away in the back of my mind.

Shortly before Anne turned one, I joined a Bible study group in Kent, and that fall we dove into a year-long exploration of Moses and all the events connected with his life.  We dipped into Genesis, read every word in Exodus through Deuteronomy, and touched on the opening of Joshua.  The story of the Israelites' escape from Egypt and their long wanderings in the wilderness, filled with their rebellion and God's faithfulness, came alive in full color.  Again I took out that idea of camping for Tabernacles and turned it over in my mind.  I remembered reading about Judaism as a teenager, inspired by my first foray into the literature of the Holocaust - the Diary of Anne Frank.  I remembered reading a lot about Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Hannukah, and Pesach, but I had very little stored away on Sukkoth (Tabernacles, or Booths, depending on your translation) and Shavuoth (Pentecost).  In the autumns back in Cleveland I saw Orthodox neighbors building their sukkahs.

Not my picture, but the sort of thing I saw

...I sat imagining late evenings in front of a fireplace, watching the embers dying, curled up in sleeping bags with a teenage Anne, reading chapters of the dramatic story of Exodus....  Then daily life came back in full force, and the idea was filed again for another year.

This last school year, Anne and Lazarus and I had moved over to a different Bible study group in Federal Way, and we plumbed the depths of the Gospel of John.  And there came Tabernacles again.  Two of the big chapters - the one about Jesus being the Living Water, and the one about Jesus being the Light of Life, were deeply entwined with the Feast.  To understand Jesus' words, we had to understand the setting.  The ancient feast had come full circle and centered on the person of Jesus.  I pulled out those mental files and promised myself to do some research on Tabernacles over the summer.

And I did.  As soon as we were done with John I dove headfirst into a study of Tabernacles, reading fifteen or twenty minutes a day, and taking notes.  I was surprised to find that if one knows where to look, that feast is woven into the whole fabric of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.  I read many parts of the Bible, with the aid of a concordance, as well as some Bible commentaries, and  I enjoyed several chapters from two beautiful devotional books by Ellen White, titled Patriarchs and Prophets and The Desire of Ages.

To start with the basics in this post, there was God's very thorough, but not particularly detailed in terms of the "how," command (in the command-filled book of Leviticus), to the Israelites to celebrate Tabernacles:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: "Speak to the people of Israel, saying: On the fifteenth day of this seventh month, and lasting seven days, there shall be the festival of booths to the LORD.  The first day shall be a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations.  Seven days you shall present the LORD's offerings by fire; on the eighth day you shall observe a holy convocation and present the LORD's offerings by fire; it is a solemn assembly; you shall not work at your occupations." 

"These are the appointed festivals of the LORD, which you shall celebrate as times of holy convocation, for presenting to the LORD offerings by fire - burnt offerings and grain offerings, sacrifices and drink offerings, each on its proper day - apart from the sabbaths of the LORD, and apart from your gifts, and apart from all your votive offerings, and apart from all your freewill offerings, which you give to the LORD." 

"Now, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall keep the festival of the LORD, lasting seven days; a complete rest on the first day, and a complete rest on the eighth day.  On the first day you shall take the fruit of majestic trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days.  You shall keep it as a festival to the LORD seven days in the year; you shall keep it in the seventh month as a statute forever throughout your generations.  You shall live in booths for seven days; all that are citizens in Israel shall live in booths, so that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God."
~Leviticus 23:33-43

There were more details in the book of Numbers as to what the aforementioned offerings were to be: quite bloody and quite mathematical.  I wonder if the families celebrating the festival had any inkling of the connection between the horror of their sin and its illustration though all the blood of the innocent animals, or the bloody sacrifice that their perfect God Himself would one day make on their broken behalf?

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month you shall have a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations.  You shall celebrate a festival to the LORD seven days.  You shall offer a burnt offering, an offering by fire, a pleasing odor to the LORD: thirteen young bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old.  They shall be without blemish.  Their grain offering shall be of choice flour mixed with oil, three-tenths of a ephah for each of the thirteen bulls, two-tenths for each of the two rams, and one-tenth for each of the fourteen lambs; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering, its grain offering and its drink offering. 

On the second day: twelve young bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and the drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, and their drink offerings. 

On the third day: eleven bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and the drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering and its grain offering and its drink offering. 

On the fourth day: ten bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and the drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering, its grain offering and its drink offering. 

On the fifth day: nine bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering, its grain offering and its drink offering. 

On the sixth day: eight bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and the drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering, its grain offering, and its drink offering. 

On the seventh day: seven bulls, two rams, fourteen male lambs a year old without blemish, with the grain offering and the drink offerings for the bulls, for the rams, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, besides the the regular burnt offering, its grain offering, and its drink offering. 

On the eighth day you shall have a solemn assembly; you shall not work at your occupations.  You shall offer a burnt offering, an offering by fire, a pleasing odor to the LORD: one bull, one ram, seven male lambs a year old without blemish, and the grain offering and drink offerings for the bull, for the ram, and for the lambs, as prescribed in accordance with their number; also one male goat for a sin offering, in addition to the regular burnt offering and its grain offering and its drink offering. 

These you shall offer to the LORD at your appointed festivals, in addition to your votive offerings and your freewill offerings, as your burnt offerings, your grain offerings, your drink offerings, and your offerings of well-being. 

So Moses told the Israelites everything just as the LORD had commanded Moses. 

~Numbers 29:12-40 

In his final sermons to the assembled wilderness wanderers on the brink of the Promised Land before his appointed day of death, Moses injected great joy into the commands for the festival, along with the solemnity of their duty to celebrate Tabernacles:

You shall keep the festival of booths for seven days, when you have gathered in the produce from your threshing floor and your wine press.  Rejoice during your festival, you and your sons and your daughters, your male and female slaves, as well as the Levites, the strangers, the orphans, and the widows resident in your towns.  Seven days you shall keep the festival to the LORD your God at the place that the LORD will choose; for the LORD you God will bless you in all your produce and in all your undertakings, and you shall surely celebrate. 

Three times a year all your males shall appear before the LORD you God at the place that he will choose: at the festival of unleavened bread, at the festival of weeks, and at the festival of booths.  They shall not appear before the LORD empty-handed; all shall give as they are able, according to the blessing of the LORD you God that he has given you.
~Deuteronomy 16:13-17

And there is one more bit Moses added to the festival (albeit only every seven years) about public reading.  I imagine a crowd coming and going, listening to a solemn speaker:

Then Moses wrote down this law, and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the leaders of Israel.  Moses commanded them: "Every seventh year, in the scheduled year of remission, during the festival of booths, when all Israel comes to appear before the LORD your God at the place that he will choose, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing.  Assemble the people - men, women, and children, as well as the aliens residing in your towns - so that they may hear and learn to fear the LORD your God and to observe diligently all the the words of this law, and so that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the LORD your God, as long as you live in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess."
~Deuteronomy 31: 9-13

To be continued...

Wednesday to Remember

Wednesday was made up of a lot of little segments of good and bad, and it was worth remembering.

At 9:00 am, our apartment looked like we were moving in or out, because we had the tent, the bedrolls, the tarps, and various other camping gear out in the living room/dining room drying, in such a manner that one could not pass without climbing over or under or through.  We (mostly Jared) had the place ready, including vacuumed! for my 9:30 student.  Only a small amount of panic.  (And don't ask about the condition of the piano room at 9:30 - it became the stow-away until both kids were up and the bedroom could take over that function.)

I taught from 9:30-2:15 straight through with my dear kids underfoot.  Some great lessons.  Some sloggy lessons.  Some happy kid moments.  Some I'm-tired-and-I want-to-nurse-because-I'm-teething-but-I-will-not-sleep moments.  I remembered to drink enough water not to get a headache - a lesson learned from last Wednesday when I taught straight through from 12:00 to 4:15 and didn't drink anything.

Then, it was time to do something about my phone.  I've dreaded upgrading since I've been happy with my 13-year-old flip phone for a long time.  But on last Friday morning, right before we left to go camping, my replacement charger bit the dust (one of our cats chewed through the previous ones as a kitten), and the beater phone was probably not worth getting a new charger for at this point... As we were out the door for four days, I powered it down to conserve the remaining battery and left it on the chair in the living room.  Tuesday, right after we returned from the camping trip, was a Gig Harbor teaching day, so going to the phone store wasn't in the schedule.  2:15 on Wednesday was my moment.  I loaded up Mr. I-don't-nap in the double stroller and we walked over to the phone store where I had to buy a smart phone (albeit the dumbest one I could find) and upgrade my service since my granddaddy plan wouldn't work with my new phone.  Anyway, I have entered 2017.  We spent a LONG time at the store, but Lazarus had a lot of fun crawling around and charming everyone, while trying to escape to the great outdoors through the propped-open front door.

As soon as the phone was operational, I found I had four missed calls from Jared.  Big oops.  He was supposed to have taken Anne out on her nap walk with the single stroller quite some time before, but as his car key went missing on the camping trip, and as I took my key ring with me with me so I could check the mail, and as the stroller was in the trunk of the Aveo for which we don't have spare keys, no nap walk was happening, and Jared had a deadline because his next lesson was at 5:00.  Lazarus and I dashed home and handed over the keys, forgoing the other planned errands.

At this point, I realized the restaurant I was planning to meet my out-of-town friend at for dinner was permanently closed, so I scrambled around to find another place and sent her a message.

Then it was time to plan my 5:30 lesson, which had been up in the air about whether it would happen, as the small subject of said lesson broke her arm last week.  By this point in the day I knew it was on, so I had to come up with a different (and may I say, successful) Pre-Twinkle lesson plan which didn't involve the right arm.  Then taught the lesson.

Afterwards, I got myself directions to the restaurant in West Seattle, got the stroller, diaper bag, and kids loaded up, and headed out to meet up with  an old friend who now lives in Phoenix.  The google directions ended up being a bit strange, and I got a bit lost, but we were only 15 minutes late.  And the restaurant turned out to be basically a bar, so we all walked on the beach for a bit and picked another place to eat.  After our first adventure eating at a Vietnamese restaurant which actually had VEGETARIAN options (this is Seattle!), we played on the beach some more, watching the sunset over the Olympic mountains, and oh! the clouds.  So beautiful.  It was so lovely to see this lady and catch up on all of her adventures.  And then it was time for ice cream.  And then it was 9:40 and starting to get dark, so time to go back home.

We didn't get lost on the way home, but just as we pulled off the freeway in Kent, I suddenly noticed foul-smelling vapors rising from under my hood.  In half a split second, I was parked on the shoulder and I was dashing around pulling kids out of car seats and flinging them onto the scrubby road-side vegetation.  I've seen a car fire before, and if we were on fire, I was getting us out of there and away from the car faster than you can imagine.  And almost before I got everyone unloaded, there were four gentlemen from three different cars there helping.  One man had gotten the screaming baby unloaded from his carrier and was calming him, another was checking on my temperature gauge, and the other two were offering me and the kids a ride around the corner to a gas station.  So we hopped into their car and listened to their Middle-Eastern pop and by the time we were parked at the gas station, our overheated car was there, too, pushed by these amazing helpers, and they had the hood open so it could cool.  I called Jared and he headed over to pick us up, and I got permission to leave the car overnight.  Once the word was out that my husband was on the way, the helpers (were they angels?) vanished into the night, and I was peacefully hanging out on the sidewalk of a gas station in the dark night with two kids, unloading all of our luggage from the car.  Two or three more gentlemen offered us help, and another fellow didn't offer us help but asked if I'd seen a "chunky White dude with a beanie, on foot".  I hadn't, but even if I had, I wasn't sure I wanted to divulge Mr. Beanie's whereabouts to the dude in the car.  Anyway, Jared made it down to the gas station after dropping off the car full of recycling at our secret drop-off location, since there wasn't going to be room for all of us and the luggage in the Honda as it was.  We got ourselves loaded up and back home and into bed, much later than planned.  And tried to sleep.  It hasn't been a good week for bed times.

(Epilogue: On Thursday morning, the car was towed to Saggu, our local friendly Punjabi car shop, and they repaired the coolant system.  Now we'll just have to see what else goes out, since that seems to be what happens when the car overheats...)

Long summer evenings

That's one thing I LOVE about living in the North.  Here are some photos from a recent long summer evening.

A little walk to our favorite city park... a few days before a mother bear and her cub ambled through mid-afternoon, shutting the park and the elementary school across the street down until they had moved on.

An eagle was busy building her nest there:

Flying off for supplies

Carrying some sticks in her feet

This is the tree.

There she is way up near the top!

Tiny wildflowers in the field

Overlooking Lake Clark

Visiting the construction site across the street.  We've been going for two years since they first started contouring the land.  Most of the houses are finished now, but you can see they're just getting started on another here.

Bopping About Town

It's pictures of the kids.  Mostly Anne is bopping around town.  Lazarus is mostly hanging in the living room.

Recreation at 7 months of a photo of Anne at 7 months

This one was Anne.

A week ago Friday it was a long, sunny evening.  Anne and I went out for a walk/ride around the neighborhood.

Heading out

Walking the walls.  (She loves trotting along the tops of the retaining walls.)

Retrieving some dandilions from a side yard.

Cat toys, baby toys - they're all the same...

For some reason, his face reminds me a lot of my brother when he was little, in this photo.

Another trip to the rhododendron garden...

Giant Solomon's Seal

Last weekend we set up the fairy princess tent in the living room.  The sillies had fun in there!

And... I finally finished my knitting project for Lazarus.  The 9-months size sweater fits him now, and will for a while.  But the baby bonnet is for a baby with a big head and a 'fro, I think.  Anne can wear it, but Lazarus disappeared  beneath it.

New swim suit was worn for three days running even though the weather wasn't amenable.

Checking out the time on her new Hello Kitty timepiece from Jeffrey and Linda

The enormous outdoor checkers/chess set is also useful for teething and for house construction.

Thursday was seriously foggy in the morning.  Then it cleared off and got hot.  It was already 70 at noon when Anne and I went down to the fountain in downtown Kent, donated by the Rotary club.  Later in the day we had a thunderstorm with hail and TORRENTIAL downpours worthy of Texas, the Midwest, or ALABAMA.

And I'll leave you with an extra-blurry selfie of Lazarus and me in the living room mirror in our matching colors....