Note: Guess who has writer's block again!

The winds of change are howling once again. Well, they have been this whole year. But, now huge, mostly positive changes are imminent. This fall (perhaps as early as late September), Mom, Jack, the dogs, and I will be moving to Washington state. Mom’s been wanting to expand her real estate outside of Colorado for a couple of years now, but I never expected to move over a thousand miles away from home. 

Mom wanted to move to Utah for awhile, but that fell through just before we were set to move there. That thankfully means we won’t have to pack much, since we did most of the packing last year when we anticipated moving to Utah. Bad news is, we likely won’t hire a moving company due to current circumstances (God only knows where those burly moving dudes have been). Also, our Washington house will be considerably smaller than our current house in Ken Caryl, so we’re gonna have to downsize quite a bit. Good news is, we already got rid of most of our useless shit in January when I was going wild on Trikafta. Bad news is, we’ll have to give up even more, including some things that will be hard to let go, like my beautiful midcentury piano my grandpa got for me when I was a little girl.

Since we likely won’t be hiring a moving company, we’ll get rid of all of our furniture and buy new stuff for the house in Washington. I’ve got lots of money saved up, so I’ll probably buy an expensive, much more portable keyboard piano for myself when we get to Washington (if you can’t already tell, I miss playing the piano and the guitar very much). Mom also plans on getting rid of her Rav4. There’s no point in paying for two vehicles right now. We don’t really go anywhere, and we won’t be going anywhere in Washington. Covid-19 kind of wrecked all of our plans. When this ridiculous shitshow ends, Mom will buy another car (which will likely be something cute if we stay in Washington where there’s hardly any snow), and I’ll no longer have to share my Xterra.

As depressing and upsetting this pandemic has been for everyone, there is a silver lining. Living in Washington over the fall and winter will be no different than living in Colorado for us. We won’t be able to visit with friends or relatives at all in Colorado or Washington, especially since most of my loved ones are unfortunately very stubborn people who think they can get away with taking a few unnecessary risks here and there. I’m not willing to put myself at risk, no matter how much I miss my family. We’ll get back together again once we all get the Mark of the Beast injected into our shoulders. 

This fact makes the move to Washington much easier for me to cope with. I do and will miss my Colorado friends and family. But, perhaps the move to Washington will keep me from feeling too sad about it. I’ll be doing a lot of exploring over the fall and winter in Washington. If we just stayed home on the Front Range, I wouldn’t have many places to go. I’ve already explored most of what Colorado’s got to offer. It wouldn’t be nearly as fun or exciting. However, I haven’t explored much of Washington state, even though I’ve been there plenty of times before. I spent most of my time in Washington hiding from my excessively affectionate distant relatives, and homesick to the point of being nauseous. This time, it will be much different. 

We’ll be living somewhere by Gig Harbor and Fox Island. I’m not quite sure if we’ll be on the island or the harbor. Mom has been using the two places interchangeably. I already know the house we’ll be moving into. Mom’s cousin, Tracy, sold her house to Mom. She will be moving into a bigger house nearby to suit her growing family, while my little crew moves into Tracy’s old house (by the way, Tracy has a PhD in Psychology, so she has never taken my introversion as a personal insult. She actually likes my introverted nature. I really enjoy being with Tracy, and look forward to seeing her and her family much more often). 

I’ve stayed at that house a few nights over the years. It’s older and rather small (three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an open floorplan downstairs with a sunroom added onto the house a few decades after it was built), but Tracy got it renovated to look much more modern when she first moved into it. I’ll have a small bedroom upstairs, but if I really need to escape, I can just go outside. It’s sort of rural, on a tall, steep hill on about an acre of land, surrounded by massive trees. If the woods weren’t so thick, and the houses weren’t so sparse, I would have a better idea where our house is on the map. I suspect it’s on the island, because I recall driving over a few huge draw bridges across the Puget Sound to get there. 

We’ll be very close to the beach of Puget Sound. The sound is quite different than the open ocean. From the shore, the sound looks a lot like the Great Lakes in the midwest. The waters are usually calm, unless it’s windy. The waves are entirely wind-driven. However, the sound is affected by the tide cycle, since it is still the ocean. And, obviously, the water in the Puget Sound is salt water. That means I plan on getting back into the water again, wearing a thick wetsuit. The cold water in the sound never freezes, and the temperature of the water doesn’t really change (hell, the weather stays relatively the same year-round in Washington too), so I can swim in it all year round.