Moving, ever moving
G'day all!
It is just over a month since we left Oz and now four weeks and one day since we arrived in Seattle! It seems to have flown past. I still have not had a meltdown. Am starting to think there must be something wrong with me...
Tonight is our last night in our Belltown hangout. We've been here nearly a month and tomorrow is our move out day.
We spent the day, strangely enough, moving stuff from here to our new rental apartment. Given we started off with three and a half suitcases of stuff, you would think it would not take long to move it all. Except 8 boxes of our stuff arrived, and I've been buying stuff for the place that we will need, and suddenly it is four loads in the car... One of our friends helped out (and very useful he was too - thanks, Mental!), so we bought him tea (aka dinner) at a Thai restaurant he recommended. Hooray - real Thai food, not the weird stuff we had the other week.
Move out means no more internet, except on the phone and its internet is dodgy. We will be getting internet, once we've figured out who can provide a reasonable service to us. Can you believe that even though we are in the land of the free market, only three companies can provide internet to us? Two have pretty rancid reputations (and best speed is 5Mb/s which is pathetic in this day and age) and the third is Comcast. Maybe you aren't aware of my run-ins with comcast in the past but they weren't exactly enjoyable either.... We can't even get AT&T (a)DSL. THIS IS SEATTLE fer crying out loud! High-tech industries all over the place! Fremont, the suburb across from ours, has a Google office, and three miles away, if that, we can't even get decent internet? Sheesh! I guess it all points to the lack of investment in infrastructure that seems all pervasive in the US these days. It's good enough, why bother making it better? Money's tight, we can't afford it. etc. Gah. The mighty USA can't even get good internet in Seattle....
With any luck the lack of internet will mean that I will get some picture editing done. I have probably a thousand pics to go through and edit. The ones on my G+ stream are from the phone mostly and aren't always as pretty as a real camera can make them. So I hope to have a few more pics to share soon. Plus being in a place that gets real live daylight will be excellent - we get no sun at all in this apartment. I should be able to get pics of my knitting. Oh, I guess I can use blogger on my mobile, like I've been wont to do in the past, but you will have to excuse any sideways pictures. It seems to be bad at that. Anyway, I am rather excited about moving into our "own" place. The lease is for a year, so I hope everything goes smoothly at Nathan's job (and my health), and by then we will have an idea how long we are likely to be here and what the rental markets and house markets are up to.
The car goes back tomorrow too. I've finally learned how to reverse and parallel park it (it has a boot/trunk y'see and I've driven hatchbacks and station wagons only for the last 14 years), I've gotten used to it, I've driven it most of the way to Paradise and back, after my husband showed me the way.... (the local Paradise is on the slopes of Mt Rainier - that's Ran-ear.) We also went through Puyallup, where a lot of cars were (not quite) piled up, though a couple of times it came close. I have to learn how to say it. Pew-ahl-ep. I think pile-up is more inventive but we must be respectful of the names of local tribes. I've started to become fond of the car - it handles pretty well, goes pretty well, stops pretty well and swallows a fair amount of luggage too despite being a sedan. (It's a Ford Fusion.) It certainly handles better than the Hyundai i45 or whatever it was that I had in California and I didn't have visibility problems in it (never noticed the A pillar was in the way on the twisty bits but I had NO IDEA where the backside of it was).
So everything changes again tomorrow. I'll be in a new place, making new connections, without internet and no car. There is a supermarket at the end of our street (not really the end, more a block away - if you look at NW 56th St, Seattle, you will see that it goes for quite a looooong way). There is a farmer's market every Sunday four or five blocks away. A few more blocks away is another good supermarket plus if I get desperate there's a Safeway opposite it. There's cafes, a quilt shop, a yarn shop all within very easy walking distance.... Our furniture, etc, arrives in another two or three weeks but the big A is paying for rental furniture in the meantime.
I have still been plugging away at some knitting. I finished a nice cowl, but I have to line it because the lovely soft merino is still scratchy against my princess-and-the-pea-neck. A sock I started two weeks ago is umm barely past the toe. The mitten I started two weeks ago has been pulled out four or more times and I think now is finally the right side (I'm good at making them monstrously large or sized for a little wee hand, and whilst my hands are big they aren't that big, they certainly aren't as small as the last version I tried. Patterns? You expect me to use a pattern?).
I also visited Little Knits in West Seattle. Oh dear. Oh my. I can see that there will be a few accidents there... If you aren't on their mailing list, you really should be. Y'see they have an internet store that is huge and have lots of sales/closeouts. I am not linking directly to them because it might be bad for those on tight budgets. You need to make the deliberate choice to go check them out. And if I go visit them without a car, it will take me 1.5 hours to get there from my new address - the bus connections are not very good.
Seattle has been very kind to me recently. It got to 15C on Friday and I got so hot that I was ready to wear a tshirt and shorts, almost.... though if you saw my legs at the moment, you would have absolutely no doubt that I am finding it cold and that I have Scottish blood in me and that wearing shorts would be a very bad idea. We've had four sunny days in a row, and the forecast goes from sunny to partly cloudy/partly sunny to possible rain by next Sunday. We've had an excellent trot though so I can't complain too much (can I?).
Hopefully I'll remember to do some mobile blogging, but for the nonce,
anon!
It is just over a month since we left Oz and now four weeks and one day since we arrived in Seattle! It seems to have flown past. I still have not had a meltdown. Am starting to think there must be something wrong with me...
Tonight is our last night in our Belltown hangout. We've been here nearly a month and tomorrow is our move out day.
We spent the day, strangely enough, moving stuff from here to our new rental apartment. Given we started off with three and a half suitcases of stuff, you would think it would not take long to move it all. Except 8 boxes of our stuff arrived, and I've been buying stuff for the place that we will need, and suddenly it is four loads in the car... One of our friends helped out (and very useful he was too - thanks, Mental!), so we bought him tea (aka dinner) at a Thai restaurant he recommended. Hooray - real Thai food, not the weird stuff we had the other week.
Move out means no more internet, except on the phone and its internet is dodgy. We will be getting internet, once we've figured out who can provide a reasonable service to us. Can you believe that even though we are in the land of the free market, only three companies can provide internet to us? Two have pretty rancid reputations (and best speed is 5Mb/s which is pathetic in this day and age) and the third is Comcast. Maybe you aren't aware of my run-ins with comcast in the past but they weren't exactly enjoyable either.... We can't even get AT&T (a)DSL. THIS IS SEATTLE fer crying out loud! High-tech industries all over the place! Fremont, the suburb across from ours, has a Google office, and three miles away, if that, we can't even get decent internet? Sheesh! I guess it all points to the lack of investment in infrastructure that seems all pervasive in the US these days. It's good enough, why bother making it better? Money's tight, we can't afford it. etc. Gah. The mighty USA can't even get good internet in Seattle....
With any luck the lack of internet will mean that I will get some picture editing done. I have probably a thousand pics to go through and edit. The ones on my G+ stream are from the phone mostly and aren't always as pretty as a real camera can make them. So I hope to have a few more pics to share soon. Plus being in a place that gets real live daylight will be excellent - we get no sun at all in this apartment. I should be able to get pics of my knitting. Oh, I guess I can use blogger on my mobile, like I've been wont to do in the past, but you will have to excuse any sideways pictures. It seems to be bad at that. Anyway, I am rather excited about moving into our "own" place. The lease is for a year, so I hope everything goes smoothly at Nathan's job (and my health), and by then we will have an idea how long we are likely to be here and what the rental markets and house markets are up to.
So everything changes again tomorrow. I'll be in a new place, making new connections, without internet and no car. There is a supermarket at the end of our street (not really the end, more a block away - if you look at NW 56th St, Seattle, you will see that it goes for quite a looooong way). There is a farmer's market every Sunday four or five blocks away. A few more blocks away is another good supermarket plus if I get desperate there's a Safeway opposite it. There's cafes, a quilt shop, a yarn shop all within very easy walking distance.... Our furniture, etc, arrives in another two or three weeks but the big A is paying for rental furniture in the meantime.
I have still been plugging away at some knitting. I finished a nice cowl, but I have to line it because the lovely soft merino is still scratchy against my princess-and-the-pea-neck. A sock I started two weeks ago is umm barely past the toe. The mitten I started two weeks ago has been pulled out four or more times and I think now is finally the right side (I'm good at making them monstrously large or sized for a little wee hand, and whilst my hands are big they aren't that big, they certainly aren't as small as the last version I tried. Patterns? You expect me to use a pattern?).
I also visited Little Knits in West Seattle. Oh dear. Oh my. I can see that there will be a few accidents there... If you aren't on their mailing list, you really should be. Y'see they have an internet store that is huge and have lots of sales/closeouts. I am not linking directly to them because it might be bad for those on tight budgets. You need to make the deliberate choice to go check them out. And if I go visit them without a car, it will take me 1.5 hours to get there from my new address - the bus connections are not very good.
Seattle has been very kind to me recently. It got to 15C on Friday and I got so hot that I was ready to wear a tshirt and shorts, almost.... though if you saw my legs at the moment, you would have absolutely no doubt that I am finding it cold and that I have Scottish blood in me and that wearing shorts would be a very bad idea. We've had four sunny days in a row, and the forecast goes from sunny to partly cloudy/partly sunny to possible rain by next Sunday. We've had an excellent trot though so I can't complain too much (can I?).
Hopefully I'll remember to do some mobile blogging, but for the nonce,
anon!
Hope the new place is really good for you and you get all sorted soon!
ReplyDeleteSo much has been happening, you are doing very well not to have a melt down, must be the cold-ish weather!!
ReplyDeleteI hope the move finishes up very smoothly and that you can exist without the proper internet for a little while. I don't mind sidie-waysie, photos!! It is rather poor that you can't get The Internet.