Moving on up...

This is our last night at Little Norway (housesitting gig). Tomorrow we move the last of our stuff to our friend's mansion...yes, 6000 square feet of mansion. I shall get lost in the house, I know, but for 3 more weeks, I must live under someone else's roof and not my own.

And I may be sans computer for awhile, which will provide me with lots and lots of reading by the time I hook up ours at home. Happy blogging, my dears.

But I am thankful we are moving back, sort of, to our side of the tracks. Living in the "north end" of Seattle is like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The traffic is amazingly awful (it took us an hour to get from here to our house today...it normally takes 15 minutes), the people are amazingly rude, and the money spent at the grocery stores and local mall is amazingly horrific. I am happy to be moving back to the grocery store that has two whole aisles devoted to Mexican items, another aisle for Asian items, and a special row in the meat section for parts of the animal I never knew were edible. I'm happy to be back in the 'hood where people say hello, every corner has a church where the congregants actually sing and faint and wear Sunday hats the size of bird baths, and the skin color is not all one hue, nor the pocketbooks all filled with enough money to gag on.

Little Norway has been a perfect respite and a perfect "nursing" home for Chester's final days, but I'm ready for a neighborhood that's a bit more real and less Stepfordish than this one.

So, we're moving on up to the mansion tomorrow (hot tub, pool, leather couches, six bathrooms) and then by the middle of May, into our own humble abode.

There is no place like home.

No place.

My biggest concern is how I'll feel moving back home without Chester. I will most certainly cry, just as I did today when a large lab licked my chin with his velvet tongue, his eyes half closed and his tail wagging.

And then the vet called and told us that Chester's remains were ready to pick up. I cried just hearing the message.

I shall cry again and again and again when I pick up the box with his remains and then figure out where to store them until we decide where to spread them. We plan on making a garden stone with some of the ashes, but then there are many hikes we've taken where Chester deserves to be laid at rest.

So soon we shall head to the mountains and I shall cry again.

Last night I dreamt that Chester was chasing a greyhound through a large field.

I woke up crying and smiling. He always did love the tall ones!

Thinking of all of you over the next few weeks and will attempt to get back in touch soon.


Signing off for now...
na