the storage unit

I feel a little like Abraham--we own a home we don't live in. Nothing is there, but we're renting a storage unit with things in it that we hope to put in the house. Things like a vessel sink and a fat cat door.

On top of the mountain

When I turned 40, I started a section in my journal I called "On top of the mountain, not over the hill." God's joke on me: Here I am, over the hill and going to live on a mountain. Here's another joke: We have never set foot on the land we now own. When we visited our daughter and her family in Mountlake Terrace, Washington, we toured the Olympic Peninsula and fell in love with the area. We have only seen the lot online. We looked at lots on line and then our son-in-law Layne checked them out for us. Layne will also be building the house. My husband Mike, who is a geographer, got a satellite picture of the lot, and meticulously studies the videos has taken. He argues with Layne about the surveyor stakes he can see in the video. Laugh if you will, but as Mike has so often told me, "Don't argue with a geographer." Ninety-nine percent of the time, he's right. That other one percent, that is another blog and it's not pretty.

We have cedar shakes.

The first purchase for the new house--cedar shakes. Layne bought them without even telling us because he got such a good deal he figured if he could sell them if we didn't want them. As if Mike Roark couldn't appreciate a bargain. Layne is working with the same guy who drafted his spec house in Cape, so it's been a long-distance, interstate project so far. Remember, we've never set foot on the property yet!