Exploring The Unknown

And here we are, sitting in our living room, Max playing on his iPad, Martha curled up in my feet, and me prospecting, sending emails, looking for great articles and writing. The other two are still asleep and hubs is in a conference call upstairs. It’s Monday morning, 8:30 AM, and first day of summer vacation for the kids. I can hear the clock, and I can hear the tapping from his iPad.

Outside the sprinklers are watering our yard, before the sun and heat will take over in a couple of hours. As the ac has been mercifully protecting us from the heat all weekend as the region hit its first heatwave of the summer, this morning the marine flow is giving us a wonderfully cool morning, but I can already see the sun burning its way through the layer of clouds. June Gloom, is what they called it in California when I was there as a teenager.

We are splitting the day as I have a meeting in Redmond at 10, and he needs to be in the office in the afternoon. That means, iPads and Xbox in the morning, mom stuff later. Mom stuff, meaning lunch, library, doctor’s appointments and hopefully a park.

This weekend was about Seattle. I have an open house coming up in the Greenlake area, and as I’m no Seattle specialist, I wanted to learn, and one learns by previewing homes. To me Greenlake has always been “the neighborhood” in Seattle, the one with cute coffee shops, restaurants and happy families browsing in the park living in those beautiful old craftsman style homes, I mean the real ones, home built in the early 1900’s. And that’s exactly what we got, cute families, narrow streets, coffee shops, small restaurants and homes with plenty of character. Some of them, too much character with kitchens too small to fit in, and bathrooms where I felt like a mammoth, not to mention basements and attics with 6ft ceilings. At one of the homes I lost Mia as she had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the maze of this home that was three homes turned into one, and found my girl crying as she thought she would never find her way out of there.

And while previewing home after home after home, new, remodeled, old, I come into a rather painful realization of having turned into a very suburban person. Me, the girl who grew up in the very heart of Helsinki. Not only is Greenlake on the wrong side of the 520 bridge for us, but suddenly I find myself preferring those wider streets, well organized floorplans and the back alley where my kids can run around and play with all the other neighborhood kids as we sip our beers with the neighbors watching our offspring at play.

I still find Greenlake and the surrounding areas charming as one could not say anything else. Charming it is. Great walking scores, homes straight from storybooks, gorgeous front yard gardens with hidden patios behind the vines, but it’s just not for me.