Midwest2Westcoast

Nothing beats a secluded guest house in the mountains during the wintery off-season for a fantastic environment to do some great writing. With just Ann and I in the house, there’s ample opportunity to concentrate and let the mind focus on things you weren’t seeing before. I worked remotely for the first five years of my present job. Sometime after that Ann’s job changed to a remote position for two years and was extended to three. Then during the pandemic, we worked remotely at home together for a bit, while the boys were there, so the four of us were working/schooling from home, but that was the state of the world at that time. This is different, of course. We’re isolated in a vacation spot with no one else around. It’s ideal, really. It just requires open communication and maintaining clear professional boundaries. I was particularly proud of the impressive amount I’ve been able to write in the past week. However, when Ann saw it, she seemed disturbed to see I had typed “All wo...

It’s interesting to see how fast a new place can become your comfort zone, even when it’s not entirely comfortable. Our inner-city Tacoma house was hard to leave. We’d been there a month, and it still felt we were leaving too soon. Knowing we would be back in a month, albeit to the other side of town, did make it easier. On our last day we finally made it to the W.W. Seymore Conservatory in Wright Park ( www.parkstacoma.gov/place/w-w-seymour-conservatory ), which is dog-friendly, or at least it was before we visited. Mary really wants to shove her face into the bushes and see what’s in there. I kept her on a very short leash, but the place is so compact that you really couldn’t keep her short enough. Then we went over to Corina Bakery www.corinabakery.com   and got a strada for breakfast and a cannoli for later. On the way out to the new digs we stopped at the Fred Meyer in Spanaway, a mere 45-minute drive from our new home, quite different from the one we were leaving where...

We started our first blog in 2011. Blogs had been around for a decade or so and were still pretty popular because social media hadn’t gone crazy yet. Ann cooked her way through Cooking Wild in Missouri, much like Julie & Julia, and I tried to hunt and fish to support it. People loved the idea. We were interviewed by the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a radio station. The blog was wildly popular for two years, and has about 200 posts. To date, it has earned us $14.43, but you don’t get paid until it hits $100, so we’ve got a ways to go. You can find it at https://woodstofood.blogspot.com/ . I started my next blog, Fred on Faith, in 2013 as a place to write my thoughts on scripture and spirituality that weren’t appropriate for work, or at least my work. I posted nine times in the first year, three times in the second year, and seven times in the 11 years since then. No one read this blog except my friend Flippo and my cousin Bob. You can read it at https://fredo...

  We’re going to miss Tacoma and living in the Stadium District. Ann has loved being a couple of minutes’ walk from a really nice grocery store. And we’ve gone out in the evenings – on weeknights even! – afoot as well. Last Saturday night, we walked to Rock the Dock Pub & Grill ( www.rockthedockpub.com ), which was hard to walk to, but we figured it out then it was easy to walk back from. They had live music (the Soulful Duo of Donny and Heather Jones) and no cover charge. The music was nice, and we got tempura-fried zucchini, which was fantastic. Last Tuesday night, we walked over to the Slovenian Hall in Old Town to see Celebrate the Seasons! The Girsky Quartet and guest violinist Maria Sampen . It was the music of Vivaldi (his  Four Seasons ), Piazzola ( Invierno Porteno ), and Tacoma's own composer  Korine Fujiwara ( BeSpoke, Unspoken ). The hall is a cool, old fashioned reception hall kind of place, they were serving amazing cookies, and everything was free...

When we arrived in Tacoma, front-yard Halloween decorations were in full swing. This is of note because it was September 19. I have no idea when it started. Tacoma is surrounded by pumpkin patches. I don’t know if these pumpkin patches inspire the passion for Halloween, or if the pumpkin matches were started to meet the outrageous local demand for pumpkins. Either way, it looks like they had a good crop this year. When we were returning from our aforementioned beach excursion, I needed to use the restroom, so I stopped at one of the larger pumpkin patches along I-5 in between Olympia and Tacoma. I thought I’d just quickly use a porta-john (they’re called Honey Pots here), but they were all inside the gate. The admission charge to this pumpkin patch was $23, so I decided I didn’t need to use the restroom as urgently as I thought I did a few minutes prior. I was in the minority, though. Hundreds of people were there, happy to pay. Back to the yard decorations here in Tacoma – they...

Last weekend we went to Poo Poo Point Trail. This reminds me that I also recently had an appointment with a gastroenterologist, but I’ll save that story for a different blog post. This was a trail that Ann found that was about a 45-minute drive from our house, and wasn’t in the National Park, so it’s dog-friendly. You can read about the trail on the Washington Trails Association website at https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/poo-poo-point or All Trails at https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/washington/poo-poo-point-trail . One has it at 7.2 miles roundtrip, and the other has it at 6.6 miles, and I don’t believe either one of them. It seemed shorter than that. But it is very steep. In places it was basically like stone stairs, but with higher-than-natural step heights. Mary did fine with the uneven terrain. At the top you’re rewarded with a stunning vista of the valley below. It’s also a launch site for paragliding, where you run and jump off the mountain with a parachute and sai...

On our second weekend, I had read there was a good trail in Gig Harbor, and we wanted to check out a potential place to stay in the area, so we headed over the Narrows to the island. The place to stay wasn’t what we were looking for. It was too far from town to be convenient, but too much of a suburb to feel like you’re out in nature. The trail was also not something we would go back to. If you’re on a bicycle and you want to get across Gig Harbor, you will be very grateful for this trail – it is a little bicycle highway. But it’s not what I would call a running destination. The old Gig Harbor downtown was nice, with kind of a Nantucket or Cape Cod feel to it. Weekend three presented us with an opportunity to explore further, and Ann found a trail starting in the unpronounceable town of Pullayup leading toward the mountains. It’s a part of a rails to trails project, so it would feel a lot like the KATY trail, and finally get us on our bikes that we had just hauled 3,000 miles to have...

Last week Ann was invited to something called Green Drinks. It’s an international organization that encourages people who work in the environmental field to meet up monthly for information sessions. You can read more about it at https://www.greendrinks.org/ . There are many chapters in Washington. It looks like the Tacoma group doesn’t keep the website updated, but they do have a Facebook page at   https://www.facebook.com/greendrinks253/ with about 1,600 followers. This meeting was at the Mule Tavern in Tacoma, known for its grilled cheese. I didn’t eat there, but did have a Moscow Mule. They make their own Ginger Beer, and it’s some spicy ginger that made for a good drink. They had a huge crowd. A couple of people talked about the upcoming Green Tacoma event, and then everyone had a chance to plug their own upcoming events and volunteer opportunities. It was neat to hear about everything going on around Tacoma relating to tree planting. Ann was lit up. She certainly felt like sh...

  It’s odd when you get to this point in your life to have something about your core identity called into question. About a year ago, I was at a training in Minnesota, and in one of the exercises, you were instructed to give a personal introduction about yourself. I described myself as being from the Midwest, and a couple of people in the room shot each other glances and made strange faces. “What?” I asked. “I thought you said you were from Missouri,” one replied. “I am, lifelong,” I said. “That’s not the Midwest, it’s the south,” they countered. These people, who were from the Dakotas and Minnesota, considered themselves Midwest. They lumped Missouri in with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Arkansas. Ok, I conceded, the Bootheel, Branson, everything south us US Highway 60, oh alright, I’ll even say everything south of Interstate 44 may seem to share a certain cultural affinity with our neighbors to the south, but overall, Missouri as a whole, it definitely more akin...

We’re conveniently located between two national parks, and neither of them want us there. This is unusual for us. We’ve been to 49 states with the boys and have camped in most of them. And I’ve been to all but a few National Parks in the lower 48 and have always been welcome. But now I’m not, due to something about Mary. If they knew her, they would feel differently, but the National Park's no-dog policy doesn’t allow for interviews to state your case. Ann started searching for other places to get into nature near Tacoma and found Little Mashel Falls near Eatonville. It was only about 35 miles away, but it took about an hour because we were on the far side of Tacoma from it. The hike was only a few miles, but we liked the idea of the falls as a destination. I thought the falls were being awfully modest with the word “Little”, as the big one in the series of three was about 90 feet or so. But the little comes from the source, the Little Mashel River. We hiked to the middle falls...

After looking at the house on the water on Saturday, we went to the local store, and Ann ran into one of two people we know in the entire state of Washington. On Sunday, we went to the United Methodist Church at Brown’s Point ( https://brownspointchurch.org/ ), up on the hill on the north side of town. It’s a beautiful chapel with a clear glass wall right up front – kind of overlooking Puget Sound, but more looking directly into the trees right next to it. We spoke to the pastor as we were leaving, and she asked where we were from. When I said Missouri, she said, “Oh, do you know Kim Jenne?” They were friends from seminary. Kim not only works in my office but is also my supervisor. I was on a zoom call with her the next morning. We took a walk through the park, which is a block away, called Wright Park. Being an arboretum, the trees are labeled. Ann appreciated this. Not that she doesn’t know all trees, but after a full career in Missouri, she is still not all that familiar with a ...