Midwest2Westcoast

  I like using things to their full potential. When we host Thanksgiving and Easter at our house in Columbia, we often have 10 people sleeping in the house, and about 20 people seated around three tables. That makes me feel good. I feel silly driving around a crew cab, half-ton truck with I’m out solo and not hauling anything. But this week I had my whole crew in my crew cab, and we filled all five seats. We were hauling a lot of cold-weather, bulking luggage in the bed, and we were using the four-wheel drive to get through some rather deep snow on Skate Creek Road. I felt really great about the truck then. Little did I know that two days later, my affection for the truck would be diminished considerably. 

  We headed back to the beach with Henry and Oliver. It was a different experience than our last trip there back in September. We went to the almost closest place, Copalis Beach. It’s about a two-hour drive from Tacoma. It’s north of Twin Harbors, where we went previously. The beach wasn’t that different, but the weather was. It was in the mid-40s I think, but it felt much colder with the wind. Mary’s ears were blowing back like she was running fast, even when she was standing still. Maybe that’s why she loves the beach so much, it’s kind of like having your head out the window when you’re going down the highway. Mary was the only one of the five of us who didn’t seem to mind the wind and cold. When the rain started to hit, we realized that since you can drive on the beach here, we could enjoy the view just as well from the comfort of the trusty F-150. We drove down the beach past Ocean Shores and finally turned in a took back to the road. Driving on the beach proved to be much ...

I didn’t think people around here ever cancelled anything due to rain, but it seems the Christmas lights boat parade didn’t have many participants this year. Perhaps it was a very fast parade and we missed it, but by the time we were in the viewing area we saw a few boats in their slips with Christmas lights, and one well-lit boat cruising by. We still enjoyed the night of Fire and Ice at the Tacoma Museum of Glass ( https://www.museumofglass.org/ ). I didn’t realize that the giant conical shaped building in downtown Tacoma, that reminded me a bit of the shuttlecocks at the Kansas City art museum, is so functional. It’s the hot room for the glass furnaces. We were able to sit for a while and observe the artists at work. We also visited America’s Car Museum ( https://www.americascarmuseum.org/ ). Mr. Lemay has an impressive and diverse collection, but I’m pretty sure I was seeing a subtle preference towards Fords. It certainly had more Ford GTs than I had ever seen in one place. I tri...

  Que up the Thin Lizzy album, the boys are in town. Oliver flew in from Columbia, and Henry from Chicago a couple of days later because he didn’t want to miss the office party that the law firm he was working at put on. From what he told me, he made the right choice. The lawyers knew how to celebrate a good year.  On Oliver’s first night here we walked Mary up to the north beach and spent a little time looking at aquatic life up on the sand. When we walked back there were a few people working around the shed that had been pushed forward in the landslide a few days prior. This seemed odd, as it was pretty late at night. We then realized the walkway back was now blocked by the shed. In the short time that we were at the beach another landslide had pushed the shed forward a few more feet, so the eave of its roof was now against the house. They already had a board in place to walk across to get back. Mary was reluctant about this, but with a little boost she made it.  We got...

  We had a stormy night recently. That may not sound newsworthy, but this one was considerably stormier than most. It was a keep-you-up-at-night kind of storm. I still don’t think it matched a typical Missouri thunderstorm, but it enough wind to knock out our power around 2 a.m. I had a Zoom interview in the morning that I had scheduled about a week prior. I couldn’t zoom on my computer without Internet, and there’s no Internet without power to run the router. But I could still do the interview on my phone, and I became proficient at taking notes in darkness long ago. Looking at my notebook, you wouldn’t be able to tell which pages I wrote in darkness and which ones I wrote with light… you wouldn’t be able to read either one. But it makes sense to me. The Interview was at 9 a.m., which is 7 a.m. Washington time. That’s well before sunrise, so I fired up three candles on my desk so they could see me on my end of the conversation. I did feel sorry for the people I was interviewing. W...

Because things (at least things of European origin) on the eastern side of Missouri have a longer history than things on the western side of Missouri, some of my Missouri friends may assume that we’ve gone so far west that nothing out here pre-dates the 1970s. Nay! We did a holiday home tour in neighboring Olympia on Sunday, and the first house we were in was built in 1854. The other homes were a bit newer, but still quite historic. https://olympiahistory.org/tour-of-homes-2025/ . For anyone into restoration, the tour included an impressive reproduction of a historic quilt. As with cars and houses, building the replica of the historic model was considerably more involved than the original build.  

  I did some yard work on Saturday. When you live in a house on piers over the water, doing yard work means finding a kindly neighborhood with a large chainsaw who can cut up the tree that has become tightly lodged in the sand beneath my floor joists, then casting the pieces out to sea as the tide rises. He was skilled with his saw. I had been wishing I had my saw here, but then I thought if I did, I probably would have gotten it stuck in the tree and lost it to the saltwater before I could get it out. It wasn’t a real high tide mid-day on Saturday, not nearly as high as the one that shoved the tree into place, but it was just deep enough for me to get it pushed out and floating, and I was then able to use the boathook (provided with the house) to push the tree out and away from harm’s way – at least not harming us, anyway. Saturday was an unusually sunny day, so we took advantage of the weather by doing a short hike in Chambers Creek Canyon, cutting right through the middle ...

  Soon after Ann and I were married, we traveled to Costa Rica. She was taking her last college course as a study abroad course in biodiversity, so I flew down with her a week ahead of time, and we made a honeymoon out of it. This was the mid-1990s, and the Internet existed then, but it wasn’t worth much (although in many ways it was markedly better than it is now). To do international travel in 1996, you got a Lonely Planet guidebook and made the best of it. We spent a few days on the east coast in a lovely little village called Cahuita, where I spent $10 a night for a hut on the beach with hot running water. We then took a crowded, bumpy bus ride back across the country to the west coast, to the much more upscale Manuel Antonio. We knew it was the rainy season because our guidebook told us so. As we settled into our hotel, the rain was torrential. We just shrugged. “So this is the rainy season I guess,” was our take. Our hotel lost power, which basically just meant the beer w...

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. As soon as we got back to Tacoma, we were back out on the town. Another first Thursday meant another Green Drinks Tacoma. This one was a sustainable Christmas gift exchange. In true Green Drinks fashion, there were no rules, guidelines or instructions beyond you could bring some things to share with people as gifts. There were a lot of nice things set out, including clothing items, art and miscellaneous household items. Ann brought a couple wedges of her cheese that she made. They were snatched up immediately. The venue was a place called The Mother Ship back down in the south part of town. It hosts a night market, which sounds like a combo art fair and farmers market kind of thing, a couple of times a month. It also hosts all kinds of events, from birthday parties to weddings. The proprietor was kind of busy and didn’t have any to tend bar, so she told people they could just pour themselves a glass of wine or a get a beer o...

You may be wondering about Mary’s absence from our photos of our trip back to Missouri. You may think that flying with a dog is expensive. You would be wrong. It’s not expensive, it’s impossible. Policies may vary based on airlines, but on the options I had available to me, they would not fly her for any amount of money. No, you can’t just get her her own seat. No, there’s not an option for checking her in a big portable crate. No, it doesn’t matter if she’s a support animal. Unless she fits under the seat, she doesn’t get on the plane. Other options were sparse. We were far too long just to have someone come by a let her out a few times a day, and our current address would have made that really inconvenient for anyone anyway. Someone suggested the “Trusted Sitter” service, where you join an associate of people who will stay at your house and take care of your dog while you’re gone. I know people on both ends of this game, those who’ve had the sitters and those who have done the home s...

My previous blogs were defined in such a way that it was easy enough to know what was blog material. This one is different. It is ultimately about the experience of a mid-career (mid I say!) couple picking up and moving all the way across the country for one of their jobs. I think there may be a few other people in our position who have considered such a thing. That leaves my guiderails rather wide. I kind of feel like anything and everything is fair game. Initially, it was a travel-blog of sorts. Then more of a Tacoma guidebook. The trip back to big MO is basically a diary. I’ll probably be touching some more on finishing up my current job, and my present job hunt. And of course the star of the blog, Mary. We can’t forget about her. I’m not writing about everything. So far most of what I’ve left out is personal interactions from people who may not want everyone to know their business. That, and I’m too lazy to write about everything. I have ample Thanksgiving photos of Ann’s sid...

Missouri wasn’t trying very hard to woo us back, weather-wise. When we first arrived, the weather was exactly the same as what we left, 50s, rainy and foggy. It got worse from there. Thanksgiving Day was nice, but then it got sharply colder. We got some snow over the weekend, and then a lot more on Monday. I was back at my office on Monday, at my old desk even, as the snow was coming down. I was just reflecting on how back in Washington, I have a 4x4 truck with new tire chains that I haven’t even put on yet. I was missing it when I drove the Beetle on Monday, as roads were surprisingly slick. I put off my planned interview I had with someone at Central Methodist University in Fayette, thinking I would do it the next day. I was out early the next morning and things weren’t much better, so I shifted it to a phone interview since I already had photos coming for the story anyway. Later in the day things were much better. Oliver dropped us off at the airport and our plane took off from ...