Looking for a place to live in Seattle isn’t that easy. It’s not just because the vacancy rate on rentals is impossibly low right now and every rental seems to have multiple bidders, but because it’s tough to find just the right place.<\/p>\n
I admit that giving up our view in Florida was hard. Who wouldn’t want to live in such a lovely place. No, I’m not talking about the drop dead gorgeous view of the ocean and Indian River. It was lovely because there was absolutely no maintenance.<\/p>\n
A condo on the 8th floor lacks foliage. There’s no shrubs to prune and definitely no lawn to trim. Well, there is a lawn, but it’s 80 feet below you and you don’t have to take care of it. A cadre of foreign speaking lawn folks would show up at the crack of early on Friday and do all the dirty work.<\/p>\n
In looking for a home here I didn’t want to make the same mistake I made in Melboring. The Diablo house came with an acre of land, something I thought would be wonderful to have. It wasn’t. Lots of yard means lots of work, and even though I had a stroke of brilliance, wanting to leave it au natural, that still meant picking up dead branches, mowing, trimming and all sorts of horrific homeowner duties.<\/p>\n
I quickly figured out how to get out of this. The very first time I mowed the lawn with the dad in law’s riding mower, I drove it into a small gully. I was never allowed to drive it again. I know, smart, huh?<\/p>\n
I have never liked yard work. I guess it’s because of all the lawn I had to mow as a young man. I only had to mow, there was no trimming in my family’s yard. Yes, it needed to be trimmed. But this was before the days of weed whackers. And there was no way I was going to trim the yard with the medieval tools my father always seemed to be bringing home from one place or another, including the ever sinister sickle.<\/p>\n
Back to house hunting. I looked at a few houses that had beautiful yards. I admit, I am in love with the idea of a beautiful yard. They can be quite beguiling. But like a woman who wears gorgeous makeup on a first date, eventually you see them without it and, well, it can be quite the sight for sore eyes. The same is true of any yard I have. It can look great to begin with, but eventually I will wake up next to it and fear for my life.<\/p>\n
The first house showed a lot of promise. It was a townhouse. A very small yard. But it was well landscaped by the owners and I could readily see that all those lovely bushes would suffer greatly at my lawn caring hands. Better to move on.<\/p>\n
Then the Shoreline house popped up on Padmapper. It had a very promising yard, one that has lots of weeds, only a couple bushes, a big brown patch of dirt in the back where nothing wants to grow and side and front yards that can’t be more than five feet wide at any one point. In fact, the grass was taller than the yard’s width<\/p>\n
Ah, the perfect yard. Now, I know some people love to spread out far and wide and love their acres of land. But I know too many of my friends who are slaves to their yards. I know they like to pretend to love weeding and planting, watering and weeding, weeding and weeding. Did I say weeding?<\/p>\n
Now, my idea of weeding is to nuke everything with Spectracide. I don’t have the patience or the constitution to do all that back breaking weeding stuff. Frankly, I have better things to do with an evening or weekend – like have fun.<\/p>\n
I have to admit that nuking is a very accurate term, too. I didn’t know until just recently that you should use this stuff sparingly as it is pretty powerful. All it has to do is touch a leaf to kill vegetation. In the spirit of “more is more” I would really lather the stuff on, thinking it would speed up the death. What it did instead was create a very large patch of collateral damage in the yard, killing all the surrounding grass and occasionally, a small bush. It looked like Vietnam after an Agent Orange spree.<\/p>\n
So it’s best that I have a small yard, a starter yard if you will. I will need to relearn things like mowing regularly and using Spectracide sparingly. I may even have to learn to pull a weed or two.<\/p>\n
Nah! Who am I kidding. As we all know in the Northwest, eventually the whole thing will turn brown in the summer because unlike the folks in Florida, we’re kind of partial to conserving precious resources. We don’t turn on the sprinklers when it’s 90 out in order to keep up with the Joneses who water day and night, damned the water bill and water shortage.<\/p>\n
There’s only one downside here. My yard has turned out to be expand-o-matic. Every September my yard triples in size. Just for a month though. I bet most of your yards can’t do that. You see, each house on the cul-de-sac has park duty and needs to mow and trim the park next to my house. That’s my expand-o-matic yard. Just over the fence lies a wedge of ground with two picnic tables and a play area. It becomes mine every September to maintain. Surprise!<\/p>\n
That’s OK though. I plan to name it as well for that month. I think Hurricane State Park will do nicely. Now all I need is a ranger hat.<\/p>\n
In the Emerald City, wondering if the locals will mind a park entrance fee,<\/p>\n
– Robb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking for a place to live in Seattle isn’t that easy. It’s not just because the vacancy rate on rentals is impossibly low right now and every rental seems to have multiple bidders, but because it’s tough to find just the right place. I admit that giving up our view in Florida was hard. Who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-randomalities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2760"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2832,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions\/2832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/robzerrvations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}