I really think that the Pacific Northwest gets a bad rap about its weather. People who don’t live there always talk about the rain, the clouds and the gloom. Well, I have to say, this weekend, the Pacific Northwest was GORGEOUS!

I didn’t get to spend much time up there…less than 24 hours. But the weather was beautiful. It was sunny, with just a little morning rain, and all around the rhododendrons, azaleas and lilacs were all blooming. The normal backdrop of evergreen was covered with explosions of red, pink, white, orange and purple.

Usually, when I go up there I stay at my family home. It sits right on the edge of the water and was originally owned by my grandparents. Now, my parents own it but many of my cousins have visited my parents for an extended period of time so it has a lot of family history.

The bay that we live on is pretty idyllic (check out the pic with the rhododendrons and bay in the back ground). In the Pacific Northwest it doesn’t feel like people have conquered and subdued nature like so many other parts of the country. But it also isn’t a place like Alaska where nature reigns supreme. It’s more like the people and nature have a symbiotic relationship.

It’s a place where people were meant to live. No one had to build a levy or a dam to dry up the land, you don’t have to use air conditioning to survive, and you don’t have to worry about crazy storms, bugs, humidity, or lack of water. You might need some gortex and a heater for the winter and it would be a good idea to make sure that you are earthquake prepared. But that isn’t so bad – it’s more like nature saying, “Welcome to my house, watch the step.”

In the morning, its cool with a little mist in the air and you feel as if it is just sinking into your skin like water into a parched sponge. The sun rises early in the north so dawn comes early and on good days the clouds burn off. On a nice day like last Sunday, things warm up but get a little breezy. You can look across the water at all the gently swaying trees and sea birds playing in the wind. I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind buying my parents house from them when they want to sell.

Unfortunately, no one can live at the house right now because my parents are in the midst of a huge remodel. I wasn’t really sure that so much needed to be redone. To me, it was pretty much perfect. But my parents really wanted to add a master bedroom on the ground floor. So, while they were at it, I convinced them to redo the kitchen, which was the one room that I thought needed some work.

I’m glad that they decided to expand the kitchen into the entry hall and add an island (my brilliant idea – the pic shows where it will go). But the job has just kept getting bigger. They found that they needed new siding and windows. And while they had guys in there working they decided that they might as well fix up the upstairs bathroom…since they didn’t do it last year when they redid the stairs and the upstairs master bath and closet.

In addition, they also found that they had to move the septic tank to bring everything up to code and that meant that they had to tear out half of our landscaping plants. The other half of the landscaping plants went out in order to get the siding up on the house.

So, as you can tell, it is a huge project. It seems to be going well. I was glad that I got to see it in progress.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under tarakirk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.