{"id":3909,"date":"2010-10-31T14:05:02","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T21:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=3909"},"modified":"2010-10-31T14:27:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T21:27:19","slug":"welcome-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/31\/welcome-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

My living room has big corner windows that look out over a somewhat suburban neighborhood. When I sit on the couch, I see a big slice of sky, a lot of telephone wires, and just there, between the sturdy trunks of some old Douglas fir trees, a tiny blue square of Puget Sound. When it’s foggy and I can’t see the water, I can hear the foghorns on the freighters and ferries as they go by. There’s a man who walks by my house every day. I can tell you what the weather is by looking at his hands. He’s there, every day, but when it’s cold, he’s got ski gloves on.<\/p>\n

In my backyard, I have scattered lettuce and kale seedlings — the squirrels have been digging up everything and ruining my ambitions for a fall crop of greens. The sweet pea seedlings blew over in the last big storm. The hummingbird feeders rattle on the metal posts they share with the laundry line and the hammock clips. I have big fluffy red and yellow dahlias, still blooming late in the season, a gift for helping a friend clean tubers on a cold spring afternoon on her expansive back deck.<\/p>\n

There are frequent batches of soup cooking up on my kitchen stove and a pile of magazines and library books that want reading on the coffee table. There is napping to be done and dumb but entertaining TV shows to watch and visiting with friends who live in different parts of town. There is a full array of exotic supermarkets to visit — today, the Vietnamese grocery was broadcasting a dramatic piano driven soundtrack that annoyed the 20 something guy at the checkout stand. “It’s NOT GOOD,” he said in his heavy accent as he scanned our coffee. The International District was brightly lit in the fall sun, big Chinese families filed in and out of the dim sum places, a woman walked across the plaza carrying a tiny, smiling, very fluffy dog in her arms.<\/p>\n

I’m a little bit behind on my work — the result of a pernicious cold. There is a mountain of laundry that needs transporting from the upstairs closet to the downstairs washing machine. Someone should do a little vacuuming and put the dust bunnies on notice. The apple trees need compost and the BBQ needs cleaning and this morning, the big cutting board snapped in half so it wants replacing. My suitcase from last weekend has shown no signs of unpacking itself and I don’t seem to be doing anything about it.<\/p>\n

We exist in a rocking imbalance of domestic activity versus lethargy. As proof of my commitment to this state of the union, yesterday afternoon, I napped for two hours.<\/p>\n

We don’t have much planned for travel this fall. Any upcoming adventures are scheduled to take place after we cross the horizon into next year. This is okay with me. I like sitting on my couch watching the sky change colors. I like playing silly games on the Wii (we have serious ski competition at our house). I like getting the weather report by taking notice of what my neighbors are wearing. I like eating home cooking, I like running to the grocery store, messing up the kitchen, washing the dishes, and doing that all over again. I like endless cups of tea and listening to the radio and weekly trips to the library and meeting friends for big diner breakfasts. Right now, I even like my day job, the work that allows me not only to be a part time adventurer but to also have dust bunnies and laundry and a couch with a view of the sky.<\/p>\n

\"Coffee<\/a><\/p>\n

C&P Coffee: A lovely cafe about a mile from my front door.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is easy, when you stew in travel, to get suckered into the idea that traveling all the time is somehow the better choice. There’s less said about the wonders of staying home, of working to have a home to return to. I have no doubt that I will be again blindsided by an irrational desire to head out to see, oh, the extreme tides of Nova Scotia. (Seriously, I hear they’re awesome.) Or to wake up in a campsite under the stars in the Atacama desert in Bolivia. It’s happened to me before — I sit on my couch and read or I go to a museum and see some art or I watch a movie and I’m flattened by wanderlust for Ethiopia or Ecuador. But that feeling exists in conjunction with the absolute delight of putting on coffee for guests who have shown up with treats from our neighborhood bakery.<\/p>\n

Before I had a home of my own to come back to, return was always painful. Where was I going to live? Where was I going to work? Who was going to pick me up at the airport? Now, those questions are all solved. The husband picks me up, often with a cup of tea sitting in the cup holder, takes me for pho if I’m hungry (we go to the same place, every time), and then hauls my bag into the house where it waits for me. I love, after being lost and jittery and overwhelmed and excited and amazed, to wake up in my bed knowing exactly where I am. I love traveling. But also, I love being home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My living room has big corner windows that look out over a somewhat suburban neighborhood. When I sit on the couch, I see a big slice of sky, a lot of telephone wires, and just there, between the sturdy trunks of some old Douglas fir trees, a tiny blue square of Puget Sound. When it’s … <\/p>\n


…read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seattle","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3909"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3916,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions\/3916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}