Sebastopol in a nutshell.

So here's the deal. Nutshelled. I've been living in Seattle for the past ten years. My sister had a baby on October 9th 2006, and I came to visit for what was supposed to be two weeks. While visiting it became obvious I couldn't live a thousand miles away while my nephew grew up, and since my sister was single and had no intention of working for the first two years while breast feeding, I decided to sell my house in Seattle and move here to help her with the baby.

We both went to Seattle to deal with selling the house and that took several months. We moved back here and stayed with mom for a couple months while waiting for a house to be ready for us to rent and possibly buy once the Seattle house closed. This house in Sebastopol is ideal. It's a little stucco two bedroom built in 1906. It sits on an acre of level fertile land and has a large barn that is already partially converted with electricity and water, and a fabulous redwood play structure with three swings, a large sandbox, a two-level play house, a couple slides and a couple old metal jungle-jym tractors all in a nice fenced in playground.

It has TONS of fabulous garden potential and plenty of room to park boats and RVs and of course, my fantasy Airstream, Streamline, Spartanette or other vintage aluminum trailer.

Shortly after moving into this Shangri-la in Sebastopol we realized that there was just no way we could afford to buy it with the sale of the Seattle house alone, and there was no way I was going to be able to manage a mortgage of around $3,000 a month myself so we were about to give up and start considering a crappy little modern house in Vallejo when Mom mentioned she wished Larry would trade this house for hers as he suggested once in passing. We started talking and scheming and suddenly everything fell into place. She is going to sell her house and buy this one, since the values are just about the same. She'll move in here and commute to work for a while, probably carpooling since a couple of her co-workers live within a couple miles of our house. She'll be up for retirement soon so the commuting won't be forever, and like her friend told her, she can always get a job closer to here if she still wants to work. She'll probably keep her job for a while just to take advantage of the benefits, but once Julie and I are both working she won't have to work at all. The really great thing about this is that with all three of us, we can all work part time and try to work out some sort of business from home that we can all work on.


Note to mom regarding sleeping arrangements in Sebastopol... I ended up having this conversation on the phone and never emailed the note, but in the spirit of keeping this journal--err, blog active I am posting it here anyway.

Mom,

I'm certain someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I have a feeling it makes more sense for me to be the one living in a trailer, rather than you, for a few reasons. Mainly, why would you want to sell your house just to go live in a trailer, when this house is so fabulous? Next, you usually fall asleep on the couch anyway, and once you are asleep, moving to the trailer (or barn) is hardly likely, especially in winter. Just imagine having to rouse yourself from that groggy post-midnight TV-hypnotism just to trudge through the frozen tundra that is our yard. You and Julie like watching TV together and I tend to like to sequester myself in my room sewing or working on some other equally time-consuming obsession, so if I have to go outside to do so that's just fine by me.

Ever since I was a little wild child I have fantasized about living in a gypsy caravan anyway. The plan to convert a semi-truck container to a dwelling on wheels was something I came up with before I ever knew there was such a thing as an actual mobile home. Probably inspired by many hours spent in the VW bus with the nifty tall closet and overhead cabinets. Of course, if you prefer to be the one living outside, that's fine too, I just wanted to let you know that I have every intention of being the one so you can have a bedroom in the house.

So now that we have a plan in the works to be debt-free and independent of anyone else, suddenly Peter wants to be involved anyway, via Allan. After telling me a couple of days ago that Allan "didn't seem interested" in getting financially involved in our house buying schemes, last night he came back with "don't do anything hasty with big numbers, like ignoring Allan's offer to get involved." I'm guessing Allan didn't actually offer anything, Peter probably bullied him into acquiescing finally. At least that's what I imagine when I try to visualize that conversation, and knowing Peter as I do. It's just a family thing, no one else would understand it, and no one in the family wouldn't.