The second floor continues to grow, with more rooms taking shape, including the dining room, Robin’s sewing room, the powder room, coat closet, study, and storage room above the garage.
View from the driveway. Second-floor framing on the left is the dining room. Top right are Robin’s sewing room and the storage room above the garage.
Second floor walls going up
It has come to my attention that some people are not on Facebook, so from now on I will post these on the blog, with cross-posting to Facebook and, for my journalist friends, Twitter. We now have a second floor, and a couple of the walls are up. In addition, the concrete floors have been poured in the garage and the screened porch, along with the footings for the deck. We also now have electricity to the site, which means the workmen no longer have to rely on a generator. Continue reading
The Great Wheel, on the Seattle waterfront, as seen from our tour boat. We didn’t ride. We just looked
A year ago we were in the middle of our trip to China. This year, with the house under construction, we are staying closer to home, but last week we did venture into Seattle for four days.
Our trip was bookended by two concerts. Wednesday night we saw the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel at the Triple Door, which our D.C. friends might consider Seattle’s equivalent of the Birchmere, but with better food and better seating. It’s a converted movie theater, so it has a sloped floor, which means all the seats have a good view of the stage. In addition, it has half-moon tables and counters all facing the stage, so no one has to pivot to see. The food is Asian, produced by the Wild Ginger restaurant upstairs, and damn good.
The opening act was a local duo called the Gumbo Twins, which comprised a blind accordion player (“The Sultan of Squeeze”) and a guy who played the guitar and the washboard. They are part of a Seattle Cajun band called File Gumbo. They were several cuts above the usual opening act. It’s not every day you get to hear a washboard solo. Continue reading
Sophia and Annika arrive in Seattle.
This is a belated report on last week’s visit from the granddaughters.
Sophia and Annika arrived Saturday night on the new Alaska Airlines nonstop flight from Raleigh. It was 1 a.m. their time by the time we got them back to the island and tucked in bed. Teddy was so excited to see the girls he didn’t know who to jump on first.
Robin had fun making Easter baskets
Sunday was devoted to Easter baskets and hunting for eggs. Robin had a lot of fun putting Easter together after a hiatus of several years. We also made the pilgrimage to Sunlight Beach, where Robin’s grandparents had their house. We walked along the beach and the girls marveled at the huge piles of driftwood. We visited the site of the new house, which Annika said (accurately) was “concrete and a big pile of dirt.” In the evening, we had the traditional granddaughters’ dinner: salmon, noodles, and broccoli. Continue reading
Rainbow seen from Prospect Point, at the northern tip of Vancouver’s Stanley Park
We spent a few days last week in Vancouver, B.C., to celebrate the Birthday That Shall Not Be Named in a country that will not elect Donald Trump to national office. Continue reading
Robin inspects the construction site.
We are back on Whidbey after a too-short holiday visit with the children and grandchildren in North Carolina (though we are glad to be missing the big East Coast snowstorm).
One of the first things we did after returning to the island was, of course, to stop by the building site. Work has been slowed by the rainy winter, so it doesn’t look like much yet. Some trees and bushes are gone and there’s lot of fill dirt and gravel leading up to the actual home site, which is still mostly a muddy hole in the ground. There is a big stack of firewood that will have to wait a year or so for the house’s fireplace to be operational. Continue reading
This photograph was taken by granddaughter Sophia. It’s sunrise in Kure Beach, N.C., near Wilmington. Kure Beach and neighboring Carolina Beach form what some people call the Redneck Riviera, perhaps not as nice as the Outer Banks, but only about two hours from Raleigh, so much easier to get to.
We took the granddaughters there for four days after Christmas. The weather was unseasonably warm (temperatures reached 80) and although rain was forecast, we only had a little. The girls had a blast.
We went to the North Carolina Aquarium, where we saw lots of fish and other wildlife, including a bald eagle. We were also near Fort Fisher, site of a Civil War battle, but we never got around to touring it. Maybe next time.
Our builder’s sign at the entrance to the property
We stopped by our property today and saw a few signs of progress. No earth-moving yet, but our contractor has posted his sign at the entrance. Even better, the surveyor had been there and staked out where the house is going to be, so we were finally able to get a sense of that. The heavy equipment arrives next week.
And we had a beautiful rainbow out over the water.
The stakes with yellow flags show where the east side of the house will be.
Rainbow over the water, looking to the northeast
Today things finally really began happening on our long-awaited island house. We had actual work being done on the property. Our contractor replaced a culvert, something that was required by the county before it would issue the building permit.
Replacing the culvert
It was very exciting to see actual work involving digging with heavy equipment taking place on our land. They dug out the old culvert, along with a lot of broken concrete, placed a nice new plastic tube, and then brought in a load of gravel to cover everything. The whole process took only about two hours, and when it was finished we had a real entrance to the property.
After the culvert work was done, Robin and I went up into the woods and had a little ground-breaking ceremony. Following Feng Shui rituals, Robin made a small garden under our big maple tree with rocks, soil and leaves. It is supposed to be a wildflower garden but the woods are too shady for wildflowers. She also hung crystals from some of the trees. Continue reading
Last week we made a quick trip to Portland for a memorial service for Robin’s cousin Larry. A cousin on her father’s side, he is the first of that generation of 13 cousins to die.
We attended a very nice ceremony at the Willamette National Cemetery, the main military cemetery in Oregon, and had a pleasant visit with Robin’s family, some of whom she had not seen for a long time.
The trip produced two family photographs. The first was this one, of eight of the 12 remaining cousins:
Eight Tuttle cousins, in ascending order of age: Anne, Mark, Nancy, Robin, David, Donny, and Carol
The trip was also the first time in a long time that Robin’s immediate family was all together in one place. That produced the second photograph:
The whole family: Robin, Mark, Karen, and Lois (Mom/Granny/Great Granny)
See Más America 