This morning I cleaned the house. Vacuumed, swept, washed, wiped, etc. Changed bedsheets, shook out rugs, all those things that get done at least once every week. Satisfying. I used to clean houses for a living, a long time ago. I wonder if I would work harder or differently if I pretended that this house was one of my jobs, if I gave myself two hours to go through the rooms…

Except as a house cleaner I didn’t do laundry. And I only got $12 an hour. Or was it $14? Amazing, eh. Oh and that was under the table, and guess what, I never reported it. Oops!

Anyway. Today was fairly uneventful. Yesterday, we put the car on a boat and crossed the gray, rainy Sound. On the other side, after getting lost twice in Edmonds, we met up with my mom for lunch in the Snohomish Co. suburbs where I was raised.

After lunch, Brian and I headed south into Seattle. I am going to have to recalibrate my sense of distance here. San Francisco is tiny. In comparison, Seattle, or King County, is huge. So much land here! Helps keep prices down I guess.

We toured an unaffordable neighborhood near Green Lake. I remember Green Lake as small, stinky, and man-made. I seem to recall cement on the bottom. But now people really want to live next to it. Must have cleaned it up. I am really going to have to stop thinking of this city as unpretentious and humble. That’s very 1980s of me. Those days are clearly over.

There are lots of places in Seattle we can afford. And even the most beautiful, ginormous, remodeled four-bedroom craftsman on Phinney Hill is selling for a price that buys you a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco, or a small fixer-upper in Berkeley. So, it’s “cheaper” here. But that doesn’t make us any richer — we’re still first-time home buyers with one income.

On Saturday we’ll explore West Seattle and other places south of downtown. Less expensive, though you have to deal with possible air traffic the further south you go. It’s a part of town I don’t think I have ever even visited. Seattle is very large.