A Post Written in Early December, When I Was Still Full of Hope

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m doing one of those things that Seattlelites are amazingly lucky enough to do: I’m taking the ferry, and it is gorgeous.

It’s stunningly blue, stunningly bright. I just passed a lighthouse, which must have once seemed very tall but now seems to be fighting to hold its own against a forest of gigantic evergreens that has grown up around it. The horizon is too hazy to see either mountain range, which is almost a good thing—it occurs to me that having so much beauty around us, with water and mountains and hills of green, perhaps lowers the visual impact of each one. Today the ferry is sailing on a dislocated sea of blue, cradled only by haze and evergreens.

It’s Christmas time, and the LT and I did the normal thing and decorated his house—in a minimal way—for the winter holidays, hoping that might have some effect on the buyers. No angels, nothing that would be overly Christian, just a wreath and some ribbon. And two plants outside. My own apartment is not decorated yet; that waits for Thursday and T-Town Girl. But it’s not like I’ve been avoiding Christmas or my tasks altogether; heck, no! In fact, I discovered a very cheap way to do your Christmas shopping in Seattle: walk.

No, really. In jeans and comfortable shoes, you can easily walk from Capitol Hill to downtown, and catch a bus—for 1.25—on the way back, and you will have saved about ten dollars in parking and, if you’re me, a 35 dollar parking ticket. (By the way, I spent Friday morning defending two recent parking tickets, and got them both canceled. Thank you, city of Seattle.) I spent a whopping 87 dollars at Ross and got things for almost everyone on my list. Adding in the 2.75 cheese and tomato crumpet I got, the 2.52 chai, and the 1.64 tea, and that’s still incredibly cheap for a day of shopping. A full day, meals included! As I said before, there are many days where I just spend that at Starbucks alone.