So this young couple wanted to buy our house in Foothill Ranch. More to the point: they were getting married in a few months, really liked our neighborhood, and did anybody want to sell? Now at this same time Kelly was looking into a variety of positions in Seattle, specifically at the University of Washington.

What happened next was a series of lightning-fast events that left us dizzy: Kelly got the job at UW (and loves it!); we sold the house and found a new one in Seattle just prior to Christmas; loaded up the cars and moved the thousand miles from Southern California through rain and icy fog (ugh). I found a job of my own over the river and through the woods; didn’t care for it and found another much more to my liking, not over the river but still plenty of woods–it is Seattle, after all. Unpacking, settling in (where do all these bloody books go!?!) with still enough time to squeeze in two conventions–Emerald City and Norwescon 2013. A breath or two to relax, and we finally feel like we belong.

So here we are in a three-story home built in 1948, just a mile from the university. The Cascades are on one side of us, the Olympics on the other, with Lake Washington and Puget Sound in between. It’s stopped raining for the moment (again, Seattle). The air smells of the forest and fireplaces, robins are on the lawn, and a creek is splashing a dozen yards from our back door. All because somebody wanted to buy our house. That ain’t a bad way to go.