How did we get here?

Boy howdy, it’s been a wild few days here in Spokane. We had wind gusts at 73 mph yesterday. People all over the city are still without power and likely won’t get it back until sometime next week at the earliest. Trees are uprooted and toppled through a lot of roofs! Electric lines are down with power poles snapped in two like toothpicks. But us, here in the RV park? We’re snug as two bugs in a rug. Our power didn’t even flicker! Praise to the Lord!  Dennis had our generator at the ready but we didn’t even need it.

I have finished the main part of the cross stitching on the “Sheep Virtues” and have just begun to outline the sheep. I decided that since most of them are stitched in tones of cream and brown, I’m going to use one strand of dark brown to outline them. So far I’ve almost completed the sheep on the bottom right. What do you think?

Since I last posted I stitched Kindness...

and Joyfulness.

I also put a few more rows on the baby blanket. I’m sorry for the lighting. It’s still gets dark so early here and I took these photos when I had to have artificial lighting on.

So. I have had a few people ask me why we’re living in the RV. And I realized that I have a few fairly new readers. Some of you know the story, and if you just want to say goodbye and not read the whole thing again I understand.

I will try to make it a short story. I was raised in Iowa, my husband Dennis was raised in Nebraska. But, the little town I was raised in was right smack dab in the middle of Omaha, Nebraska! A long, long time ago the Missouri River flooded and left that little tiny bit of Iowa on the Nebraska side of the river!  Anyway, we were both born and raised within 7 miles of the other.  In fact, the same doctor delivered us both. We realized that when we went to get our marriage license and we looked at our birth certificates. Omaha is a pretty big city, so the odds of that happening are pretty small. We met each other in a Sunday School class when Dennis was home on leave from the Air Force. All three of our children were born in Omaha.  We were the last people you would ever expect to leave the city that we had always lived in, with our families all around us. 

However, Dennis was offered a great job here in gorgeous Spokane, Washington in 1993. At the time, gang activity was increasing greatly in Omaha and we didn’t want our children growing up around that. We packed up our three kids and moved west! We have never really regretted it. Except the part of being away from family.  We love the Pacific Northwest. It is absolutely beautiful country here. We sold our first house here in Spokane and built one in 2002.   This is a picture of the house we built, just before we sold it last summer.

We thought that would be our forever home, but one by one our children grew up and flew the coop. Our oldest is now in Omaha with her family. Our middle son is in Montana with his family. And our youngest flies between London and Japan on a regular basis. His fiancé is in London. 

Dennis’s mom is almost 85 years old. Having lost his sister, who lived very close to her last summer, and with his brother living in Florida, we have come to realize that she needs us close by. I also lost my brother from Covid last May. Each day that passes we realize more and more how precious family is. Dennis will be retiring in the very near future and with the housing market doing so well last summer, we decided to sell our house. The first day it was on the market we had several offers, all over the asking price, so it sure didn’t take long. We gave most of our furniture to a refugee family next-door and over 25 truckloads to the Goodwill.  We do have a storage unit the size of a single car garage with mainly kitchenware, books, Dennis’s tools and yarn!  We do have a few pieces of furniture but not much. We moved into our 38 foot travel trailer and we’re living in an RV park until he retires.  Although our plan has always been to travel and not buy another house for at least a few years, we have come to realize that his mom needs us close by the majority of the time. We will still travel with our trailer, just not for extended periods like we had originally planned.

Well, that’s it in a nutshell. If I didn’t answer all your questions, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I hope you all have a wonderful and safe weekend. It sounds like progress is being made on vaccine distribution. Hopefully that means there is light at the end of the tunnel for us all.

Blessings and love, 

Betsy