Seattle, WA

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We were just in Washington state.  We haven’t been in probably a decade.  It made me start to realize that irritating trait older people have… ‘I remember when’, ‘You’re too young too remember’, etc.  Yes, it’s true we are young to be retired, but here we are… we never won the lottery, we never ‘made it big’… but we saved hard, and lived a different lifestyle.  We seldom wrote checks to have others do for us what we could do ourselves.  And we are younger than most of our retired friends.. the rest just aren’t retired yet.  Why we have to endure their…. ‘just wait you’ll get there’, is beyond me.  I hope never to do that to others in the future.

But here we were in WA state, bemoaning how it has changed from the last time we were here.  I suspect that as time has passed, and time goes forward, it will forever be true.  You can’t take it back as you plow down nature, replacing it with buildings and high-rises holding the likes of Starbucks and Hard Rock Cafe’s.  As each of us see something for the first time, it is forever not the same again.

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The traffic alone in the Seattle area was enough to keep me from ever coming back.  It was worse than the worse day in California traffic, and that’s notoriously bad.  People from the area swear never to go to Seattle proper just because of the traffic.

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We remember going through Pike Place Market ever so fondly in the past, so we made a special trip to walk it’s halls yet again.  We felt like salmon swimming upstream in a sea of tourists.  It was a complete zoo.

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Retaining Wall

So if you have been following me and my blog, you are probably aware that this blog is one of three blogs I try to keep up with.  I have my foodie blog, krittersmenu.com; and my photo blog, kritterspix.com.  Maybe you follow just one or all three.

This blog, kritterspaw.com, is my general blog.  It is more travel and project centric.  Having said that, I haven’t posted a lot of projects lately.  So if you’re following, you’re probably wondering what happened after that massive pizza oven project.  Well, don’t despair, we haven’t hung up our hammer or power tools.

When we first built our cabin in the woods 5 years ago, we designed and built a bridge to literally ‘bridge the gap’ to our house.  You can see that video here.

While the bridge incorporates several safeties to assure there are no ‘surprises’, we have found that the ledge of the moot is crumbling and eroding with the weather shifts.  Thus, we have embarked on securing the wall.  Admittedly there are many different ways to approach this problem statement, and we debated many of them.  What we decided on was a rebar and wire mesh lined with landscaping cloth, anchored on the stable land, and filled with rock.

wire walli.JPG This re-bar wall winds around the solid land dirt crumbling wall.  In all it’s over 60′ long.  The re-bar is in; the wire mesh, and landscaping cloth all installed.  It is drilled and anchored to solid ground, and now awaiting to be filled with 25 ton of crushed red granite. blk cloth2i.JPG

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Believe me… pictures don’t do it justice.

Next up, we will plasma cut metal animals to ornamentally grace the wall.