Enjoying the sun in Corpus Christi

We are in Corpus Christi this week and it’s been so delightful feeling the sunny breezes. When we walked off the plane, we were wearing dark clothing for the gloomy weather we left behind and we looked like refugees from the Land Where Rain Never Stops. Meeting us were Bob and Nancy Eckert, who were major players in the saga of Church of the Redeemer that I wrote about in my 2009 book. Bob is now writing a book about his life and he asked me to come down for a week to help him finish it. Veeka and I have taken walks in the sun and visited two beaches, one of them a restaurant on a pier overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.I’ve been following the Yukon Quest – which is a dog mushing race considered tougher than the Iditarod – and I found this delightful video about musk oxen, who live WAY north in Alaska and Greenland. So, click on it if you want to transport yourself up to the northern regions.Back in Seattle – well, actually I live on the Eastside, a region where a lot of folks don’t travel downtown if they can help it. I run into plenty of people who tell me they are never in Seattle and don’t want to be. I try to get downtown if possible, as there are things there that one cannot find in the suburbs. It’s a place where you can find restaurants that serve “decadent vegan food” and where anything right of Bernie Sanders is mocked in the local media.As it says in the Seattle Weekly “Conventional wisdom in Washington politics states that all the votes Democrats need to win a state majority can been seen from the Space Needle, but in recent elections Republicans have successfully nibbled at the edges of this turf.” This was from a column that lamented how the Neanderthals in eastern Washington are trying to outlaw abortion and that due to an unfortunate accident of geography, the much despised and red-state Idaho lies just to the east of that. Of course I’ve lived in blue states before but rarely where the loathing of all things conservative is so palpable.Another really depressing part of being here is the housing. Homes everywhere are selling for more than half a million dollars; condos (which is what I’d probably be in) are edging close to $300,000. I’ll get some money from selling my house in Tennessee, but not that much. And without a full-time job, there’s no way I can make enough money to buy a home at present. Housing in King County, where I live, went up 11% in a year and it’s not going down any time soon. Not only that, but lots of Wall Street speculators are in town, buying up homes like crazy, then renting them. This editorial tells why consumers are being had over this. No wonder there’s so many homeless here in town!One bright spot this month was that Veeka sold 55 boxes of Girl Scout cookies by slogging it out door to door. I taught her how to present the cookie sale sheet; how to explain what each cookie contains and that we don’t collect the $4/box now but later when we deliver and by the time we were doing the last 10, she was getting pretty accomplished at her spiel. I had hoped for 30 sales; she easily surpassed that during our walks around the complex where we live, so I began to hope for more. We had finally reached 50 and were walking home when we dropped by a neighbor I’d met by the condo dumpster, who ordered 4 more. Veeka gets a badge if she reaches 55, so I threw in a box for us and her goal was met. And we got to meet a bunch of people near where we live.