SOMETHING AWESOME THIS WAY COMES!

So much has happened and is happening since my last post. I must have sat down to write this blog at least 15 times in the last couple of months but I can't get past the first sentence without losing myself. What to write first? Should I start with the most important or keep it chronological? Then I forget what exactly I wanted to write...Oh Yeah, so much stuff and so much brain fog. This is going to be a long blog post...

We finally sold our house in February! Thanks to Snohomish Counties runaway house prices our 780 square foot house sold for 250K and almost three months later our same tiny house is worth nearly 300K!!!! Heck, at that price, we couldn't afford to buy back our old house let alone buy a better one anywhere near Everett, Washington. If we wanted to stay in Snohomish county we would have to buy a complete dump or rent. No and no.

But, even before we put our house on the market Tacoma has been calling me. The years I lived there as a child had a huge impact on me. It inspired the Raina Kirkland series. It's this strange mixture of grunge and grime and history and elegance. It's as dangerous as it is intriguing, as fun as it is sad. The city is a living being, being both beautiful and good as it is disgusting and shameful.  James, however, would never agree to move there. He hated that idea. Tacoma doesn't have the best image. She's a lady whose been around the block a few hundred times but has a heart of gold...still, she's not the girl you marry.

But something changed. Everett's house prices are causing a huge income gap, as only rich people can afford to move there and poorer folk are priced out of their homes. Seattle's monstrous homeless problem is extending north to Everett. Twice in the past year, I've called the police because I've found a body on the side of the road, unresponsive and seemingly dead, only to discover upon police arrival that it is a homeless man 100% past out and laying in his own shit. The Taco Bell down the road has had at least two shootings last year. The high school had bomb threats and Chace Bank was robbed twice. Everett, Washington may seem desirable to home buyers for some reason, but its culture is suffering. Desperate people do desperate things.

Mid-March James finally agreed to 'look' at houses in Tacoma and that very day (which was after a night shift for me, meaning I had 0 sleep between working a 10 hour shift overnight and staying up past 8 o'clock at night!!!!) we drove down, but by the time we arrived only one house was still open for a  showing. It was a nice house, but the stairs were extremely narrow and steep.

After leaving that showing we actually found one more open house and drove to the far south Tacoma on the border with Spanaway...only to find out that the open house had been canceled and their website not updated. Oh poo...when we got back to the car I checked the website (redfin) once more and saw that a house just 4 miles down the road was actually open as well, but it was closing in 5 minutes! Without even looking at the pictures James, the kids and I drove down to see this home...and I was surprised to pass my dad's house on the way. In fact, he was only 2 blocks down the road from the house. As we pulled into the driveway, the agent selling the house was just closing up shop, but he let us take a look and we fell in LOVE hard. We made an offer on the spot! The agent left but we hung around the house with my Dad when some strange and mean people drove up. They said that they already bought the house and James got into a bit of a tiff with one of the men...

30x40 On Sale, Contact Me

After we left the house, all upset about the fight and the fact that we finally made a move on a house but we weren't fast enough, our agent called to let us know that the owner of that house did indeed agree to sell it to the mean folks, but that he HATED them! As soon as the paperwork was signed they were mean to him too. They wanted to sell it to us instead, so as soon as they could get out of the contract with the mean folks, we were free to buy the house!!!

New house's living room...

My husband was able to transfer his job with coca cola down from Everett to Tacoma, which is awesome and also brings me to some other news.  I was fully prepared to drive from Tacoma to Mukilteo ( a town near Everett) for work 3 nights a week for my 10-hour shifts, but just a few weeks before the move was to physically begin my General Manager hired my arch nemesis as her new Assistant Manager, AKA my new boss! Nooooooo! I put in my 3 weeks notice (3 because I'm awesome like that) But now I'm out of the job. OH NO! Every month I'm not working we're near $2000 short, so what's the plan?

Going Away Flowers from Boss Lady.

Well, as far as I've budgeted we can survive until the beginning of July without me working, but then I either need to get a job or find a way to not pay utilities or buy food.

The plan is to try and make a go of being an Artist, and hopefully not a starving one. I have 6 published books, 25 awesome drawings, and 2 massive paintings so far. I've written the first episode of Fatal Retribution and submitted it to Amazon for a new series pitch. For a month I paid Facebook to advertise my books and I think it helped a little at first, but now it seems useless. I posted both my paintings on OfferUp and Letgo. I had one bite on OfferUp for $150, but it fell through. I have a gig in July with Urban Unglued to sell my books and art under a 10x10 tent in Pacific Park, but I can't really afford it, so I created a GoFundMe thing.

By the way, please press HERE to donate a dollar to my dream. LOVE YOU!

I don't know if being an artist will ever support my family. Probably not. There is a plan B. Around the end of June my adult sister will be moving in with us. She needs to put her life together and we need a live-in nanny so I can go back to work. It fits. We help get her her driver's license, a car and support her while she attends college and she watches the kids so I can work again.

But I have until July to try...I just feel like something Awesome is going to happen soon!


Oh, and I got a new cat. We found this starving half dead thing under our new house a month after we bought it. Her name is Lizza and she is doing GREAT!