We've been in the Seattle house for a little over three months now--long enough to get good and settled and to get cat hair all over everything--and for the most part, I'm pleased with the place. I am not actually hip enough to live here, but I can get away with pretending that I am retro-grunge (instead of what I actually am, which is 'generally unwilling to give a shit what I look like as long as my clothes are weather-appropriate and comfy'). On many occasions I have caught myself wandering around Seattle in my battered old flannel shirt and jeans, toting a froofy coffee and a reusable cloth grocery bag; people in Seattle don't actually look like this any more, but it still feels very appropriate.

Right now, as we approach the solstice, the sky is barely dark for six hours a day. There are still traces of daylight in the sky at ten PM, and there is a significant amount of light in the east at four AM. I find this unnerving. I've started sleeping from four AM to noon instead of from six AM to two PM, partially because of the freaky, freaky sunlight and partially because most of my friends are now either two or three hours ahead of me, and as such, are going to bed just when I'm starting to prowl around. Is this what it feels like to be a cat?

Our neighbors are reasonably friendly and tend to startle me by doing things like bringing in our trash cans and mowing the teeny-tiny strip of grass that pretends to be our front yard, since they had the mower out anyway. I also find this unnerving, as I have a certain amount of protocol anxiety. Generally I reciprocate when possible and hope that's good enough.

The city is beautiful. There are actual, honest-to-God mountains on both the western and eastern horizons, and Mount Rainier looming off to the southeast. I've never lived anywhere with mountains on the horizon before. It looks like a matte painting: too perfect to be real. There are multiple bridged lakes, and seaplanes everywhere, and the landscape is so hilly that there's a vista around every damned corner, green building-studded hills rolling down to the lake or up into the sky. Right now the city is awash in greenery, like a tidal wave: houses vanish in it, roofs are covered in it. Sometimes it's like getting swallowed alive by a hungry vegetable blob.

I'd also like to mention that the average temperature in Seattle in July is sixty-five degrees. This June has been a little cooler than normal, actually--highs in the mid-sixties, lows in the mid-forties--and while it does rain a bit, it doesn't rain nearly as much as people think. In the winter, sure. This is a temperate rainforest, after all. Seattle benefits from its own tiny microclimate where the weather rolls in from the south and away to the north. The weather in Seattle has nothing to do with the weather anywhere else.

Some day it will rain monkeys here.