These Strange Times We Are In . . . A friend of mine says that our blogs should have pictures. Since I am not the artist she is and I have not quite figured all of this out yet, I will be adding few pictures to start. However, since moving to Tacoma I have witnessed an ongoing optical illusion that gives me a start each time that I see it. We are living in an apartment in the Stadium District of Tacoma. Our apartment looks out to Commencement Bay. SeaTac Airport and McChord Air Force Base are not far away from here. In fact, the huge transport planes from McChord have a flight pattern that sweeps across the bay and then heads south down the coast line. With all the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan there are flights almost daily. A couple of weeks ago there were flights heading out every few minutes. Seeing those huge planes low over the bay is one thing but as you can see by this picture sometimes it is unnerving. This plane is one of the smaller ones that fly the pattern. Every time I see this I am taken aback momentarily. My thoughts are " Oh, no, here we go again." To think that I probably would not have had such thoughts but for 9/11. Now onto the apartment. This is a test for us as we get ready to make our final retirement plans. Can we live in the city? Do we want to live in the city? How much more can we downsize? All of that stuff... So far we have decided that after 30 years of marriage it is really the pits trying to downsize. Lucky for us we have moved several times so it is does not seem like an impossibility. We have also decided that we would still like to have a least a small piece of grass to mow or dirt to plant flowers. Each day we get closer to knowing what we would like and hopefully can afford when we move east to be closer to Erica and Geoff. The apartment then has been a good testing ground.