Chapter 23: Arrangements

On July 20th at 8:15pm Jason Uranga, my grandfather on my mother’s side passed away. After 6 months of battling renal failure and being fully prepared to join my grandmother he made his grand exit to the ballroom in the sky.

This entire week has been a horrible waiting dance, waiting to exit, waiting for papers and estimates. Suffice to say that I'm sufficiently drained. This weekend i’m doing my best not to fill every single empty second with something. Dealing with unstructured time paired with the fact that i’m trying to fulfill a dream can feel paralyzing.

I’m pursuing this land and home without a husband or kids. I’m setting down foundation that could potentially just be myself and my dogs without anything to pass down to . That’s intimidating to me because I feel as though most of my life I was told to hurry up and then wait.

I refresh my email daily, afternoon, nightly. I wait , get an automated message from Puget sound and grit my teeth. Nothing with King county is fast or efficient. I wish that were hyperbole but it’s not, anything involving king county and the buying market is a sitting on hands game until they send over the bill.

The Time line :

Puget Sound Estimate → Submit to USDA → Land Survey → Close → begin the process of payments to begin construction & building → land approved and cleared → foundation → container home designed and delivered → hook ups → shablam! we got ourselves some land and home .. oh shit time to move .

I am repeating myself over and over but essentially this is where I am at.
I need an estimate, even if a rough one at that to send to USDA (my underwriter) specifically to begin the process of approval which for USDA can take up to 45 days. THEN begin the process of closing.

THAT being said there is also the 450.00 survey in order to succinctly determine the appropriate location for my septic tank. I will try and see if in tandem with the septic tank installation if I can squeeze in one free empty.
Future me will thank me down the road.

I often wonder how much life I should put in these blogs. they quietly remind me of those cooking recipes where you have to trudge through petunia’s great grandmothers foot fungus before you finally get to how to make cornbread from scratch .

As for my grandfathers passing, it comes in tiny waves. I was fine (it’s how that line usually starts) until yesterday at work i found an old video that my aunt had sent me of my grandparents at the old folks community center. Dancing and swaying to what could have very well been one of the last songs they would ever dance to. I can hear their voices clear as day in my head, grandma’s loud singing, Grandpa’s “Hiya Honey!” And i truly hope that never goes away. I sobbed, immediately downloading the vide and tucking it into a google drive. I’ll make sure to transfer that over to a portable drive with all of their photos. I’m finally getting some pictures from not only when I was young but when my mother was a baby. Her eyes filled with hope and promise and not yet wracked with the burden of a husband or child birth. Not yet given an autistic child. Not yet Somebody else but a child and in that sometimes it’s hard to look at .

My family, much like this journey is a little complicated and so many of the reasons why I look for home externally. Perhaps that’s hard to understand or perhaps it’s not. Nevertheless, it’s ironic the way the past can play such an incremental part to how you want to shape your future.

To tell you mine , I'd love to be the cozy cottage that my friends and my little family come visit. I’d love to be the home someone else comes home to or runs away to. I’d love to invite people more into my space knowing it’s mine. I’d love to one day look around and know that at any moment, at any time I can sell my property and leave if i needed to.

I’d love to build or craft a she shed to focus solely on my painted work and leave my phone in my house and truly be unreachable for some time.
I’d love to have friends surprise me with their visits, thai food in tow and hugs wrapped around my waist.
I’d love to know that i’m not totally isolating myself just because it was something I was familiar with as a kid.
I’d love to invite friends and family over to see the stars, whomever would come up.
I’d love to not always be the one visiting other people but to have it the other way around as well.

That’s most of it I think. The weekend is just a pause period, two days then refreshing emails again.

Time to go out and live.