Been around the world

I'm a sucker for 30-day challenges.  Like doing the Whole30, or 30 Days of Lists, or my crafty 30 Days of Thankful.  (More on the last two in a future post!)  30 days is short enough that I won't get bored, but long enough to accomplish something.

I just found out that November is National Blog Posting Month, where people are challenged to post *every day* for a month.  There are even daily prompts for it. So I guess I'll give it a shot!  This means I need to go back and do a post for yesterday since I didn't know about this challenge.

Today's prompt is: If you could live anywhere, where would it be?

Photo by jcolman on Flickr

I can fantasize about tropical islands with palm trees, daily 75 degree weather and no snow, ever. But that's not my real answer.  My real answer is right where I live now.  We live in a not-so-hip suburb of Seattle.  Everything is closed by 9pm.  But it's home to me like nowhere else has ever felt.

Maybe it's because I love our house.  It was the first one we saw when we started looking to buy a home, but I knew right away that it was "the one".  We've already agreed that we won't ever move to a different house in Seattle.

Another reason is that I love the diversity of our area. There are people from all over the world in our tiny suburb.  There are also TONS of interracial and inter-cultural families.  I noticed at a restaurant one evening that 5 of the 7 other tables near us had interracial couples or families.  As a consequence, it's not weird or unusual that my kids are mixed-race.  No one bats an eye, or even asks about it.  LOVE that.

The small but awesome side effect of all this diversity is that we can get nearly any international cuisine we can think of, within a 25 minute drive, similar to Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Well, except for really good Mexican food.  I'm still searching for that.

One other huge factor is my feeling of "community", which I wrote about 5 years ago, and it's only gotten stronger.  Because I live so close to work and I've been at the same company for almost 10 years, I constantly see people I know when I'm out and about.  Just today I ran into a neighbor and former coworker at Old Navy.  When we took T trick-or-treating, we met up with another neighbor who also used to be a coworker of mine.

We love T's preschool, which is right down our street and has only about 10 families in it right now.  And of course, having lived in Seattle for most of the years since 1997, I have tons of friends in the area.  I can't imagine starting over from scratch in a new town.  Even looking for a Space Needle photo on Flickr yielded one from an acquaintance's husband.  How crazy is that?!

Yes, the weather from October to May sucks.  But we're getting better at taking advantage of the dry days, so we're not trapped inside.  And after 10 years, I think I'm getting used to it.  If we strategically plan a good vacation in February or March, the dreary gray season is bearable.

Your turn.  Where would you live?