Speaking of the Electra

Lounging with a view!
Shhhh! Don't tell the owners, but Elliot loved the top of their kitchen cabinets. What's a cat mom to do?

Speaking of the Electra in my previous post, I thought I would recount an odd memory of our housing for part of June and July from 5 years ago.

We were in need of temporary housing as we waited for our condo sale to close. A temporary housing agency placed us with a condo near downtown Seattle, and we would simply meet with the owner to get the keys upon our arrival to town.

Remember at this point we had been driving across country for many days and we were road weary and couldn't wait for a place to relax and call home, even for just a month.

One would figure that the condo was leased out often on a temporary basis and all the basics would be included in the condo -- 4 plates, 4 bowls, 4 towels, sheets on the bed, etc.....

Umh, yah....that, and more!!! This was the private residence of a couple who decided to take off to San Fran for 6 weeks and decided to lease out their place. It was completely living in another person's home with all of their decorations, and we even had their dirty dishes from breakfast in the dishwasher.

They knew we had a cat, and the leasing agent must have told them Elliot was old. Try 2 and super energetic, but we won't go into that. We looked around at all the crystal and FREAKED OUT! As soon as the owners left, I used the digital camera to snap pics of the dozens of sit arounds and we put them and all the house plants way out of the cat's reach. Whew! Crisis averted!

Then we realized we were on the 13th floor of a condo with all the windows open and NO SCREENS. Holy cow! Elliot could skydive to his death if we weren't careful! So, needless to say, we had to be ultra careful with the windows.

The owners had rabbits (fortunately these didn't stay; maybe they went to San Fran as well?) and so we had a place for Elliot's littler box where the rabbits had had their box. There was a small hole to crawl through to get inside the utility room to the box....very creative!

There were 2 small bathrooms in the condo, and I claimed the one with a bathtub. And when I showered, the shower window overlooked Interstate 5, so all of America could watch me shower if they really wanted to....very creepy!

One benefit of our location was the great view of Lake Union, where I would sit and just watch float planes come and land -- quite an amazing view of the water! Elliot enjoyed it, as well, and we got a few pictures of him enjoying the view, which you see at the top of this story.

One drawback of being on the 13th floor was that window washers came and hung outside the window to make our view clearer. This scared Elliot so much that after he saw the window washers he ran and hid under the bed for the whole last week of our stay at the Electra. We could barely entice him out from the bed with the jingle of food in his bowl...it was very traumatic to see people hanging outside his windows!

As we carted all of our belongings out of the temporary condo, we even freaked out neighbors down the hall who were having a party. You see, we had Matt's elk mount living with us in the living room (we had no storage!) We had picked it up on our drive through Colorado, as it was finally coming to live with us. As the mounted elk moved down the hall on a hotel-styled cart, a few overly tipsy neighbors who were having a party yelled to others, "I just saw a moose moving down the hall" (elk; moose; same thing to a city dwelling urban-ite, I suppose!) It really caused quite a stir as it made it's path down to our truck....

And thus were the adventures of our first month of living in the PNW.