I Am Looking At Seattle Again

I am once again considering moving to Seattle.

I mentioned in a prior post that when I was unemployed I asked my friends in various cities what their cities were like. A couple of them lived in Seattle.

I mentioned that one of the things I liked about Chicago is that I do not need a car to get around. One of them, MSL (I will identify them by their initials) said that he did not have a car and got by fine without it. Another, JL, who was MSL’s roommate in college, gave me a different opinion. He said there is mass transit, and you can get by without a car, but it is not too convenient. JL said that Seattle is not as green as its reputation. I told him that MSL said he got by fine without a car. JL informed me that MSL had gotten injured mountain climbing, and was unemployed for quite a while, so he did not really need a car. Taking an hour to get across a city is not that big of a deal when you do not have to go anywhere most of the time. I got the impression that JL and MSL had kind of drifted apart. But JL’s assessment led to my crossing Seattle off my list.

A few years have passed, and I am unemployed again. When I spoke to him a couple of years ago, JL said that he loved living in Seattle and hoped to stay there his entire life. He and his wife have now moved to San Francisco. I think they may have moved for his wife’s job. JL has been working on a book featuring interviews with people who have lived in countries that were/are under martial law. At some point I will ask him why he started this book. His degree is in electrical engineering. How one goes from EE to martial law is a story I would like to hear.

MSL is employed, and he has also left Seattle. He is now in Amman, Jordan. I will call him on Skype sometime and ask him how/why he wound up there.

I needed to talk to EYL, MSL’s sister. I thought she and her husband were living in New Jersey near Philidelphia, but they have moved to Seattle. So after we discussed the topic that I needed her assistance for, we talked about Seattle.

I last spoke to her around the same time I was in contact with JL and MSL. I was looking at job in Madison, Wisconsin. I told her I did not want to live there. It seemed pretty depressing when I went there in February of that year. As lonely as Chicago can be, I thought that Madison would feel even worse. She gave some positives about Madison: It is a pretty liberal town, there is a technology scene, it is a college town with college women. This actually made me think that I should look into Austin more. I realized that just about all of the positive attributes she listed for Madison also applied to Austin, and Austin had one more: Its population is three times that of Madison.

She said that unlike Madison, Seattle actually has a metropolitan area: about 3 million people. She said her nanny gets by fine without a car. Her husband works for Microsoft as a contractor. She said that there are a lot of technology companies in Seattle besides just Microsoft and Amazon.

She told me that while Texas can be hot in the summer, it is only for a few months. But she was not too crazy about the weather in Seattle. It can be kind of depressing.

I have been to Portland, but I have never been to Seattle. I am still leaning towards Texas, but I will also start keeping an eye on Seattle.

Image from Wikipedia