Me too. I came here in 79 and for a time lived on Queen Anne. Time to go. Prescott AZ? Fairhope AL? Somewhere else?

Time to discover Cape Ann . . .

I'd say.

None of that sound stuff - Puget, that is - that Seattle features.

We have the honest-to-God thing right here on our doorstep.

The North Atlantic.

Try it.

You'll like it.

I grew up near Renton. The Portland, Oregon region has somewhat better weather.

I'm in NJ but we're considering relocating to the South, possibly Georgia or the Carolinas. Better weather, in all the meanings of the word.

We're turning all our lights on from 8-9pm as well. Hee.

I moved to Seattle from SoCal in 68 as a lad of ten. While the area has always had a leftist bent from way back, it was of a different sort then. A tough working class leftism consisting of dock workers and fishermen and other blue collar types personified by our Senator Henry M. Jackson. Even then this more muscular liberalism was on the wane, to be replaced by the flavorless, gelatinous mush represented by the likes of Patty Murry, Chistine Gregoire, Greg Nickles, Jim McDermott.
I held out as long as I could as an urban dweller all the while adhering to the lazy conformity of Seattle style liberalism as it developed through the 70's and 80's. A few years on Queen Anne, a few in Westlake then Belltown and I realized I had had enough. Post 9/11 I started reading a little, discovered blogs and found that my lifelong identity as a democrat just sort of evaporated away little by little.
No great loss. I moved to the other side of the Sound about five years ago and have found a friendlier environment for diverse views.
Can't help you with the weather however.

Consider if you will, the Texas panhandle. That's the "square" part of the state. The sun shines over 300 days a year, the sky is so clear you can almost reach out and touch the stars, and in a good year, it rains about 20 inches.

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by Eric Burdon and the Animals:

In this dirty old heart of the city
Where the sun refuse to shine
People tell me there ain't no use in trying

Now my girl you're so young and pretty
And one thing I know is true
You'll be dead before your time is due

Watch my daddy in bed and dying
Watch his hair been turning grey
He's been working and slaving his life away

We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you.

I was born here and about half my time on this planet has been spent here. It's true that only the relentlessly cheerful and those immune to light deficit disorder can thrive in the endless grey. Oh, of course there are the sanctimonious proles of the Puget People's Party, happifying themselves by shoving the rest of us around. Seattle is a GREAT place for them.

Tanning booths and my huge, wonderful family have made it a break-even proposition for me, but I'd hate to see a genius writer/social critic like our Gerard lost forever in the fog.

The oleaginous liberals in charge locally are just the slumped icing smeared over the rain-soaked cake, and moving is a viable way to dump the whole mess. I've been trying for a decade to coordinate a mass exodus from here. At last that may be happening, and it would add to my delight to read Gerard's reports from some other, saner, sunnier haven.

What Deborah fails to mention is that it gets VERY HOT in the Texas panhandle and the wind blows 40 mph every single day.

Alas, there is no perfect place or climate. I have friends who have the means to be "Snowbirds" - Summers in Puget Sound, winters in Arizona. Near perfect, yes? But I hear they had a cold winter in Arizona this year. (Comparatively speaking.)

I try to make do with a coupla weeks in February in a sunnier clime. Gives me faith that old sol is still up there.

It snowed this morning and it was quite beautiful on the trees near mi casa. Something about the purity of the white and the stillness.

From 38 years of blasting through the sky in aluminum tubes, I learned that the weather is what it is, but only you can make yourself miserable.

Would hate to see any conservatives or libertarians who reside here leave. It's lonely enough for us now. And we need to elect Dino Rossi as governor.

I think Jimmy J. means RE-ELECT Dino Rossi.

You see, us conservatives can play the Florida whiner card too :)

Utah. Or Idaho. Heck, even northern Nevada.

The character of Utah is in flux right now. I thought the same thing through the nineties, in the first five or six years we were here.

Now is different, though. There is an edge that wasn't there back then.

It's become the norm, this sharp tang of unpleasantness hiding just behind the doings of any given day.

I don't like thinking ahead. But I believe the government stopped doing that years back, so I guess I owe it to myself to keep on looking and planning.

Come on, summer...

Mom,
LOLs!
JJ

Once upon a time, only a few decades ago, a history of the Middle Ages was published authored by William Manchester title "A World Lit Only By Fire." The vast majority of at least semi-educated people understood why Manchester chose this title. How far we have fallen in so short a time.

Ooooohhh! A darkened Seattle. Shades of "Dark Angel," when Jessica Alba was not yet famous or obnoxious.

And where'd you guys dig up a boob-ninny like Nickels, anyway? Man, I thought Bloomberg was a prissy little old lady, what with his trying to turn his entire city into The Cloisters, but Sissy-Pants Nickels has got him beat.