We were walking through the mall this weekend for the first time in a while. I saw a stand with bus route information in the middle of the mall, which I thought seemed a little strange for a suburban mall. I wouldn't expect to see that kind of thing in Texas.

The neat Troy Laundry building across the street has been emptied out of all the newspaper holders. I assume the building has been sold and will be redeveloped somehow. It's historically protected, though, so at least the facade will remain. When I walked by recently I could see inside and took a few pictures:

We had our first earthquake this morning around 5:25AM. It was 4.6 magnitude and about 22 miles to the Northeast of us. I didn't feel anything though and there's no reported damage.

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Troy met me downtown after work today and we went to Pike Place Market just for fun. It was really sunny today and not as cold as it has been recently. It was really nice being able to look out at the beautiful Bay and see the sun setting. The market wasn't busy at all either. In fact, today was probably the least busy I've ever seen it. We didn't bump shoulders with anyone or get run over by kids. We were a little hungry, so we got a salmon pâté piroshky from Piroshky Piroshky. The market is one of my favorite places in Seattle, it's just such a neat place.

Since Seattle is close to salt water (though technically about 100 miles from the ocean), there is a lot of good seafood here. However, the one type of food that dominates the landscape isn't seafood, but Thai food. There are more Thai restaurants here than any other type of food.

I didn't discover Thai food until a couple years ago, but in that time it has become one of my favorite kinds of food. Pad Thai is the dish I started on and it's pretty safe if you like noodles, vegetables, a little bit of sweetness, and a little bit of spice. Since then, I've had a variety of Thai dishes, most of which have seemed somewhat healthy, with a good mix of vegetables and the option to not include meat. I like Thai food and am glad that there are so many different Thai places in the city.

Troy & I have been hanging out with friends from church about once a month for a while. We've gone to a wine tasting, a hike, a pumpkin carving, and several other things. We have a fairly big group of 20 and 30 year olds at the church and it's so big (probably around 25 people or so) they need leaders to help plan and organize things. So we volunteered this year to come up with fun activities for the group to do every month.

So, for February, we're going to be hosting a Super Bowl Party for our church group to attend. We rented out the community room downstairs, which has a big HDTV, three couches, a pool table, a dining table and chairs, and almost a full kitchen. I'm pretty excited about the Super Bowl itself too, but since we're hosting, it may be a little bit harder to actually pay attention to the game. I'm not sure what food we'll have, we haven't quite figured that out yet, but hopefully everyone will bring something, either a drink or food item. Troy mentioned making cheese dip, so we'll probably do that. I'm looking forward to it, it'll be the first time we've hosted such a big party.

I had gotten pretty used to it being dark outside after work, and used to walking home from the bus in the dark, and walking around the neighborhood in the dark. However the sun has been setting noticeably later than it was just a month ago. It's really nice to have more daylight in the evenings and it means that spring is coming sometime not too long from now.

I guess the economy has been bad everywhere lately. The local economy has generally been pretty strong, with unemployment rates trailing the rest of the country for the past 5 years. However with firings by Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks, along with Washington Mutual failing, the local unemployment rate has risen precipitously.

Sometimes I have to go to job sites at work, but normally I can anticipate this. Last week, however, I unexpectedly had to go to a job site by myself, and I had taken the bus to work that day, so I didn't have a car. The company has a fleet of vehicles, so I asked to borrow one, but apparently they had to do some kind of driving background check first. With that option eliminated, a co-worker let me borrow his Prius, which I was thankful for.

The next day, I had to go somewhere again, but drove to work so I'd be prepared. Getting reimbursed $.55/mile was kind of nice, but I can't plan on driving my car to work every time I might need to go somewhere.

This week, I had to drive somewhere again, and since I submitted my papers for the background check earlier, I was able to borrow one of the company's Toyota Priuses. I don't know if anyone had driven this car after it was picked up from the dealership because it only had 623 miles on it. It was cool to drive the nice, clean, new company vehicle, though the "How's my driving" sticker made me drive extra-conservatively. I think it's funny that I've now driven three different Toyota Priuses in the past year, when I've only driven one of any other model of car. It's a nice car and I'm glad to have been able to drive it when I needed to.

Taking the bus to work has had its moments of inconvenience, and having to borrow a co-worker's car last week was one of them, but now that I can borrow the company's vehicles, it makes it easy to keep taking the bus to work.

The night before we left to fly out to Fort Worth for Christmas, we ran into someone we know from church at the airport. Then, last weekend, we had to make a late night run to the store and we saw another person that we know from church. Less than a year ago, we didn't really know anyone in this city, so it's kind of neat that we've been running into people lately.

When we were in Fort Worth for Christmas, several people asked us when we'd be back to visit again. Well, we probably won't be back during the summer or any time soon, possibly more than a year from now. We've gone back twice in the last 5 months for one thing. For another, we have several other rather expensive trips planned over the next year, which will use up a lot of money and vacation time. Anyway, just thought I would mention that since people were wondering.

One of the small differences I've noticed here is that all the milk jugs come with a cap that screws on instead of a cap that pops on. The pop-on style cap was the common kind of lid in Texas and the kind I prefer. It seems that there are more problems with this screw-on lid, including spills when pouring, and it also seems that more milk dries around the edge and sometimes falls off. I remember as a kid having some problems with the pop-top lid, but I think it's a better design overall and I miss it.

On Sunday, we went to church and then watched both football games. I'm glad the Steelers won, hopefully they'll win their 6th Super Bowl in a few weeks. After that we went to the grocery store, made taco salad for dinner, and watched an old movie from 1966, The Battle of Algiers. It was really interesting, but not really my type of movie. I'm looking forward to getting our next Netflix rental, Season 3 - Disc 3 of Frasier.

Yesterday we rolled out of bed at 9 and went walking around Capitol Hill and downtown looking at furniture stores for a new desk. We also went to a furniture store in the Ravenna area north of the U District, but didn't find anything we liked. We ate lunch at a Thai place called Djan Dinning in Wallingford and it was really good. The food was excellent and the atmosphere was nice and cozy in a previously-owned house.

Then we went home for a while and I cleaned around the house a little bit. Then we walked to REI to try to find something for Troy to get with his giftcard my parents gave him for Christmas. They had mostly clearance stuff and not much selection, so we'll go back again in a month to look.

And that was the rest of our three day weekend. Nothing that exciting, but it was nice to eat out at some new places, walk around outside, and enjoy the nice sun.

A light rail station will be built on Capitol Hill, less than a mile from where we live. All the tenants moved out and, for some reason there was a delay before construction starts, and all the storefronts were turned into art exhibits. It's a really neat street scene to walk by and see all the different exhibits, especially at night. It's really cool that they were able to set up all this art for people to enjoy. Click the picture to see a few pictures of parts of it.

I sprained my ankle over a month ago and it's still not completely back to normal. Every now and then I'll step on it a little funny or sit on it a bad way and it'll get stretched again and start hurting. I guess I need to be more careful. I just thought it would have healed by now.

It has been pretty cloudy this past week even though the weather had been forecast to be sunny. Yesterday looked like much of the same, with low clouds/fog in the morning, but by afternoon it had burned off and it was clear and sunny! It was a very nice day and I'm glad we were able to get outside and enjoy it.

We're under an air stagnation advisory here. I don't know why. The air stagnates in Texas, but we were never advised of it when we lived there. I guess the advisory is so that people won't start any fires outside or something, and maybe the air quality is a little lower than normal, I guess.

We have a three day weekend because of MLK Day on Monday. We weren't sure what we wanted to do this weekend, but we came up with a few good ideas. Saturday morning we went to eat breakfast at a restaurant that my Dad heard was good, The Dish. It was pretty small inside, contrary to the gigantic food portions. We sat at the counter and could see into the kitchen, which was pretty cool. I got a ham, cheese, mushroom, and onion omelette that came with roasted red potatoes and a choice of an english muffin, a scone, or toast. Troy also got an omelette, but his had italian sausage, parmesan cheese, onions, and spinach. He also got potatoes and toast with his. On top of all that, he also ordered a blueberry pancake that was probably about 8" in diameter. I'm surprised we actually ate most of our food. It was all pretty good and not too expensive by Seattle's standards.

After breakfast, we went to University Village and walked around. It's been really foggy and cloudy the last several days, but it's gotten really clear and sunny today. University Village is basically an outdoor mall with all kinds of small shops, stores, and Starbucks, of course. We walked around the Crate & Barrel and I found a ton of stuff that I like, but won't be buying any time soon, unfortunately. Then we got some hot tea from Starbucks with one of my gift cards I got from work.

Then we drove to Kerry Park to see what the view was like since it's been sunny today. It was still kind of foggy in the distance though and the sun was at a bad angle, making everything silhouetted. After that we went home for a little while and cleaned up the place, then went for a long walk to the waterfront and through downtown. We were planning on seeing Slumdog Millionaire tonight at the Harvard Exit theater on Capitol Hill, but it was sold out when we got there, so we just went home. We might watch the Netflix movie we have and play some video games.

Tomorrow we'll go to church and then watch the championship football games.

I tried to make a pecan pie last night, but it didn't turn out too well. It was extremely wet inside when I took it out of the oven after cooking it for the amount of time the recipe said. We cooked it almost 40 more minutes to see if it would be any less wet and now it looks overcooked. We just ate some of it and it came out in globs and is just overall gross. I guess I won't be making a pecan pie ever again. I have no idea what I did wrong...

We're pretty close to I-5 and took this picture looking north while walking across. The traffic is often congested on the northbound part, but the express lanes (northbound in this case) usually aren't that busy.

My parents gave us a neat magnetic photo holder for Christmas that I hung up last weekend. We have several wedding photos still lying around so we stuck those on there for now. We'll probably buy some other photos to hang sometime, since we have a ton of pictures of us hung up everywhere. But, anyway, it's kind of neat.

One of the neat things about Seattle is that there is a lot of public art. I found the colorful sculpture below on Mercer Island (technically not Seattle) and thought it was pretty neat. I edited the picture to heighten the contrast and highlight the color.

There was some fog coming off the water last night. I thought it looked kind of neat, so here's a picture.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct runs between Downtown Seattle and the Waterfront, but it's an old highway and there's a 1 in 20 likelihood that an earthquake could shut it down within the next decade. After years of discussion and inaction, local politicians have finally decided to replace the viaduct with a tunnel. There were a number of options proposed and this is one of the most expensive ones, but it should make the area by the waterfront much nicer.

With the snow and then the flooding, the major interstate highways, I-5, and I-90 had been closed recently, but they're back open now.

It's kind of crazy how often the interstate is closed around here. I-90 is often closed at Snoqualmie Pass, where it passes over the Cascade Mountains. There can be heavy amounts of snow there and sometimes avalanches that close the roadway. It's hard to believe that sometimes people are physically cut off from the eastern part of the state by land. Of course these closures have no impact on us, since we have no need to go outside the city, but it's amazing the impact that the weather has on the transportation infrastructure.

I like my new job more than my old job, but one nice perk that I had at my old job was that my desk was by a window with a view. And then while I was working from home for six months, I could look out our apartment window. But now, at my new job, I sit away from the windows, which have blinds over them anyway.

I've missed seeing the sun this winter, but that's more because I don't have a window at work than because the sun never comes out. It's been cloudy a lot lately, but according to Lesley, who works in an office building with a lot of windows, the sun has been coming out often. And, this week's forecast shows clear days for most of the week.

I guess I need to make a habit of walking by the windows or taking breaks outside because I do miss seeing sunlight.

This is the 500th post on our blog. That seems like a lot of posts. Of those, 101 posts include pictures, and 94 refer to travel that we've done.

We were posting a lot when we first moved here and thought that the posting might slow down after we'd been here for a few months, but we've remained pretty consistent at more than a post per day over the past year.

We've tried to keep things interesting with posts about things we've done, local news, various observations, along with pictures and videos. We've also found a good balance for us so that we enjoy writing regular posts and uploading pictures without making too big of a time commitment or feeling obligated.

Hopefully we can maintain momentum over the next 500 posts and keep things interesting. Thanks for reading.

Washington is one of the states with its own minimum wage that's higher than the federal minimum wage - $2 higher, in fact, with the latest increase to $8.55/hour. It took me a while to find out that we have a state minimum wage here, but it probably contributes somewhat to the higher cost of living here. There are plenty of arguments for and against a minimum wage this high and I don't really want to get into all that, I just wanted to mention it, since there's not a state minimum wage in Texas.

There are a lot of high elevations and steep streets here. I found a cool page that lists the highest elevations and steepest streets in Seattle. Queen Anne Hill, which we can see from our window, is the 4th highest point in the city. The steepest street in the city is a 21% grade, which seems pretty darn steep, but the steepest street in San Francisco is a 31.5% grade. That's a lot steeper than the streets in Dallas and Fort Worth.

We've mentioned lately how we've had a lot of snow. That's melted away for the most part, but Spokane, in eastern Washington, has gotten more than 6 feet of snow the last three weeks.

Spokane has received more than 78 inches of snow — about the height of Michael Jordan — since mid-December. That's far above its average of less than 50 inches for an entire winter. Normally about 16 inches would have fallen at this point. The local record for an entire winter is 93.5 inches set in 1949-50.

Roofs have been collapsing under the weight of the snow, streets are clogged with ice and slush and locals are starting to refer to this as Sno-maggedon.

All the melting snow, combined with several inches of rain the last few days, is causing a lot of flooding and mudslides in the surrounding areas. Fortunately since we're in the main city, the flooding won't affect us at all. Most of the flooding is near the mountains and to the north and south of us. Amtrak service has been canceled too.

Throughout Washington, 62 highways are closed, including all passes in the Cascade Range.

The state has closed down a 21-mile stretch of Interstate 5 in Lewis County. The closure stretches between Exit 68 at Highway 12 and Exit 89. The closure area includes Chehalis and Centralia. It could last up to five days.

In December 2007, floods closed a large stretch of I-5 in Lewis County for four days.

The NWS says 22 rivers in Western Washington are at or above flood stage and major flooding is expected on 19.

The weather has just been really crazy lately. It's also been really windy and the last two days my building has been making creaking noises. Anyway, we shouldn't have any trouble in our immediate area and we don't have any plans to travel very far on the freeways any time soon.

We used to use Jumpcut to upload and edit our videos. The service was extremely helpful because it allowed us to edit our videos and there is nothing else like it on the internet. Unfortunately, Yahoo has chosen to abandon the service.

So, now, we're without an easy way to edit our videos. If we just want to upload single clips, YouTube works okay, but for combining clips, adding titles, and adding music, we don't have anything that works well. An alternative would be Windows Movie Maker, but it's the most unreliable program on our computer. So, anyway, don't expect any more videos soon.

After waiting almost two months, Troy and I were awarded tickets to two events in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We're going to the men's individual 5,000 meter speed skating final on 2/13, and a men's preliminary hockey game on 2/16. It would have been nice to see the luge or another event I haven't already seen a hundred times like I've seen hockey, but it'll still be pretty cool. Tickets were pretty expensive though, so it's probably a good thing we didn't get all the events we requested.

Now we need to start looking for a hotel and figure out what else we want to do in Vancouver while we're there. I can't wait!

Over the past few months I've lost almost 10 pounds. I'm not sure what to attribute that to, but I'm sure that walking regularly and eating healthier has helped. I'm still in a healthy weight range so it's not really a big deal, but I guess it's better to be losing weight instead of gaining it.

Winter is the worst time of year here. The sun is set for more than 15 hours per day and even when it's up I haven't seen it much behind the clouds. The snow and ice we had earlier made things difficult for a lot of people, too.

The weather patterns here are interesting. It's been pretty windy here this weekend, with wind coming from the south. In Texas, wind from the south meant that warm weather was coming, but this wind wasn't bringing warmer weather with it. Local weather forecasts are interesting here, too, since the weather is appreciably different on the Olympic peninsula, at the Cascade foothills, and at the mountain passes. Each weather forecast mentions the snow level, which is at 500 feet now.

It kind of feels like we've turned a corner, though. There's still plenty of winter left, but the days are getting longer, the snow has melted (mostly), and the weather is in the 40s and getting up to 50 on Wednesday.

We had some pretty bad snow and ice here, which was made worse because Seattle didn't use salt to melt the ice. However, based on how much the city was shut down during the last couple weeks, the mayor has decided to use salt in the future:

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced this morning that the city will reverse its decade-old policy and use road salt to melt ice in future storms.

It's been 10 months since we moved to Seattle and in that time we've taken around 8400 pictures. Some of them were pretty good and we were even able to sell a few of them. Here are 10 of our favorites:

Vote on your favorite below and feel free to suggest others in the comments.

Happy New Year 2009! Troy & I rang in the new year with sparkling apple cider and had an awesome view of the fireworks at the Space Needle from our apartment! We bought some red wine for tonight a few days ago, but since I caught Troy's cold yesterday, we figured we'd save it for some other night. Right now we're playing our new video game my parents got us for Christmas - Burnout Revenge. We'll probably stay up a little while longer, but I'm getting tired.

2008 was a good year for us. We moved to our new city, got really good jobs, and made some new friends here. It was a tough year for our families though. Hopefully 2009 will be a better year for everyone.

Here are some pictures of the fireworks. We also took some video, but who knows if and when we'll post that.