Ever since we got here I've been looking forward to checking the mail, not just because I actually like checking the mail and going through it, but because I've been looking forward to getting cards and things from my family in Texas. I got a package yesterday from my sister! It was in a long rectangular box and I had no idea what it could be. She sent me a really nice big umbrella and some makeup she got from her work! The umbrella should work really well when I walk to and from work. I like it a lot and it seems to open and close good, unlike the older, cheaper umbrellas we have. It's always nice to get free makeup too. So that was pretty cool to get all that stuff in the mail.

Click here for some pictures of it:

There are a ton of trees that are starting to bloom all over the city. A lot of them have all these pink blooms on them and are very pretty. I dunno if they're cherry trees or what.

Pink tree:

Everybody knows that I got pretty sick of the hot weather in Texas. I knew the weather here would be more mild and I was looking forward to cold winters, seriously. There's a lot of things to like about cold weather, but I just don't think it's been cold enough here. I guess at times it has been fairly cold and windy outside, but now the weather's already warming up into the 50s, which means I don't get to wear my sweaters, scarf, or beanie as much. And, even worse, we have never had to use our heater here. In fact, almost every day we've had to open the window to keep it from getting too hot! I guess we shouldn't be too surprised since we face west and receive afternoon sunlight, but I was hoping that it would get chilly in here and give me a reason to cover up with a blanket and drink hot tea. Instead, I've been wearing a t-shirt all day and have had to open the window to keep the temperature reasonable. I guess I shouldn't really be disappointed, I don't want a bunch of snow or anything, and compared to 90 degree afternoons in March and torrential downpours, the weather has been great. Still, a little part of my wishes it would be just a slight bit colder...and wonders what we're going to do with no air conditioning in the summer.

The weather this afternoon was great, in the low 50s with plenty of sunshine. Even though Lesley had just walked home from work, somehow I talked her into going for another walk. We had yet to walk to South Lake Union Park, so we took the 10 minute walk to get there. The park was rather small, but it offered some nice scenery and was a worthwhile walk from our apartment. Click the image below for pictures.

I guess this is our 3rd weekend here, but I'm sure we'll lose count soon. After working my first full week, I was ready for the weekend and was looking forward to being able to sleep in again. Friday night we went to eat with the couple we met at church and that was really fun. After dinner, Troy and I drove around for a while and drove on the floating bridges to Mercer Island and Bellevue. We were able to use our webcam to talk to some friends and then went to bed. It was really nice sleeping in until like 9:30 Saturday morning. We didn't really have a plan for the day, so we had to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do before we could leave. We finally went to Noah's to eat bagels (the same bagel place we went to last weekend) and then we drove to Discovery Park. It's a pretty big park that has a ton of places to sit on benches and see the great views from the cliffs. We walked probably over 3 miles throughout the park. It was pretty with all the pine trees everywhere and I bet it's even prettier in the spring and summer when the other trees are green. At one point, we went to the western most point of the park and were able to walk right on the beach. There was a lighthouse there too and tons of rocks and sea shells. We also saw a Hanjin barge which was kind of cool. The first time we went to Seattle, we saw a ton of the Hanjin cargo containers near the docks and so I started to associate them with Seattle. Every time I saw one in Texas, which wasn't very often, I thought about Seattle.

Anyway, we spent a few hours in Discovery Park and after that we were pretty hungry, so we stopped to eat somewhere in an area of the city called the Ballard District. We went to see the Ballard Locks, which is a set of locks between Lake Union and Puget Sound. Since Lake Union and Puget Sound are at different heights and one is fresh water and the other is salt water, the city needed a system to move big boats between the two bodies of water so as not to disturb the marine life in each. After that we went back to the apartment, left the car there, and then walked downtown to see what was going on. We went to a couple of stores looking for furniture that we're interested in buying and some picture frames. I also looked for a new purse, which I'm having a lot of trouble finding. We ate at a sports grill attached to a GameWorks and then ate ice cream from Coldstone. While we were out, we bought a book of bus tickets so we don't have to have exact change anymore if we take the bus around the city.

Then today we went to church in the morning and then went to IKEA to try to find a small dining room table and chairs, a new desk, a bookshelf, and a tv stand. We saw a few things we liked, but weren't too crazy about anything. We ate at Panera and then went home. We didn't have time to take a ride on the ferry boat, but maybe we can do that next weekend.

Click here for pictures:

The first weekend we were here we went to a church nearby. We wanted to find to find a church to attend to aid our spiritual growth and we also hoped to meet people. On our first visit, I was surprised to see the beautiful, historic sanctuary less than half full, and I didn't see many young people. It made me better understand what people mean when they call Texas part of the Bible-belt. But anyway, it just so happens that there's a couple that attends the church that graduated from SMU a few years ago, kind of unexpected to meet people from Texas so far away. Anyway, they invited us out to dinner, so we went out last night to a sort of hip noodle place. It was a nice dinner, we had a lot in common, we came to Seattle for a lot of the same reasons, and we had a lot to talk about; they've only been living in Seattle for a few months longer than us but they gave us some suggestions on restaurants and things to do. Anyway, it's kind of cool to have met people so soon after arriving, I'm looking forward to meeting more people and having more social events.

They have casual Friday's here and I wasn't told about it. We can wear jeans and tennis shoes if we want! I've never had a job that had casual Friday every single Friday of the year. That's so awesome. I can't wait to wear jeans to work next Friday.

The two cameras we ordered showed up yesterday, along with two other boxes for the previous tenant.

Here's a picture of the webcam taken by the point-and-shoot camera:

Here's a picture of the point-and-shoot camera taken by the webcam:

I was a little surprised that the point-and-shoot uses a battery pack rather than AA batteries. I forgot to even consider this when I bought the camera, but as long as I remember to plug in the camera to charge, I guess it's no big deal that it doesn't use AA batteries. Also, the camera didn't come with a wrist strap and it's not the easiest to grip, so I'll have to figure out something to do about that. I haven't gotten to use either of the cameras much, but am looking forward to using them.

I started my new job working for a broker-dealer this past Monday and I've been working for 3 days now. Here's a few pictures of my building from the outside:





It's been a little hard getting up at 6:15 in order to leave for work at 6:45, but it's nice to get off work at 4 and still have tons of daylight. So far I've just been sitting with various people, watching what they do and how they fit into the company. It's been fairly boring at times and the people are like, "well, I don't know what your boss wanted me to show you exactly, but um... you can watch me do what I normally do." A few people have run out of things to explain to me.

There are only about 30 employees total and there are about 350 registered representatives spread mostly over the Pacific Northwest that use us as a broker-dealer. It's been hard learning everyone's names and where they sit. Since I've worked for a rep in the past and a clearing firm, I have a very good idea of how the business works and what the rules and regulations are, and think I'll fit in pretty well. After just three days I have a good idea of what everyone does. One guy I sat with for a while gave me several restaurant recommendations, which was really cool. Everyone seems really nice and they're very friendly. There are a lot of people my age and then a lot between the 25-40 age range. My boss is actually one of the people who's worked there the longest and she's reducing her hours this summer to transition into retirement.

Most of us have little cubicle areas in groups of 4. Unfortunately, my computer monitor faces out into the open room and so anyone walking by can easily see what I'm doing. I've been using my hour-long lunch break to check my email and stuff on the internet, but otherwise I probably shouldn't play around too much, at least not this soon after starting work. I work on the 28th floor and can see for miles and miles. I can see Puget Sound and Alki Beach from my work, which is pretty awesome. They also have a kitchen with a dishwasher, microwave, refrigerator, and coffee makers of course. They also have free kinds of tea available, like green and white tea.

Overall it seems like a fairly laid back office with a great atmosphere. I think I'll like working there.

When we started this blog several months ago, it was mainly a way for us to keep a recorded journal of how things were going. But along the way, we realized that in additon to just being a journal, it could be a good way for us to let our parents know what's going on. So, it's kind of surprising and cool that now we have quite a few friends and people in our extended families who read this regularly. You'd think that moving 2,500 miles away would put us farther apart from everyone, but now we get emails from friends and family that we didn't talk to much before and it's brought us closer.

While a lot of the excitement has passed now that we're here and moved in, I expect to continue posting regularly so that we can not only keep in contact with everyone, but also provide entertainment to everyone who reads this. Anyway, we're happy that so many people read this and hope that you'll keep coming back.

Since I'm working remotely and most of the rest of my coworkers are in central time, I've been scheduling my day around central time, making sure to start working by 9:00 central time so that I'd be available when most of my coworkers are. Since my work computer still uses central time, throughout the entire day I feel like it's central time. So, I get off of work after a full day of work feeling like it's 5:30 when in fact it's 3:30 pacific time, so there's still plenty of daylight left in the day. It feels like I get to stay up late, too, because I don't go to bed until almost midnight central time, and even though I have to get up at 6:45 pacific, it still feels like I get to sleep in because I don't get to work until 9:00 central. Anyway, working from home has its shortcomings, but I do like the schedule so far.

Supposedly gas around here is up to $3.48 per gallon. I say supposedly because I've barely noticed gas stations since I've been here and we haven't even gotten gas since we've been here and still have almost a half tank left. Back in Texas, the cost of purchasing gas made up a good chunk of our monthly expenses, and even though the high price of gas encouraged us not to drive as much, there was no way to avoid it when we had to drive to and from work every day and drove from Irving to Fort Worth a couple times per month.

Since we've been here, though, we haven't driven much. I telecommute every day so I don't burn any gas, and now that Lesley's working, she just walks to work. In the evenings or on the weekends, we've been able to walk or take a bus to most places we've wanted to go. We've used the car a couple times to do groceries, to go places that are somewhat inconvenient to take a bus to, and for just driving around. While I enjoy driving around from time-to-time, it's nice to not have to deal with traffic and to not have to worry about gas prices.

Since we've been here, we've purchased a few things, such as a bath mat, shower caddy, camera, and a few other things. However, there's still a lot of other things that we sort of want to buy sometime soon. There are some things we own that are kind of old and not very nice or, in the case of our desk, are falling apart. Shopping for stuff can be sort of fun, but I don't especially like acquiring things for several reasons, but basically I just don't like getting stuff that I'll eventually have to get rid of, and buying stuff usually isn't worth the money and natural resources that it takes. Plus it just takes so much time to make big purchases; if I'm going to buy a desk, I don't want to just buy one, I want to find the best one that's going to be the best one to use, look the best, last the longest, and be the cheapest, and finding the right desk takes time. Right now, here's the list of things that we kind of want to buy in the next few weeks:

• desk - The desk we have is falling apart. It holds everything okay, but we want to get something that will last longer.


• TV stand - Lesley's TV stand holds the TV okay, but it doesn't hold any of our electronics, game systems, or movies very well. I guess it works okay for now, but it would be nice to have an actual place for our stereo receiver rather than just putting it on the floor.


• clock - Lesley has an old blue clock that works fine and I have a nice Dallas Cowboys clock that's even better (at least by my standards), but we kind of want to get a new clock that looks nicer and that we can keep for several years. We spent a bunch of time looking for a clock online but haven't really found anything that we like much.


• bathroom clock - Lesley would sort of like to get a clock for the bathroom so that she knows what time it is when she's getting ready in the morning. This is just something cheap we'll need to find somewhere but we haven't gotten to it yet.


• curtains - Since a lot of light comes in through the windows and since the place would look a lot nicer with some curtains, we probably should get some curtains sometime, but it seems so complicated. I think we've basically figured out what we want to do, but we have to find the right curtains and then buy all the stuff and put it up, which seems like a lot of work.


• dining table & chairs - I've suggested getting TV trays instead because when we had them, we ate on them most of the time anyway at our old apartment, so I don't know if it'd be worth it to get a table and then have to find room for it, but we might eventually have to get this, if for nothing else than just to be able to pull another chair up to the computer.


• knife sharpener - our kitchen knives haven't been sharpened since we've had them. Every time I've looked for a knife sharpener at the store, they've only had these huge knife sharpeners that sharpen three kinds of knives and take up a bunch of space. I'd like to find a little handheld knife sharpener.


• step stool - It'd be nice to have something to stand on for reaching our high cabinets above the fridge. I don't really want to buy a step stool, though, so maybe we can get a chair and just use that.

If my option is to spend a day of my weekend buying something or doing something else, I'm going to choose doing something else. There can be some satisfaction with buying and owning stuff, but having to get all of this stuff is more of a hassle and not worth all of the attention it requires. But, I guess we'll have to find the time to get some of this stuff sooner or later.

Lesley started work today, unfortunately the day after daylight savings time. Since she works for a financial services company and the stock markets open at 6:30 pacific time, most people start their days early. Since it was going to be dark outside, I offered to walk her to work. It was a little tough for both of us waking up at 6:15 (which felt like 5:15) and it was still dark outside. It was lightly raining the whole way there and it was still dark when we got there. Still, it wasn't too uncomfortable and it took about 15 minutes to get there. Then, I had to walk back and the rain was slightly heavier, but my beanie kept my head dry. Once the sun rises earlier and it's not as rainy, walking to work in the morning wouldn't be too bad at all.

We were too busy during the week this week to figure out what we wanted to do this weekend, so when we woke up late Saturday morning, we didn't know what we were going to do. We decided to start the day by reviving our old Saturday tradition of getting bagels. Whereas we used to be able to get bagels less than half of a mile from our apartment, the nearest bagel place to us now is about a mile away and up a steep hill. It's not very easy to find parking in that area of town, either, so we decided to take the bus. It was a short walk to the bus stop, and once the bus arrived (a few minutes late), we got on and purchased a day pass so that we could conveniently get to the other locations we had started to plan on. It was a fairly short ride to the bagel place, and the line wasn't too long. We used to pick up three bagels and take them home to put cream cheese on, but since we weren't taking them home this time, we just requested three bagels with cream cheese. We realized once we got our bagels that they were larger than the bagels we used to get and that they had a lot more cream cheese on them than what we would normally apply. After wiping off some excess cream cheese (the first time I realized that there is such a thing as too much cheese), the bagels were quite tasty, and while a little different than the ones we normally got, still very good.

After bagels, we headed the opposite direction on the same bus line toward newly-opened Olympic Sculpture Park. I had found out about this from a Seattle magazine that one of our neighbors was geting rid of and wanted to go as soon as we could. We found our way there without much trouble. Olympic Sculpture Park opened in January, and is basically a park/garden with a bunch of sculptures, as the name implies. It immediately reminded me of Dallas' Nasher Sculpture Center since the're both park-like areas with sculptures. However, unlike the Nasher, which is a secluded retreat in the middle of downtown, Olympic Sculpture park bridges the dense surrounding urbanity, the outdoor greenery and running trains, and the open expanse of Puget Sound. Olympic Sculpture Park offered a quick and peaceful escape from the city while still being connected with it and I enjoyed our stroll through the park, observing and interacting with the interesting sculpures along the way. The main reason I went, though, might excite a few other native Fort Worthians aside from myself. When I was young, I didn't go to downtown Fort Worth very often, but I remember a large red sculpture in front of the Bank One Tower (pre-tornado). This sculpture hasn't been in downtown Fort Worth for a decade, but for some reason I still remember it. That's why I was so excited to read that Alexander Calder's "Eagle" is the centerpiece of Olympic Sculpture Park, it felt like what it must be like to run into a former teacher who you didn't appreciate at the time but now are happy to see again. I was able to take a few pictures before my batteries ran out. If you're interested, here's an article about how Calder's "Eagle" got in Seattle.

Anyway, after this, we walked along the waterfront, past Pike Place Market, and to Pioneer Square, where we had wanted to learn a little about the history of Seattle by taking the Underground Tour, which is kind of a tourist attraction, but we thought it would be a fun way to get better acquainted with the city. Before the tour started we toured a small museum about the Klondike Gold Rush in the late 1800s, which brought a lot of people and properity to Seattle. The tour started with a brief and amusing introduction into the early days of Seattle, which weren't portrayed glamorously. Where downtown Seattle sits now used to be a lot flatter and the hills to the east were a lot steeper, but this caused a lot of problems such as floods and difficulty ascending the hills, so the city decided to gradually raise the ground level. However, all of the buildings were at the old ground level and all the city could do was raise the roads, so a lot of the storefronts were about one story below the roads. Eventually the city paved sidewalks at street level and buildings raised their entrances by a level, and now the underground tour is done at the old entrance-level under the current sidewalks. Kind of weird but kind of neat. Apparently there were at one time 32 underground blocks which were no longer used, and we got to tour about three blocks. Still, it was an entertaining lesson about the city and I found it neat to be underground.

After that, we rode another bus over to some dinner on Broadway and then headed home and called it a night. While it wasn't an overly exciting day, it was an enjoyable day around town.

I'm looking forward to getting my new driver's license and a passport. I would have gotten them within the past two weeks, but in order to get a new driver's license, you have to prove you're a resident of Washington. Well, in order to do that, we need some sort of electric or water bill, neither of which we have yet. Therefore, I have to wait until we get one and then I'll have to take time off of work to go get my license.

I also wanted to get a passport, but you can't do that without a valid driver's license. Well, you might be able to, but you have to jump through several hoops and bring additional documents that I just don't have.

Oh well, I guess I'll get them sometime soon.

Since I start work on Monday, I figured I should try to get errands done this week. I tried to schedule a dentist appointment, but they didn't have any availability until two weeks from now. I may be able to reschedule that for Good Friday. I also wanted to use my massage gift certificate now and I needed to get an eye exam because I'm almost out of contacts.

So, yesterday I scheduled an eye exam for today at a place 3/4 of a mile away. I walked there this morning and it took maybe 15-20 minutes to get there. It wasn't that bad of a walk at all. There were plenty of people walking around and I felt pretty safe. I also had a chance to stop at a Wells Fargo ATM right across the street from the eye doctor to get some cash. Anyway, I got my eye exam and a prescription for contacts. They ordered them for me and will be shipped to the apartment next week sometime. It only cost me $46 for everything thanks to Troy's vision insurance through his job.

It's so ridiculous that eye prescriptions only last for a year. I hate going to the eye doctor every single year just for them to tell me my eyes are the same. Hopefully within the next 5 years I can have Lasik so I don't have to deal with glasses or contacts again any time soon.

I have a holiday after only 10 days of working. They get Good Friday off at my new job. The next one is Memorial Day. It'll be nice getting a day off so soon. I may go to the dentist that day since I haven't gone in like a year.

At our old apartment, we had the cheapest DSL available and it worked fine. That's what we thought we would do here, too. However, Qwest's cheapest internet (256k) is slower than what we had before, and after living with it for a couple weeks, we've realized that it's way too slow. So, we've upgraded to 1.5 Mbps, which is already a great improvement.

For Valentine's Day, Troy gave me a gift certificate for a massage at a place called Massage Envy. Since we were pretty busy packing and getting ready for our move, I didn't have a chance to use the certificate until we got here. There are Massage Envy places all over the country, and so I went to get my massage today at Northgate Mall, which is 6 miles north of our apartment. I'd never had a massage before, so it was sort of cool to experience it the first time. The lady did a full body massage and there was nice music playing and a heated bed to lay on. My mid and lower back were really tight and are a little sore now.

Overall I can't say I was that impressed. Maybe the lady just wasn't that good, who knows. But it was still a nice gift.

While I was out, I also stopped by Target across the street from the mall and picked up some rather boring, household items, such as Windex and toilet paper. It was cool driving up and down I-5 and getting to see the snowcapped mountains to the east and west. I drove on a bridge across Lake Union and could also see Lake Washington to the east.

I went ahead and bought a webcam online. It comes with a microphone so I will be able to use it for conference calls for work, if I choose not to use our land line. I hope to use it a couple times per month to chat with my parents. I may not use the web cam a whole lot, but I think it'll be useful on occasion.

The area we're living in used to be kind of industrial but now there's a lot of development. From our apartment window, we can see 12 different cranes (click for pictures). From living in Dallas, I'm used to seeing a lot of cranes, but the cranes here appear to be mostly for condos rather than for office buildings.

We have DSL through Qwest and they give us the option of whether we want a land line. We weren't sure how good our cell phone reception would be and sometimes it's nice to have a backup so we agreed to pay the extra $7/month for a land line. Since I'm working from home, I had been forwarding my desk phone to my cell phone and we hadn't even bothered setting up our home phone yet. But, my cell phone minutes added up quickly so I decided to connect the home phone and start forwarding my desk phone to our home phone. However, one thing I forgot about is that home phones are junk call magnets. And, since we don't have caller ID, whenever the phone rings, I just assume it's from work. Yesterday, though, there was a call from the newspaper and today was a call from the state troopers' union. There are a lot of annoying things about junk calls, but not being able to ignore them is a big annoyance. I would really like to cancel our land line since our cell phones work for everything else, but we don't have enough minutes for all of my work calls and conference calls. So, I guess I'll just have to put up with the junk calls until we can figure out a better solution.

We put my new Washington license plates on my car the other day. I'm no longer the "Southwest High Nerd" (the last three characters on my old plate were "SHN") as my parents used to say. I kept the old plates though. I don't know what to do with them, put them out on display in the apartment I guess. I like how the new plates look.

Looks like today will be another clear day. I can see the mountains to the west and the entire city pretty well. If only Troy didn't have to work, then we could go to a park or something and take advantage of this great weather.

It's been really nice having the past 3 weeks off of work. A week of that was taken up by our 6-day road trip and now we've been here a week and a half. There's work to be done around the apartment, but I just feel like doing whatever I want with the rest of my free time before I start work again on Monday. Unfortunately, since we're 3 hours behind New York, financial companies on the west coast normally have earlier hours than what I'm used to. My boss wants me at work at 7:00am on Monday. That's bad enough, but on top of that is Daylight Savings Time which is this coming Sunday. It will be a little hard to adjust to getting up so early, but it helps that Troy also gets up pretty early. I'm not sure what my normal hours will be, probably 7 to 4 or 7 to 3:30 depending on how long a lunch I take.

One nice thing about my job is that it will have a great view. I'll be on the 28th floor of a big building right in downtown. It has a view of the bay and the rest of the city, which will be really nice. I'll be getting paid again, so that's always nice. But I'm not looking forward to giving up my free time again.

We have a pretty nice video camera and a pretty nice still camera and we've been using those to take pictures. However, both of them are pretty bulky to carry with us, so I ordered a small point and shoot camera online and it should arrive in a week or so. We should be able to take the camera with us every time we go out and it will make it a lot easier for us to snap pictures around town. So far we haven't been able to share much from our neighborhood and the city, so I'm looking forward to that changing.

In choosing a camera, I wanted to limit myself to only buying cameras that can use xD memory because I still have quite a bit left over from my last point and shoot camera and didn't want have to repurchase all my memory. I found a pretty highly-reviewed Fujifilm camera, the Fujifilm FinePix F20, that was available for fairly cheap online.

When we arrived at our new apartment, I wasn't sure how we would arrange all our furniture. We had a ton of bedroom furniture and I knew that all the pieces wouldn't fit in the space we have for the bed. Thankfully we found enough room to fit everything and nothing is really in the way too much.

We still have a few messes to deal with and we still have to put pictures and stuff on the walls, but we made a lot of progress the past 5 days.

We posted pictures of our apartment with furniture arranged here.

Today we walked to a Kinko's (which is close to the Seattle Center) to print a few things and while we were out, we stopped by Key Arena. We bought tickets to see the Sonics play the Sacramento Kings on March 30th. The Sonics are probably moving to Oklahoma City after this year, so this is one of the last chances we'll get to see them play. I don't care much about basketball, but it'll be fun to see another arena and another team play besides the Mavericks.

While we were there, we also got tickets to opening night for the Mariners. Oddly enough, the opening series is against the Rangers. We're going to see the first night game of the season on April 1. It would have been nice to go opening day, but I have to work until at least 4 every day, so I wouldn't be able to make it in time for the start of the game.

I'm really excited about getting to go to a Sonics game and a Mariners game. We'll probably go to at least a couple more baseball games this summer.

We updated our photo gallery with a better style and it looks a lot better now. You can view the pictures at Our Move to Seattle Gallery.

Soon we'll post pictures of the apartment with all our stuff in it.

Last weekend was our first full weekend in Seattle. We had just gotten our stuff delivered Friday afternoon and had a mess of over 50 boxes. We started unpacking and I worked on cleaning up the bathroom while Troy worked on the kitchen and living room. Everything fits pretty well in the bathroom. We have so many towels though that we had to use some of our chest of drawers space for extra towels.

We ordered pizza from a place called Mad Pizza which is a block away from our apartment. It was sort of expensive, but it tasted pretty good. We continued cleaning the rest of the night.

We woke up Saturday morning with a ton of empty boxes laying around that we had emptied the previous day. At one point, we couldn't even get out of our apartment because boxes were blocking the front door. The wardrobe boxes took up the most space, so thankfully we stored them in the back of the closet and got them out of the way. After cleaning a little bit, we walked around downtown looking for lunch. We ate at Kells Irish Restaurant and I had a sandwich and Troy had corned beef and cabbage. Mine had really really spicy Dijon mustard on it and I didn't like it at all, but Troy liked his corned beef. It was located in Pike Place market and we could see the water from where we sat though, which was pretty cool.

After that we walked around Pike Place market for a while and saw the flying fish and all the neat stores and fruit stands there. Then we walked to Bed Bath & Beyond to pick up a few things for the apartment. It started raining/sleeting/hailing while we were in the store, but it stopped by the time we were done shopping. We walked to a nearby grocery store to get milk and butter so we could make dinner that night, which turned out to be salmon, pasta roni, and green beans. We didn't want to go to Safeway to get a ton of groceries on a Saturday afternoon because we were afraid it would be really busy. We watched our Netflix movie, Fight Club, while eating dinner.

Sunday morning we went to First United Methodist church of Seattle which is located in downtown. Then we went back home, ate lunch, and continued putting stuff away. The place is much much better now, but it's still not organized completely. Sunday afternoon we took a break from packing and went to Washington Park, which is 3 miles away. We saw tons of tall green trees on our 45 minute walk. The air was really fresh and it was about 50 degrees outside.

So, we had a busy first weekend. We did a little exploring, but not as much as we will in the coming weekends.

When we visited the pacific Northwest in January for Lesley's 8 job interviews, we also visited 10 apartments in Seattle. In the case that Lesley was offered a job, we wanted to make sure that we could also arrange for a place to live without making an additional trip or move into a hotel for a couple weeks until we could find a place to live. Unfortunately, none of the apartments were overly impressive. We knew we'd be paying a lot more than we did in Texas, but even $900/month would only get us a place 70 years old with no dishwasher, garbage disposal, or washer and dryer, and old fixtures and cabinets. Of course, all of that stuff mattered more to Lesley than it did to me, I was most interested in living conveniently to everything, but I also wanted a view from the window and hoped that we wouldn't have to spend most of our income on an apartment every month. It was hard to find something that had everything we wanted - you usually get what you pay for. By our last day, we had found a place that seemed like a good choice - pretty good location, reasonably priced compared to other options, and the apartment itself was pretty nice - we both expected that we would live there. But, we had some time left on our last day and figured we'd look around some more in case we found something even better. We found another place to look at, which was even newer, and it happened to be a LEED-certified building, which basically just means that the building was designed to be more environmentally-friendly and use fewer resources. And, there would be a unit with a view available. Lesley loved the fact that the apartments were so nice and new, with built-in washer & dryer, nice cabinets & fixtures, new appliances, and tall windows. It definitely was the nicest place we looked at and the pricing was in line with some of the other top choices. After seeing this place, Lesley didn't even want to consider anywhere else, and I was excited enough about the view that I wasn't too upset about it being in a more deserted neighborhood and farther away from a lot of restaurants and other places. So, we decided to go for it.

After our first week of living here, I'm definitely pretty happy with it. One concern we had early on was finding a place large enough. Since we were basically looking at studio apartments, many places had one large living/bedroom area without a lot of room. Our apartment has had enough room for all of our boxes and furniture, and now that we've unpacked, there seems to be plenty of room to put everything. And, it seems well-designed; the layout makes great use of the 555 square feet, with a separate sleeping area that makes it seem more like a one-bedroom than a studio, none of the rooms are too small to move around comfortably or too large with wasted space, and the closets are large and convenient. Plus, there are the design elements that led to the building being environmentally-friendly, like steel-framing (rather than wood), fewer toxic chemicals in the paint, and energy-efficient windows. Not only was it well-designed, but it also seems pretty well built; I guess the fact that it was built in 2003 means that there hasn't been much time for things to fall apart, but the construction just seems more solid - the building hasn't shifted like at our old place, the cabinets have smooth-operating and sturdy Italian-built hinges, and the carpet is stronger.

And, so far I've loved the easy-open windows that let the air from the bay and the sounds in from the neighborhood - we haven't had to use our heat yet and if we want air conditioning, we just open the windows wider. Even better is our view. The Space Needle may be cliché, but it's still a very neat looking building and a beautiful thing to look at from the kitchen at night. Furthermore, the opportunity to look out the window at any time and notice something new (other than noticing a new blade of grass or brick in wall, which is what we could see out of our old place) is great. But the best part is that there are no bugs (so far), unlike at our old place where we found roaches (living and dead) all the time. Overall, the apartment itself is better than expected, it's probably the nicest place I've lived.

The biggest drawback so far is that there isn't much in our immediate area. When looking for an apartment, one of the things that was most important to me was being able to step out of the front door and get wherever I needed to go on foot. This place is definitely better in that regard than our place in Irving was; we've walked to almost every meal that we've bought out so far, and there's a lot of places within walking distance (depending on how far we're willing to walk). Unfortunately, though, our immediate area is still rather industrial, though there are several apartments, condos, restaurants, and bars around. But, unlike other parts of the city, there are quite a few warehouses and other miscellaneous places, which means that we have to walk farther to get somewhere we might want to go, and it also means that there are fewer other people out. The area still seems pretty safe and it's not bad, but after 10 minutes of a walk on our way to a department store yesterday, we passed one of the other apartments we looked at, and I thought how nice it would be to be 10 minutes closer to everything. Still, though, I'm pretty happy with where we're living. While I may eventually tire of the noise across the alley (turns out there's a recording studio there), the dogs we run into in the elevator, and the high rent - for now it's great.

Traveling over 2,600 miles on our road trip up here, I expected to find a lot more differences along the way. I expected people to act differently from Texans, for the gas stations and stores along the road to be more different from what I was used to, and for the billboards to be more different. While we definitely traveled over a wide variety of landscapes and through a good number of towns, the thing that struck me wasn't how different everything was, but how similar it all was. Even now that we're in Seattle, while the people dress a little differently, they're still friendly and don't act much different than what I'm used to. Things may have been different 60 years ago before the media and national companies softened the cultural and linguistic differences between all the cities from coast to coast, but it's kind of crazy to me that we passed through several different states and over several thousand miles, but it's all so similar, and it's all America.

Occasionally on our road trip up here, I'd pause from reading my book and look out the window. Almost every time I just couldn't believe we were moving and were already so far from home. Even now, when I think about, it's still pretty crazy to me to think that I'm all the way in Seattle, in a totally different city, and that I live here now. I'll get used to it eventually, but it's pretty crazy that we've moved so far away.

We finally got our kitchen situated for now. As we were putting stuff away, I realized how good it was that everything was packed so well. I want to take this chance to say thanks to Mom and Dad for helping us pack. All the silverware was nice and neat when we got it out of the box to put away and it was nice that everything was so well organized. Our knives were packed really well too. Thanks also for helping us clean the kitchen before we left, that saved us a lot of time!

Our place is still a mess, but we're making progress... slowly.

I've never been more excited than I was last night about getting to sleep in a bed. Sleeping on the floor was okay, but having a bed is so much better. And, having comfortable chairs to sit in during the day is great also. We had some camping chairs that were better than the floor, but I've never before realized how great cushioned seats are. All the rest of our stuff showed up, too, the only exception being a green broom we had, which seemed to be kind of an afterthought for the movers when we moved out, so I figured we wouldn't see it again. And, not only do we have our stuff, so far nothing seems to have been damaged, except for our rickety desk, which we'll probably replace soon. I kind of expected our glasses would be broken, but they weren't, and while we still have a few boxes in the closet to open up, it's good that all of our relatively important stuff seems to be just as as good as it was in Texas. Right now our apartment is a pretty big mess, but we've already made a lot of progress since yesterday. We still need to figure out where to put everything in the kitchen, but otherwise it's just a matter of putting things where they go and finding space for our collapsed moving boxes.

Well, it's in the process of being put in our apartment. The movers still have to bring in the bed and set up the furniture. We have all our boxes accounted for though and so far we haven't seen any broken dishes. It will be an incredibly big chore to put all this stuff away in the little space we have. It should all fit though. I'm looking forward to being able to cook stuff again.

The movers got here around like 12:30. They showed up without warning, but thankfully we were able to hurry down and greet them and get the garage door open and an elevator reserved. The apartments wanted to know ahead of time when the movers would be here, but the movers never gave me a time estimate other than sometime today. It all worked out though.

We've had great weather ever since we got here. The highs have been in the 50s and it's been sunny and clear like every day. It's been cloudy a few mornings, but it burns off before 11AM. I think it rained for a few hours Wednesday morning, but otherwise, the weather has been awesome. We've gone for a walk three times already. It's actually been a little warm in our apartment, so we've had to open the window every day. We may have to get a fan for the summer since our apartment doesn't have ceiling fans. I'm looking forward to not dealing with 100 degree weather anytime soon.

Since we're living in the city now, I expected it wouldn't be as quiet as it was at our old place. So far, it hasn't been too loud. We've had our windows open in the apartment quite a bit during the day and there's been the occasional ambulance, but nothing too repetitive to annoy us and nothing too loud to wake us up at night. Apparently there's some kind of live music venue nearby, though, and the band keeps playing the same song over and over. It's been going on for almost an hour and they keep playing the same song. We just shut the window and are about to go to bed, so we probably won't hear it much anymore, but it seems a little strange. I guess we'll probably hear more strange things while we live here.

I finally uploaded the rest of the pictures from the trip. I broke them into 6 sections:


Old Apartment


Road Trip Pictures from TX to AZ


Road Trip Pictures from NV to WA


Albuquerque


Grand Canyon


Hoover Dam & Las Vegas

Again, the layout of the photo album will be much better once we can re-do it with the desktop computer files.

Our bank account was created in Texas, because that's where we lived when we got married and created a joint account. Yesterday we stopped by a local branch to deposit a check and it came up that we had just moved here from Texas. The teller suggested that we might want to speak with the manager about some possible reasons why we may need to change our bank account locations to be based in Washington rather than Texas. So, we figured we'd talk to the manager just to see if there was any good reason to. The manager explained that accounts in some states may get certain fees that Washington would not apply (which doesn't matter because we don't pay any fees) and that in cases of fraud it may be easier to deal with if our account is based in Washington. Anyway, he took like 5 minutes to explain this and basically all it told me was that we didn't need to change our account, especially since we'd have to get a new account number. Anyway, it's good to know that it doesn't matter if our account is still out of state. I don't want to get new checks either because we never write checks and getting new ones sounds annoying.

We're finally posting some pictures. Unfortunately, the style sheet for Troy's photo site is located on our desktop, which won't be here for a few more days, so the photo gallery we've posted looks pretty basic. Hopefully, we'll make it look better when we get the desktop. Anyway, here are pictures of our apartment (click on the first picture) and pictures of our view (click on the second picture).

In Texas, I had to pay like $40 a year to get my car inspected. Here in Washington, they only make you get your car tested for emissions every two years and it only costs $15. They don't require a full inspection like Texas did. That will be nice not having to pay for the inspection anymore. The registration sticker will be about the same, about $60 a year. I'm excited about putting my new plates on my car. I'll probably keep my old ones for a while.

Our view is great, but the whole wall is missing something, and I think that thing is curtains. Now, I won't pretend to know anything about curtains, but I think they could add some color to the room and could be used to help obscure the room when it gets really bright in the afternoon. The problem is that neither one of us really knows much about curtains, so we're not really sure where to start. The window is pretty wide (over 9 feet), so I'm assuming we'd want a kind of curtain that we could drag across to cover or uncover the entire window, kind of like what they have in hotels. But, I don't know what our options are and don't know where to start looking. Do you get something like this at a department store or at a home improvement store or at some kind of specialty store? And then what are our options? Do we just pick a color or are there a lot of different types? Times like this are when I'd wish someone would do everything for me.

There's a lot we need to do soon. I hope that tonight or tomorrow we can get all of our pictures ready from the trip, plus additional pictures from before the trip and of our new apartment. Also, I really want to share some of the video we took on the trip, and since there's like 2 hours of it, I want to edit it first to get it at a length where people might want to watch it. Plus, we need to get ready for all our stuff to arrive on Friday and figure out where everything is supposed to go. With me working all day and wanting to go out at night, it's hard to find time to do all this stuff, especially with these caramel vanilla Drumsticks from the store being so tasty.

I rolled out of bed today and fell on the floor. Good thing the bed is also the floor. I had to get up early today for my first full day back at work. Working remotely is even better than going to college, where I could get out of bed, put on some clothes, and get to class in like 15 minutes. Now I don't even have to get out of bed, I don't have to get dressed, and I don't have to go anywhere. But, I was still half asleep when I had a 7:00 meeting. Still, it wasn't too difficult to catch up on email and take care of the things I needed to and I feel like I got a lot done, possibly even more than I would have if I were physically at work. I don't know how I was able to sit in a camping chair with the laptop on my knees all day, awed by the view out of our window with the Space Needle and distant mountains, but once I get a desk, my productivity should triple. Or maybe not, but it will be nice to have a desk.

The nice thing about starting work by 7:00 local time (which is 9:00 back at the office) means that I get off before it gets dark here. Since Lesley really wanted Dr Pepper and there wasn't any at Whole Foods, we decided to walk to Safeway, since I'm trying to avoid driving as much as possible. After walking more than a mile up very steep hills and finding the Dr Pepper, we realized that there were other things we wanted to buy and didn't want to carry it all back with us. So, we walked back and stopped for some Asian food along the way - thank goodness they have Pei Wei here (just kidding, we went to some local Japanese place, which was pretty good). When we got back, we drove back to Safeway (though we forgot our reusable grocery bags), and bought Dr Pepper along with other groceries that we can use once we get our pots and pans back. I'm not sure what we'll do the rest of the night, but there's a lot of things we need to do.

One of the big reasons we chose the apartment we did is because of the great view. I'm sitting in the living room now and I can see the Space Needle, Queen Anne Hill to the right, and snow-capped mountains in the distance. We're too low to see the water, but it's still an awesome view. We have an open kitchen too with a bar area and you can see out the window while cooking. This is so cool!

Today was our first day in our new place. To celebrate the end of the road trip, we slept in a little bit, but it was hard to sleep in very long on the hard floor (the bed is coming with everyting else on Friday). We had a mess of a place to clean up, since I'd just brought everything in last night and put it wherever. We cleaned up a little bit and then found a nearby place to eat, World Wrapps, which we had a little trouble finding because it was inside of REI (a nearby sports and outdoor equipment store). I caught up on work email a little bit and then we wanted to get our car licensed in Washington. It took us a few minutes of reading online to figure out what we needed to do, but then we set out to get our car's emissions tested. I kind of forgot that it was almost rush hour, so traffic was a little annoying, but it didn't take too long to get to where we needed to go, and once there it was pretty easy. After that, we headed downtown to the administration building to get our license plates. Despite having to wait in line at a government building, the whole process wasn't too difficult and we got our new license plates. After that, we walked to the grocery store to buy a few things for dinner and the next few days. It was a pretty nice first day.

Here are some pictures we took from the apartment:

I'm already liking being able to walk places. First, we walked to lunch today, which was inside of REI (which is like 2 blocks away). The weather's been nice all day - sunny, no rain, very comfortable temperatures - and we needed groceries, so we walked a few blocks to Whole Foods and bought our dinner and food for a few more days. Anyway, I think it's pretty great that I can walk places again without much trouble. I'd like to go for a walk tonight, but we'll see.

The seemingly-interminable road trip finally came to an end at 3:15 when we parked outside of our new apartments. We went through our lease and a bunch of paperwork with the leasing agent and he showed us the parking garage and our room. We finished all of that around 4:30 and then we started bringing stuff into the room. It would take quite a few trips to bring everything in, but we couldn't do it all at once because Lesley wanted to watch the Academy Awards at 5:00. So, since we don't have our TV yet, we watched it in the lounge area on their 50" HDTV. Since there was so much stuff to bring in (and because the awards are boring), I periodically brought stuff into the apartment from the car and had everything in by the end of the show. Afterward, we were too tired to do anything so we just went to bed.

I think today was the first time in my life when I woke up at a hotel before the free breakfast was served, normally I barely want to get up before they stop serving it. Anyway, we headed out at dawn and immediately faced serveral miles of mountains with hills and sharp curves. The roads were a little wet, but fortunately it was not cold enough for freezing conditions because it looked like it would be really dangerous if the roads were icy. There were a lot of fog that we would sometimes drive above, through, or below and this was probably the prettiest part of our entire trip, but all of the curves, hills, and light rain did get tedious. About halfway through Oregon, the land got flatter and there were fewer trees but it was still scenic. We stopped near Portland to buy a shower curtain liner and a couple other things that we would need soon because Oregon doesn't have a sales tax. We had some pizza for lunch and then got back on the road, driving through the beautiful city of Portland. Around 12:30 we crossed the Columbia river to be in Washington. Washington was flatter and less green than Oregon, there was more traffic, and there apparently isn't a local translation for "Slower Traffic Keep Right." Traffic wasn't too slow, though, and we made it to our apartment in Seattle at around 3:15 local time.

I'm so happy we decided to move to Seattle. I can't believe it's actually happening. It seemed like such an unattainable dream 2 years ago when we first thought about moving away. I'm really glad things worked out so well with our jobs, our apartments, and everything else. We planned our trip in January for interviews fairly well and I had 8 chances to get a job. Troy gets to keep his old job for a little while and in the mean time he can look for a more permanent job in Seattle. Our apartment lease just happened to end close enough to where we didn't have to break the lease or pay for several months when we wouldn't be there. Our new apartment in Seattle seems really nice, with a great view of the Space Needle. It's 10 blocks from my job, so I can walk to and from work and not have to bother with a car or parking. I just think everything worked out well.

It's just so cool that we're getting to do this. I couldn't have imagined living in D/FW Texas all my life, that would seem like such a waste of my life, to never experience another part of the country for an extended period of time. Yeah vacationing for a week is nice, but nothing at all like living somewhere the whole year round. Our dream finally came true, and I can't wait to experience the next phase of our life in Seattle.

• I wish every hotel had free internet. We payed like $45/night for our first hotel and it had free inernet, but our last two hotels haven't had it. Of course, there are plenty of other things to do at the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas other than using the internet, but it would've been nice to check our email and post on our blog when we wrote the posts.


• We've been eating nothing but fast food for the past few days. Of course we've wanted to eat quickly for lunch when we've been driving, but even last night in Vegas we couldn't find anywhere to eat for a reasonble price so we gave up and ate fast food. Plus, we've been eating our snacks in the car, which haven't been all bad, we've had some bananas and granola bars and stuff, but it will be nice to have a good meal.


• Vegas is a crazy place. I'm glad I got to see it, it was pretty neat, everything's just so big and flashy. I probably won't want to go back for a while, but it was a neat place to stop.


• The car is so full, I really wish we didn't have all of these coats and dirty laundry and stuff, it's just a mess, and all of our bags keep falling over and our food keeps faling out of the bags and it's just such a mess. I'll be glad to clean the car out.


• Being from Texas, I'm not very used to experiencing elevation changes, but we've experienced a lot on this trip. As I'm typing this, we're on a downhill slope of freeway that lasts for 17 miles. When we open any bottles we've brought, the air inside is at a higher pressure than the ambient air, so the pressure has to equalize. And, driving at these high elevations really makes the car sluggish because of the lower amount of oxygen, it makes a bigger difference than I thought it would.


• It'd be nice to have a different car for this road trip. Our Protege is fine, but if we still had my old Lumina, it would have a lot more room, it would ride better and quieter, it wouldn't get pushed around by the wind as much, and we'd get better gas mileage.


• We stopped to get gas in Oregon, which was an interesting experience because Oregon is one of two states (the other being New Jersey) where people are forbidden from pumping their own gas. Some guy had to walk over to the car, swipe my credit card for me, select the gas, fill it up for me, and hand me my receipt. I guess if I'd stayed in the car, it might have been nice to have the convenience, but not being able to pump my own gas is as weird as it would be to have to let someone start my car for me. I'm kind of glad we're moving to Washington and not Oregon for that reason alone, like why should I have to pay for someone to gas my car, why can't I do it?


• It's kind of weird that we don't really have a home now. Both of us have Texas driver's licenses, but we don't live there anymore, and we don't really live in Seattle yet, so we're basically homeless - just for one more day, though.

Shortly after arriving, we went to a neat local restaurant called Greenleaf where I had chicken marsala and Lesley had salmon, both were pretty good, though not as filling as the big meals in Texas that we're used to. Apparently this town is a popular tourist destination and there are a lot of neat shops and restaurants in its downtown area. Anyway, it's pretty in Ashland, but it's also cold, so we're going to bed early so that we can make it to Seattle and move into our apartment tomorrow.

It was a chilly morning in Visalia when we left to go north on California highway 99. We drove through a lot of farms and towns. You'd think that the drive would be scenic, but I thought it was boring, and the heavy traffic and annoying drivers made the drive frustrating. We made our way over to I-5 at Stockton and stopped for lunch and gas in Sacramento. Sacramento had a lot of trees, but nowhere else along the way had that many trees. Past Sacramento there was a lot of rain, though, almost continuous until we checked in to our hotel. Closer to northern California, the scenery changed from relatively flat farm land to mountainous with a lot of trees and we ascended to 4000 feet and even had some snow falling (though the roads stayed clear). We got to Ashland around 4:30 local time.

Since we skipped Death Valley, we wanted to drive to Sequoia National Park once we stopped in Visalia. The park was almost an hour away from town and we had about two hours of daylight left, but we decided to drive to the park anyway. On our way to the park, we went through a lot of green hills, over a mountain stream, and through a few tiny towns. It was a very pretty drive. The trip to the park was worth the drive by itself, so we weren't too disappointed when we got to the park and found that snow chains were required to see any Sequoia trees. We could've gotten into the park, which I'm sure was pretty as well, but it was getting dark, so we decided to head back. I'm sure we'll go to the park some other time. That night, we found a local Chinese place where we ate orange chicken and shrimp and broccoli for dinner, and ordered way too much food, but it was pretty good. After dinner, we made use of the free internet in our neat old-but-well-maintained motel off of the highway. It was kind of noisy in our room because of some loud people outside, but it quieted down after a while.

Google satellite image of farms along highway 99 in California.

Since we had seen a show late the night before and we were both sick and tired, we decided to sleep in for a little while. We ended up not leaving until almost 9:30. We had originally planned to drive through Death Valley on our way to Lake Tahoe, but since Lake Tahoe was forecast to get a lot of snow, we canceled that reservation and booked a hotel in Visalia, CA. We were still planning to drive through Death Valley even though it was going to be pretty far out of the way. But, since we got up so late, it made us want to reconsider, and since Visalia is near Sequoia national park, we decided we'd rather see it instead of Death Valley. So, we were able to leave via I-15 from Las Vegas until we reached a highway that would take us to Bakersfield. The land for this leg of our trip was pretty dry with a lot of mountains and strong winds from the south. However, before we hit Bakersfield, the landscape changed suddenly and dramatically from relatively-flat desert to green hills. We went north at Bakersfield on state highway 99 and drove through continuous farms on both sides, mostly orange farms. However, traffic also got a lot heavier, and this was made a lot worse because big trucks had a speed limit set to 15 miles per hour slower than everyone else, which meant that most cars wanted to stay in the left lane to pass the trucks, even if other cars wanted to pass them. We still got to Visalia with a few hours left in the day and even though I didn't have a map or directions of where our motel was, we found it without much difficulty and with enough time to drive to Sequoia National Park.

Now that we've left Las Vegas, the trip is half over. Spending all this time in a car hasn't been nearly as bad as I thought it would be and the whole trip so far has gone by pretty quickly. So far most of our driving has been over pretty dry land. The rest of the way I think we'll see a lot of rain, but it should be more scenic. We've been stopping at some neat places so far, like the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, but the rest of the way we're not really stopping anywhere special. I'm looking forward to getting to our new home.

We got to Las Vegas fairly early in the day and decided to drive down the strip first to check things out. There was a lot of traffic on the strip so it took us a while, but since it was my first time there, it was neat to see all the different hotels. Once we did that we checked into our hotel - Bally's. I was going to self-park, but it would've taken like 15 minutes to walk to our room with two heavy duffel bags and other stuff, so I just did valet. We asked for a room with a view of the strip and got a pretty good view to the south - we could see the Paris and part of the Bellagio fountains. Our room was prety big, too. Then we walked along the strip and went to some of the shops, such as the Forum shops at Caesar's Palace and the shops at the Venetian. It's kind of neat how everything has a theme. The weather outside was pretty nice, but the sidewalks were pretty crowded, I can't imagine how busy it must be during the peak time of year. We walked to the Mirage (though the volcano wasn't working) and to Treasure Island. Then we walked all the way down to the Luxor. On our way back, we got lost in the MGM Grand. It's crazy things are so huge in Vegas. There are a lot of neat hotels in Vegas, but they don't always make it easy to find your way around, so we did a lot of walking.

That night, we watched the Bellagio fountains a few times and they were really cool, probably the most impressive thing I saw in Vegas. I got bored with walking around and looking at shops pretty quickly, though, so we decided that we should try to see a show. There are lots of shows in Vegas and we didn't know what to see since we don't care much for stand-up comics. So, we decided to see "O" by Cirque du Soleil at the Bellagio, since I've seen Cirque du Soleil before and was impressed. The early show was sold out and only the cheapest tickets (which had a slightly limited view) were available for the 10:30 show, but we decided to get them anyway. The theater was neat looking inside and we were actually pretty close to the stage. Being Cirque du Soleil, the show had great sets, costumes, music, and acrobatic performances. Unfortunately, this time I wasn't nearly as impressed because it wasn't really anything that new this time, since I'd seen Cirque before and had seen another acrobatic show a couple months before. Still, it was pretty entertaining and a good experience. After the show I was dead tired, but it was a good day in Vegas.

When we got up the next morning, there was still snow on the ground. I wasn't sure if we would be able to drive out that morning, but I didn't want to wait for the snow to melt because another winter storm was supposed to move in later that day a few miles down the road. I walked along the road within the park a little bit and saw that there was plenty of gravel on the snow to add traction, and heard from a park employee that the highway out of the park was usually kept pretty clear. So, we decided to leave, figuring that if the roads were really bad, we could turn around. The roads out of the park had a lot of snow, but it was a lot safer to drive on than it was the night before. Once we got out of the park, the roads didn't have gravel, but the road had been driven on enough to crush the snow. We had to go a little slowly for a while, but after a few miles, while there was still snow on the sides of the road and on the yellow dashed line, it was just wet where everyone had driven, so we could go pretty fast. We made our way back to I-40 and after a while we got to the highway that would take us to Las Vegas by way of Hoover Dam. The highway was very flat and straight for quite a while, but as we got close to Hoover Dam, we drove by a lot of mountains and then down a very windy road to get to the dam itself. Since I'd never been to the dam, I figured we should stop and look around a bit. We walked around a little bit and looked at it. It was kind of neat, but there wasn't a lot to see. We didn't take the tour or go see any of the exhibits because we didn't want to kill that much time. If I want to hear more about the dam later, I figure I can read about it on Wikipedia or watch a Discovery channel show about it. Anyway, after that we were pretty close to Las Vegas and were able to check eat lunch there before checking into our hotel.

It was my first time to the Grand Canyon. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that was left there from two and a half weeks before. We checked into our lodge and then walked to the Grand Canyon and walked along a short trail. Unfortunately, there were some clouds nearby so the canyon wasn't lit up by the sun and the views weren't as majestic as we were hoping. I kind of wanted to do more walking on the trails and maybe even walk into the canyon, but the trails were covered with snow and we didn't have much time there anyway. So, after our walk, we decided to drive to some of the scenic viewpoints. We drove east for a while and stopped at a few places and took some pictures. Then, it looked like the clouds were moving closer and that it was going to start raining soon, so we started heading back. Well, it did start precipitating but it wasn't rain, it was snow. A lot of snow (at least by my Texas standards). We had to drive pretty slowly to stay safe but the snow just kept accumulating. We finally made it back to the room but wondered if we would be able to drive back out to leave the next morning. That night we ate at the nearby cafeteria, which was adequate, and then we went to bed early again, wanting to leave early the next day to get out of the mountains before the next storm came in.

We left Albuquerque pretty early in the morning, but unfortunately both of us woke up sick with sore throats. We headed west on I-40 and stopped to get gas and cold lozenges in Gallup, which is like the only town in New Mexico west of Albuquerque on I-40. I guess before I-40 was built, travelers took Route 66 and couldn't drive as far in a day and they used to have to stay the night there. There were a few old motels in Gallup and there wasn't really much else there, I'm not really sure why it exists. Anyway, after Gallup, we made it into Arizona and ascended a few thousand feet to get to Flagstaff. When I think of Arizona I think of deserts and rock formations, but Flagstaff was a mountain town with snow and trees. There weren't many quick eating options, so we ate at Taco Bell. After Flagstaff, we went west a little further and then headed north toward the Grand Canyon.

I don't see how this is the best time during the entire year of 2008 to get a cold. We're in the process of moving 2,500 miles to our new home. This is the worst time to get a cold. Sure, we don't have a lot going on in a car for 6-10 hours a day, but when you're constantly having to blow your nose, sneeze, and see through watery eyes, it makes driving fairly difficult. It's strenuous enough without being sick. If I was at home with a cold, I would do as little as possible. If I had a job interview, I would reschedule it on the grouds that I wouldn't want to get other people in the office sick. I would also stay home from work (like I did last year when I had a cold). Who goes shopping when you're sick? You don't have to do anything when you're sick. Driving great distances with a cold sucks. We HAVE to drive this week. It's not like you HAVE to go to work or shop when you're sick.

Also, who cares about sharing this with others? This doesn't affect us at all. We still interact with people during the day such as the people at the hotel lobby and people at restaurants. I don't see how you can say we have limited interactions with people.

I would go to bed early with or without a cold because there's nothing to do in the hotel rooms and we have to get up early to drive the next day. Having a cold doesn't affect going to bed early at all. We'd be tired from driving and walking around anyway, so we'd go to bed early anyway. I would also not be taking care of normal home chores if I was sick. I'd make you do them if you're not sick and if both of us are sick, the chores can wait, they have before.

Having a cold now inhibits us (or at least me) from enjoying things as much as I would otherwise. I felt miserable while walking around the Grand Canyon. It was already cold and windy, but having a runny nose and sore throat made it even worse to deal with these things. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I would have if I wasn't sick. I would have hiked more and stayed out at viewpoints longer if I didn't have a cold.

So, yeah, I don't see how this week is the best week of 2008 to get a cold. It's one of the worst weeks.

I thought I was going to get out of Texas with only one cold this season - the one I had before Thanksgiving, unfortunately, I caught one right before we left. While no time is ever a good time to catch cold, I think that this is one of the best times I could possibly have a cold. Firstly, we're in a car 6-10 hours every day from Tuesday to Sunday, so it's not like we have a whole lot going on. While a cold just makes those long drives a little less enjoyable, driving with a cold isn't that difficult, and a lot easier than having to go to work, have a job interview, or even go shopping. Secondly, having a cold at this time means that we're probably less likely to share this with others because we're not in an office with a bunch of other people, we're in a car most of the day and in the evenings have limited interactions with others. Also, since we're driving so much and getting up early in the morning, we're going to bed early anyway without much to do after dark (the only exception being tomorrow at Las Vegas), so having a cold means we can actually go to bed like we're supposed to, unlike if we had a old at home and were busy taking care of normal home chores. And, basically, having a cold now doesn't inhibit us from doing anything. Today we still went for a short hike near the Grand Canyon and we still drove around to some of the scenic viewpoints (before the storm moved in). At home this would either make us miserable at work or keep us from going, and keep us from going out and doing things.

So, while I'd definitely rather not be sick, if I had to be sick any time during 2008, this would probably be the week because it doesn't keep us from doing what we want, we won't share it with others, we can go to bed early, and it doesn't make us as miserable driving as it would if we were doing other things. Of course, next week wouldn't be too bad either, but I guess I'll wait for later in the year to get another one.

We arrived in Albuquerque at around 3:30 local time, which was pretty early considering the long day of driving we had. We hadn't really been planning to do much there, but a couple people recommended taking a tram up a nearby mountain, Sandia Peak, and since we had plenty of daylight, we decided to do that. We parked at the bottom of the mountain and bought our tickets for the tram. The ride up was a little crowded and we were stuck in the middle so we couldn't see much, but the view from the top was pretty cool. We fought the stiff, cold winds to take a few pictures and then walked around for a few minutes on one of the snow-packed trails. We got back to the observation level to see the colors of the setting sun and took a few more pictures (we'll share some of these pictures as soon as we get a chance). After taking a few pictures of Albuquerque and Santa Fe at night, we were pretty hungry. We went back down the mountain and drove to get some pizza at Saggios, which is a local pizza place that sounded good, and it was pretty good. After that we headed back to the room to get some rest for our next day.

Well, it's finally time to leave. I've felt ready to go for a few days, and since this is the longest driving day of our trip, we wanted to start early. We got up at 5:40 and left before sunrise. The traffic was a little heavy but not too bad, though it still took us about 45 minutes to escape the sprawl of the Metroplex. It didn't take long for us to pass Wichita Falls. There isn't a lot of developed land and not much to look at in northwest Texas, but I felt that the dry, flat land had a beauty of its own. I drove the first 270 miles, then we switched at a nice Texas rest stop. We decided to have lunch at Whataburger, which is one of those Texas places that we won't be able to have again for a while (though before today I probably hadn't had it for more than a year). After lunch, we were glad to leave Amarillo, but we couldn't escape the pervading smell of cattle, and had to close the vent in the car because the smell was so strong along I-40 in Texas. We got into New Mexico, which made Amarillo and the Texas panhandle seem bustling. The few towns in New Mexico were far apart and don't look any different than they must have looked in the 1960's, except that most of the establishments are now missing parts of their signs. Fortunately, the scenery was a little more interesting, with bush-studded rocky hills and, as we got closer to Albuquerque, mountains in the distance and even snow on the sides of the road. Fortuantely, Lesley drove the whole way through New Mexico so that I could read one of the books I brought along and type out most of this blog post. I'm looking forward to shorter and more scenic driving days.

We let the movers take almost all of our personal things with them, but had a few things that we wanted to or needed to take with us. Leading up to the move, we tried to minimize what we would take with us as much as possible, knowing that space would be limited in our small car. Still, after the movers left, I realized that we had a lot of stuff in our possession. I wanted to load the trunk with everything that we wouldn't need until we arrived in Seattle so that we wouldn't have to open it until we got there. So, I started by loading some of our personal files, my work laptop, and some cleaners that we would want for our new place. We also loaded our suitcase full of towels and clothes that we will use at our new apartment until our stuff arrives. All of that stuff had the trunk pretty full. However, we also had a lot of blankets and bedding that we used last night and will use until our bed arrives. One of my favorite challenges is someone telling me that something "won't fit" because I have a knack and persistence for making things fit into places where it doesn't look like they can, but even I wasn't confident that we could fit all of that stuff into our trunk. After loading the blankets, there wasn't much room left for our two queen head pillows and two large body pillows. But, being that pillows are soft and compressible, I figured I'd try. I squeezed a couple in and then put the body pillows on top, but they still stuck out over the edge of the trunk and I had to pin them down so that I could get the trunk lid to close. Getting the lid to shut felt like a great feat. I'm glad we won't have to open the lid again until we get there, and hopefully the pillows will prevent everything else from moving around. Let's just hope that we don't have a flat because it would suck having to get out the spare.

The back seat is pretty full, too, but it wasn't such a struggle to get everyting to fit. We have two bags of snacks (some were gifts for the road, some were unfinished from our apartment, and some were from work), we also have a bag of camera equipment, our two duffel bags, a bag of books, a 24 pack of bottled water, a bag of other drinks, a box of makeup and two bags of dirty laundry because we failed to give it to the movers. I hope that this stuff doesn't entice smash-and-grab car burglars, but we will have to make a couple trips to bring everything into the hotel each night. I'm just glad Lesley didn't bring her wedding dress along.

It's very strange to think that today was the last time we'll be in Texas for a while. I've lived in a few different places, but all in D/FW. It's hard to comprehend that I'll be calling somewhere else "home." Everyone I know and so many memories and experiences I've had were in Texas. You could say that I'm leaving it all behind, but that's not really how I feel. It's not really an abandonment, it's just a change. I won't physically be in Texas, but it will continue to live in me. While our 2,600 mile relocation is a big deal in a lot of ways - a significant change in physical location, surroundings, and proximity to others - it's really not that big of a change in others - I'll still be the same person I've always been and will stay close to my family and friends even if I'm not physically close. This is a big journey ahead of us, not just the six days of driving, but living in a totally different environment. While I don't exactly know what to expect from this and how it will change us, I think this will be a significant positive influence on my life and I'm ready to discover the new things and changes along the way.

I used to go camping when I was a cub scout. I didn't like the bugs, the cold nights, or the hot days, but one thing I always wanted to do on a camping trip was go exploring. There wasn't that much to look at, but that didn't deter me; whenever there was free time, if I wasn't playing football, I'd want to wander through the trees and up the hills to find what was nearby. I haven't changed much over the years - when I got my driver's license and first car, it meant that I could explore Fort Worth and nearby country roads after school and on the weekends (fortunately that was before gas prices tripled). At college, I'd go for a walk almost every night and enjoyed walking in different directions to different things nearby. Once I graduated, I moved to Irving, which was a part of the Metroplex with which I hadn't been particularly familiar. The first few months, I explored my immediate area on foot, but quickly ran out of sidewalk. The city itself didn't offer much more by car. And, after a lifetime of living in the Metroplex, even living near the geographical center of it all, I still couldn't think of many more new things to discover for myself. And over time, I'd visited all of the nearby cities and even large towns in Texas. I'm no Vasco DeGama, I don't really care to discover things, I just like seeing new things and I felt like I couldn't explore anymore, living in D/FW. I felt like I'd seen it all and anything that I hadn't seen couldn't easily be explored by foot, which is the best way to explore. Sure, I could take vacations, but while that would satisfy my curiosity for part of the year, that would still leave 50 other weeks stuck in the same old place. That's one of the things that prompted this move across the country: a desire to explore. I'll have a whole new neighborhood, city, and part of the country that I'll get to know for the first time. And, even better, I'll get to explore this city and its surrounding natural beauty largely on foot. Who knows what will happen once I've seen everything in the Pacific Northwest, but for now I can't wait to release that energy within me for exploration.

It's been a challenge to plan the logistics for these days leading up to our move. We wanted to pack as much as possible for the movers to take but at the same time make sure we had enough to get by. Figuring out how many towels we'd need and what toiletries to keep has been a little difficult, especially considering that we've been trying to minimize what we take with us since our car is going to be packed. Fortunately, I think we planned pretty well and we should be able to fit everything in the car without too much trouble. There are a couple bags of things that I wish we had let the movers take, and we ended up with an extra CD that won't fit in the CD wallet. But, those are the biggest problems to date, aside from having to pay for the movers to bring a smaller truck this morning, which meant that overall things are going well. Soon we're going to unplug our modem, pack our computer, and get ready to leave as early as possible tomorrow.

We've had our trip planned out and reserved for a few weeks and we've been pretty excited about it. However, since we're driving pretty far north during winter, we knew that weather could be an issue. Even though the weather along our route has looked pretty good for the past few weeks, unfortunately it looks like a winter storm is going to move into Lake Tahoe right before we were planning to get there. So, while I don't know how much snow will accumulate or whether road conditions will be that bad, we decided to alter our route. While we were really looking forward to seeing Lake Tahoe, we figured that it would be better not to risk driving through bad road conditions and getting delayed or sliding off the road. So, I've already canceled our hotel and booked another one farther west. This new route won't take much longer and it shouldn't be as risky, so I'm glad I was able to take care of that. I'm ready to get on the road.

We've spent all weekend cleaning up our apartment and putting everything into boxes and before that we spent some time for the past couple weeks putting stuff we didn't use into boxes. I can't really estimate how long it's taken to do all of this work, but it's been our top priority for a while. And we only have a one bedroom apartment. I can't imagine how much work it would be to move if we had a larger place or more people in the household. Well, we finished everything last night and were ready for the movers to arrive this morning and take everything away. They arrived when they said they would and after figuring out how to maneuver their 18-wheeler to our apartment, apartment management came out and told them that their 18-wheeler wasn't allowed. Apparently, even though there is enough room for a big rig, sometimes they run over the curbs and damage the sprinkler or damage the gates, so the apartments don't allow them. So, one of the movers had to drive all the way back, like 20 miles, to their warehouse to get a smaller truck. Anyway, after they get everything loaded, hopefully all our stuff will arrive when they say it will, then we'll have the time consuming but more fun task of unpacking everything.

Well, after months of talk and planning, our move date is almost here. We pretty much have all of our packing done and are ready for our stuff to be picked up tomorrow. I wish we could leave now, but we have to wait for the movers and then we're spending one last night here (rather than paying for a hotel) before we drive off on Tuesday. It's been kind of a hassle spending all weekend packing everything, even though we don't have that much stuff, I wish we had even less. Thankfully, Lesley's parents helped us pack and clean a little bit today.

Now that we have all of these boxes in our apartment and have said goodbye to our parents, moving across the country sounds like a bigger deal than ever. But, while it's a lot of work and going to be a big change, I'm ready to go.

My parents visited us in Irving today for the last time. Fortunately, they were in a good mood and I had a good time having lunch with them. I'll still stay pretty close to my parents by phone, email, and internet, so moving away shouldn't be too big of a deal, but after living my entire life no more than 50 miles away from them, it's kind of a big deal moving almost 50 times farther away.

Yesterday was my last day in the office. I haven't really thought about it much, but it's going to be weird not to come into work for a while. I haven't made a big deal out of it at work, a few people have talked to me about it, but since I'm still going to be working for the same company and I'll be traveling into the office sometime again, I don't want to treat it as too big of a deal. Still, as I looked at my desk for the last time, I realized that I'm going to miss some of my coworkers and it will definitely be different working from home.

I dropped off my car last weekend for my dad to help sell. We washed it and cleaned it up well inside. I didn't really want to sell it because after almost 5 years of ownership I had grown pretty fond of it. But, taking two cars with us to Seattle just isn't practical, so we had to get rid of one of them and mine was older, so that's the one we chose to get rid of. Thankfully, my dad did all the work to sell it and now it's gone, but it was a good car.

Well, today was my last day at my job... I'm definitely going to miss all my co-workers. I guess when some doors close, others open. They always do. I plan to try to keep in touch with them and send pictures. I only worked there for 8 or 9 months, but in that short time, I feel like I made pretty good friendships that could possibly stand the test of distance and time. Maybe I'll see them again some day...

We've gone ahead and set up our phone and internet. Qwest is the local provider we chose to use and their website was so easy to use. Plus, we had questions about whether we could change our service later and when our equipment arrived, and there was a very easy to use online chat feature which allowed us to get our questions easily answered by a real person. We may end up dropping our phone service and upgrading our internet later, but it seems like it will be easy to do that, given our first positive experience with Qwest.

We're leaving two weeks from today, and in less than three weeks from today we'll be settling down in our new home. Right now all the talk and thinking about moving is exciting and it sounds pretty cool, but I'm pretty unprepared for how radically our lives are going to change. I have only 8 days left at work locally, but that just hasn't been entering my mind much, I've just been doing my job as if nothing's going to change. And, as I see it, I don't think that much will change, but it will definitely change, I'm just not sure how. In fact, our whole lives will change a lot, in many ways that I have hardly begun to comprehend. Change doesn't really bother me, though, stuff just changes and it's fine. I'm sure in a couple months I'll be used to living up there and I'll look back at my time in Texas and realize how totally different it was.

There's an idea out there that it rains a lot in Seattle, and it does rain often, but it rains less than 4" more per year in Seattle than Dallas. Check out the images below, captured from weather.com, to see the differences in temperature and rainfall between the two areas of the country. Click on the image to toggle between Dallas and Seattle.

Dallas Temperatures and Rainfall

Seattle Temperatures and Rainfall

Overall, the weather in Seattle doesn't vary as much as it does here. It's colder and rainier more of the year than here, but the temperature doesn't fluctuate as wildly. The weather isn't perfect in either place, and both have their benefits. It's not for everyone, but I'm looking forward to the nice summers in Seattle, even if I have to go through some cold and rainy winters.

We haven't really done much over the past week or so, just finishing up our arrangements with the moving company and apartment complex. But, now that we're just over two weeks away from moving, we realize that the biggest task between now and the move date is going to be preparing all of our things to be moved.

We've started loading boxes with things out of our closet that have sentimental value but don't get used often. We have a long way to go, though, and a lot of things that we've been hesitant to pack because we've been using them or expecting to use them (video games, wall clocks, etc.). This weekend we're planning to really get into it, taking stuff off the walls and packing anything we aren't sure we'll be using or taking in the car with us.

It kind of sucks how much stuff we have (though we don't have that much, by comparison with other people), but it'd be nice to have a lot less things to pack. Still, it shouldn't be too hard to pack everything and keep up with it. We've prepared labels to put on each box which indicate the room the stuff was from, the priority of opening the box when we arrive, our delivery address, and a unique box number. We're keeping a list of what's in each box to make it easier to unpack later. It'll be good to start making more progress on packing, but it will definitely be more rewarding to unpack when we get up there.