I've been at my current job for almost three months now, so I've gotten more involved and have a much better understanding of things.

I work for a company that designs, builds, operates, and maintains building facility systems, like HVAC, electrical, and lighting. My department works for customers on projects to integrate and apply technology toward their building control systems. So, for example, a customer might have multiple buildings and we provide them with a single web interface that shows the status of and gives them control to all of systems. I'm still learning and we're still defining what we do.

So far, I've mostly been helping out with the web interface for a particular project. But, I've also been working on a few things to help us work together better as a group and to refine how we should be doing things. I expect that as I get more comfortable and find more ways to contribute that my job responsibilities will evolve.

I've had to adjust to this job. I work with engineers now instead of businesspeople. Rather than sitting far enough from the main walkway in a quiet hall with a view from my window, now I sit in a big room with my back to a busy walkway. I went from an environment where I took ownership of projects and systems to now being assigned individual tasks. That's definitely the most frustrating thing, but I expect to gain more responsibilities.

I've been a little frustrated about a few things, but I still am very positive about this job because I see a lot of opportunity. My position was created for me, so I'm getting to define what I do somewhat. I've been doing web development as a hobby for more than 10 years, so it's kind of cool to get to do it at work. I don't expect to be doing web development for my job long-term, but I expect to continue to be involved in the web aspect of our department. I'm excited about how things will go with our department and the types of things that I might be involved with.

We've recently been spending a lot of time planning our schedule for our Christmas trip to Texas. It's been really difficult figuring out how to fit in time for everyone. But we've tried to make it as fair as possible and fit in as much time with everyone as we can. We'll start to share specific details over the next week.

Last week, I had barbeque in Seattle for the first time. I had been reluctant to take the initiative of going to a barbeque place to pay for something that wouldn't be nearly as good as what I had in Texas. But, I was also curious, wondering if it would be as bad as I imagined.

So, last week, a co-worker suggested going out to Pig Iron Bar-BQ and I curiously, but cautiously, agreed. It was a small place with decent ambiance, though the entry way reminded me of a 50s diner than a barbeque joint. The prices were a little high. On the lunch menu, a barbeque sandwich was $10 and a barbeque platter was like around $16. I found it interesting that the brisket sandwich was buried halfway down the sandwich menu and instead took a co-worker's recommendation to have a pork sandwich. It came with potato salad, cole slaw, or beans. I opted for the potato salad, feeling it would be the best way to judge the place. I didn't bother looking for fried okra, my favorite side, wanting to play things relatively safe.

A kind of nice thing was that there were three kinds of sauces: a regular barbeque sauce, a sweet mustardy kind of sauce, and a chipotle sauce. My plate came out with pork on a large bun and a smallish scoop of potato salad. There were also some grilled onions and pickles on the side. The sandwich was pretty good. The amount of bread was a little excessive and the pork was a little dry and flavorless by itself, but the flavor of the sauce saved it a little bit. The potato salad was not as chunky as I expended, and it had a little of the mustardy sauce drizzled on top. It tasted okay.

I think my large Texas appetite must have shrunk some because a sandwich and a side without any bread or additional sides doesn't seem like much, but it was plenty of food. Overall, I was satisfied and maybe a little surprised that I couldn't find much to complain about. I would consider going back.

Troy and I have never actually been members of a church. We considered joining the church where we got married, but we figured we wouldn't be there long enough to warrant doing that. But now that we're in Seattle and we've been going to the same church since we got here, we figure we should become members. So, this Sunday at the end of the service we'll join the church.

We were taking the bus to the park on Saturday when all the traffic stopped. Apparently there was a march going on for gay marriage. We had to transfer buses anyway, so we got out and walked up to the march. We stood for a few minutes as hundreds of people walked by with signs, chanting. There were a lot of signs protesting California's Proposition 8, which overturned gay marriage there, as well as signs protesting religion and the Mormon Church, which paid millions of dollars to help pass Proposition 8. I was amazed at how many people there were and I'm sure there were hundreds more than had already passed. According to the newspaper, thousands of people participated. We recorded some video below.

The weather was great last Saturday, clear and in the upper 50s, so rather than going for a hike outside the city, we decided to go for a long walk through several parks in the city. We took the bus to Washington Park Arboretum and walked through there. I'm sure it would've been prettier a week or two ago if all the leaves were still on the trees, but it was still nice. Then we walked up a hill to Interlaken Park, which has a wide, winding path surrounded by lots of trees. There were also some decent views. Then we headed up a hill along a leaf-covered, muddy trail. It was worth it, though because then we got a great view of the U-District, lake, and mountains to the Northeast. We then walked on to Volunteer Park and Lesley talked me into walking up to the top of the observation tower, which offered some amazing views. After all that, we walked through a nice residential area to get back home. It was almost a 5 mile walk in total and it was one of the most enjoyable walks we've done in the city. Click below for a few pictures.

Amur leopards are the rarest large cat in the world and only about 30 still exist. So it made me sad to see that the Oregon Zoo had to euthanize one of their two amur leopards yesterday. He was 17 years old and had terminal cancer. They gave him treatment the last few months with little success. The zoo still has one other amur leopard, so maybe whenever we visit Portland, we can go to the zoo and see her.

Thanksgiving is only 10 days away, I can't believe it's almost here. I've been gradually buying food at the store to prepare for all the food I'm making. I'm really excited about making all the food for ourselves and seeing how it turns out. This past Saturday we got a 3 pound turkey breast and the marshmallows for the sweet potatoes. The only things remaining that we need to buy are the corn meal, celery, an onion, eggs, and rolls. I've been trying to find the small corn meal packages my Mom uses, either Aunt Jemima or Martha White, and I can't find either one. We have one more grocery store to try and if they don't have it, I guess we'll have to settle for some huge box of off brand corn meal.

And I also gave up on the idea of making a ham, which Troy seemed ok with surprisingly. We'd just have too much food leftover if I made both a turkey and a ham.

I also decided to try to make a pecan pie with the other pie crust I'll have after making pumpkin pie (I got a pack of two pie crusts). I won't make it until after Thanksgiving though since we'll already have a lot to eat. I'm not that fond of pecan pie, but it sounds easier to make than apple.

I'm looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with Troy and having a long weekend to ourselves.

When we hiked at Cougar Mountain recently, we kept passing piles of white powder on the ground. Someone had moved the leaves out of the way and poured some powder on the ground. The first time we saw it, it was in the shape of an X. Then we saw a small pile. We also saw three parallel lines. And an arrow. And a couple times at trail intersections we saw a circle. We saw these piles more than 10 times on our way back to the car and the whole time I was totally baffled. I was really confused as to why someone would purposefully do this and what the powder was and what the shapes represented. I mean, I guess they could have just been using the powder so that they could find their way back, but, why the shapes? And why that much powder? And why was it even necessary, it's not that easy to get lost? I wanted to run and try to track down the person that did it, but I didn't know which direction they were going. I mean, seriously, what was going on?

I never did figure it out...I guess I'll just call them the crop circles of the Northwest.

We hiked last weekend at Cougar Mountain, which is one of our favorite places to hike because there are so many trails and it is so close. We walked by a cold stream by an old coal mining area. We've walked by several old coal mining areas in our hikes here, but this one had a display with old photos and an old coal wagon. On the ground were lots of leaves and some of them were really, really big. I thought everything was bigger in Texas, but the leaves here are definitely bigger.

The first people we became friends with in Seattle, the couple we met at church, are now pregnant. She's due in May and we offered to help them with whatever they need, including baby sitting. Neither of us has any baby sitting experience at all, but I guess there's a first time for everyone.

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting because Troy told me after we first met them that he was afraid they'd be having kids soon since they're older than us (28) and now they are. I'm excited for them though.

When I started my previous job, I tried not to think about work when I wasn't at work, feeling that they were only paying me for the hours I put in at the office and that my only obligation to them was during the working hours. And I wasn't very career oriented, either, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my career and work was just a job to me. I was fine with my boss and where I was in the company and what I was doing, so I didn't really have a long-term vision. It was a corporate-oriented environment and my co-workers there were very career-minded, however.

During the time with that company, I changed in a lot of ways, and most of the changes were positive. One interesting change is how the career-mindedness of all my co-workers there influenced me. One of the last pieces of advice my boss gave me was that nobody is going to watch out for my career and that I should take charge of my career and where I'm going.

After starting this new job, I've been spending a lot of energy focusing on my career. I think part of it is that I now have work experience at a full-time job, so I've been comparing this current job to my previous one. There are some things that I don't have in my current position that I had at my previous employer. For example, I don't have the same level of responsibility or involvement in projects. So, I've been trying to figure out what I need to do to get back those things I used to have and to get more things that I want. I've been thinking of what kinds of things I want to do and who I want to work with and things like that.

The interesting thing is that I never really wanted a conventional career. I just wanted to work for a while until I figured out what I really wanted to do. But now I'm thinking and acting as if my career is very important to me. When I got my first job after college, someone said that I could start "climbing the corporate ladder" and that really turned me off. I didn't want a job like everyone else. But, now, here I am, in a regular job, focusing on my career, even though I still don't see myself following this career path for the next 40 years. I guess we'll see if I start climbing that corporate ladder, or maybe I'll someday figure out what I've wanted to do all along.

Our car had accumulated a lot of dirt, dust, and pieces of leaves inside over the last several months, so we finally decided it needed to be vacuumed. We had to walk around our garage and find an outlet to plug our vacuum in. There aren't that many outlets and most of the parking spots next to them were taken. We did find one that was open, so we had to move our car there and drag our vacuum down from our apartment and down some stairs to the car. It didn't take that long to vacuum the whole car and it looks a lot better now.

On my first day of work, I got a new cell phone. It's just so that people can contact me if I'm at a job site during the day. As I expected, I've barely used it. I left it in my drawer for the first month.

However, one co-worker insists on calling me on my cell phone. So, now I kind of feel obligated to keep the phone on my desk. That also means that I need to make sure it has power. So, now I have to remember to check it occasionally to make sure that it's charged.

It was not charged this morning, so I had to plug it in. However, there aren't any available outlets at my desk. My boss and I share a power strip, so I had to unplug something of his so that I could charge my phone.

Anyway, the whole thing is annoying. I don't want or need a cell phone for work.

I don't want to pay for a new bicycle and I don't want to do the work required to find a good used bicycle. But, I think it'd be nice to have a bicycle. If Lesley got one, we could ride places on the weekend or during the week. There are a lot of places to ride in the city and it could be a lot of fun to ride recreationally. Having a bike could also make it a lot easier to get places that are too far away to walk conveniently. I don't know much about buying a bicycle and don't really want to learn. I just want a cheap bicycle that will work for riding in the city and not cost too much.

After Barack Obama was declared the winner last night, people crowded the streets to celebrate. Obama won 72% of the vote in King County, which includes Seattle along with the more conservative east side of the metropolitan area. It would be interesting to know how well Obama did in just the city of Seattle, but a lot of people here definitely like him.

We went to an election party last night with people from church. It started at 7 and even before we got there Obama had won Ohio, so there wasn't much suspense regarding the national election.

There were a lot of local and regional elections to track, though. Our governor was up for re-election in a rematch of the 2004 election, which was very close. Also, there were a few local initiatives on the ballot. One of the biggest ones was to expand light rail throughout the region and that one passed, raising sales tax by half a percent. There were also initiatives to fund renovations to Pike Place Market and improve park land, both of which passed.

Anyway, a lot of people showed up and there was a lot of energy in the room. It was fun hanging out and watching the election results come in.

I get a cold twice a year normally, despite the fact that I wash my hands regularly and get enough sleep and take vitamins and all that stuff. So, I'm wondering, now that I'm riding the bus, am I likely to get more colds than normal? Or, will all the other germs that I'm exposed to from riding the bus cause my immune system to strengthen so that it can fend off colds better? I've already heard several people sniffling, so I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Today we can all see how far America has come. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I'm glad that this day is finally here. History has been made in that Google Street view finally includes Seattle! Now we can see street-level pictures from pretty much anywhere in the city!

We requested our tickets to a few events for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Unfortunately, the prices were so inflated for American citizens that we couldn't really afford to see the opening ceremonies (over $650 per ticket) or any figure skating event (over $200 per ticket), both of which I really really wanted to see. I was pretty disappointed about that. But I guess it will still be cool to go to a few other events, assuming we are awarded the tickets we requested:

• Speed Skating - Men's 5,000 m Individual Final - 2/13


• Short Track Speed Skating - Ladies' 500 m Qualification / Ladies' 3,000 m Relay Qualification / Men's 1,500 m Qualification and Final - 2/13


• Ice Hockey - Men's Preliminary - 2/16


• Luge - Doubles Runs 1 and 2 - 2/17

It would have been nice to go to a medal match in hockey or something like that too, but tickets for the bronze medal game are a minimum of $235 each and $454 each for the gold medal game.

The ticket process is kinda crappy. We weren't sure how many events to request tickets to. We were afraid of requesting tickets to several events and then getting all of them and spending a ton of money, in which case it would be really hard to resell them. You're not legally supposed to according to the CoSport website. But we didn't want to request too few events and then have them all be sold out and not get any tickets. So, who knows if we'll get the tickets we requested, I guess we'll find out in mid-December when they notify us. The events we wanted are spread out pretty well. It will be nice to explore Vancouver and do other things in the city too. At some point we'll have to look into hotels too.

It's really annoying having to go to a sports bar to watch Cowboys games. It'd be alright if I were going with a group of fellow Cowboys fans, but normally I'd rather watch the game at home. Today, the Seahawks were on TV instead, so the Cowboys game wasn't on local TV.

It's a pain to have to go to the restaurant and then all the food is so expensive and it's not any good. Today we got some chips and two sandwiches and it came out to $38. And the sandwiches sucked. At least the place is smoke-free, but it still sucks.

We don't usually post about our entire weekend, so I thought I would summarize what we did this weekend.

Friday after work we went to eat at a Thai place called Golden Singha. It was pretty good and not too expensive. After that we went back to the apartment, watched The Shining since it was Halloween, and ate some macadamia nut cookies.

Saturday we took the 8 bus to get some bagels at Noah's. Unfortunately they were all out of most of the flavors we like (asiago, sesame, and sourdough), so we had to try new flavors: sun-dried tomato, everything, and poppy seed. They were alright, but still not as good as the flavors we like. We might start going to a different location downtown to see if maybe they'd have the flavors we like more often.

After bagels, we drove to Kerry Park to see the nice view, despite the rain. We walked around the close by neighborhood in Queen Anne and found another viewpoint called Marshall Park. Across the street was Parsons Gardens, where there were so many colorful trees and piles of leaves on the ground everywhere. I had no idea that it would be this pretty here in the fall.

Then we drove to Georgetown near Troy's work and around south Seattle. There's not much there except some really old run down houses and a few fast food places like Arby's and Subway. We were hungry after only eating bagels, so we went to Red Mill Burgers for an early dinner. We got burgers, fries, and onion rings. It's probably the best burger I've had in Seattle.

We drove home and then walked to Pike Place Market to get some fruit and cheese. Troy only had $2 cash on him and I didn't bring my purse, so we had to go to an ATM before we could buy our fruit. After that we went back home and watched some of the UT-Texas Tech game. Then we went back out to get groceries.

Sunday we didn't do much. Troy went to church early so he could volunteer as a greeter. He accidentally took the garage fob with him instead of the regular fob, so when I went to drive to church I couldn't get out of the garage. I waited a while to see if anyone else would leave so I could get out behind them, but no one ever came, so I had to skip church. Once Troy got home, we went to Sport Restaurant and Bar to watch the Giants-Cowboys game. Needless to say, I was pretty happy when we left before the game was over. Troy on the other hand, was not.

So, that was our weekend. Nothing too exciting, but it was nice to get outside for a while, especially on Saturday to see the fall leaves.

We changed our clocks this weekend like almost everyone else in the country. However, I'm pretty unhappy about it because now the sun is going to set at 4:45 in the afternoon. Since my hours are somewhat flexible at work, I'd rather just ignore the time change and go into work at the same time as always, according to the sun. If I did that, then I'd still have some daylight when I get home.

However, Lesley's and my schedule have matched pretty well, with us going to bed around the same time and me walking her to work. So, since she would rather just change her clocks, me not changing my watch would desynchronize our schedules. Still, I'm not ready to give up my evening daylight yet, at least for this week. I'll probably give in next week, which sucks, because I like seeing the sun.

Thanksgiving is coming up really soon and I'm already getting excited about it. This will be my first time making all the food myself. I've already started buying all the stuff to make everything. We plan on having turkey breast, ham, dressing, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, rolls, and pumpkin pie. We'll probably watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and of course the football games. I wouldn't normally get the Friday after Thanksgiving off since I work for a financial company and the markets are open that day, so I'm using my last vacation day this year that day. We'll probably go see the Thanksgiving parade in downtown Seattle that Friday. Since I'm getting days off immediately close to both major holidays this year, I doubt I'll be able to get those days off again next year. But anyway, I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving in less than 4 weeks.

Seen on our way to the grocery store:

The free bus pass that my employer provided is expiring, so I got a new one today. The old one is very plain looking with some black text and the dates it is valid for in large green text at the top. Since it looked so plain, I figured the new one would look a little better. However, the new bus pass is exactly the same except the dates have changed. No changes at all. They didn't even change the color from green to something else. How boring!

The state of Washington mostly votes by mail, so a couple weeks ago we received our ballots in the mail along with a booklet detailing all the propositions on the ballot and introducing all the candidates. We just had to fill out our ballots and either mail them in or drop them off. It was nice having plenty of time to review the information and make a decision about everything. Anyway, after filling out our ballots, we had time tonight to walk to the ballot box downtown to drop them off. In the 21st century, I don't know why every state doesn't make it this easy.

We don't go to the waterfront very often, but I always enjoy it when we go. It's mostly a tourist area, but it's kind of neat. We were there the other day and we saw a seal that had caught a fish. I'm not sure how common it is to see that, but I thought it was neat. I tried to video it but didn't do a very good job, but you might be interested in watching it below.

There's a ton of construction projects in our immediate area and close to downtown, probably easily more than 10. More were planned, but with the recent financial problems, the economy is slowing down and this has caused some projects to be delayed. Most of them are in what's called the Denny Triangle, which really does need to be revitalized. It's sort of a dumpy area right now and there's not much there. Be sure to click on the PDF related to the article to see which projects are being delayed. Overall though, the economy in Seattle is still relatively strong.

This past Saturday we went to a pumpkin carving party with a group from church. We were hesitant to go since we weren't that interested in carving pumpkins, but we went anyway to have something to do. I told people at work that I'd never carved a pumpkin, seen a pumpkin being carved, or gone to a pumpkin patch and everyone was shocked. I guess doing those things is a big deal here or something. I just don't remember any pumpkin patches in Texas. Carving a pumpkin never crossed my mind as a kid.

We ate hot dogs with homemade chili that the host made and it was pretty good. We watched our friends carve theirs first and it looked like a big mess. No wonder my parents never did this with us. Well, we finally started carving ours and it actually didn't turn out too bad. I cut the top part and pulled out most of the messy insides, which was a lot of work. Some people actually take out the pumpkin seeds and roast them to eat. Then Troy cut out the eyes, nose, and mouth. We took it home afterward and put it in our windowsill.

That will probably be the extent of what we do for Halloween. We'll probably watch The Shining on Friday, but don't expect any trick or treaters or anything.

Click here for pictures of our pumpkin:

We saw this reference to the environmentalist slogan, "Think Globally, Act Locally" on a local brew pub. It probably wouldn't work in Texas or other parts of the country, but I guess it makes for good advertising here.

The light posts around here are painted teal. Kind of an interesting color for them to be. I think they're only painted teal in our neighborhood. I wonder why.

Our current lease is up at the end of next month, so we were wondering how much our apartment complex would raise our rate. We were a little worried that they would raise it so much that it would force us to move somewhere a little cheaper. Then, sometime last week, we received a flyer that said if we renewed our lease before October 31st, that they would honor our current rental rate!

So, today we renewed our lease for 11 months. We were planning on doing a 12 month lease and pointed out the error to the lady completing our paperwork, but I don't think she knew what the heck she was doing and tried to just gloss over the error saying it was "confusing." So, whatever, we got an 11 month lease that will be up at the end of next October. I'd be pretty surprised if they let us renew at our current rate next year too, so we may have to look elsewhere next year. But for now, I'm really excited that we get to stay in our apartment at our current rate.

We've noticed a lot of cultural differences between here and Texas but haven't talked much about the many significant differences between our current church and previous churches.

We've noticed this church seems to be more externally focused. Back in Texas, sermons seemed focused on how to be better Christians and church people occasionally did missionary work in far away places. At our old church, we would pray for others, especially victims of major disasters and national tragedies. However, our current church places a big emphasis on social justice and focuses more on the less fortunate, specifically the homeless, including serving breakfast to the homeless of the city. I rarely heard anything about the homeless in other churches I've been to. I'm not sure how to attribute those differences, whether to the uniqueness of our current church, to the fact that our old churches were all located amidst homogeneous suburbia, or to cultural differences between regions.

Anyway, we've mentioned before how he mindset here seems less insular and will try to post future examples of some of the interesting differences between church and life here versus in Texas.

The weather was pretty nice last weekend so we took advantage of it by going for a hike at Lime Kiln Trail at Robe Canyon Historic Park. The trail we went to wasn't very busy. It followed the path of where a railway line used to be and followed along the Stillaguamish River. After about an hour we reached a bunch of old artifacts where people used to live. Then, we found the lime kiln. We walked a little further and went down to the river where we sat on a rock and had a snack. We also used the cold river water to cool off our drinks. On the way back, I walked past a snake before Lesley noticed it, but it didn't seem to care about us. The trail was pretty flat and covered with a lot of big leaves. It was a really good hike.

Since I can't watch the Cowboys games here, I signed up for NFL Field Pass so that I could listen to the game online. Fortunately it offered a 7-day free trial. I figured I'd keep my subscription because I don't want to go to a sports bar every week to see the game.

However, I'm on hold to cancel my subscription right now for several reasons. I couldn't hear the first 30 minutes of the game, they just played music the whole time, so I spent like 20 minutes trying different browsers and different feeds so that I could hear the game and none of them worked. I think they were just asleep at the switch or something because eventually the game feed came on. It was intermittent at first, but eventually the audio started coming through fine. However, on every commercial break they muted the commercial and put on the same music, however after the commercial break I'd always miss the first few words while I waited for them to turn off the music and turn on the game audio. And each time they did that, the sound came back at a different volume, so I kept having to adjust my volume.

Anyway, maybe it works for some people, but this was such a crappy experience that I figured I'd let everyone know. And I've been on hold for 10 minutes so that I can cancel my subscription. So, for now, I guess I'll just have to go to a sports bar if I want to see a game that isn't shown here.

There are some trees with really pretty red and orange leaves that we can see from our window. There are leaves on the sidewalks everywhere and the air is so crisp and cool. Fall may be my second favorite season behind the summer.

We recently ran out of honey, so we figured we'd go buy some more. Instead of buying it at Safeway or QFC, we went to Pike Place market and bought some honey made locally at the Snoqualmie Valley Honey Farm. They gave us samples at the stand and we decided to get the wild blackberry honey. It doesn't really taste like blackberries, they just call it that because that's the type of flower the bees collect nectar from. It's nice to buy stuff at Pike Place market because it's all locally made. Every time we go there I want to buy some fresh fruit, fish, or yummy pastries. Pike Place market is awesome and we are looking forward to eating our honey, perhaps on some biscuits tonight.

There's an apartment building nearby that sometimes has a Texas flag in the window. And someone at work has a Texas flag by their desk. Texas has the best flag in the United States, so I can see why people like to display it. I haven't seen flags from any other state. It's kind of interesting that even though we're so far away, we still see the Texas flag sometimes.

We live close to the Seattle Times building. We see these neat old machines as you walk by. I've never seen them in use, I guess that happens when I'm sleeping.

One of the neatest things we can see from our window is the arches at the Pacific Science Center at night. The arches are often lit up in different colors, and it's always exciting to see what color they are lit with. They've been all purple, purple and green, all white, and a few other colors.

We don't drive often and we pay $125 per month for parking, on top of insurance and other expenses. I kind of wish we could sell our car to save money and then pay ZipCar to borrow a car when we needed it. That way we wouldn't have to pay for parking, gas, insurance, and maintenance. It would also be much more environmentally friendly as we would be more motivated to walk and use public transportation.

However, ZipCar charges by the hour and we use our car too often for ZipCar to be a practical, money-saving alternative. And, while I posted a while back about wanting to live closer to the grocery store, groceries only account for about a sixth of the time we use the car. Another sixth is shopping. About a fifth of our time with the car is church. More than a third of our time with the car has been spent on going for hikes.

So, if we were to sell our car, we would have the money we make from selling it, but the cost to rent a car for all those times, even considering the fact that we would drive less, would be higher what we currently pay per year. And, even if we moved closer to church and the grocery store, the cost for day trips is much higher if we don't own a car. Plus, if we sold our car now and had to buy another car later, we would probably have to pay more for another car than we would get for our current car. So while I was interested in selling our car as a way to save money and help the environment, it just isn't feasible right now.

I've been wanting a new dining table to eat on for a while. When we lived in Texas, we were using a borrowed table and folding chairs that didn't match. We temporarily fixed the problem when we moved here by getting tv trays from Target that weren't very sturdy and already have gashes in them. I got tired of eating on tv trays or at the computer desk all the time, since there's not much room at the computer desk for both of us to eat at comfortably.

We finally bought an IKEA table from someone on Craig's list this past Monday. It would have cost us about $200 brand new from IKEA, but we managed to buy this from some people in Tacoma for half that much. It actually seems pretty solid, which surprises me since most of the stuff at IKEA is cheap looking to me. Our table is 36" by 36" and has a black finish on it that matches our chairs and bookcase, both of which we also got from IKEA. It's also expandable, which will be nice when we have guests over and need more room to serve food. Although we only have two chairs now...

Anyway, it's really nice to be able to eat at a table again and not have tv trays in the way all the time.

I used to be a little uncomfortable about riding the bus because of the unique people that rode it. However, it wasn't long before I became comfortable riding the bus and unaffected by the different types of people on the bus. I've become so used to the diversity that I encounter on the bus that I don't really even notice what other types of people ride it.

Bus rides are generally pretty diverse. Nowhere else in my daily routine am I among such a diverse variety of people. The types of people at my job all share some similarities with each other, just like the people at the grocery store mostly come from the same neighborhood. However, the bus goes through many neighborhoods and takes people to and from many different types of jobs, stores, schools, and other places.

On the buses I ride to and from work, the vast majority of people seem to be regular working folk. I ride through downtown, so when I first get on, going toward downtown, most of the people are white-collar office workers who all get off as the bus goes through downtown. Then, the bus starts filling up with people who work in the industrial areas south of downtown where I work.

When Lesley and I ride the bus on the weekend or during the week, we encounter different types of people, depending on the time of day, neighborhood, and direction of the bus. When we ride toward the University District, the buses often consist of a lot of college students. When we ride to Capitol Hill, the bus has a lot of young hipsters and sometimes some possibly homeless people. Buses heading into downtown generally seem more diverse.

However, I've realized that the types of people on the bus don't really make a difference. Nobody ever bothers us and sometimes strange people can make the ride interesting. Like the guy on one bus who was listening to music intently and chanting "marijuana" every so often. Riding the bus has become a diverse, interesting, and integral part of city life for us.

Our current residence is the most urban location that I've ever lived in. We're about a mile from downtown and several other thriving neighborhoods. Pretty much anything we want or need isn't too far away. So, we've gotten in the habit of not leaving this nearby area very often.

We did some driving around the city recently and it had been months since the last time we had been to neighborhoods like Ballard, Fremont, and West Seattle. Those neighborhoods are only about 5 miles from downtown, but to me they almost seemed like distant suburbs since we go out there so rarely.

It's great having everything so close, since we don't have to go very far for what we need. However, it's easy to forget that there's a whole lot of city out there that we haven't explored. Whenever I look at a map or talk to my coworkers about where they live, I'm reminded of how expansive this metropolitan area is and how little of it I have seen.

I doubt I'll ever have a reason to visit most of the suburbs here, but I shouldn't forget that while the inner city is an exciting, vibrant, and awesome place, there is still a lot of Seattle to see.

We've had our shower curtain since we got married and it's been really wrinkled the whole time. I guess I just never really cared about it, but I was thinking yesterday that I would iron it since I had some time. It looks a ton better now. I don't know why I didn't iron it before.

Hope you enjoyed that really exciting post.

Gas Works Park is a pretty popular park in the city. There was a coal gasification plant on this site and they decided to leave a lot of the equipment for it and turn the land into a park. Anyway, it's a neat place and has a pretty good view of the city. We went there a while ago and never posted pictures from it, so here they are:

On the first day of fall, the weather felt a little cooler. Seems like the seasons are more defined here. There was a little bit of warm, summer-like weather last week, but the trees already know that it's fall. The leaves on the trees nearby are turning yellow and already beginning to fall. Today it was windy and cool and a lot of leaves fell.

We went out last weekend to take some pictures. We took pictures of downtown, the water, and other things from two different viewpoints in the city. Enjoy.

I took a few more pictures of my view from work back in July that I never posted until now. We had really clear days for most of June and July, which made it possible to see Mount Baker in the distance. A few buildings are much closer to completion now and one building is over 30 stories tall and blocks half of my old view of our apartment complex.

Vulcan owns a lot of the land in our neighborhood and has been building a lot of buildings. Consequently, property values have gone up considerably. There was a very interesting article about some of the impacts to small business owners. Here's an excerpt:

Fairman has been in business in Seattle for 31 years... When Safeco Field was built and Sodo redeveloped, he was forced from a warehouse there.

So he settled into South Lake Union, where rent was cheaper...

This was 12 years ago. "There wasn't much going on the neighborhood back then"...

"Vulcan says all of the right things, how they want to keep the neighborhood's charm and small businesses. Then they do things to drive out those same businesses."

Fairman... said it's why downtowns across the nation have begun to look the same. Developers create lease options that only major franchises can afford.

"That why you are more likely to see Niketown and Starbucks than a mom-and-pop business," he said.

I've seen this coming, unfortunately, and it's one of the reservations that I have about this area. In a decade or so, a lot of the unique characteristics will be gone and replaced with fancy new buildings with new mainstream establishments. It would be nice if the area could stay diverse and eclectic with room for everyone.

I've been consistently taking the bus at least four times per week. After finding out about MyBus.org, I've been missing the bus a lot less. I missed the bus in the morning once last week, so that was the day I decided to drive. However, I really like taking the bus, mostly because I get to read along the way, but also because I don't wear out the car. It takes a little longer to take the bus, but I've really enjoyed it. I'm still thinking about getting a bike to ride to work, but for now the bus is just fine.

We're planning on going to the 2010 Winter Olympic games, which will be held in Vancouver, BC, only 140 miles from us. Tickets will be available to request this Friday, October 3. Thankfully the tickets are not first-come-first-served, it's more like a lottery system. I'm interested in seeing the opening ceremonies, figure skating, speed skating, and hockey. Medal events cost more too, so it will be difficult to decide which events are most important to us. And I guess it depends on which tickets we are able to reserve depending on demand. But anyway, I'm looking forward to hopefully going to a few events and spending time in Vancouver.

We went to a Washington Huskies football game on Saturday. It was exciting to go to the game. The Cascade Mountains and Olympic Mountains were both visible from the stadium, as was Mount Rainier and Lake Washington. We went to our seats in the end zone and could see a few boats parked in the water.

The Huskies were 0-3 entering the game against the Stanford Cardinal (singular) with the second worst defense in the league (the worst was my alma mater). Anyway, it was an exciting atmosphere with the fans in our section barking loudly before the game started. I'm just glad they didn't play "Who Let the Dogs Out." The opposite side of the stadium yelled "Go" and our side yelled "Huskies".

It was a high-scoring game and it was pretty close for a while. Unfortunately the Husky defense couldn't stop Stanford and Washington's quarterback broke his thumb. With a couple big plays in the second half, Stanford pulled away and won the game.

After the game, there were like 50 buses waiting outside the stadium. We found the one for downtown and it stopped right by our apartment. And it was free. Our bus ride to the stadium was free, too, with our tickets. I've never been to a sporting event where transportation was free.

Anyway, we had fun going to the game, even though the Huskies lost. Maybe someday we'll see the home team win one of these sporting events that we go to.

I don't really know what to say about my job. It's been going well, I guess. Lately, things have been a little slow, and I've run out of things to read and learn for the moment. However, I've slowly been getting more responsibilities and have been contributing some with one of our projects. We have projects where we integrate HVAC controllers so that building managers can see the current temperatures (and air flow and other things) in all of the rooms of a building and also make changes from a web console. I've been doing a lot of web development so far.

The department I work in is relatively new, so I'm helping out with some of the organization of our files on the network. I'm also helping with our weekly meeting and figuring out how to update and display a list of our current projects. (Wow, all of that seemed so much more exciting until I just typed it out.)

I'd like to get a better understanding of what exactly we do and the phases of our projects so that I can help us get things done more efficiently. Anyway, it's still early and not too exciting yet, but so far I like my job.

Ticket prices dropped significantly today on some of the flights we were monitoring, so we booked our tickets today. Prices had been hovering around $515 per person, but we were able to get these non-stop tickets for $434 with taxes and bag fee. We'll be arriving the evening of Sunday the 21st and flying back here the morning of the following Sunday.

We wanted to arrive back here on Saturday so that we'd have a day to rest before going back to work, but we also wanted to have at least 6 days there. I also kind of wanted to be able to go to our old church. But, we had to compromise a little bit to get the good price. So, we'll be coming back here a day later than we wanted to and we won't be able to go to church, but we'll still get to be there for a full 6 days.

Over the next few days we're getting warmer than normal weather for this time of year. The highs the next three days will be in the mid to upper 70s with sunny skies. After that though it gets to be more like normal with highs in the 50s and 60s and some rain.

I've been wanting to decorate our apartment recently and we finally made some progress last weekend. Troy hung up a shear light green curtain to separate our bed from the hallway. Now whenever we have guests over, they won't be able to see directly into our bedroom. It also helps keep light out at night when we're going to sleep.

We also bought a set of three black sparkly flower pots to put in the windowsill. We're going to have jade plants re-potted in them this week.

Here's a few pictures of our recent additions. I'm looking forward to buying a new desk and a dining table.

We've seen a commercial here during NFL games for a new DVD, History of the Dallas Cowboys. The commercial shows some highlights and says where you can buy it. It looks like an updated version of the The Complete History of America's Team, 1960-2003 (which I already own).

Anyway, the interesting thing is that the commercial doesn't mention any other teams, it's just for the Dallas Cowboys. This would be totally normal if we were in Dallas, but I'm a little surprised that this is playing in Seattle (and I guess nationwide). I didn't realize how popular the Cowboys are.

We're going to a Washington Huskies football game this weekend and I was trying to figure out how to get there. So, I was looking at their page of how to get there. They tell you which buses you can take, and where the park and rides are, and all the normal stuff. Then, at the bottom, they have "Arrive by boat." Apparently, that's not an uncommon thing to do here, since the stadium is close to water. Still, I've never in my life thought about taking a boat to get to a football game, so the idea still sounds strange to me.

The Wall Street Journal has published the results of a study on personality traits across the nation. The article discusses the results and includes an interactive map (may not work in all browsers). Each state is ranked on five factors - (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness). Since the results are aggregated by state, it fails to account for differences between city-dwellers and country-folk.

Anyway, the most interesting part of this is comparing the state of Washington to our old home state of Texas. Texas ranked close to the median for pretty much everything, while Washington was ranked as the 4th most introverted state, 5th least neurotic, and also ranked very high in openness to new ideas along with the rest of the west coast. So, for what it's worth, I guess we live in a more introverted, emotionally-stable, and open-minded state than before.

The state of Washington has voted Democrat in every presidential election since Reagan beat Mondale in 1984. However, the election for governor of Washington is projected to be the closest in the country. Four years ago, the same candidates ran and the margin of victory was 122 votes. So, I'm going to be especially careful in deciding who to vote for. Unfortunately, I missed the debate that took place on Friday, but I'm looking forward to voting for the first time in the state of Washington.

On Sunday, the church we go to broke ground for their new building (link to Seattle Post-Intelligencer Article). We've been attending ever since we moved here and like it more than any church we've ever been to. We arrived right when the church was moving out of its majestic downtown location and have been going to services at Seattle Children's Theatre at Seattle Center.

We finally put together a video from our trip to San Francisco. Troy did most of the work on this one, which is probably a good thing, because I would have tried to include too much and it would have ended up being a 30 minute video. Enjoy!

I've had some frustration about taking the bus to work, since it's not very consistent. However, I found this great website, MyBus.org, which displays how far behind (or ahead of) schedule the buses are. It's not as good as what San Francisco has, but it offers some guidance to me so that I know when I need to leave my desk to catch the bus. So, now that I have that resource, I really enjoy riding the bus to work 4+ times per week.

Q102 used to be a popular rock station in D/FW. Q102 ended in 1998. So, it was very odd for me to see an old Mazda Truck with a bumper sticker that said, "Q102: Texas' Best Rock." It had a Washington license plate. I wonder if they know that Q102 hasn't existed for 10 years.

We decided to go visit one of the nearby national parks last weekend so that we could see it while the weather was still good. It takes almost three hours to get to the park from Seattle, so we left at 8:15 (which is very early for us on the weekend). There are a lot of trails there, so our first stop was the trailhead for Cascade Pass, which is away from the rest of the park, but it's the hike that we had read the most good things about.

To get there, we had to drive an hour on a narrow, unmarked road, and halfway along the road, the pavement ran out and turned to gravel. The parking lot was pretty full and it was surrounded by mountains and glaciers. Anyway, we started walking up the trail, which was surrounded by tall trees like most of the other hikes we've done. After about an hour, the trees started getting noticeably shorter and we started seeing more streams of water dripping down the mountain. After a little while, the trees basically disappeared and we were amidst a colorful meadow on the mountainside. After walking a little further, over some rocks, we made it to Cascade Pass. We stopped to enjoy the beautiful view, the cool, fresh air, the bright, warm sunshine, and the crunchy peanut butter sandwiches we brought with us. It took us almost 2 hours to get there and was probably the most difficult hike we had done. On the way back down, we had to stay focused do that we didn't lose our footing. At one point while we were walking, we heard an avalanche (from another nearby mountain - there was no snow on ours).

Anyway, after an hour and a half walking down, we got back to our car, then drove to another hour to get back to the main highway. We drove for another thirty minutes before we entered the main area of the park. We drove along the blue-green Skagit River and then past several dams on our way through the park. We stopped at several lookout points to observe Diablo Lake below, the trees ahead, and the mountains above. There were more trails available, but we didn't do any. Whereas many other national parks have a major point of interest that's not available outside of the park, this park contains just a sample of the beauty throughout the Pacific Northwest. Even without an entrance fee, 40-year-old North Cascades National Park wasn't as busy as Mount Rainier National Park, which we went to earlier in the summer. We had a great time there. Check out our pictures and video below.

Every year my company hosts an annual conference for all of our representatives. The kick-off reception was last night, which offers a chance for us employees to meet representatives and their assistants. Anyway, a full bar and food was provided and I thought it was interesting that potstickers with teriyaki sauce and egg rolls were a few of the things that were served. I don't think you'd ever see that kind of food on the menu for meetings like this in Texas. They were really good. I started to get a headache though because it was really hot in there with all those people and the band was really loud too, so I ended up leaving early. A few people had already left, so I didn't feel too bad. I'm sort of glad that that's over.

Unfortunately we've come to the end of our posts about our trip to San Francisco, after more than a week. It took a while to figure out how we wanted to organize our thoughts for posts since there was so much we wanted to say. We ended up posting about things in a random order rather than chronologically. So, here is a brief list of things we did day by day:

Wednesday

• Chinatown
• Alamo Square
• Divisadero Street
• Giants game

Thursday

• Oakland Bay Bridge
• Yerba-Buena/Treasure Island
• Twin Peaks
• Sausalito
• Muir Woods
• Marin Headlands
• Fort Point
• Ocean Beach
• Twin Peaks at night
• Golden Gate Bridge at night
• Drove down Lombard Street

Friday

• Cable Car
• Fisherman's Wharf
• Pier 39
• Ghirardelli Square
• Fort Mason
• Walked halfway across Golden Gate Bridge in fog
• Walked around Clement Street
• Walked to Rossi park and USF in fog

Saturday

• Golden Gate Park
• Japanese Tea Garden
• Haight/Ashbury
• Walked around Clement Street
• Walked to USF in clear daylight

Sunday

• Yerba Buena Gardens and Martin Luther King Memorial
• Ferry Building
• de Young Art Museum
• Arboretum in Golden Gate Park
• Walked on 9th Avenue
• Buena Vista Park at dusk

Monday

• Civic Center
• Rode Streetcar

We had a lot of fun on the trip and look forward to going back some day. We hope you enjoyed the pictures and look forward to sharing video soon.

List of Previous Posts

1. Introduction
2. Neighborhoods
3. Giants game
4. Hanging out with our Friend
5. Muir Woods & Gardens
6. Food
7. Bridges
8. USF
9. Famous Places
10. de Young Museum
11. Transportation
12. Marin Hills and Other Viewpoints
13. San Francisco Video

Probably the best place to see the Golden Gate Bridge is from the Marin Hills, just North of San Francisco. After we went to Muir Woods Thursday afternoon, we stopped at the Marin Hills on the way back. We were very lucky to have clear weather for viewing the bridge. Normally there are blankets of fog that cover the bridge every day. The Marin Hills are neat because they are so high that you can look down toward the bridge and you can see the everywhere from the Pacific coast to Oakland. We went to several viewpoints on the hills and took lots of pictures:



There are so many other viewpoints around the city: Treasure Island, Twin Peaks, Sausalito, and Buena Vista Park to name a few. The day we rented the car, the first thing we did was drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge to go to Treasure Island to see the view. Most of these pictures were taken from Treasure Island, but some were taken from Buena Vista Park, USF, and the de Young Museum observation tower.

I had been looking forward to last night's Monday Night Football game all week. The only problem was that it was showing on a network that we don't have, since we only have local TV channels. So, we met a couple friends from church at a local sports bar to watch the game.

One nice thing about that is that smoking is banned in bars here, so we could enjoy the game in relative comfort.

One other nice thing about watching Monday Night Football here is that the games start right after work for me (5:30), so there's not a lot of time to kill before the game. Of course, if I got off work later, it would be a pain to miss the beginning of the game. But, in our case since we went to a sports bar, it was happy hour so food and drinks were cheaper. And, the early start meant that we could enjoy the entire game without worrying about going to bed on time since we were home by 9.

That was the Cowboys' only Monday Night Football game this year, and it was a good one, so I'm glad I got to watch it.

Figuring out how to get where you want to go is one issue (or it can create many recurring issues) on any vacation. In San Francisco, we had a lot of options, and the numerous ways we got around made the trip more exciting.

Flight toward SF

First, we flew out from Seattle toward San Francisco. We decided to fly into Oakland instead of SFO because it was $75 cheaper per person. Fortunately, Alaska Airlines had quite a few flight options so we picked the best one for us. However, that meant flying on a Bombardier CRJ-700 (operated by Horizon Airlines), which is the smallest airplane that either of us has ever flown on. Instead of walking on a jet way to get on the plane, we walked on the ground and up some stairs to get on the plane. I really liked the plane, though, because it was very quiet inside, flew pretty smoothly, and we didn't have anyone between us and the aisle or window.

BART from airport to hotel

Once we arrived in Oakland, getting to our hotel was pretty easy. We didn't rent a car at the airport because we would be spending most of our time in the city and having a car to drive and park would just be a hassle, so we opted to take BART rail. Unfortunately we had to pay $3 each to take a bus to the rail station, but it didn't take too long and we didn't have to wait too long for the rail. The dated-looking light rail trains took us just a couple blocks away from our hotel in the middle of downtown.

Bus

Once we got in the city, we used multiple ways to get around. San Francisco is very walkable, so we were often able to get where we wanted to go on foot. However, we also took the bus quite frequently and had some negative experiences the first day. We tried to catch the bus at one stop, but all the buses that came were too full and didn't stop. The buses we were able to catch had standing room only with little room to breathe. After attending the baseball game our first night, we waited for the bus for 30 minutes before it came.

Throughout the rest of our time there, we rode the bus a couple times almost every day and had some good experiences where we didn't have to wait long and were able to sit, but those were balanced by the less positive experiences. One benefit of a big city is that you have a lot of ways to get around, but the problem with that is that none of them are very good. Still, the bus was a fine way to get around the city.

Car Rental

However, for getting outside the city, we chose to rent a car. It was nice having a car so that we could drive over the bridges, visit Muir Woods, and go to some of the less accessible viewpoints. We also drove down Lombard street, though it was at night. The car rental place closed at 6 and said that we could return it after-hours for $30. That's a lot of money, but parking it at our hotel would have cost $38 overnight, so we dropped it off that evening after we drove pretty much everywhere we wanted to.

Cable Cars

San Francisco is known for its cable cars, so we rode the Powell-Mason cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. Unfortunately, the line to board was pretty long and there was a temporary problem with the track that slowed things down. However, eventually we got on and rode across the city.

Streetcar

On our last day, we rode a neat, old Italian streetcar along Market Street.

Returning to Seattle

When we left, we took the same way back to the airport. Amazingly, checking in and getting through security in Oakland took less than 10 minutes. We saved time because we didn't check any bags but it was incredible how quickly we got to our gate. We gave ourselves a good time cushion, though, but missed the previous flight to Seattle, so we had to wait a while at the gate for our flight. Anyway, after a 96 minute flight, it felt good to be back.

Here are some pictures we took related to transportation:

San Francisco has a few famous art museums, but the one our friend most strongly recommended was the de Young. We decided to visit on Sunday and it was incredibly busy. We waited in line for tickets for like 30 minutes. Most people were there for the special exhibit, but we just saw the regular exhibits, which were fortunately not very crowded. The exhibits we saw had some impressive works of glass and contemporary art. The building itself was also very interesting and had an observation tower. Click below for some pictures we took at the museum.

We went to see the famous play by Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera, at the Paramount Theater this past Friday, opening weekend. The Phantom of the Opera is the longest running Broadway musical in history. I saw the play before at the Bass Hall in 1995 for my 13th birthday and I remember liking it a lot, so I was excited to see it again. We left an hour early so we would have plenty of time to get there and look around the old theater. We walked just over half a mile to the theater (which is really cool by the way, no parking hassles), and I bought a program. We had purchased the cheapest seats possible in the upper level since the ones on the main floor were $70 each.

Anyway, we walked in the theater and had our tickets scanned. As we were about to go up the stairs to our seats, an usher stopped us and asked to look at our tickets. He told us to wait there and he ran off with our tickets for some reason. I was a little irritated and didn't understand why this usher would stop us. He came back with another man and said that our tickets weren't valid. At that point I was angry because I didn't know why our tickets wouldn't be valid and I really wanted to see the play that we paid to go to. The other man introduced himself as an associate for Broadway for America and said that Wells Fargo had purchased some seats to give away. Then he handed us new tickets - two front row seats in the lower level, right up to the stage. I was shocked! He also gave us some goodie bags that had a Wells Fargo coffee mug with some Ghirardelli hot chocolate and raspberry chocolate coffee, a stuffed animal Wells Fargo horse, and some book about owning a home. I felt kinda bad for being irritated initially after I realized what was happening. Two front row seats to Phantom of the Opera! Wow!

So, we went inside and sat down in our seats right up at the stage. I just couldn't get over how crazy it was that we had gotten a free seat upgrade. The theater itself looked really cool inside and had lots of ornate old sculptures on the walls and chandeliers in the foyer. A few people came up to us and asked us how we got our seats. The start of the play was exciting because a chandelier prop in the play rises up from the stage to the ceiling, which was right in front of and above us. During the intermission, the usher that had stopped us initially came by to talk to us. He said that he's been picking people for a while now and he was looking for some "down to Earth" people to give the seats to. He also said that this was the only performance during the month-long tour of Phantom of the Opera in Seattle that they would be doing this seat upgrade for and only two seats were being given away. So, we were incredibly lucky. We just happened to pick Friday night to go to and we just happened to leave at a certain time and walk past the right usher.

The play itself was awesome, just how I remember it and I had a really great time. It was awesome being able to see all the actors' faces and expressions so close. I love the Phantom of the Opera and can't wait to see it again someday, perhaps on Broadway.

When we arrived on Wednesday, the first thing we did after eating lunch was meet our friend downtown and walk through Chinatown. It was cool seeing all the Chinese buildings and signs. After that, we took the bus to one of the most famous spots in San Francisco: Alamo Square. This is where the opening sequence was filmed for the tv show Full House. The famous Steiner street houses run along the east side of Alamo Square. Seeing all the old Victorian-style homes was cool.

On Friday we did most of the touristy things we were planning on doing. First we rode the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf, where we ate lunch at Boudin's. After that we walked along the waterfront to Pier 39, one of the major shopping areas nearby. One of the cooler things to see at Pier 39 are all the sea lions that congregate there. About a hundred of them sit on the docks there and make noise all day. There isn't much else to do at Pier 39 besides browse around some of the little shops there. I did want to go to one specific place though, the San Francisco Music Box Company. The last time I was in San Francisco, I bought a Beatles music box that plays "And I Love Her." I wanted to go again this time to see if they had any new Beatles music boxes, but I didn't see any.

After that, we went to do one of the things I wanted to do the most on the trip: eat ice cream at the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory. They have old equipment on display in the store in the process of making chocolate, which is pretty neat. We ate a brownie hot fudge sundae and barely finished it. We also went to the gift shop to look around some, where they gave us free samples of the new flavor, milk chocolate with peanut butter filling. I managed to eat my sample somehow, but Troy saved his for later. There are other small shops in Ghirardelli Square, but most of them were closed due to major renovation of the Square.

Near there is a small beach and a pier that extends into the bay that offers a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. We spent some time on the pier watching the blankets of fog roll over the bridge and across the bay past Alcatraz. Fog covered the entire city after a few hours. After that we walked through Fort Mason, which also offers good views of the bridge and the water. Then we called our friend for directions to a bus that would take us to the Golden Gate Bridge so that we could walk on it. It was neat walking across the bridge in the fog.

Other touristy places we went to included Lombard street at night, Yerba Buena Gardens, the Martin Luther King Memorial, and the Ferry Building. The Ferry Building was recently renovated and now has several shops inside and vendors on the street outside, along with a fountain. It was kind of similar to Pike Place Market, but not nearly as good. Most of the shops inside were pretty upscale, one of which was a wine-tasting bar. I did enjoy going on the other side of the Ferry Building toward the water, where you can see the Oakland Bay Bridge. On Monday, we briefly went to City Hall and the Civic Center, but there wasn't that much to do there.

It would have been nice to see Lombard street during the day and I would have liked to see Ghirardelli Square again, but it's hard to fit everything into so little time. Overall though, I'm happy with the places we were able to see.

Our friend goes to school at the University of San Francisco, which is prominently located on a hill in the middle of the city. We were able to tour the campus on both a foggy day and a sunny day. The architecture of the campus is impressive and the campus also offers good views.

Here are a few pictures:

The Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge are two of the most beautiful things in the city. We drove across the west section of the Oakland Bay Bridge on the way to Treasure Island on Thursday. The bridge is divided into two main sections: west and east, both over 9,000 feet long. By comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge is only 8,981 feet long.

After visiting the Marin Hills (also on Thursday), we drove to Fort Point for a great view of the Golden Gate from sea-level. Fort Point was built in 1853 and was the only fort on the West Coast at the time. There are still old cannons on display in the old, preserved fort. We tried to go back at night to walk on the bridge, but didn't realize that it closed to pedestrians at 9. Instead, on Friday we took the bus to the Golden Gate Bridge and walked halfway across it in the fog, which was pretty neat. Sometimes it looked like the bridge disappeared into a cloud of fog. I wish we had walked across it when it was clear on Thursday. Maybe we can do that someday.

Oakland Bay Bridge pictures:



Some of my favorite pictures from the whole trip:

Biking is very popular here. Two people I work with ride their bikes to work and one of them rides more than 17 miles each way. The Executive VP at Lesley's work also rides his bike to work and another VP rides his bike 17 miles each way.

I used a bike for a couple of semesters in college. I really appreciated how a 15 minute walk to class turned into just a couple minutes on my bike. Plus, it allowed me to go places that were too far to walk to.

I'm sort of interested in having a bike again. It would be better if Lesley had one, too. We could ride to places nearby to eat or shop or whatever. We could also ride it to and in the park. And, if I felt adventuresome enough, I could make the 6 mile ride to work on my bike. It would be faster than the bus and cheaper and healthier than driving.

I would probably avoid big hills for a while. I think it would be fun and it would be good exercise to have a bike. I'm just not sure how often I would want to ride it. And would I really want to ride it to work? I'm just not sure, but I am kind of interested, so we'll see what happens.

San Francisco is a very international city with a lot of places to eat. The number of different places to eat and types of food was almost overwhelming, with lots of small, unique restaurants on every block. Fortunately our friend helped us find some good places to eat while we were there. And, even though San Francisco has one of the highest costs of living in the nation, Lesley and I never paid more than $30 for the both of us and often paid much less than that.

We had a lot of Asian food while we were there. When we first arrived, we stopped at a Japanese place two blocks from our hotel. I had some pretty good ramen noodles and Lesley had sushi. Our friend lives close to Clement Street, which has a lot of Asian food, and we went to a few places that he likes. One evening we picked up some good Chinese food, another time we went out for Thai at King of Thai Noodle and shared several different dishes, including a noodle dish, a rice dish, and a curry dish. Another time we picked up Dim Sum, which is a type of Chinese food that Lesley and I hadn't had before. We also stopped at a couple pizza places and went to a place that had pretty good chicken kabobs on Haight Street. We also stopped at a burger place on 9th Avenue, which had a good turkey burger. One of the highlights was when we went to Boudin's sourdough bakery at Fisherman's Wharf - the clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl was very good. Most mornings we ate breakfast snacks that we brought, but one morning we went out to breakfast near our hotel and another time we got bagels.

There were a couple meals that weren't very good, like the $10 sandwiches in Sausalito and the other location of Boudin's that we went to. But, most of the food was very good and I really enjoyed getting to try a variety of good stuff.

We really wanted to go to Muir Woods since we like nature and the outdoors so much. We rented a car for one day so we could drive to Muir Woods, among many other places. It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would to drive there. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped in Sausalito for lunch, and then drove the rest of the way to Muir Woods. It was a really windy road for a little while, but not long enough to make me car sick thankfully. We finally arrived in the park and it was pretty busy and full of other tourists. I had forgotten how crowded and loud it can be.

In order to avoid the crowd, we walked on the longest loop trail (about 2 miles) and eventually were able to get away from all the noisy kids and other people. It was nice and quiet after that and we could hear the water flowing through the creek and birds in the distance. On our way back, we saw a young deer eating, which was really cool. It wasn't more than 15 feet from me and didn't seem to mind all the people taking flash pictures of it.

It was really cool to see the giant redwood trees again. It wasn't quite as impressive as I remember, perhaps because I've gotten so used to seeing fairly tall evergreen trees in Washington. But Muir Woods was still definitely worth going to and I'm glad we were able to go. It would have been nice to spend more time there, but we had a full day planned and had to use the car to go do other things. Maybe some day we'll go back to San Francisco and take a longer hike through Muir Woods.

As for other garden areas, we went to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. It had some neat looking pagodas and bridges, but wasn't as big as I thought it would be. They also have a little deck area where people can buy tea and crackers for an extra charge, but we didn't stop for that.

We also walked through the Strybing Arboretum, also in Golden Gate Park. It was grouped in sections according to the different countries or states. For example, there was section for plants native to Australia and a section for Californian plants. The arboretum was alright, but overall not that impressive.

I wanted to go to Baker Beach, but we never did. We went to Ocean Beach at late sunset though, which was neat. It would have been nice to do more things outdoors in natural areas, but I guess we have Seattle for that.

Anyway, here's pictures from Muir Woods and other garden areas:

One of the compelling reasons for going to San Francisco now, rather than one of the many other places we want to go to, was to go while our friend is still living there for school. I was personally very interested in getting to experience more than just the touristy areas and to go to and explore some of the unique neighborhoods of the city and having our friend there made that much easier. Plus, he guided us to lots of good food places and gave us tips for riding the bus to get around. And, aside from all that, it was great to get to hang out so much. We got to hang out at his apartment and go out and do a lot of stuff in the city together. It made it tougher to leave, knowing that it could be a lot of fun to stay and do more things in the city with our friend. But anyway, I'm very glad that we were finally able to go visit him and the city.

I definitely wasn't going to miss going to a Giants game while in San Francisco, so we got tickets for the last game of their home stand against the Rockies on August 27th, our first day there. My dad has always been a big Giants fan and we went to games before on our trips to San Francisco. In fact, Troy and I planned our trip around the game since the Giants were going to be on the road after the 27th.

We arrived pretty early because we were unsure how reliable the bus system would be and we wanted plenty of time to explore AT&T Park. We spent about an hour walking around ballpark, which is right on the water actually. In fact, several home runs have been hit into the water (named McCovey Cove) behind right field. It was a good game to go to since the Giants' best starting pitcher was going to pitch. They beat the Rockies 4-1 with back to back home runs in one inning. I'm glad there were a few home runs so I could hear the fog horn again, which sounded every time the Giants hit a home run. I remember hearing it when I went to Giants games the last two times I was in San Francisco. Anyway, I'm glad we went to a game, here are some pictures we took:

San Francisco is the most walkable city in the country and it's also known for its unique neighborhoods. I was very interested in walking and exploring the city and I feel like we did a good amount of that.

Our hotel was in the middle of Union Square, which isn't a neighborhood in the residential sense, but was a very interesting part of town. It was very dense and busy and reminded me a lot of Manhattan. There were tons of major stores and diverse people and small restaurants and art galleries and big advertisements. It was pretty neat. Another interesting neighborhood was Chinatown, which wasn't too far away. We walked along the touristy part, which had a lot of intricate accessories as well as some trinkety junk for sale. Then we walked around the more authentic part, which was really busy and had interesting foods on display.

We walked through the Haight, which is famous for some stuff that happened a long time before I was born. To me it just seemed like another vibrant neighborhood. There were a lot of independent stores and restaurants. We spent some time in Amoeba Records as well as in a very small bookstore with way too many books.

Another neat area we walked through was the Mission District. There were some unique stores there, such as the weird pirate store we went into, which wasn't a party store, it was very serious about pirates and had pirate clothes, sea salt, and some books. There was a tub of sand in the middle and there was also a barrel of lard for some reason. There were drawers along the side of the store that had different things. One of them had hair in it. I'm not really sure why.

There was another weird store nearby, which was definitely creepier. It had bins of different kind of animal claws for sale, like badger claws. It also had rodent remains wrapped in foil. I'm not sure why you would buy either of those or how the store obtains those in the first place. It was a strange but very interesting place.

Near our friend's apartment along Clement was a diverse area, which had some things similar to Chinatown but also had a lot of other types of establishments. His neighborhood was three miles or so from downtown but still had a lot of places to walk to. It amazed me that there were so many businesses on each block and that they were all so diverse.

Walking through all of these unique, vibrant neighborhoods made me realize how unique San Francisco is among American cities. It was amazing how dense the city was and how many square miles it covered. It's a huge city and I felt it reached a potential that most cities never dream of. It certainly has its flaws, but its lively neighborhoods make San Francisco a pinnacle of urbanity and one of the few great cities in the country. It's definitely a place that I would like to go back to and experience further.

Here are a few pictures we took in various places throughout the city:

Like I mentioned in a previous post, Troy and I went to San Francisco to visit a friend over Labor Day weekend. We left Wednesday, August 27 and flew back on Labor Day. We had a really great time seeing our friend and spending a lot of time in the city. We did pretty much everything we wanted to do and enjoyed being there. Over the next week or so, we'll be posting about our trip along with different sets of pictures each day.

Today's set of pictures were taken from Twin Peaks, one of the best viewpoints in the city. Hope you enjoy them.

List of Posts

1. Introduction
2. Neighborhoods
3. Giants game
4. Hanging out with our Friend
5. Muir Woods & Gardens
6. Food
7. Bridges
8. USF
9. Famous Places
10. de Young Museum
11. Transportation
12. Marin Hills and Other Viewpoints
13. San Francisco Video

I've been taking the bus to work some and while overall I'm glad I do, sometimes it can be annoying. The bus I take to work has been pretty consistently 5 minutes late, so I can count on it. However, the afternoon bus is unpredictable. Sometimes it shows up early. I don't know how early it shows up, but it's early enough for me to miss it.

Then, because all the people like me who missed the first bus are crowding onto the second bus, the second bus is delayed more than normal. When this happens, the bus is often overcrowded with standing room only and not much room to stand at that. Anyway, I'm going to start trying to show up to the bus stop earlier so I don't miss the bus in case it shows up early.

We got back from our trip to San Francisco this past Monday and have been so busy that it's been hard to make time to edit all of our photos. We took over 800 pictures and I shot more than 40 minutes of video during our trip. It's taking a while to figure out which pictures we want to post and how to organize them. We've already worked on the photos over 3 hours and are still not really close to finishing them. Hopefully we'll have some posted by the end of the weekend.

I've been going to work for a couple weeks now and don't have a lot to say about it yet. I am still very happy that I got this job and am glad that I chose it over my other options. I have enough to keep me busy at work, so that's good. I'm really looking forward to becoming more involved and understanding things better.

My job gave me a bus pass so I can ride to work for free. I don't have to use it all the time, so I have been driving some, but most of the time I've been taking the bus to work. It does take a little longer to get to work by taking the bus, but I can spend most of that time reading. I also save gas money and help the environment.