New Firehouse

When Scott and I were walking to Herkimer's last week, we commented on the fact that our local firehouse is kind of ugly! Turns out there are plans underway to remodel it! It will be a while though becuase they are still in the design phase, and will not open bids to contractors until next summer. Still, I'm happy and excited!

The downside is the temporary firehouse while this one is under construction will be the empty lot down the street. Apparently, they will be housed in 'tents and trailers'. What an eyesore!

Read the post here: http://www.phinneywood.com/2008/07/27/fire-station-21-rebuilding-update/

Ride Metro!

I finally signed-up for the free bus pass from work and decided to test it out a few times this week. Overall, not bad. I walk one block to the bus stop from home, take an "express" bus into downtown ("the 5"), then hop on an "express" to Bellevue ("the 217") which drops off down the street from work.

What seals the deal is that many of the buses have Wi-Fi on board, and it's pretty fast too. I find that folks vary when they arrive in the morning (thus minimal crowding), but the ride home is more conjested.

If I actually stick with the bus, I can save $1.5K / year in fuel. Perhaps even $2.5K / year including insurance and $3.5K / year including the interest from the residual on selling my car.

Trip planner

still waiting...

Found out that our couch STILL has not arrived from Dania (aka "Plummers" for SoCal folks). The lady on the phone sounded very apologetic that it's taken so long (we are on week 14 now). When she looked at the computer, it said it was going to get shipped next week, and would take about 4 weeks to get here! I was upset, so she 'fixed' it somehow and said now it should arrive next week. I'm crossing my fingers!

Dinner with Neal

Neal started at Expedia on Monday so is out here in Seattle all week. It was good to see him again! I met up with Scott and Neal dor dinner and drinks at BOKA. I had read some favorable reviews of this place so Scott said let's go here! I'm sad to report that I was pretty disappointed. Wine list was expensive and the food was really only okay. I had the lamb chops and they could not begin to compete with the ones I had at Stumbling Goat. It looked like there was a size-able happy hour/drinks crowd so maybe next time, we'd do that instead.

*Note from Scott* Unfortunately May spilled her glass of red wine, not only on herself, but also on a few random neighboring guests. We offered to pay for their dry-cleaning, but they were very nice about it. Both funny and sad since May had a nice new coat... fingers crossed the stains come out!

Shakesbeer Festival

This may win as the most clever name I've seen in a while: Shakesbeer in the Parking Lot. Pretty funny huh?

We headed on over at about 5:30 on Saturday night and were pleasantly surprised with the turnout. Several hundred people, a dozen or so breweries (each with several brews), a folksy band that played great music and then some bratwurst and sauerkraut from Barking Dog! I only purchased a "Designated Driver" ticket so didn't sample too many beers, but Scott had a blast. Strangest beer, jalapeno beer... you could smell it, and taste it, but it wasn't spicy. Interesting.

Favorite beers:

- Laughing Buddha

- Lazy Boy Brewing

- Rogue Ales

It's a Small World After All!

We don't know too many people in Seattle just yet, so Greg and Lauren (BK's brother and sister-in-law) were sweet enough to invites us over to welcome us to the city. They have a nice place spitting distance to downtown Fremont so we walked over to Chiso for dinner. While waiting for a seat, another Campbell Hall-er walked in! I didn't even know that Danny now lived in Seattle, so it really tickled me that even 900+ miles away from Laurel Canyon, there can still be a strong CH connection. It IS such a small world, isn't it?

Still No Sun Yet!

12:30pm on Friday and the sun peeked out for only about 2 minutes before it got cloudy again. BOOOOOO.

New Chairs

Finally, we made it over to Costco Home to buy our two living room chairs. Costco Home is awesome; it's basically just a big Costco with only furniture and appliances in it. Lots of good deals to be had there. We found these "Lucinda" chairs that we really liked, but we didn't want to pay the $150 shipping fee so we had to wait until my little SUV was up here in order to go over and pick it up. When I called yesterday, they said they had 7 still in stock so we rushed over after work to get them.

We picked the green over brown or white but now that it's in our living room, it doesn't match the rug as well as I had hoped! And, the swatch of the Dania sofa (argh, not scheduled to arrive until ~Jul 20) against the green is not as contrasty as I had hoped. You can judge for yourself in the photo. That's what happens when you don't take the swatch with you when you go shopping! In any case, I'm very excited that our living room is finally coming together.

Haircuts and a Picnic

I'm really digging our new neighborhood. Scott need a haircut, so we walked down Greenwood to Rudy's Barbershop. It's this kitschy looking barbershop that has a lot of black paint and loud music. Funny thing is it's a chain! They even have some of these in LA!

On the way, we passed by Picnic, a new food + wine boutique that is set to open at the bottom of the Fini condos. They had a menu posted on the window, and it showed some lunch items and then cooked items (like lasagna, salads, meatloaf) that you can take to go. It seemed odd to me they would cater to a lunch crowd when Greenwood doesn't seem like a lunch place location... what offices/businesses are nearby? I hope it does well though, becuase I'm happy to have any new food place open within walking distance to me!

Speaking of food places, when we walked by Olivers Twist, it was decently full. Mental note: need to go back and check it out again!

Fortune Cookie Chronicles

I came across a mention of this book today: Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee. It sounds intriguing - all about Chinese restaurants/food in the American culture. I think this may be my next summer read!

Here's an excerpt from the book that was posted on USA Today's website. http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2007-12-26-Fortune-Cookie-Chronicles_N.htm

We're Heeeeerrrreeee!

The drive up took a lot longer than I thought it would! The drive to SF was a breeze, but then making our way to Sacramento took THREE hours. That's some crazy traffic! And then the portion between Medford and Seattle took 8 hours because the speed limit in a lot of the areas is 60mph and we stopped to check out Portland.

The Ranch weekend was great as always, and a nice way for me to leave all my gal pals. This time, there were 11 of us who made it up to Oregon for the long weekend and there was lots of fun tubing/rafting down the river, fishing, wine tasting, cooking and gabbing. Next time though, I would spend more time there and get in few more hours of wine tasting and some time exploring Jacksonville, Ashland and Crater Lake. Since we were last up in the area 2 years ago, a few new shops/restaurants in Jacksonville have opened, new wineries (Fiasco! what a fun name!) have popped up, and we just have never made it to Ashland and Crater Lake before.

And now, back to the grind. I'm off to San Jose/Campbell tomorrow, and Scott flies out to NY! Seems sad to leave Seattle when we just got here! We can't enjoy the great weather! (80s today)