A Glimpse Into My New World

First, my sincerest apologies to all of you who have set my blog as your homepage. You know who you are. There haven't been nearly enough updates lately, and a lot has changed recently, so here goes.

First, I moved to the Seattle office of my company--same company, just a new location. It's a bigger office and I knew basically no one there when I started at the beginning of July, so it's definitely a new challenge for me. I'm the assistant manager of the branch still, which is great and hopefully this is a good career step for me. Business has been much better the last few months with the market improving, keep your fingers crossed for that trend to continue!

Having been raised on the Eastside, there are a few things I've noticed about working in Downtown Seattle. First, apparently hippie girls with dreadlocks and dirty dogs and/or boyfriends and a guitar are making good money in Seattle, because they seem to be on every street corner. Also, Greenpeace and other organizations stalk the streets looking for suckers to make eye contact with them so they can take a quick 20 minutes of their time. The trick is to pretend you're on your cell phone--it's a trick I learned from Shawn Alexander when I was in line behind him at Teriyaki Madness a few years ago, and it works!

There are also a lot of people with limps in Seattle. And eye patches. And grown men in skirts and combat boots. It's just a different crowd than I'm used to. But it's fun, there's a great energy there. I can walk around Pike Place Market at lunchtime, watch some fish get thrown, get some fresh fruit (and by fruit I mean Doughnuts), and watch the action! It's an exciting place.

I take the bus, which is both good and bad. It's good because I've outgrown the condition that made my carsick when I tried to read in a moving vehicle-that only took 30 years. It's bad because I can't stand being on someone else's schedule, and being crammed in a bus with a bunch of strangers and no air conditioning when it's 105 degrees like it was yesterday is about the most terrible thing you can imagine.

The kids are great--Kyle hasn't worn any clothes at all since Mid June and he's addicted to the Lego Star Wars video game, Carter just wrote his first Christmas list and mailed it to Santa so that St. Nick has no excuses this year about running out of time to find all the gifts. Carter requested an early delivery but I told him that Santa almost never grants those requests. Brinley is perfect except when she cries in my ear, but she's learned how to roll around to get things which makes it so I don't have to get off the couch so often.

More updates soon :)