Little Britain

My Studly Hubby and I have found a new great show, from the BBC of course. It's called Little Britain, and is a smart sketch comedy show with mainly two guys playing all sorts of funny characters, both male and female, hetero and homo, hick and liberal, all sorts. The two guys are shown on the left. The US seems to always be lagging in sketch comedy.

I HATE hills... but I like Seattle

I am hating hills more and more. First, there was the burned clutch incident, then today my Studly Hubby and I tried to go for a short easy run and it turned into a crazy hard hill run because that's what everything is around here. According to our neighbor we're only about a mile away from a beautiful lake (Green Lake) but I bet it's all hills all the way there.

I like Seattle though. Every place we've gone out to eat has been delicious, the weather is grand (a cool 70F, as opposed to the midwest's 100F heat wave), the people are super friendly, our apt seems to like us ok, and we're starting to get used to the traffic (at least my Studly Hubby is, I haven't attempted to drive yet and won't until I have to).

Plus I found my socks and underwear today in one of our many unpacked boxes, and we bought a super neato strawberry print tablecloth at Ikea. Man, Ikea is a nuthouse.

World Traveller

This is where I've been so far:




I found this neato site thru Peggy in Scotland, whose blog is full of interesting ideas. I still have a few more places to go (according to the site I've only seen 4% of the world, but that's much less because I haven't actually seen all of the US or Canada, it just lights up the whole country if you've been to either one).

Burnin' Down the CLUTCH

We are seriously challenging our clutch in this City of Many Steep and Confusing Hills (Seattle). We took the parents-in-laws out for a day on the town on Sat, got detoured by some popular parade going through downtown, and ended up at the bottom of a steep hill that the car just simply couldn't get up. Thanks to my Studly Hubby's excellent clutch driving and quick thinking, we managed a route around it and got home but were all a bit traumatized and the clutch a little shorter lived (has anyone ever smelt a burned clutch? I have). I was reminded of my first few months in Minneapolis when every time I drove anywhere I would have a heart attack because of the crazy traffic and jammed freeways. By the time I left there six years later it was all normal and untraumatizing. Hopefully Seattle will become like that (or we'll buy a new car).

This morning when we woke up there was a dead cat in our backyard. My Studly Hubby's Studly Mommy might have witnessed the murder but didn't catch any of the details as she didn't realize a murder was taking place until we found the body. Not knowing what to do and being new to the neighborhood, we decided to simply shut the window blind, which worked quite effectively. Eventually our next door neighbors found the body and dealt with the murder while we peeked at them through the blinds. Hopefully they didn't see us or implicate us in the murder.

Did you know that Grey's Anatomy takes place in Seattle? I just learned this tonight. It's on an hour later here.

We've Arrived!

We arrived yesterday, emptied out the truck in the afternoon and then walked down the street to a waterfront seafood restaraunt and pigged out. What a load of work (the moving, not the pigging out). We are now gearing up for a day of Seattle touristing including a boat tour and trip down to Pike's Market. We also have to get the truck returned before we hit something with it.

Moving Moving Moving

We are en route to Seattle right now (can you believe it? the wonders of technology). We have had a big couple of days.

First, I had to say good-bye to everyone, which has been ongoing for a few months but this weekend, and Monday, was the Big Bad Final Goodbye and that was infinitely harder. On Monday, I said good-bye to everyone at work, held it together till I got outside, then bawled my eyes out. Do you know of anyone who has ever cried when they LEFT work? Well, now you do, that's me.

Then, we had to get all our stuff ready for the Crazy Moving Morning on Tuesday. We had movers coming, so wanted to have everything ready to maximize their Amazing Muscle Power, so we unplugged things, pulled apart furniture, and kicked up as much dust as we could manage. Then we slept in it. I woke up this morning and immediately sneezed right in my husband's face. Being a generally cleanly guy, and slightly stressed about the imprending Crazy Moving Morning, he got a little pissed and gave me a loudly delivered Cover Your Mouth When You Sneeze lecture. I suppose I should have learned that by now but I just never really understood the principal. Now I do.

Then we moved. It was great. The movers did all the heavy lifting (with some help from the Studly Hubby and his Studly Pop), the ladies did all the heavy cleaning (except I spent most of the time sneezing so it was mostly my Studly Hubby's Studly Mommy) and then we had a very nice Last Lunch at the Birchwood Cafe, a super-spectacular good-whole-food kind of place down the block that was even better after a long morning of sneezing. Then we jumped in the truck, which is at least twice the size of what we would have needed and taller than our building, jumped several curbs on the way around the block and headed off down the freeway.

Now we're in Moorhead, Minnesota (next to Fargo, North Dakota) trying to pick up some last snatches of good accent before we head off into the Westlands.

Packing Packing Packing

We have a lot of stuff. When it's all tucked away into corners and closets it still seems like a lot of stuff, but after packing all weekend (and for the past month) it REALLY seems like a lot of stuff. If we can find our camera I'm going to take a picture of the floor-to-ceiling stack of boxes in our dining room to show y'all. The trouble is, now that everything is packed it's getting tough to find some things.

We ran out of boxes twice. The first time, we went into my lab, unpacked a bunch of supplies (shoving them pretty much everywhere - sorry guys) and then took home about ten boxes. We also went to Menards and bought a few boxes, but the small ones were $2 each (we bought six, all they had) and the medium sized ones were $7.50 each. We weren't about to spend $7.50 each for as many boxes as we needed, which is where the lab came in. My mom bought boxes for her move (and gave us a lot of them), and didn't spend $7.50 per box, so maybe if you buy them elsewhere and/or in bulk they are cheaper (she bought them at U-Haul). But we didn't really have time to box-shop or order boxes so the next time we ran out we went to a local bookstore, and then the local co-op. The co-op had the best boxes; they were APPLE boxes that were not only super sturdy but also smelled like apples. We first stacked them in the hallway (we were running out of room in our apt at this point) where they made the hallway smell like apples and then we brought them in and packed them with sheets and towels which I'm also hoping will smell like apples.


Now I'm off to run a few pre-moving errands, then in to work for the last time (boo!!) to make some trouble for my co-workers and hopefully finish organizing a few things. Not only am I working up until the last minute, but I'm actually taking things with me from this job to Seattle to finish there - I have a paper to finish writing. I love it that much that I don't even mind taking it with me. But even if I didn't love it that much, it would be worth it because it's good for my career (both the paper AND Seattle).