Seattle

It's been a crazy year. I feel a little tired, but am happy we have had the opportunity to travel and see so much. After resting and playing at home for two weeks, we headed out to Seattle for a work project. Since we used to call Seattle home, we have our favorites that we love to visit, the zoo, the aquarium, the Pacific Science Center, Pike Street with all of its yumminess like the French bakery, the Crumpet Shop, and all of the fresh fruit. In addition on this trip, we spent an evening with Jason's team that will go down in history starting with dinner at a funky little neighborhood restaurant called Skelly and the Bean where the boys bonded electronically with a co-worker's kids. Afterwards we headed to what is called the Shadow House, an old mansion that three of Jason's hacker co-workers live with a few other hackers to roast coffee beans...at 9:00pm (after all, this is Seattle). Upon entering we each stood under a jaggedy knife to measure our height where we wrote our hacker names on the wall. After watching some coffee bean roasting action and taking stock of the impressive number of different coffee-making apparati (we didn't even get to see the French-press cabinet), a non-hacker resident of the house who is a gemologist enthusiastically showed us her gem and jewelry collection, giving the boys all kinds of gems to bring home and allowing us to check things out under her uber-microscope. It was very cool and at 10:30 we reluctantly pulled ourselves away to head back to the room to get some sleep. Other highlights from the trip were meeting with an old college roommate and his family to eat dinner and play in the park, a trip to the Japanese garden in the arboretum, a hike up Little Si mountain for mothers day, and accidentally walking into the middle of a street fight where I got run over by an enormous black guy.

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