Our last weekend in Maryland was three days long, and since my dad and Linnie were at the beach, we had the house to ourselves. A brief recap of our weekend, more for me than for you, so I don’t forget:

Friday night we called John 10,000 times to ask him irrelevant questions about the house he went to look at for us, which he subsequently went back to on Saturday so he could put the deposit down for us. John will be receiving help painting his home in return for his patience and heroism.

Saturday we got our house in Seattle (again: thanks, John!), posted a bunch of stuff for sale online, and went out for Thai food at the Rio. The real-life Rio is almost as creepy as the Rio website! Manufactured suburban experiences always kind of weird me out. The food was okay, though, and we were happy to get out of the house. I wore my tallest high heels, and Brian commented that I was a lot taller than his other wife.

Sunday started out as almost all of our Sundays have this Summer, with a trail run on Section B of the Billy Goat Trail in Great Falls National Park. There’s a great spot about a mile in where Cooper can swim, and then we run the rest of the way through the woods on windy trails. Great Falls is roughly halfway between my dad’s house and the city, so after our run we went down to our old neighborhood farmer’s market to get our food for the week. The Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market is the best farmer’s market I’ve ever been to, and it was sad to say goodbye to the farmers we’ve been buying our food from for the past four years! I’ve really grown attached to them. I am looking forward to meeting new farmers in Washington, though, and visiting the heirloom apple orchards a few hours outside Seattle.

Sunday evening we met our friends Meg and Jay and their absolutely adorable daughter Amelia Jane (seriously, the prettiest little girl ever) for barbeque. Meg is one of the very few people who I could see everyday and never get sick of, possibly because we met at work and got used to seeing each other everyday, but more probably because Meg is amazing. Speaking of amazing, if you live near Rockville and you like kickass barbeque, get yourself down to Urban BBQ pronto. You won’t be sorry! (But your waistline might be, especially if you get fries with your ribs!)

Today was spent getting more stuff done around the house. This included playing frisbee with Brian while Cooper ran back and forth between us, attempting to intercept the frisbee. I initially thought this was cruel, but it became clear that Cooper was still having fun even though he was denied the frisbee time and time again. That dog has the best outlook on life! I got 37 bug bites on my legs within about 20 minutes (yes, I counted), which is par for the course in my dad’s yard. We spent the afternoon and evening over at Aarti’s parent’s house, celebrating the million and one things that everyone has going on. There were 14 of us there and literally every single person had something significant to celebrate. For us it was our move and our wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow. The only thing better than feeling happy for yourself is feeling happy for people you love, and it was great to be able to share our happiness with some of our closest friends on our last weekend in town.

The last week has been a flurry of crazed activity as we’ve looked for houses, researched PODs and moving companies, planned no fewer than five possible cross-country routes, and tried to see friends before we leave town. We did manage to find a house to rent in Seattle–no easy feat when you’re 3,000 miles away. Thanks are owed to Brian Woodruff, Joan Li (Woodruff!), and John Simons for going to visit multiple houses on our behalf. In addition to their running around, we spent endless hours staring at Craigslist and Zillow until our eyes turned red, dried up, and fell out of our heads. Finally, we came to a decision, and happily put down a deposit on a great house yesterday morning. Actually, John put down the deposit for us, which was even better, until we wrote the check to reimburse him.

Behold, our soon-to-be new home:

Isn’t it cute? I know! It’s so cute! Here’s some more eye candy for you:

If I have my way, that purple bedroom will be repainted immediately. But aside from that, it seems the house is great as-is. The front door opens to a large living/dining area with a wood-burning fireplace, and the kitchen and bathroom are also on the main floor. Upstairs are two bedrooms, which we’ll use as our bedroom and office (words cannot express our excitement about having an office). The finished portion of the basement is going to be a guest room, so come visit! The unfinished portion of the basement has a washer and dryer and plenty of room for storage. In addition to all that, we have a cute brick patio (which you can sort of see in the first photo above) and fenced yard. The house is built at the back of the lot, so all of the yard is in the front.

From the street, it looks like this:

Yup, a garage! This is, of course, a HUGE plus and Brian is especially excited about it. You can see that our yard is nice and private, which means that we’ll actually get to use it as our own little outdoor retreat and dog park. Looking at these photos is getting me all excited to get out there. Seattle is having great weather right now, I hope it lasts a few more weeks at least!

Credit for all photos in this post goes to our lovely realtor, who was impossibly patient and kind while we were being driven insane by Craigslist.

Yes, it’s true, we’re headed West. Much, much further West than we’d originally intended to go! Let’s backtrack a bit here, since I wrote about Brian flying to Austin just a couple of weeks ago. Although Brian’s interview went fabulously, the company wanted to hire him for a different job at a later date. The alternative job sounded cool, but they couldn’t provide any concrete info on the “later date” so we decided to move on.

I’d already done a phone interview for a Project Manager position with Design Commission, a small interactive agency in Seattle, about a week before Brian’s Austin trip. I enjoyed my interview and felt really positive about the job and the company, but we wanted to wait and see what would come out of the Austin thing. When that didn’t pan out, Brian and I decided that we were up for a change in plans and that I should pursue the job. Within a few days of making that decision we were on a plane to Seattle to meet the founders of Design Commission and spend a weekend with the West-Coast Woodruffs.

Needless to say, everything went great! We loved the Design Commission guys and they loved us (or at least liked us enough to offer me the job and ask Brian to do some contract/freelance for them). We had a great time with my family, and concluded that getting to hang out with them all the time would make up for Seattle’s damp, gray winters. Nasty outside? Just stay in, stuff your face, and chat with all your favorite characters! Seattle is also a very dog-friendly city (dogs are allowed on the bus!) with lots of parks, and I think Cooper will appreciate the cooler temps. Next step is finding a place to live and coordinating the move…

I am blessed with several acquaintances whose misuse of the English language provides me with tragicomic relief on a near-daily basis. A few examples:

Unlinquish

Minimalize

“Great news! They’ll be chagrined to hear that we can handle their request!”

Absolve (Used in place of both resolve and abstain. Genius.)

I try very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes I am tested.

More and more lately I find that I have the experience of remembering things that happened a long time ago, and then realizing that “a long time ago” means twenty years ago instead of ten. Sometimes I’m amazed at how clearly I remember those things that happened so long ago, and other times I’m shocked at all the things I’ve forgotten. Friends or family will say, “Remember when…” and I look at them blankly and say, “That happened?”

Many of my memories, or at least the ones I return to most often, are of the smallest things. Things like what the sun looked like streaming through the vertical blinds in the living room in the afternoons when I returned home from 6th grade–I can remember exactly the pattern it made on the floor and the back of the sofa. On the other hand, I can’t remember what I did on any of my birthdays until I was 14 or 15, save for trip to Farrell’s for my 5th birthday. That’s not to say they weren’t fun or amazing birthdays, I’m sure they were, but I just find it strange that I can’t remember them while I can clearly remember sitting on the steps outside the pavillion at my mother’s company picnic, eating barbeque and trying to be friends with her coworkers’ children. I’m sure my experience is not unique, but I wish I understood better what causes certain things to be preserved forever and other things to just fade away as if they’d never been real at all.

Brian flew to Austin last night. He didn’t get to his hotel until almost midnight, and mentioned that it was still hot then. He said that it “smelled like syrup, and kind of felt like syrup, too.” He often has really unusual but very accurate ways of describing things. When someone says that Austin feels like syrup there is no confusion: it’s hot, sticky, thick, heavy. In a syrupy place, the air sits on you and makes you slow, so that all your movements feel very deliberate.

In the summer, the sun rises in Austin about 30 minutes later than it does in DC. This is of course due to Austin being so far south, and we had a discussion about the position of the earth vs. the position of the sun during different seasons and how that combined with a specific location’s distance from the equator affects day length. I’m not sure how I ever learned all that stuff but I certainly take it for granted. Do you ever stop and consider the vast amount of knowledge that you have internalized and try to figure out how you came to possess it? I often can’t remember when or how I learned specific things, it feels like I was born knowing them, which I know is not true. And then I think maybe I just feel that way because I am getting old, so old that the formal act of learning is a vague memory that I associate with a different phase of life.

Apparently, the interview went well, but we’ve learned to not count the proverbial chickens before they hatch, or even after they’ve hatched and run around all crazy-like. Brian’s been to Austin for interviews several times over the past few months, and every time it seems like whatever job he’s interviewed for is a done deal. There are verbal promises, positive feedback, and then the offers never come. Weeks later we find out that there’s a hiring freeze, or the company is being reorganized, or someone just doesn’t have their shit together, and that there will definitely not be an offer. Of course we’ve usually moved on to the next thing by then, but it still stings. Few things are worse than being led-on. You can go for a while on anticipation alone, but coming down from it is harder than up-front rejection. So, we’ll just cool our heels for a bit on this one, and keep our fingers crossed.