With the kharmic collision of craptastic weather and limited vacation time, I was definitely thinking that this Christmas holiday was going to mostly consist of Mike and I staring at each other.  Thankfully, at the last minute, our friends Justin and Leah decided to come up and visit us for some post-Christmas goodness.

Even though he is technically Mike’s friend, Justin is one of my favorite freaking people in the world, mostly because whenever he’s around, we eat really really well.  His girlfriend, Leah, has similiarly good taste, so that is pretty much what we did this weekend.  (This isn’t totally true.  We did do actual non-food related activities, but I haven’t uploaded pictures yet.  So I’ll just talk about food.)  Starting with a really late night Christmas dinner, every meal was awesome:

• 13 Coins: Justin and Leah arrived at about 10:30 pm on Christmas Day, so our dining options were relatively limited.  13 Coins is a Seattle staple that is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, and has everything from hamburgers to Beef Wellington to a full breakfast menu.  Totally worth the fact that we had to dig the Mini out of a snow bank (thanks to a really kind Samaritan who happened to drive past us with a shovel in his trunk) and drive up some icy hills that had giant “ROAD CLOSED” signs to get there.
• Theo Chocolates:  Not really a meal, but we did the tour of this awesome chocolate factory on Friday at noon.  It was really interesting, and I successfully met my chocolate quota for the year.  (Don’t worry Dad, we will totally do this with you when you come up here!)
• Pho Viet Anh: Our favorite local pho place.  We were in desperate need of something savory to cut the massive chocolate consumption earlier.  Is there anything that pho doesn’t cure?
• Umi Sake House: This is my favorite sushi place in Seattle thus far.  Go here.  Preferably with me.  Everything is fresh and their sake list is unbeatable.  I described it to a friend as a place where sushi died, went to heaven and got even better.  Yum.
• Volunteer Park Cafe and Market: This is a super cute cafe near Volunteer Park in Seattle.  Again, the drive here was a bit treacherous thanks to the giant snow drifts and total lack of plowing (grrrrrr) but my apple and brie panini and chicken matzoh ball soup made it worth almost dying.  So yum.  (Mike didn’t love his BLT though.  I guess that means we’ll just have to go back to find something else he does like.)
• Quinn’s Pub: I had originally been thinking of doing something seafood-intensive for dinner on Saturday, but for some reason, the topic of marrow kept coming up in conversation during the weekend.  I took it as a sign that we should go to Quinn’s, which is a gastropub that specializes in adventurous meat dishes (kind of like The Spotted Pig in NYC).  We had frog legs as an appetizer (they were like buffalo wings, but a little tougher, I think.)  I had a wild boar sloppy joe (I’m easing my way into pork- so far, no vomiting), Mike had fish and chips (not so adventurous, but he has a rule that he has to eat fish and chips at every restaurant that offers it.  He’s a connoisseur.)  Leah had pork cheeks and Justin had beef tounge hash with bone marrow on toast.  Everything got a solid thumbs up (except for the extra sediment in my wine (Mike said it was a tarantula when he first looked at it and I almost threw up), but they quickly replaced it.
• Etta’s:  By Sunday morning, most of the snow had melted and the sun was out!  We went to the market, wandered around, and basked a little in the goodness of the day.  Leah was wanting a sit down breakfast, so we ate at Etta’s, which is one of my favorite places for brunch.  It’s a Tom Douglas restaurant, so it’s a good Seattle staple, and they make their mimosas with fresh squeezed orange juice.  Those put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

We did do other things, which I’ll share shortly, but I think they require pictures and that takes effort.  In the meantime, I need to go run 10 miles or something.  Every day.  For a year.

Trapped.  On.  Hill.  Want.  Off.  Now.  Thanks.

Everybody I know is starting to come a little unhinged thanks to the snow.  One of my coworkers is stuck out on Bainbridge Island with no electricity, our friend Muneeb was one of the 3,000 people stuck at the airport thanks to delayed flights, and everybody I know who lives on the hill… well, let’s just say that if one of us gets all The Shining on somebody’s ass, I won’t be all that suprised.

So what do you DO when you can’t leave a 2 mile square radius of your house?  You start cooking.

The week I’ve been working from home is a little dull to say the least, but it has given me a chance to remember how freaking much I love oatmeal.  Oatmeal is awesome.  I think I could eat it just about every day.  And considering the last time I went on a big oatmeal binge was when I was trying to eat 100 grams of protein a day, I am much more in love with it right now because I don’t have to pour scoops of protein powder into it (nasty) anymore.  (By the way, what did I learn from that experiment?  Processed soy is bad for you.  Take note.)

So for the past week, since I’ve had time to make breakfast, this has been my standard go-to meal:

Scrambled egg whites with a little bit of aged gouda (yum) and slow-cook oatmeal with vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, dried cherries, golden raisins and pecans.

On a related food note, Mike had said that he had a crazy craving for a burger tonight.  This probably has something to do with the fact that I make way too much chicken (since I don’t eat beef).  He was even open to the idea of trying to walk down the hill to Dick’s, which is Seattle’s not as delicious but locally iconic version of In N Out.  Unfortunately, the icy sidewalks + the steep hill were not making that happen.

So, after doing a couple laps around the neighborhood with Barrie (it’s the most activity we can get right now), I decided to be a nice wife and make him a burger.  I had some ground sirloin in the freezer already, so I figured I could whip together some sort of homemade burger type meal for him, even if I couldn’t taste it and really don’t know how to tell when a burger is done.

Once I was in Safeway, I realized that I was about to totally score!  Thanks to the crappy weather, perishables were totally on sale.  I got a bunch of chicken, bacon and sausage on a two for one promotion.  There were similar deals on beef, but I don’t know crap about that and decided to come back with Mike tomorrow.  I ended up only paying $45 for $70 worth of groceries!  Yay!  (I know, I’m old.  I’m excited about groceries.  Even sadder, I’ve already posted this on my local knitting board to share the joy.)

Oh, and the burger turned out “awesome,” according to Mike.  This is particularly vindicating because, as anybody who has ever seen him eat anything I’ve made, he is not particularly gentle on his reviews.  This culinary success goes towards proving Derek’s theory that I am indeed really good at making food that I can’t taste.

Last night, we were sitting in front of the fire, watching Weird Science courtesy of our Roku (which Mike had never seen before, weirdly) and thinking we were pretty much good for the night, when our friend Max called me telling us that we had to get down to the Queen Anne hill stat.  It was hard to make out what he was talking about, but I did hear something about sleds.

We bundled up again and walked down to the Queen Anne and Highland, where almost a hundred people had gathered and decided that since the city doesn’t plow, we might as well all take advantage of it:

This chick had some serious speed going:

A group effort:

Most creative vessel of the night:

I guess that’s what you get when you combine freak snowstorms, a poor infrastructure and lots of super fun hills.  It is definitely a bright spot in our virtual house arrest of late.

So Blizzardwatch 2008 is officially on.  Since we live at the top of a really steep hill in a city that has never bothered to get their act together re: snow, we are kind of stuck up here.  As a result, I’m going a little stir crazy and you get another awesome snow post.

We look so cute bundled up.  Meanwhile, my toes were completely numb.

Mike won’t go wine-tasting with me, but he will do some snow tasting.  Disgusting.

On Thursday I tried to sled.  This plan didn’t work so well, considering my sledding materials of choice were the following:

Yeah, that’s me, rocking Marc Jacobs galoshes but still to cheap to buy a real sled and opting for the lid of my CSA bin and the top of our trash can instead.  I have awesome priorities.

And finally, for Mike’s friend Justin and my fabulous parents who will be visiting us soon:

Bring a jacket.

These are things that I’ve heard over and over again during the past couple of months:

• “It doesn’t snow in Seattle.”
• “Eh, it may snow for like, 3 minutes, but by morning everything will melt.”
• “It NEVER snows here in [insert current month here].”

Obviously, people are in denial.  Or they are just liars.    Just look outside our office window:

I was awoken at 5:00 am by thunder and lightning.  Huh?  Is that even possible in conjunction with snow?  My boss emailed everybody on my team telling them to work from home today due to this outbreak of “thundersnow.”

This weather phenomenon is just confirming my belief that Mike and I do, indeed, have some sort of magnetic attraction for all things strange and random.  Seattle, I apologize for the deep freeze, but I think we brought it.

There isn’t much that is visually exciting to report here, and I know that without pictures, I tend to get a bit… wordy.  So instead of updating you about my fabulously mundane beginning of the week, I will share my latest obsession with you instead:

I discovered Justin Hillgrove’s Imps and Monsters series at the Urban Craft Uprising a few weeks ago and instantly fell in love.  I mean, come on, it’s a bunch of pictures of monsters and robots!  How can I NOT feel like this was made just for us?  (In case you don’t know us well enough, Mike LOVES robots, and his nicknames for me over the years have included “Monster,” “Shrek,” “Quasi” [as in Quasimodo] and “Shrekky-Shrek” [when he's feeling affectionate].  And when he proposed, instead of getting down on one knee and asking if I would be his wife, he asked if I would be his Monster.  Awwwww, I know, we’re occasionally cute in our own weird way.)

Confession: I didn’t do a lot of research on Seattle before we decided to move here.  I knew it rained a lot.  I knew there was a lot of coffee.  I was aware that I would probably have an excuse to buy more jackets than I did in SoCal.

But snow?  I had no idea it snowed.  We had been here a week before somebody made an offhand comment about how little it snows here, to which I responded, eyes agog, “Wait a minute- it snows in Seattle?”  This person probably thought I was an idiot.

So once I started making friends and I mentioned my snow-phobia, everybody assured me that snow in Seattle is a total anomoly, practically a myth.  They said there were about two weeks a year that the roads would ice up a bit, people would get in a ton of car accidents, and then it would be over.  Seeing acutal white stuff on the ground, they told me, NEVER happens.

Then I looked out the window last night:

I was wary.  Especially considering that I had signed up for the Jingle Bell Run on Sunday.  Running in the SNOW?  People don’t do that.  I got nervous.  But then I remembered how everybody says that snow always melts during the night, so I’d be fine.

Then I looked out the window this morning:

Hmmm…  not exactly melted.  I didn’t want to be a total flake though, so I bundled up in as many layers as I could manage (including 2 of mike’s mismatched knee-high snowboarding socks.  I couldn’t find a matching pair for the life of me) and headed over to my friend Barrie’s house, where her very awesome and very brave boyfriend was there to drive us downtown.

I always hear people complain about Seattlites not knowing how to deal with snow.  Well, Barrie and Dominic are evidently the McGyvers of snow- here they are scraping Dominic’s car windows.  We didn’t have an ice scraper, so they used sticks:

We made it to the madhouse that was the race.  As should be expected, there was a bizarre error on my number identifying me as “Angie Bach,” a 22 year old who lives in Federal Way.  I was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of people to try and argue.

How many people were there?  Well, here is a picture I snapped as our heat started:

So yeah, there were a lot of people.

The race was good.  Considering that I’d been having visions of falling into a snow drift and having my corpse shoveled out days later, I was pretty happy that I ran it in 32 minutes (the thing was definitely too crowded to do much passing.)  Theoretically, I would like to subtract some time for when I slipped in an ice patch, scraped my knee and tore open my running pants right at the knee- now they have a cute “grunge” look to them.  Very Seattle.

I still finished the race, where I met Barrie, who had already finished and managed to ravage any freebies within a 3-mile radius.  I think she ended up walking away with 2 lbs of bananas:

We look cute, huh?

After the race we grabbed breakfast, where I saw the reason why print journalism is failing- this headline:

It’s going to be a fun winter.

I am pleased to report that Operation Don’t Suck was a huge success!  As I’ve alluded to, Mike has a very uneven past with celebrating birthdays.  But last night even he said “I did way better than usual this year, huh?”  Yay!  Well, considering there were no styrofoam containers of food or Dora the Explorer decorations (I mock, but my party last year was really fun.  But he did decorate with those stupid streamers and will forever suffer for it)

So yeah, Mike earned a lot of good husband points yesterday.  First, he actually gave me a present on my acutal birthday!  This is a major achievement.  Bonus points for the cute packaging details:

(The first Etch-a-Sketch said “Happy,” but I immediately dropped it while trying to take a picture.  Just imagine it’s still there.  Mike had to hold the box with the Etch-a-Sketches in place the entire drive home to keep the message there too.)

Then he whisked me off to our mystery dinner.  But not before he properly outfitted our chariot:

(And so begins a series of crappy iPhone pictures.  I forgot my camera, and Mike didn’t tell me that where we were going would be a really really good place to bring a camera.  Oh well, everything else was good).

We drove down the hill to the Space Needle, where we were going to eat at the restaurant on top, Sky City.  Yay!

Now, people who live in Seattle talk a lot of trash about Sky City.  And I understand why- it’s tourist-tastic.  It’s a restaurant on top of the most iconic building in Seattle, so how can it not be?  And your meal will be expensive, which is hard to justify in a city where there is seriously amazing food everywhere you turn, and a lot of it is 1/4 of what you pay to eat up here.  In fact, I’d always heard rather bad things about the food itself, which actually turned out to be a good thing, because I think low expectations generally result in a better experience.

But even though it’s touristy and expensive, it’s beautiful to look out at everything while you eat.  And it’s something that I feel like you have to do once, and what better excuse than a first birthday in Seattle?  Again, bonus points to Mike for finding a clever way to knock the super touristy Space Needle experience off our list of to-dos in the least cheesy way possible.

And in case you don’t believe me on the touristy factor, look here- you check in for your reservations in a freaking gift shop.

So while you wait for the elevator to come pick you up, you get to look around at all kinds of fabulous t-shirts and choctchkies, including random assortments of golf balls in non-Seattle sports team colors (I think.  I could be wrong about this since I know nothing about sports.  But I saw this, and I thought Lakers.  And then I thought of my two most crazy Lakers fanatic friends, Helaine and Kris.

Random.

We went up the elevator and sat down at our table, which was right by the giant window.  It really is crazy to look at everything.

I had to take a picture of the Specials Menu because it said December 9.  Yay December 9!

Freaking awesome.  (I had the lobster risotto, which was really really good.  Of course, it’s pretty hard to screw up something that combines lobster, vanilla, butternut squash and leeks.  MMMMMM.)

They brought out the requisite Happy Birthday free dessert, which while it wasn’t amazing to eat, their use of dry ice to make a smoke effect was pretty awesome.

After dinner we went out on the observation deck.  All I wanted was to take a picture of us with the skyline in the back.  Unfortunately, I was only able to take one picture before Mike’s fear of heights ended that little dream.  And, since I am the worst photographer in the world and only had my phone, it looked like this:

What do you think- should this be our Christmas Card picture?

All in all, we had good food, good wine and a ridiculously pretty view.  And most of all, my freaking amazing husband actually planned something, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Yay birthdays.  Yay Mike.  Yay birthday dinners!

Tomorrow is my birthday.  While I’m starting to deal with my normal paranoia of getting old, I also cannot stop thinking about what a crazy year it’s been since my last birthday.

On December 9, 2007, I was recovering from the birthday party that Mike had thrown for me the day before- complete with the Dora the Explorer paper decorations he had bought and about 30 of our closest friends crammed into our little apartment in Irvine.  We had just found out that the offer we put down on our house in Anaheim had been turned down.  Mike’s left leg was still a little swollen from his accident during our honeymoon.  Every wall in our home was white.  I saw Mike’s mom at work every day.  Jimmy lived with his parents.  Elizabeth Ng had just gotten engaged to a boy she was kind of dating at our wedding six months earlier.  There was a giant unspoken weirdness between Amy and I but we pretended everything was fine.  Elizabeth Carter was knee deep in nursing school.  Most of Mike’s friends- Ben, Derek, Justin and An- were still deep in the midst of their undergrad.  Mary had just moved back to LA and we were ecstatic that we lived in the same state again.  I had never played Rock Band before.  Derrick was the youngest person in his family.  I had never broken a bone.  Mike would proudly tell people that he never wanted to leave Orange County.

And then the year happened.  That house that our offer got rejected on- we bought it.  And we spent a month remodeling it with the help of our amazing friends and family.  We went from living in the most sterile apartment ever in Irvine to a house in Anaheim with a green living room, a blue kitchen and an orange craft room.  We finished it just in time to host Elizabeth and John’s engagement party, complete with a quesadilla bar, and in May we went to their wedding.  I hung out with Mary every week.  Elizabeth Carter, Justin and Ben graduated, and An and Derek(!) will be done with school in a matter of weeks.  Derrick is an uncle!  Amy and I had a huge fight but then made up and are actually close again.  We hosted barbeques, open houses and birthday parties in our fancy new backyard.  Rock Band was played in our house so often that we somehow ended up with a mike stand.  I completed a triathalon.  I then fell off my bike, broke my wrist, had surgery on it and walked around with a big piece of metal sticking out of my arm for 6 weeks.  Then I had the piece of metal unscrewed while I watched.

And then, of course, Mike got a job offer at Microsoft and we moved to Seattle.  I quit my comfy job at the surgery center, we watched our stuff get packed and we said good-bye to our friends and family.  We were worried that buying the house had been a huge mistake, but when Derek, Justin, Jimmy and Ben moved in, we realized that everything was going to work out.  (Thanks again- you guys are the best tenants ever!)  Mike sold the Rav4, bought the Audi and then sold the Audi.  We found an amazing apartment in the best neighborhood ever in Seattle and lived there with no furniture or internet during our first week in Seattle.  Justin came up to visit us and I spent an entire week trying to entertain him, and in the process he became “our friend” instead of just “Mike’s friend.”  Amy and Derek came and visited us and took us to our first show in Seattle.  I went from thinking public transportation was disgusting to using it every day to get to work (I do still sometimes think it’s disgusting though.)  We started to make new friends and I found the best knitting group in the whole wide world.  I found somebody who runs with me (so we’ve flaked a bit the last two weeks, this Sunday it’s ON) and doesn’t complain when I lag behind.  Mike made a friend up here who may possibly know even more about cars than he does.  We have a group of people that we go out to dinner with regularly.  We’ve started thinking about looking at some investment property up here.

In short, this year has been absolutely, totally unexpectedly, crazy nutso random.   I never would have thought that any of this was going to happen, but I’m glad it did.  This year has been an adventure.  When people ask me how long I think we’ll be in Seattle, I tell them that I honestly have no idea.  I’m over making long-term plans for now.  I’m ready to just sit back and see what’s going to happen.