Past:

• This week exhausted me.  Really long hours thanks to always exciting usability testing, which included a fun-filled trip to Boise, where the highlight of the city is the sign you see leaving the airport.  (Warning: this is only really entertaining when you say “Boi” with a Flava Flav affectation- “Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.”)

• Yesterday Mike and I slept until 11 and then went on what we intended to be a leisurely bike ride.  We ended up going 23 miles round trip.  I was thinking that I could handle a 100 mile ride by the end of summer, but now I think I should stick to something much shorter.  We forgot a memory card with the camera (kharmic revenge for me stealing my dad’s memory card and not mailing it back to him in time), so the only good picture I got was this, taken with my phone while laying on top of a picnic bench post our dinner at the bourgoise grocery store conveniently located just off the bike trail when we realized that we were both starving to death:

• This afternoon I sat in Olympic Sculpture Park with two of my favorite knitters, Brooke and Ange, and we knit.  I reapplied sunscreen 3 times in 2 hours and still ended up with a wicked sunburn.  Thank god for aloe vera.

Present:

• Sitting on the couch, resizing images for Handicrafte Cafe, writing this blog post, trying to figure out how to watch the season finale of “Bones” on our television because our stupid faux-tivo ate it.  Oh well, thank god for Hulu.

Future:

• Tomorrow: going with the knitters to help find an elopement dress for somebody sane enough to NOT plan a wedding.  Then coming home to get cooking prepped for the week- turkey pesto meatballs, grilled vegetable and pesto salad (me), pasta salad with some grilled vegetables thrown in for kicks (Mike), Chicken and Spring Vegetable Gratin, and a bastardized version of Banana Blueberry muffins that use oatmeal and quinoa instead of flour.  I am very well aware that this last item may taste like total crap- it’s an experiment.
• Next week: Promises to be grueling, but at least it’s only 4 days long.  Happy dance!
• Next weekend: Kate‘s getting married!  Super happy dance!  Now I just have to find something to wear.
• Next next weekend: Our two year anniversary is June 2!  Mike told me to take Thursday and Friday off, but he won’t tell me what we’re actually doing.  Much like the quinoa-hippie muffins, this could be great (like the surprise trip to NYC for my 25th birthday) or it could be a disaster (like our trip to Monterrey in 1999 when we ended up sleeping in a motel in Salinas that came complete with bars on the window).

I’m feeling kind of ancient and rickety right now.  A couple of reasons:

• We had a date at a food court last Friday.  And I was amused.
• On Saturday, we went to see Video Games Live.  Our biggest complaint?  a) The douchebag announcer who kept hogging the stage with his multiple costume changes for no reason (seriously- he came out at one point wearing Bedazzled jeans.  Vomit) and b) Mike didn’t even recognize a bunch of the songs they played- Mike, who has slept outside for multiple video games and consoles.  God of War?  What are they talking about?  Just play the Tetris theme song and make me happy.  (The Video Game Pianist playing live was pretty badass though.)

• Mike rode the bus for the first time!  Yay Mike!

• Tonight’s Good Eats episode was about Brussel Sprouts, and I was so excited that I emailed Scott (who has started a really badass blog himself) about it.
• I was bragging to Mike tonight that I get to sleep in tomorrow- til 7:30 AM.
• It’s about 10:30 PM and I’m totally ready for bed.  Nighty nite!

I approve of this past weekend, mostly because it was cash-flow positive.

On Saturday, Mike and I spent most of our day going through our rather large book collection and deciding which ones we could bear to part with.  We sorted through 18 boxes of books.

After we decided on 7 boxes of books that we would sell or donate, our remaining collection looked like this:

Still a lot of books, but much more managable.  Now we only have 11 boxes worth of books!

To reward ourselves, we went to Veraci’s Pizza, aka the best freaking pizza we’ve ever had.  Veraci’s has been a regular at the Seattle Farmer’s Markets scene for years, but they just opened a real restaurant last week.  They still don’t have the logistics of the ordering process down pat- only 1 cash register, long lines, etc- but the product makes it more than worth it.  Just look at how many people were waiting in line.  At a sit-down restaurant.

That line went out the door.  Delicious.  Plus, they messed up and gave us an extra half a pizza by accident.  Free breakfast!

Later that night, the garage sale mastermind herself and I met up for drinks and dessert to celebrate some recent good news.  It took our waiter about 10 minutes to greet us and take our order, so in order to preemptively apologize, he told us that our desserts would be free.  Score again!

On Sunday, Mike slept in while I schlepped books in front of Barrie’s building.  We manned the “store” until 2 pm, at which time I re-schlepped the remaining books back into my car and over to Half Price Books, where they were more than happy to buy what we couldn’t already sell.  Total take-home: $201!!!!

After I came home and collapsed for a bit, we went to grab dinner with our friends Kate and Max.  They are big fans of Ivar’s, where you may remember we earned ourselves a hefty gift certificate after a not-so-great review.  We didn’t want to pass up the chance to cash in part of our gift card, so we joined them and had a free dinner.  These two are a good fit for us to eat with- Max and Mike geeked out over car talk while Kate and I geeked out over yarn talk.  There was nary an awkward silence in sight.

Total take home this weekend: $201, 1 free meal, 1 free dessert and 2 free pieces of amazing pizza, and significantly more space in our garage.

Hi!  It’s me!

I haven’t posted in 3 days and I’m sure that anybody who knows me assumes that I just got bored with this blogging thing.  But no, I promise, my short attention span is not responsible for the lack of recent posting.  The blame for my virtual absence lies entirely with another one of my (many) flaws: my infamous clumsiness.

We had high hopes for the weekend: finish getting the house in order Friday and Saturday, then spend Sunday exploring more of the city.  We made our 3rd trip to Ikea since moving here Friday evening, but after returning one pair of desks, we found out that we couldn’t fit the desks we did want in either of our cars, so we left, extremely dejected.  We were mightily cheered up though by our first taste of Pagliacci’s Pizza, which is pretty much iconic in Seattle, and deservedly so.  Delicious pizza, pasta salad and blackberry gelato restored us to our normal, jovial selves.

SaturDAY was good.  We slept in, went back to Ikea (4th trip- damn you Ikea!), found a desk solution we could live with, and then went to Bed Bath and Beyond, where, thanks to one of those fabulous 20% off coupons and the culmination of YEARS of whining, we finally got a Dyson:

Seriously, he was soooooo happy.  The boy loves vacuuming.  Which is good for me, but bad for our finances- we already have a Roomba, a handheld Dyson and a Swiffer Vac thing.  Not to mention the fact that we left a Shop-Vac and and older non-Dyson upright vacuum in Anaheim for the boys.  ::shaking head::

Anyways, at approximately 8:30 pm, disaster struck.

This is the staircase that I dropped my beloved 4 year old Dell Inspiron laptop.  Stupidly, I had rested it on the banister while I was cleaning, so me knocking it down was inevitable.  You would think that I would know better, but no, I don’t.

This was the physical damage:

Obviously, it would no longer turn on.

At this point I went a little catatonic.  Mike spent 5 minutes trying to reassure me that the hard drive was fine and it wasn’t really a big deal, but then quickly remembered that I’m totally unreasonable (true) and let me sulk while we set up the office.  At some point I took a Xanax and went to sleep.

By noon on Sunday, we were at the Sony store buying a replacement.  Then we drove to Renton and visited Fry’s (talk about feeling like we were home again) to get whatever Mike needed to rescue the contents of my poor hard drive.  While we were in the ‘burbs, we called our friend B, who met us at Ratcha Thai for a late lunch.  The food was a little “eh,” but dessert more than made up for it:

Oh tart yogurt, how I love you, and how I miss your excessive availability back home.  ::sigh::

We came home.  I turned on my new laptop.  It worked.  I squealed.  Mike restored everything from my old hard drive in about 10 minutes.  I squealed louder and danced a little.  He told me to stop.

All in all, everything is back to normal at our house.

(I know you’re looking at this extremely flattering picture and thinking, ‘God, Mike is a lucky, lucky man.’  You’re right.  He is.)

I’ll be honest, we are getting a little bored waiting for all of our stuff to arrive. There is not really anywhere to sit (besides the floor) and I spend a lot of time (in my head of course) lamenting how much unpacking I’ll be doing next week. Thank goodness we have a) our air mattress and b) internet. The combination of these two things has allowed us to comfortable get fully caught up on this season of “America’s Best Dance Crew.” Thank God we can get one vitally important task checked off the to-do list.

Even with the siren song of spending all weekend rehashing dance-themed television calling to us, we have managed to get out and explore the city a bit. Today, we went to Gasworks Park to check out a bicycle festival called “Tour de Fat.”

We felt a little lame driving to the Tour de Fat, since it was only 2 miles from our house and it’s main goal is to encourage people to bike more and drive less. Well, thanks to the lack of physical possession of any of our bikes and my infamous robot arm, we sucked it up and drove. Next year we’ll ride, I promise.

Once we got there, we didn’t feel so bad though. There were quite a few cars, even though many were a bit more colorful than our 4-door Ford Fusion (it’s a rental and Microsoft pays for the gas. Eh.)

But there were definitely a lot of bikes, too:

We really dug some of the more… creative bikes we saw:

But probably the coolest thing (and the thing that really made me really hate the robot arm more than usual today) was a special area where you could test ride some very special modified bikes:

Mike’s favorite was this guy: