Dresses, obelisks and cake

I bought my dress!! I took a couple of mirror pictures with a sleeve option semi-attached (I need to decide by the March fitting whether I’m having them add sleeves or making my own shrug), but I will resist temptation to post them here. It’s a great dress, though, and now I just need cute but comfortable (and ideally blue) shoes to go with it. (I should also get these arms in shape. Yikes.)

I went to DC! The Boy and I spent Thanksgiving with his family in northern Virginia (also joined by my mom, so the families have finally officially met), and since my mom had never been to DC before we did some sightseeing. No captions on these photos yet, but here’s an idea of what we saw:

Thanksgiving 2010 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I made a cake! This has nothing to do with anything except that I baked and iced a cake for Thanksgiving dessert and thoroughly enjoyed it. The Boy and I tend to get our birthday cakes from the local Chinese bakery, and they’re beautiful and light and delicious but I’m thinking of trying to recreate them at home for the next occasion. Just what I need seven months before a wedding—a new reason to bake

Oh, those summer nights

Who am I kidding? Seattle's summer nights are pretty much like nights during the rest of the year--considerably colder than the daytime, and either foggy or downright rainy. Today's high was low 60s and it rained this morning. August here is very confusing.

But I *did* do a lot of fun things this summer, and lacking the motivation to write a more involved post, I'm just going to drop in some photos of highlights from the past couple of months.

This actually happened a few months ago, but dude! It's Mario Batali! Signing a book from which we have since cooked!

We joined some friends to go clamming in early July. It was cold and muddy and my quads hurt for days from all the squatting, but the clam chowder we made that night was AMAZING.

Lots and lots (and lots) of lavender at the Sequim Lavender Festival. Fun girls' weekend with two future bridesmaids.

Traditional group shot from this year's awesomely awesome amusement park trip. (This is the Alamo, not some incredibly authentic-looking olden days roller coaster.) Lots of future wedding participants in this photo. And finally...

This is where we're getting married next summer. Behind us is the main clubhouse that I'll walk out of and down the stairs, and the little stage area is where the ceremony takes place. (The plywood in the background is early construction on one of the stages for the yearly golf tournament, but the coordinator assures us that our wedding date will most likely fall before any visible construction.)

And I suppose a quick life update: thanks to a small crew of surprisingly strong movers, the vast majority of my remaining stuff (after an embarrassing number of trips to Goodwill) is now cohabitating with the fiance! I'm writing this from my new office with one kitty asleep in the chair next to me and The Boy computing in his own office about twenty feet away. The new place is many miles removed from my old apartment (and work, and downtown Seattle, and most of the places I normally go), but it's huge (distant suburbs = more for the money) and I'll get used to the distance and we're happy to be together full-time, even if our respective cats have yet to fully embrace each other. I'm a lucky, lucky girl.

The year so far

My, it's been a while since I've posted. I'm not in the mood for a terribly long or introspective post, though, so I'll just fill the space with a selection of photos from the first chunk of 2009. Good times :-)

Bigger versions of these photos (and the rest of the albums they came from) are here, here, here and here. Someday I may even add captions. Enjoy!

Workiversary

There's a tradition here that on the anniversary of your first day of work, you bring in as many pounds of M&Ms as the number of years you've worked. I had to approximate (turns out the medium bag is only 14 oz, so I added some truffles), but within minutes of announcing the presence of candy outside my office I'd received a few visits (from the true chocoholics) and several congratulatory emails.

It's a little mind-blowing to look back over the past year and think about how much has changed. I'm probably supposed to say something like "it went by so quickly!" or "wow, it's like I've always been here!" but somehow neither is appropriate. Some parts of the year went by quickly -- the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, for example, when I was scrambling to schedule meetings and reach milestones before everyone cleared out for the holidays -- but others, like the never-ending winter of nothing but rain for 6 months, ...well, they never seemed to end. Even now, as I take a break from a couple of large and less-than-thrilling projects to write this post from work (I'd normally be home by now, but my modem decided last Saturday that it didn't feel like working anymore and the cable guy can't come out until tomorrow so I'm taking advantage of the internet wherever I can get it), I can already tell that the 7 days between me and vacation will involve both mind-numbingly boring meetings and moments of panic when there aren't enough hours in the day to write decent web copy for 5 new pages. (Or 6. The number keeps growing.)

It might just be the fact that I'm sitting in my office as I write this, but the past year for me has been completely dominated by work. It'd be an understatement to say that my relationship with my job has been rocky -- I've gone from totally overwhelmed to madly in love with the Pacific Northwest (although I'll point out that that post had nothing to do with work) and back again in the space of a few weeks -- and at the moment I'm a couple of last-minute-bombshells-from-the-boss away from hitting another low point. But one thing I've learned in the past few months is that this is actually kind of normal. There are various remedies ranging from asking your boss to assign you to something that doesn't make you want to shoot yourself to looking for another position within the company (which at least a couple of my co-workers have chosen). Right now I'm sticking with the first option, and it's likely I'll start looking at other positions/departments next spring or early summer, which is totally normal at this point in my career.

Life outside of work has picked up, too, despite my fears of spending the rest of my existence friendless and lonely in Seattle. I've made some good friends at work (although I'm starting to see the downside of being close friends with workmates -- arguments make the hallways awkward), and between b-school classmates and friends of friends I've got a nice little network of people to hang out with. The rumors of single, attractive men swarming the streets of Seattle (and the halls of my office building) have largely proven false, but I haven't given up all hope just yet. It's a big city, and it's entirely possible that one of these friends of friends will turn out to be a good matchmaker.

So...yeah. I had all these plans to spend this post ruminating about the lessons I've learned in the year since I moved and all of the ways my life could have turned out differently (what if I'd turned this job down to keep trying for the CPG marketing job I so desparately wanted? What if I'd stuck with non-profit management like I planned going into business school? What if I'd gone to law school instead? What if I'd decided to stay in California for college?), but now I'm tired and will be hungry by the time I get home, and even if there's no internet in my apartment (*sob*) there's still a New Yorker to read and a sock that needs knitting and episodes of Firefly to watch (and you wonder why I'm single). So I'll leave you with a couple of pictures from the team birthday lunch I attended yesterday and be on my way.

And "workiversary" = work + anniversary. I'm trying to make it a thing. Help me out?

I really should've gotten this OR the BLT, not both.

and time goes by so slowly

...actually, no. No it doesn't.

Spring has been an odd mix of nonstop craziness and lazy days of knitting and the Food Network. (One day I will run away and join Duff and the gang at Charm City Cakes. Fair warning.) Between a second weekend in Portland, the discovery of my new favorite board game, and the weekend in which I visited most of the West Coast's major cities, I have worked my way through most of "Arrested Development," a backlog of New Yorkers and 9/10 of a pair of socks.

Here's a guided tour of my recent adventures:

cool sky in Portland

unflattering photo of my legs on the first (and, so far, only) warm day (yaaaay beach!)

wedding! this took place in san diego and was the source of my whirlwind west coast tour (layover in SF on the way down, LA on the way back)

baby! also at the wedding. I last saw her at christmas and I didn't think it was possible but she has somehow become even cuter.

spoils from an awesome, awesome concert

Also, let me just pause here and thank United Airlines for NOT screwing up my (admittedly risky) plan to return from San Diego and attend the aforementioned concert mere hours later. I had my doubts, especially because "importance of attending engagement" usually correlates with "probability that something major will go wrong," but no! United delivered me (and my luggage!) safely home in plenty of time.

Now, Alamo, on the other hand...

the spirit lives on...

Ah, Oregon.

I remember little of my first visit to the Beaver State (no, really) aside from a particularly cheesy state-history museum and multiple trips to The Best Bookstore Ever, so when my biz-school classmate issued an open invitation to crash with him in Portland, I jumped at the chance to make a return visit. And it was great! The drive was uneventful -- about 3 hours in either direction, with (of course) rain causing the occasional slowdown -- and I was only there for about 24 hours, but the city is beautiful. I thought Seattle had cornered the market on outdoorsiness and randomly-occurring forest, but Portland? Kicks Seattle's North Face-clad behind, hands down.

My friend works for Nike, whose campus in the Portland suburbs pretty much makes it impossible to be the least bit unhealthy. Parking is limited to a couple of inconveniently-placed lots, so walking seems to be the only way to get around. Not that I have any sympathy for Nike employees, who get to look at this all day:




Other highlights included the Japanese Garden and the Rose Gardens, which are conveniently located a short walk from each other. The weather didn't cooperate, of course, but I managed to get a few decent shots from under my umbrella:



...so yeah, it was a good weekend! The northwest is finally starting to grow on me -- not that I ever hated it, but between adjusting to this whole no-roommate thing and having to make new friends for the first time in, like, eight years, things were starting to look pretty dire. But as silly as it sounds, having someone to sightsee with made a HUGE difference. If anything, I'm even more jealous of my co-workers who moved here with significant others, but until I line up one of my own (yeah, yeah, I'm working on it, if by "working on it" you mean "wishing really hard") I'll have to make do with the growing circle of friends. Things could be worse :-)

now or never

Well, seeing as how work starts tomorrow(!) and odds are I'll be too exhausted, overwhelmed or generally computered out to do a real update for a while, here's the obligatory "what I did on my [very last] summer vacation" post. My apartment's not yet ready to be shown off (I'm waiting until I get my first paycheck to finish procuring furniture), but I suppose I can show you my already cluttered kitchen:


What's more interesting is the sightseeing I've done, both intentional (e.g. Alki Beach, which has an excellent view of the Seattle skyline) and unintentional (occasionally I'll turn down a street and have a distinct memory of passing through it on my way to a top-secret Committee meeting during YGC tour '03). You'd like to see pictures, wouldn't you? Of course you would:

view from Alki Beach

Mt Rainier

trying to take artsy photographs on the way back (not recommended while driving, btw)

But as pretty and green and leafy as everything is, it's been a little lonely sightseeing alone (cf the above comment about taking pictures while driving), and while the few friends I have here are great, I'm looking forward to assembling a solid crew similar to (but not nearly as awesome as) the people pictured:

(I miss you too, Dani -- I just wanted to make sure these guys saw their c-raaaaazy picture from GPSCY karaoke)

For now, though, I'll be at work, trying out this new Vista thing I keep hearing about and batting my eyelashes at the programmers in hopes that one of them will fix my laptop, which has taken an inexplicable-freezing turn for the worse. Looks like I'm starting just in time...