Home Sweet Home

Wow, after an interesting three months, it's great to say the family is moved in ("settled" is a little too strong a word at this point!) to our new home and neighborhood in Snoqualmie, WA. BOO YA!

Neighborhood is great already. Have met tons of neighbors (many of which work for Microsoft, interestingly enough), all of each have at least two kids under 10, most near Spencer's age and some even near Garrett's age. It's a great, family-friendly community with beautiful views of the mountains. Amy and I are going to like it here for a while. So many kids in the area that a new elementary school is being built. And Amy and I have sampled the local fare... best burgers and pizza we've had since moving to Seattle!

Finally got broadband access today - amazing how many things we have that depend on it, and how dependent I've gotten on it to find information on just about anything. Geez, I can't even go to Home Depot to pick up stuff for the house without searching on the web to see if they are going to have what I want, what the price is, and what are alternatives. And of course now that we have Vonage we need the Internet to have phone service. Interesting that so many places assume that phone service is still landline based. I could not look up whether DSL is available in this area because I do not have a phone number corresponding to the area!

The house is starting to look a little normal after having our stuff moved Tuesday. Most of our upstairs (bedrooms, bathrooms) are unpacked. Spencer and Garrett get a playroom up there and other than the legos Spencer dumps out every 12 seconds it's still boxed. Maybe it will be that way for a while =)

Still need to find my XBox wireless adapter to get on live... hopefully can get that done by Friday and hook up with the old guard after being out of the loop for so long.

Do not have a basement, so it's good that I screwed up a few months ago and grabbed a Gladiator Freezerator (as opposed to the refrigerator) to serve as a freezer. Out here the water heater, furnace, etc is in the garage, anchored to the floor and walls in case of earthquake.

Backyard is not much of a backyard, but bigger than all the other houses. Way smaller than what we moved from (and that was only a quarter of an acre!) but are happy given the price of dirt out here. To put it in perspective, people here do not talk about yards in terms of "acres" but rather "square feet." At least mowing will be easy =)

And it finally actually "rained" out here Friday. "Rain" defined as needing a jacket or umbrella. The weather here is just fantastic. No air conditioning in the house - don't need it. Gets up to 80 max, and is usually in the high 60s during the day. Will be interesting to see how the winter goes - apparently no snow.

So, mid-July, and it hardly seems possible we've been out here two months. The last four weeks have gone by very fast. For the Fourth of July we caught the fireworks at Bellevue with some new friends. Had a great time and I look forward to playing some golf with Steve soon... as soon as I can find my clubs =)

One of my superstars that worked for me at Whirlpool has accepted a job at Amazon.com. If I was smart enough to have recruited him I would have raked in a nice referral fee; as it is he found the job on his own which I am damn impressed with. Looking forward to having you out here, Aaron!

Pictures to follow later.