I'm sitting on a sectional in a spacious, minimally decorated living room, staring out at the rainy weather on Lake Washington. Patrick and I are currently house-sitting in Mercer Island for my aunt's sister while she's in Hawaii, allowing us some time to ourselves. Luckily, this will also allow us to follow our own schedule and be a little more productive in our job searches. Staying with family and friends has been great, but our routine changes every two weeks (thus defeating the purpose of routine). Staying with people with kids in school, then a grad student with a flexible schedule, to a house full of more kids on Spring Break...we wake up at different times, get a different amount of stuff done, and never know what is going to happen next. This has helped keep our life interesting but it causes us to lose track of time! It has been almost a month exactly since we made our attempt at leaving Montana and heading off to our Seattle adventure. So we are here in Mercer Island for two weeks (minus this weekend when we'll be in Bellingham) to get grounded and organized again. And to get some quality US time :)
We celebrated Patrick's birthday on the 19th by waking up and going to get donuts. If we were still in Bozeman, we would have gone to Granny's donuts and enjoyed Robert's company, but alas, we must find a donut shop here locally. We made it to Top Pot Donuts to find that the entire little league football team had had the same idea, so we bought our donuts and ran. We decided it would be a day of do what Patrick wants to do. We hung out, David and Patrick played video games and eventually we made our way to the Seattle Center. Patrick wanted to go to Genki Sushi where you eat sushi off of a conveyer belt. Each plate on the conveyer belt is a different color denominating $1, $1.50 and $2 sushi. There was also an option to order rolls of your choice. It is a little intimidating at first, but after you get the hang of everything, it's pretty fun and cheap! Patrick ate mostly vegetarian and I discovered Eel Sauce. You could probably put that on anything and make it taste good. Mmmm. We had Mochi for dessert (if you haven't eaten it, you should. It's a rice dumpling filled with ice cream). Since Dave and Carrie couldn't join us for Patrick's real birthday they joined us the next day for games and Pagliacci Pizza (the Agog Pizza is the best). Good times for all and a whole year older for Patrick.
We stayed last weekend at Tintinger House #2 - John, Lisa, Mark, Leah and Anna...and the 6 chickens, lizard, cat and dog. I helped with delivering kids to where they needed to go and the rest of the time we just had fun with the cousins. Patrick's allergies tried to kill him at this point in time so he wasn't sleeping much, but at this time we also discovered Allegra, which seems to be helping now. This group of cousins goes to The Attic, a community home-school...hard to explain, maybe visit the website for more info. We attended their Interest Project Night and I got to meet lots of the staff. Lisa had me write some pitches for workshops for the summer (beginning photography courses, basically) and the lady who approves them remembered me and is very excited to review my credentials. So I might be teaching some this summer, which would be great!
And things I learned from being around chickens (and trying to take their picture) - don't wear shiny things unless you want to be pecked. I wore a jacket one day with shiny brass buttons...and they tried to eat me. And shiny toenail polish isn't any better...
I have been teaching piano lessons to my youngest cousin, Emma. She has grown and learned so much in the few weeks we have had classes together! After realizing that learning piano doesn't have to be scary and it is okay to make mistakes, she sings while she plays, makes funny music jokes and talks about music with me. It has been great for me because I can revisit those good ol' beginning photography books that I taught myself from. I look forward to Emma completing her first piano book and being able to name notes without pause.
The cousins also remember me making pizza in the kitchen the last times I have visited, so I promised Lucas and Emma pizza night. Sunday Patrick and I came over and made three pizzas along with homemade pizza sauce (Lucas' suggestion). I love getting these guys excited about cooking and baking, it'll make it easier for them to learn and help out as they get older. Below are photos from my phone of Emma's treble clef joke and pizza #2 from Sunday.
I applied for a Media Editor position in Bellevue yesterday at about 3:30 on Monster.com. An hour later I received a call from the company telling me about the position and that they will be having a meeting about it all tomorrow. The lady told me I would be a perfect match for the position and she was going to recommend me to the higher ups. So keep fingers crossed, it would be a contract job for a year!
Patrick is shooting off resumes and hoping for feedback. Once we got to Seattle we realized how you have to cater each resume to every company you apply for. So he has been working on reformatting his resume and creating a LinkedIn profile. He's also learning how to drive in Seattle traffic and on the hills. He's doing well but he's ready to be an engineer!! He'd be great at it, we just have to get him some interviews :)
Hope everyone is doing well! We'll let you know if anything happens here in Seattle, you keep us posted too. Love you lots,
Tessa and Patrick.
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