Travel Season!

Last weekend, we started the Holiday Season with a wonderful weekend in New Orleans. Melissa had to go to the 'Big Easy' for a conference on tropical diseases (ASTMH). Since neither of us had been there before, we decided that we should make it a fun trip and Luc came along for a short vacation! New Orleans is a great town.


We mostly walked around the French Quarter (which wasn't affected by Hurricane Katrina), enjoyed the street music - live blues and jazz at every corner - and went to a couple of jazz clubs. The city, the people, tourism, and the jazz all seem to be doing well in New Orleans! We loved it!

Oh, and yes, Melissa enjoyed her conference too! :-)

Home, sweet home

We had Thanksgiving in our own home!

After a few weeks of negotiations, repairs, verifications, small crises, solutions, and many many signatures, we finally closed on our house in Ballard early in November. The move was fairly smooth, despite having only a short week to paint the new house while packing the apartment. But we did it, and good friends help us (once again!) to move our stuff. After about 10 moves between us in the last 6 years or so, it is wonderful to think that this will be it for a while. We're ready to stay put.


We have many little projects to do in the house, but overall it's in really good shape. We love it!

Seattle is our home!

Just as we were giving up on finding a house this year, a house came on the market in the perfect location- less than a block from Salmon Bay Park (a cute little neighborhood park). We went to look and found that it met most of our criteria- more than any other house we had seen. We had to go back a couple of times to convince ourselves that this could be our new home. Lucky for us the market is hardly moving at all and we could take all the time we needed to think about it. We aren't finished with the deal yet. But it seems that most of the sewer and electrical repairs will be done early next week. SO, we might be painting next weekend!

We are quite happy that we passed on the earlier house that we refer to as the "slightly haunted house." This one feels much better even if it doesn't have a tree house in the backyard. The structural integrity of it appeared unable to withstand Luc's weight anyhow.

Visit to Woods Hole and Nantucket!

Late in September Melissa had a conference in Woods Hole and Luc had a meeting the week after. So we played leap-frog in our visit to Woods Hole, and we stayed for one weekend together in Nantucket. September has always been one of our favorite months on the Cape. The weather is usually still pretty wonderful, most of the tourists are gone, and the water is still warm! I love visiting the Cape and the trip certainly makes me nostalgic for all the great things there- like Smitty's ice cream- yum yum- cherry amareto chip!!! And of course our wonderful friends that are still there!

Our romantic weekend in Nantucket was amplified by the near miss of Hurricane Kyle. The ferry ride to the island was a bit rough although plastic "travel bags" were provided at no extra charge. The island was pretty quiet, and reservations were not required at restaurants. We enjoyed a great meal at American Seasons just around the corner from our little B&B. We even saw a touch of sunshine at the beach on Saturday morning.

Great views come at a price!

September turned out to be a busy month, but we managed to make one great hike. I was looking at the pictures the other day and reminded of the amazing views. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday and we headed for the mountains. Granite Mountain has a fire lookout on top with 360 degree views with the clear skies we were assured to have a stunning view from the Cascade range all the way to Mt. Rainier. The climb was 4000 ft elevation gain over 4 miles on a dusty and rather busy trail. But it was well worth the effort- grueling but stunning. There were even some ripe blueberries along the way. I guess that is what attracted the bear we saw swimming in one of the lakes- quite a sight from our mountain top vantage point.








Needless to say this beautiful day just reaffirms our decision to move to Seattle. What a great place we live!

End of August...

The last week in Seattle has been very cold! We were planning on going hiking last weekend, but when we heard that it was supposed to rain/snow all weekend (snow above 5000 ft, which is not that high around here!), we decided to postpone our trip to the Cascades (the area near Mt. Rainier is our next destination).

This is a picture from our previous trip in the North Cascades (early August). "Where was the tent again?"

So, instead of heading to the Wilderness, we spent one day at at the Bumpershoot festival at the Seattle Center. Quite the opposite of large open and quiet space. We saw several cool artists: Neko Case, The Round, Estelle, Asylum Street Spankers, West Indian Girl, Nada Surf, and M. Ward, together with a little modern dance and some graphic arts (including a great Iran-US poster show). A great day.

On Sunday, we went to visit Solomon (and Bonnie and Peter).  We had a great (read quiet) long walk with Sol and Babalou (the dog), while P&B stayed at home and enjoyed an empty house (they were both fast asleep when we got back 2 hours later). 

And now, it's already September! 

Aida!

Last weekend, we were all geared up to babysit Solomon, the three-week old baby for Peter and Bonnie, while they went to the Seattle Opera production of Aida. A great chance for us to check out how cloth diapers work, and discover how they get so big, so fast. But they had a rough night and decided that the minute the lights went out, they would too. Not to mention the imagined horror of their friends trying to juggle a non-stop crying baby and later coming up with wild excuses to avoid them (and mainly the aforementioned offspring). They decided that they want to keep their friends-without-babies that they secretly wish would actually-just-have-babies-already.

They had signed up for the Sunday matinee. When I woke up that morning, I picked out my finest baby wrangling clothes- comfortable and easy to wipe clean since about all I know about kids that age is that they leak from places I probably don’t want to know about. Anyhow, we ended up driving halfway to Tacoma to pick up the tickets and then directly to the opera. The music was beautiful (modern dancing not so much but I will leave out my rant about that today) and opera dramatic as expected. Our day was dramatically changed in one phone call from the loud wails of Sol to the highly trained vocal delights of the Opera. Maybe Sol is just practicing for his later debut. I just hope that we can be there to see that too!

Congratulations Bonnie and Peter!

Our dear friends Bonnie and Peter welcomed their new baby to the world. We were honored to be there for it. Their new son, Solomon is beautiful. Bonnie was in the hospital for over 30 hours before Solomon made his entrance into the world. So it was a long haul for Bonnie. Best of all everyone is happy, healthy, and at home resting now.

The Bris is later this week. A celebration albeit informal. Not really sure what one wears to a bris? And of course, the only thing I know about it I learned from Seinfeld. Maybe not the most reliable source of info.

At home in Seattle....

We have decided that Seattle will be our home and are looking for a house to complete the picture. The market is rather funny right now with the economy in flux. But our timing isn't too bad since it is a Buyer's market (if only someone could tell the Seller's- it would help!). Even though the foreclosure rate was up 70% in June from the year before, Seattle seems to be a pretty solid market. We did try the Redfin thing with little success. We suspect that they are more effective for the HOT market and can't actually provide any service other than the monkey filling in the blanks on a document. This is a pic of the house we liked- but we have not decided about it yet.


There are a lot of issues. Some of them are little things like the half bath on the main floor- complete with angels, gilded gold mirror, and clouds in the sky on the ceiling! We are still trying to decide if the BIG issues are deal-breakers or not....


Luckily we have time on our side. It has been on the market for three weeks now. Slow markets are perfect for the indecisive.

Summer in Seattle: 4th of July!

Ok. We have been meaning to post forever. We had such grand plans for being bloggers, we even started a few a while back and never got around to adding the pics and posting. But now, we want to share some of the fun we are having. Living together in Seattle has been great, especially with summer finally arriving. There are tons of fun things to do. Freemont Solstice Festival, random musical events in Volunteer Park, fun concerts and happy hour!

But we will skip all that and jump to our 4th of July. We went backpacking in the Olympic National Forest. Since it was a three-day weekend we thought it could be really crowded and picked a nice obscure hike- Tubal Cain. It was perfect. The wildflowers were all in bloom and provided us with our "fireworks for the 4th". The first night we hiked to Buckhorn Lake and camped. We had the entire alpine lake to ourselves! The next morning we hiked up to Marmot Pass for some nice views of the mountains. We didn't stay long since the wind was cold coming from the next valley over and we trotted back to our warmer ridge. There was still snow on the trails, but there was no problem passing it.



Then we wanted to hike to the site of the B-17 bomber crash and camp there the second night. On the way we passed an abandoned mine shaft. We decided to camp here- since we got such a lovely greeting from all of the mosquitoes near the marsh. I always forget how good food tastes until I go hiking. Red beans and rice never tasted so good!

Wedding highlights!

We put together a slideshow with pictures of our wedding in Mexico (April 5th, 2008). Most of the pictures are from Jason, a friend of ours who agreed to be our official photographer, but we also picked from the many great photos that our friends and family sent us. Thanks so much to all! It was truly wonderful.

Click on the window below...



... or directly go to:
http://picasaweb.google.com/luc.melissa/WeddingHighlights

It is official- We are Married!

Luc and Melissa are finally married! And what a great time we had. Mexico was fabulous. Isla Holbox was the perfect "remote yet accessible" destination with just the right amounts of solitude, beauty, fiesta, and fun! The streets really are made with sand and dominated by golf carts.

So happy for those of us that joined us on our quiet island for our intimate ceremony. And we missed those of you that could not be there. We will be compiling pictures in the coming weeks and posting bits about our travels and celebration.

The BIG Move

We managed to move across the country two-weeks before leaving the country to get married without too much trouble. And even a little bit of fun. We made the trip in less than a week, visiting some wacky sites along the way and soaking up the last of our Southern meals for a while. We went to Elvis Presley's birthplace in Tupelo, Miss. and a drive-by on Graceland in Memphis. Also some of the best Bar-B-Que in Miss. The ribs were delicious.

Then up through a bunch of states we might never see again. Kansas certainly won the vote for most boring state. Even though we did manage to find a fun historical marker on the roadside. Part of The Oregon Trail passed through here. Notice how flat and boring the landscape is behind Luc-












We tried to visit the memorial of Little Bighorn's Battlefield but we were denied....

We passed through this funny little ranch in MT that was founded by a Quebecois man in the 1800's. He abandoned it after it started to get too crowded! Ha! But we did get to practice our farm skills while we were there. And made some new friends-

We stayed a couple of nights in Missoula, MT with Jonathan. We even caught a Bob Wire show, which was just delightfully good fun, not to mention some darn good music. Luc had never seen the smooth two-stepping cowboys complete with big hats and big boots. He was impressed with their fancy footwork, but then again who isn't? Maybe next time we'll stick around long enough that he can pick up some extra slick moves.

Almost...

Our plans seem to be coming together now. It looks like next week will be Melissa's big cross country move. Luc is at a conference in Florida. He will fly up to Atlanta and we will embark on our cross-country tour sans large moving truck. [what a relief- driving through snow-covered mountains would not be fun with a loaded truck.] We are planning on checking out some of the wacky Southern/Midwest states that we have not been through. We heard that the KFC in Ole Mississippi has fried chicken livers on their menu- who would have guessed? An overnight visit to Arkansas and maybe Nebraska (Go Huskers!). Then we'll head through Montana to Seattle. Let us know if you have any recommended sites along that route.

And of course, we are finalizing our arrangements in Mexico for the trip. Yeah! We are really looking forward to the trip. It should be really fun to spend time with everyone and share a little adventure with you.

Hopefully we will have most things unpacked before we leave for Mexico. It all depends on when the container arrives. But it would be really nice to return to our new city in April for a clean, fresh start.

2008 already?

Are we really already in the second month? Is it too late for a Happy New Year? It has been rather hectic lately (still), but we are looking forward to calmer times ahead. We just found out that the Melissa can transfer her grant to Seattle. Yeah! We will be able to live together at last. I have gotten rather good at moving with an average of one move per year over the last six or seven years. I had secretly hoped that Luc would buy a house before I arrived and I could live in ONE place for a while. Although the apartment he found is lovely, we will live there for the time being. AND we are hoping to be in Seattle for a quite some time. So be sure to let us know if you are in the area- we would love to see you!

And the wedding is getting closer too. We are getting excited about celebrating and taking a vacation. We could really use a little R&R- running around Mexico and climbing Mayan Ruins. I can't wait to see everyone!