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!