Back from Seattle

We're back from our mini-vacation to Seattle now. We had a great trip and had lots of fun seeing our friends Mary and Luis, Aimee and Cress, and we got to meet some new friends as well. We spent three days touring in the city and we made it out of the city to see part of Olympic National Park on one day. We had pretty good luck with the weather - it only rained a little bit one morning, and it was actually clear enough to see Mt. Ranier and the Olympics on the other days!


You can check out the rest of our pictures here. Here's a quick summary of what we did:

Day 1

• Dinner at Redhook Ale Brewery

Day 2

• Walk through the Seattle Center
• Public Market
• Seattle Aquarium
• Seattle Public Library
• Dinner at Marjorie with everyone

Day 3

• Costco (yes, we're dorks)
• Chateau Ste. Michelle winery
• Columbia Winery
• Uwajimaya Japanese Supermarket
• Dinner at Belltown Pizza with everyone
• Space Needle at night

Day 4

• Olympic National Park - Hurricane Ridge, Lake Crescent, Marymere Falls, Rialto Beach

Day 5

• Museum of Flight
• Vino shopping
• Afternoon cokes with Aimee and Katie
• Dinner at Canlis with Mary and Luis (with the best wine we've EVER had!) to celebrate Jeff's birthday

Anyway, it was lots of fun, and we had a great time doing it with a bunch of friends from college who we hadn't seen for a while!


This weekend we're going back up to Hays for our second garage sale. Woo hoo. :P But, I may get to see my friend, Kansas, because she'll be visiting her family for the weekend! Yay!

Garage Sales and Mini-Vacations

The first garage sale was a big success. We borrowed almost 30 long folding tables from the library, and filled them all. The driveway was lined with furniture. We started the sale at 7:15 am, and we were done by 12:30. I couldn't believe it, but almost everything was GONE by then. We filled a couple of boxes to take to Goodwill, kept a couple of boxes of stuff to try and sell again, and threw a couple trash bags full of junk away. One of our friends was a missionary in South Africa for several years, and he and his family just moved back to the States, so they came over and took a bunch of furniture and games for the kids.

The coolest part of the day happened when we got rid of all the stuffed animals. My mom had this HUGE collection of teddy bears (hundreds of them) and we tried to give them away to various charities, but no one could take slightly used stuffed animals. We gave some to her friends and sold a few at the garage sale. We had just put all the remaining ones into two or three huge trash bags to try and resell when a car pulled up and a man hopped out asking if we still had stuffed animals left. He said that one of his relatives was an EMT, and that they gave hurt kids stuffed animals in the ambulance rides. He didn't care if they were slightly used, so he took all of them off our hands for $10. It was awesome.

We have another sale planned for Labor Day weekend, and then the house will be empty. It's such a relief to be getting close to done. We've spent 8 of the last 10 weekends working on the house, and it's really exhausting. Hopefully only two more to go, though, then the house will be put up for sale! We did find something last weekend that made all the work worthwhile... I'll post pics sometime soon (our motherboard crashed a couple of weeks ago, so no digital photo action for a while until we get the new computer built).

We're really looking forward to this weekend - we're going up to Seattle from Friday through Wednesday to visit some friends from college. We'll stay with one of our aerospace classmates, who married one of my best friends from my schol hall. My roomie for two years is coming up from San Francisco with some of her post-college friends, and there's another girl from our schol hall who lives in the area that we hope to see, too. We haven't seen my roomie for several years, and she's been through a lot in those years, so it will be really nice to see her and catch up with her. We're going to celebrate Jeff's birthday one day early at what we hope is a really great restaurant - Canlis. I've been perusing their menu and wine list today, and I'm just drooling with anticipation! Anyway, it will be nice to get away from taking care of the estate stuff at my mom's house for a while, and spend some time with good friends. I'll be sure to post some pics when we get back.

Cutest Puppy Ever

Fang and Errol got baths last night, and Errol's hair went all cute and curly afterwards. Awww, look at the cutie wootie puppy butt! Ya gotta love it!

We're having our first ever yard sale this weekend at my mom's house. Wish us luck. We have a crazy amount of stuff to try and get rid of. We've filled her garage top to bottom, front to back with stuff to sell, and we're not even through the whole house yet! So, as luck would have it, all four of us kids are available this weekend to help with the sale. Hopefully we'll have fun, and get rid of some of the stuff!

We're also going to the wedding of one of Jeff's friends from college. She's originally from a town north of where my mom lived, and that's where she's getting married. We haven't seen her since our wedding, so it will be great to catch up with her and meet her new hubby.