8/02

It seems appropriate that my birthday post should also happen to be post number 802. Nice little coincidence that.

As I said the other day, I had lunch with Shane and Cathy on Friday and had a great time catching up with them. We met at Crossroads mall and chatted about all the normal things and laughed a lot. I really miss them and wish I could work with them again; they're such good people. They've put an offer in on a house near where Julia and I currently live, but it looks like they'll be moving in around the same time we'll be moving away. Oh well, at least Julia and I can tell them about some of the places we've found and enjoyed in the West Seattle/Alki area in the past couple of years.

Saturday Julia and I stopped for a yummy bagel breakfast (bagels and lox definitely being one of my favorites), then stopped at a couple of houses on a "edibile garden" tour of West Seattle. I'm not a huge gardening person (Julia is), but it was really interesting. I loved seeing the gardens and yards of the people involved. One has had chickens and its own beehive and another had a beautiful trellis they'd made to support a giant rosebush and some other climbing plants. I wish we could have gone to more of the places on the tour, but we had to pick up Shana since we'd promised to show her the new house.

Around noon or so (after picking up Shana) we got to the new house and found that the workers were there slaving away. All of the hardwood was down and covered with cardboard in order to protect it. We could still see enough of it to know we'd made the right choice on the color. The guys working were busy installing the carpet in the living room, up the stairs, and in the bonus room. Again, the carpet looks great. It's so strange that we'll be moving in there within the month. Julia's started some packing, but we haven't done much to prepare so far. Most of our things are already packed away from when we emptied the house in order to stage it for selling, so I don't think it will take us long to get everything that's left packed away. But I could be wrong.

After checking out the house we decided to go with Shana to see Wall*e. It was pretty and well-made, but it didn't really do much for me or Julia. The one thing that kept running through my mind was how you write a story like that. I mean, a script that's going to play out on-screen. There was a lot of action and movement with very little dialogue. I can only imagine the script was incribly long and detailed -- and very unlike a typical movie script. As for the movie, I'm sure I won't be seeing it again. I'm sure a lot of people will love it, I wasn't one of them.

After our late lunch at a scary Denny's we drove around South Seattle to try and find a house we'd looked at buying last year. We've joked over the last year about how screwed we'd have been if we'd bought it. Well, we were happy to find that someone who had extra money or who was very handy had bought the place and fixed it up really nicely. (Oh, we would have been so screwed if we'd bought it!)

In the same neighborhood we found a woman who sells flowers out of her house. We found the place pretty much at random and ended up buying five plants of varying sizes for a paltry $14. The owner was a cute Asian lady who was really sweet. I'm sure we'll be back there soon. Probably next weekend.

For my birthday evening we watched Juno. We enjoyed that and were surprised by where the story went, so that was nice.

And unless I'm forgetting something important, that was pretty much my birthday. It was a nice, relaxing day and I really enjoyed it.

Sunday we did some more errands, drove by the house Shane and Cathy put a bid in on, bought comics, picked up more stuff to sell on ebay, worked in the garden, and went to Julia's parents' for a cookout birthday dinner. A good time was had by all.

More soon.