RSS Feed

January, 2009

  1. Weekend Update

    January 28, 2009 by Katie

    The weather this past weekend was a bit of a schizophrenic, with a sunny and warm(ish) day on Saturday and snow on Sunday.  Todd wanted to go for a walk on Saturday, so I happily agreed.  What was mainly intended to be a stroll to get coffee, ended up being a 5 mile afternoon walk for us.  

    We got our coffee and decided to walk down to Belltown, stopped by our jeweler to get my rings polished, and I suggested we continue on to one of my favorite Seattle spots— Olympic Sculpture Park.  It’s my favorite place to go for a long run and enjoy the beautiful scenery right along the Puget Sound.  It’s actually 3 parks, totaling about 2 miles in length, but I just refer to the whole thing as OSP.  

    It was wonderful to just enjoy the beautiful day, talk about our weeks, and not have any agenda to adhere to.

           osppath

              shoreimg_0156

           katierocks

     

    Sunday we enjoyed dinner at Blue C Sushi with our friends Chris and Laurie, and their 3 month old son, Riker.  Blue C serves its food ‘Kaiten style’, in which your sushi and non-sushi choices circle the room on a stainless steel conveyor belt.  You grab whichever plates you want, whenever you want, and pay $1.50-$5.25 according to the color of the plate.

    drive by sushiMr. Ryumminess

    Even though only 2 of us enjoy sushi, it was a fun evening and Todd said he actually liked eating there. Maybe it was watching the food drive by, or pushing the blue call button, or the fact that little Riker took a deep liking to Todd and wouldn’t stop smiling at him the entire drive home.  I like to think that Todd formed two new friendships that night— Riker and Blue C Sushi.

    Category General | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Just a bloke from a car show

    January 27, 2009 by Todd

    Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a big Top Gear fanatic. So when a friend of ours gave us an Amazon gift certificate, I knew exactly what I would be spending my share on — Richard Hammond’s semi-auto-biography. I say semi-auto-biography, because half of the book was written by his wife. Hammond is one third of the trio on Top Gear, and a couple of years ago he had a major accident while filming a piece for the show. He was driving a jet-engine powered car when a tire blew out at about 290mph. It consequently veered off of the race track, flipped, rolled, and dug the roll cage (and his head) into the ground.

    Richard Hammond : On the Edge

    The book is a story mostly about the aftermath of that day. He had a massive brain injury due to the wreck, and the book details his life afterwards. This is where his wife comes in — obviously he can’t detail what exactly happened after the wreck or much of the next couple of months, so his wife recalls the experience. I won’t go into too much of the story, but I found it to be an interesting and easy read — it’s only about 300 pages and decently sized font (and pictures, too). If you’re interested, you can probably find it at your local book store or here on Amazon.com.

    And to finish up, here’s a link to a (partially funny) commercial for his book : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ChupoaIqsg

    Category General | Tags: | 1 Comment

  3. Bittersweet Day

    January 25, 2009 by Todd

    Just a quick little note to say that, yes, I am still employed. Microsoft announced on Thursday that they would be eliminating 5,000 jobs over the next year and a half, including 1,400 jobs on Thursday (full press release here). I’ve heard that about 700 of them would be at the Puget Sound campus—which is mostly Redmond–which, I think staffs about 35,000-45,000 people. How many of these other 3,600 positions will be due to attrition, reduced hiring, or by other means is unknown.

    Thursday morning I woke up and read a flurry of e-mails from some of the executives in the company, including Ray Ozzie, talking about the downsizing. Ray Ozzie is Bill Gates’ replacement in the role of “Chief Software Architect” at Microsoft, and he’s the guy who started the group that I joined just a few months ago. If you’re interested, there’s an article about him that was in the December issue of Wired – you can skim it online here. It talks a little bit about Live Mesh (the product I work on). In Ozzie’s e-mail, he reiterated that there would be cuts across the company, including his division (of which I am a part of). This, of course, got my heart pounding a little faster than normal.

    However, the next e-mail that I got put all fears and doubts aside; it was from our “Dev Manager” – my boss’s boss – saying that there would be no cuts in our team and that we are the right size in the eyes of the executives. So that was wonderful news.

    However, I also know some of the few that weren’t so lucky. The team that I had moved from had about a third of them laid off. This made the day bittersweet – they were part of my family at Microsoft, as I had worked with many of them since I started. I wish them the best of luck in all that they do and pray for all the unemployed that the economy gets better soon and they can find jobs.

    I certainly feel blessed that I still have my job and can continue to support our family.

    Category General | Tags: | No Comments

  4. Nuts & Bolts

    January 19, 2009 by Katie

    While Todd spent Friday evening and Saturday morning over in Redmond playing video games and frisbee golf with friends, I was busy with some projects at home.

    Since we both lived separately in small apartments, neither of us had a table to contribute to our place when we got married. We made due with just eating meals on the couch, using the coffee table for our dining table. Somehow we got used to it, but it’s not something I wanted to continue doing for too long. It hurt my back, got food on the couch, and I particularly disliked it when we had guests over and they were forced to dine ‘Harris Style’.

    So Friday when I dropped off a friend at the airport, I stopped by IKEA on the way home to do some browsing. Honestly, I just went there to browse!

    Well, I had access to an SUV (not our ’2-seater, no trunk space’ car), and I ended up coming home with this:

    IKEA goodies

    I spent the good part of Friday evening putting together a table and 2 chairs. IKEA does a great job of making their products easy to assemble, but only having a manual screwdriver made the task very time-consuming and painful for my wrists.

    For fear of becoming too manly (and needing some relief from the frustration of manual assembly), I kept my feminism in check and baked a delicious homemade loaf of banana nut bread.  yummy.
    MMMM!goodness

    Thankfully, Ryan let us borrow his cordless screwdriver yesterday so I could finish up tightening the screws and making sure we didn’t have a catastrophe in the middle of dinner.
    ms. handywomanmy handiworklil' BJURSTA tabletable expanded

    It’s a little 2-person table that has hidden sleeves that pull out to extend the table to a 4-person seating. I wasn’t sure if it would work—it has some weird contraptions going on underneath—but so far, it’s been good to us and will suffice until we move someplace big enough for a ‘real’ dining table. 

    I realize it may seem odd that we don’t own any power tools*, but when you live in apartments, it’s highly recommended not to screw things into your walls, etc., otherwise you’ll have to pay for the repairs. We’ve just never needed anything more than a hammer, some nails, and a screwdriver.

    *Todd probably would appreciate it if I mentioned that he owns lots of tools. It’s just that they’re for cars, not building things for the home:)

    Category General | Tags: | 3 Comments

  5. Budding Opera Fans

    January 16, 2009 by Katie

    Our friend Aubrey works for the Seattle Opera and frequently invites us to events for BRAVO Club—the arts organization for Opera patrons under the age of 39. We’re not currently patrons, but I feel like we might as well be. We fully support their parties.

    Last night’s event was a silent auction at the Arctic Club Hotel, a beautiful historic 1900 hotel downtown. I’ve decided that I want to take Todd there someday for a little romantic ‘getaway’. Perhaps for an anniversary of sorts. Speaking of, our anniversary of getting engaged is approaching. But I digress….

    There were delicious hors d’oeuvres, complimentary wine (to help boost peoples’ bidding confidence, i think), a vocal performance by one of the young opera artists, and a dance party to finish out the evening.

    We placed bids on a McCormick & Schmicks gift certificate, 2 hours of dance lessons, and an Xbox game giftpack.  Guess which one we ended up winning.  

    Being amongst a group of people who probably don’t even own video game systems, we were the only bidders of the Xbox games.  But we still won, so I felt like that was a victory. Plus, our donation helped out the Seattle Young Opera Artists Program.

    We didn’t get to hang out with Aubrey much since she was working, but our friends Ryan and Shauna attended also, so we all had a great time. And Ryan won a tour of a Seattle firehouse and fireboat for 15 people, so we’re looking forward to enjoying that excursion someday (although we’re pretty sure it was intended to be used for a child’s birthday party).

    Pictures from my iphone, in the beautiful Northern Lights Domeroom. Thanks, Aubrey, we had a blast!

    enjoying the opera performance Northern Lights Dome Roomopera fans bluri'm hungrytodd & ryan

    Category General | Tags: | No Comments

Older Entries