Wests Go West | Nick and Marie's move to Seattle

Museum of History and Industry

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Marie

On Saturday, Nick and I went to the Grand Opening of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI). While MOHAI has been around since 1911, Saturday’s Grand Opening celebrated the museum’s opening at its new South Lake Union location.

MOHAI preserves and presents the history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Artifacts in the first floor atrium include a Boeing B-1 float plane (Boeing’s first commercial plane), Rainier Brewing Company’s iconic red neon “R” sign, a 1923 UPS truck, Lincoln Towing Co.’s original Pink Toe Truck, and one of Ivar’s famous dancing clams. There are also themed tower rooms, one of which focuses on building video games. 🙂

The second floor has a permanent exhibit, “True Northwest: The Seattle Journey,” which has thousands of artifacts and images of the area’s history. Through September, it is also hosting a temporary exhibit, “Celluloid Seattle: A City at the Movies.” The third floor is home to another temporary exhibit, “Punctum/Poetry,” which will feature poetry from local high school students through May. A permanent exhibit, “Waterways to the World” is in the Maritime Gallery on the fourth floor.

It was super busy for the Grand Opening (as was to be expected) and to help celebrate, there were dragon-boat races, boat rides, and tours of The Royal Argosy cruise ship and the historic Arthur Foss tugboat and Virginia V steamship. Nick and I went aboard the Arthur Foss and Virginia V and that may have been the highlight of our day.

Pictures are below. They’re taken with my phone, because Nick and I accidentally left our camera at the cabin on Christmas. Whoops! Click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized images and descriptions.

Categories: Outing, Seattle | Comments Off

Decorating for Christmas

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Marie

Nick and I had fun decorating our new home for the holidays over the weekend. We brought up our boxes of garland, lights, ornaments, and decorations and enjoyed figuring out where to put everything. Now that we have a fireplace, we’ll have to pick up some stocking holders so we can hang our stockings above the fire. We’ll probably want to get a bigger tree for next year, too. Our old apartments just didn’t have the space we have now. 😉

We also had a good time playing with Lego over the weekend. We even built a Lego ornament for our tree, based on an instruction guide I found online.

And yes, that is a Yoda Santa hat on top of our tree. 🙂

Decorated for Christmas

Lego ornament

Categories: Geekery, Townhouse | 2 Comments

Being a Single Vehicle Household

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Nick

Since being together Marie and I have owned 2 cars. In Michigan I don’t think we could have gotten by with just 1 car, even when we were working in the same building. But in 2008 we downsized one of our cars to a Smart Fortwo to help save us money on our 30 mile each way daily shared commute. To date we haven’t regretted having the Smart. Since moving to Seattle we’ve noticed that we really don’t need two cars. I take the bus to work (I have yet to drive to work) and we now live within walking distance of restaurants, a hardware store, a grocery store, and pretty much everything we need. Plus we are active Amazon Prime users (really we order more stuff on Amazon than ever before).

So in this year, 2012, we decided to downsize even more; we sold our Ford Escape with the help of Uncle Peter. We have been a single vehicle household for about 2 months now. Not only are we a single vehicle household but our only car is a 2 seater Smart Car. We still make our Costco trip every other month or so and we still stock up on the same things we used to (it all fits in the Smart, with both of us on board). With the savings from not having to insure a second vehicle, we’ve decided that we can afford to have more stuff shipped to us, but really Amazon prime is covering the vast majority of the shipping cost on just about anything we’d normally run out to get and shove in our SUV. There will undoubtedly be something that Amazon can’t send us and we’ll have to shell out some cash for shipping or delivery, but I doubt it’ll cost us more than insurance for the extra car every year, not to mention maintenance and depreciating value of the vehicle… Overall, we’re very pleased to be a one car house and really I don’t think we could have done it in Michigan.

Categories: Daily Life, Seattle | 1 Comment

Job Update + Zaw Pizza

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Marie

My name badge for the Casual Connect conference I went to in July

Several people have asked me how I’ve been enjoying my new game development job. Well, I really like it and I’ve been learning a ton! 🙂 It’s a small start-up company, so it’s just me and two other developers. It took a while to get used to the new software, tools, and libraries and I’m still learning new things every day. In addition to development, I’m also involved in the design process and it’s been fun offering my input in the games we’re working on. I also like when we get to spend time testing games (getting paid to play games, darn!). 😛 We have a couple of games that should be released shortly, so I’ll be sure to let you guys know when they’re available.

Oh, and one of the neat things about being a game developer I can justify playing video games as “research.” 😉 😀

Nick has been keeping busy in his job, too. He was nominated and recognized for being awesome at a recent annual iSchool retreat. He’s also now on two UW certificate advisory boards. Nick’s been working hard on the new iSchool website, which launches next week. It’ll be a huge improvement over the current website and everyone’s really excited to see it go live.

Last night’s Zaw pizza

Last night, we had pizza from Zaw, a bake-at-home pizza place that uses fresh, local ingredients. We were first introduced to Zaw by Martin (one of Nick’s coworkers) and his wife, Shelly, shortly after we moved to Seattle last year. When Groupon had a 50% off deal the other day, we couldn’t pass it up. We tried a pizza that was half Arugula Patch (prosciutto, cherry tomatoes, basil, parmesan, mozzarella, and arugula) and half Tailgate Feast (bacon, pepperoni, caramelized red onions, parmesan, and mozzarella). Both were really good. 🙂

Sean (a friend of ours) moved to Seattle a couple weeks ago and it’s been fun teaching him all of the quirks about Seattle, along with fun things to see and good places to eat. Most of the major differences relate to traffic: carpool lanes, express lanes, tolls, the bus system, parking, etc., but there are other things like the plastic bag ban and recycling / food & yard waste that he’s been getting used to, too.

What else is new? Nick and I started playing a new game called Guild Wars 2 that I’ve been blogging about on my personal blog. It’s an MMORPG similar to World of Warcraft, but with a lot of improvements. Nick and I have been having fun exploring the world and seeing this new take on the genre.

Categories: Daily Life, Jobs, Restaurant | Comments Off

Working in the Garden

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Marie

The results of 1.5 hours of pruning this morning (with Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man out of You” stuck in my head):

Before pruning (the weird gap where the rocks are is from when I was pruning yesterday)

After pruning

Now I just need to tend to the rest of the garden… 😉

Categories: Daily Life, Gardening | 1 Comment

New Dining Furniture

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Marie

Dining table & chairs

We were asked the other day if we had gotten a dining table yet. Whoops, guess we forgot to blog about that! The dining table we got is perfect for our new home. It is a gateleg table that seats up to 6 people. We usually only keep it opened halfway, which is perfect for just the two of us. When we want it out of the way, it folds down into a pretty compact console table. I love the purple dining chairs we got, too. They’re really comfortable and I don’t think the picture quite does their color justice.

Living room + bar stools

We also (finally!) got some bar stools. It was surprisingly difficult to find some that were bar height (rather than counter height). We visited lots of furniture stores and very few had any stools that were bar height. We narrowed it down to a black bar stool that had a back, but couldn’t swivel and a teal bar stool that didn’t have a back, but could swivel. We went with the teal ones, which look great with our rug.

Categories: Home Improvement, Townhouse | Comments Off

Enjoying our Backyard

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Marie

Nick and I have been taking advantage of the warm weather and our new grill by grilling a few times per week. We tried out a new recipe from “Bite Me: A Stomach-Satisfying, Visually Gratifying, Fresh-Mouthed Cookbook”, which we got as a housewarming gift. The recipe is called Magical Moroccan Chicken and it consists of marinated and grilled chicken with a honeyed-citrus sauce on top. Really yummy! Another new favorite recipe of ours is Pineapple Beef Kabobs, which I found online. It has a sweet, Asian-inspired marinade and the kabobs turn out super flavorful and delicious. And we love the grilled pineapple! It’s definitely one of our favorite meals.

Outdoor Bistro Set

So that we can enjoy our backyard a bit more, we got an outdoor bistro set over the weekend. We had been browsing for small outdoor dining sets for a while and fell in love with this set’s mosaic stone tile tabletop. We like that we can eat outside now and it’s nice to have somewhere to sit when we’re grilling.

We’ve been neglecting the garden lately since we’ve been so busy, but we had some time this weekend to tend to it. Nick and I are both totally new to gardening, so it’s been fun learning about taking care of everything. We want to plant some more herbs, but we’ll have to wait until next year for that.

Categories: Cooking, Daily Life, Home Improvement, Townhouse | 1 Comment

Crumble & Flake

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Marie

Crumble & Flake pasteries

Mom and Amanda stopped by yesterday afternoon with some bakery treats from Crumble & Flake Patisserie in Capitol Hill. They were recently featured in Seattle Magazine and Mom and Amanda had been dying to try them out. They got three different filled-to-order cream puffs (blackberry, chocolate, and coconut), a fig and olive tapenade roll, and kouign amann (a salty, buttery, carmelized, crunchy pastry that’s like a croissant). The kouign amann was unanimously the favorite and apparently Mom and Amanda were lucky to get it; it sells out so quickly that customers swear they don’t make it. 😉 The blackberry cream puff was really good, too. Thanks for the yummy surprise!

Categories: Daily Life, Restaurant, Seattle | 1 Comment

Temperature via Arduino

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Marie

It’s hot in Seattle this weekend with highs in the 90’s. Because of Seattle’s mild climate, most homes here don’t have air conditioning. The weather is generally nice enough that you don’t need a/c or heat most of the year.

On what is likely to be one of the hottest weekends of the year, Nick and I had the brilliant idea to spend our time working on my dad’s website. So we spent today in our computer room, which not only generates tons of heat from our computers, it is also on the top (aka hottest) floor. 😛

At some point, we were wondering just how hot it was in the computer room, but we didn’t have a thermometer to measure the temperature. Nick tried a meat thermometer, but we didn’t think that would be a very reliable source. 😛 Then, Nick remembered that our Arduino kit (which we got a while back, but haven’t used yet) came with a temperature sensor. We ended up building and programming our very own binary display thermometer, pictured below!

For the geeky details, visit my blog post on my other blog, xaben.com! 🙂

Our Arduino binary thermometer (87 degrees!)

P.S. We have other things we’ve been meaning to blog about, too, and we’ll do that soon – promise. 😛

Categories: Daily Life, Geekery, Seattle | Tags: arduino | Comments Off