Established in Seattle

Quickly coming up on week two in Seattle now. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that happened since the last post. We're both looking for work, and when my fiancé and I aren't searching the internet for employment, we're combing through thrift stores for things to replace what we left in Wisconsin. Our apartment now has most of the furniture we want, excepting a couple chairs and things that will have to wait until I have a job so that I can pay for materials to build them. Our neighbors are going to think we're building a doomsday device with all the crap I'm planning on doing. It's mostly just shelves, but they might secretly be DOOM SHELVES!

I'm particularly proud of our new sleeper sofa. It's not really interesting or even good looking, there are even a couple of light stains here and there, so it's not the thing itself I'm proud of. My pride resides in how all it's bajillion pounds got into the apartment from 4 miles away and up three flights of stairs. We found it cheap on craigslist, and we also found a guy that hires truck drivers in major U.S. cities to do furniture delivery for cheap as well. Cheap-cheap. It's called Craig's truck and is actually based in Seattle, so I got to meet the owner when he picked me up so I could help him lift the sofa into his truck. He's a bit of mixed bag, and I'm not sure who was more foolish: me for getting into a stranger's van or the stranger who let me get into it. After a conversation that included everything from Christian rap music to the Seattle couch-trade, I determined that we both had definitely made better decisions in our lives, but were both safe acquaintances.

And now we have a couch.

Otherwise...we celebrated pi day a few days ago by making pie. Next year, I think we'll have to only eat food that is circular or has pi in it. Double points for foods like pizza and tillapia (that's been cut into a circle).

Next up: Things to do with the upcoming trip to NCUR.

Post about moving in I meant to do roughly forever ago.

I'm in Seattle now.

The preparation for the trip out here and the trip itself were great ways to wrap in tarp/bury in concrete whatever time my Fiance and I had. Even though we spread the trip out over five days (it was only supposed to be four, more on that later), the stress from it was enough to shrink my appetite and the number of hours I normally sleep in half. It probably would have been easier if we had more than a month prior to get everything packed and shipped out, and it definitely would have been easier if both of us hadn't participated in the River Falls Community Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing. My soon to be wife was cast as Lenora, a female equivalent to Leonato. I'm engaged, by the way. Been that way for a little more than a year now. She did great, despite the gender-bending and other circumstances of the show. As if moving half-way across the country weren't bad enough, the play was more than a bit of a circus. I won't linger on it, but just to give you an idea, the initial actor playing Verges showed up to all of three rehearsals and was generally useless while he was there. I ended up being re-cast for the part a week before the first show. With the exception of a few high school theatre classes, it was my first time really acting on stage. Hopefully I broke a few legs.

Along with the shortage of time, the weather was very problematic. Wisconsin, in addition to surprisingly large political unrest, was recently hit by some nasty blizzards. This made visiting friends and family before we left difficult. We really weren't keen on crashing into a snowdrift immediately before driving it to Seattle. We did manage to see the majority of people we wanted to see, although not all of them. We'll soon be back in Wisconsin for the wedding and a few other things, so hopefully we'll catch up with them then. Thankfully, we'll get to take the train back. While it won't be as bad in the summer, driving through the mountains is a real challenge during the winter, particularly through Idaho. On the outside, it just looks like funky shaped state full of potatoes. Do not be fooled, as it's primary export is actually death. Idaho is like the Ninja of the United States. It's deceivingly small section of I-90 is dangerously graded and normally racing with semis and secretly-aspiring nascar drivers. We decided that it was bad enough without being covered in snow and ice and so spent another night in our hotel waiting for I-90 to become less terrifying.

P.S.

For some reason, I was also unable or forgot to return almost any of our friends' and family members' possessions that we've borrowed. The right thing to do would be to mail it to them, but that seems counterproductive. I'm sorely tempted to create just one more incentive for people to come visit us.