Sunday, December 14, 2008

The frostbitten slopes of doom mountain (or Seattle in winter)

Natasha:
On Monday, I was hired officially, thereby dissolving my "temp" status. This coincided with more money and benefits!, In which I have enrolled promptly and am soon to be able to utilize them. Yay dental cleaning! It will be almost a whole year when I finally get an appointment. Also this week was my final French class. I will not be going next semester, as Grayson has elected to utilize the budget in order to take Ancient Greek, to prepare for graduate school. I enjoyed the class, and made friends, and have a good start on French for travel, and for eventually learning it better if I want to use it academically. Yay French! It was fun, but hard to balance with 40 hours of work. It's amazing how little energy I have after sitting on my butt for 8 hours.

Saturday we went to Bellevue for our final three Christmas presents. Bellevue is crazy: in one block, nay on one STREET on the length of one block there is a McCormick's, Cheesecake Factory, P. F. Chang's and the mall, which has Nordstrom's, Crate and Barrell, Thomasville and The Container Store just in view on this street. I am also told that the mall "snows" every night during the season before Christmas. We missed that lil chestnut. The movie theater there is pretty swank, too. They have like twenty screens that are all huge, and the seats are these huge, cushy, faux leathery things that rock and feel like thrones. We went to see "Milk." Tickets were TEN DOLLARS. I remember when ten dollars could buy... ah, whatever. The movie was good, though.

Grayson:
It snowed most of Saturday, and actually managed to stick to the ground. This is the first time it's ever snowed in Seattle while we've been here. A view from our apartment window:

The snow was still around Sunday as we trekked through Wallingford. We needed to get a few last xmas gifts, and to check out this place called Kidd Valley, a burger chain confined to western Washington. Mostly standard fare, except for...sweet potato fries!

Hard to tell from the picture, but they are much darker in color than regular fries. They don't taste too different, but you can certainly detect that extra sweetness in them. Highly recommended, if you ever come here.

Finally, it is imperative that you see our glorious monument to xmas tradition, the fiber optic spectral colored celebration tower (i.e. xmas tree):


Again, hard to see from the picture, but it has acquired the standard ornament-per-year. The star on the top is supposed to glow or something, but its energy source has failed over the years. This year's ornament is a Hello Kitty Lucky Cat from our good friends at SANRIO CO., LTD.

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