Seattle

It's been a while, and I actually have been pretty busy. I had some fun visitors a couple weeks ago--Mona, Brian & Patrick came up to visit. Brian had a meeting up in the Boston area, and Mona & Patrick decided to join him at the end and to spend more time checking out Boston. Luckily, I was able to catch up with them and they came and spent a couple days with me.

They had spent a day out exploring on their own, but unfortunately for them, it was a soggy day. I was able to catch up with them at about 4 p.m., and picked them up at the airport when they dropped their rental off. I do have to tell you my one unfortunate story of the weekend. As some of you know, my trunk lid broke a few years ago, but I'm too cheap to pay the $600 to fix it, so it doesn't stay up by itself anymore. As I mentioned before, it had been raining, so while we were messing around with the trunk at one point, I lost my grip on the slick trunk, and it whacked me right on the nose. I didn't break my nose, but I really banged it up! I had a huge headache for about 4 days, unfortunately I'm sure it didn't make me as perky as I could have been during their visit.

The first whole day that we had, we drove over to Newport, RI. We checked out the mansions, which is always fun....living precariously through the lives of others. I thought they may like the cliff walk, but I quickly discovered that Patrick wasn't really a big fan of walking no matter how beautiful the view. After checking out a couple of the mansions, we walked down town and checked out the shopping. By the end of the day, my dogs were barking!!!

The next day, we headed into Boston. We started our visit by hanging out at Fanieul Hall, which I always have a blast doing. We walked through Quincy Market, which is a big food market, basically, and we decided after looking things over that it really was time for lunch, so we ate to our little hearts (and my big old tummy's) content!! Then Mona had heard of this exhibit called 5!Wits. We decided to take the T over to the Fenway Park area where this is, but the T is under repair and it dropped us off before the stop, so we had to walk the extra distance; unfortunately, we didn't know that and had gotten the directions to 5!Wits from the last stop, so we were a bit lost. It took us some time to figure out how to get there, but luckily, Brian finally led us to the right location. It's an Egyptian Pyramid interactive adventure where you have to figure out how to go through all the chambers of the pyramids and find the pharaoh before time (45 minutes) runs out. It's a kid's adventure, but done really well. Patrick (and I think everyone) had a great time! By then, it was time to head over and drop everyone off at the airport, then I went home and recovered...my feet were beyond barking by the end of Sunday. Whew, they wore me out! :)

The following weekend, I did something I never expected to ever do. I wrote a mystery. Shari wrote me asking me to help her put together a mystery party for Lydia's 10th birthday. Now, I've never written a story, I know practically zilch about 10 year olds, and I've never been to a mystery party, but Shari sent me such a flattering email that I just couldn't say no. So I did a little bit of research to figure out how to write one of these and to pull together a story. Shari had told me that Lydia really likes High School Musical (HSM) 1 & 2, but I hadn't even heard about them, let alone seen them! Luckily, I went online to look up what the heck that was, and found that HSM was premiering Friday night on the Disney Channel, so I grabbed a pen and paper and turn on the television to figure this whole thing out. Beyond it being a bit young for me, it wasn't too bad, and I was able to come up with a good story line. I then spent the rest of Friday night and a good portion of Saturday trying to figure out how to write the darn thing. It actually came out OK, if I do say so myself. I can't say that anyone would actually pay for the story and clues I came up with, but since it was free, I figured it was FABULOUS! ;-) Since it was for 10 year olds, I figured any little glitches or holes in the story probably wouldn't be THAT big of a deal and a hunt is always fun!

Then on Monday, I had to fly down to Washington, D.C. to do an executive onboarding for one of the new executives we just hired. Just as I was getting ready to leave to return home, I received an email that one of my teammates had very unexpectedly passed away over the weekend. It came as a HUGE shock. Scott was such a great guy--and he had a fairly young family--his kids range in age from 12 - 20 years old. He and his wife had left Saturday on a much anticipated vacation that he was just so excited about, and he passed away on Sunday evening right after dinner. For me, this has served as an important reminder that we have to make sure that we don't take anything for granted.

On Tuesday, I received an email from Microsoft inviting me to fly up to Seattle for an in-person interview. I was pretty sure that I have no interest in living in the Pacific Northwest where they're known for their rain, and this week wasn't the best week to take off, but in light of Scott's death, I figured to take the bull by the horns. I have always wanted to visit Seattle; it's been a dream for a long time, and this was the opportunity I was given to get up and check it out.

The week was hectic, but I hopped on a plane Friday after work and headed up to Seattle. Microsoft had arranged for me to meet with a relocation specialist to show me the area, but I waited until about 10 a.m. on Saturday and still hadn't heard from them to give me a time to meet, so I called them and let them know that I was going to explore the town myself. I went to down town Seattle. It wasn't exactly as I expected--it was actually kind of a scary place...LOTS of homeless people there.

I did a tour of the Underground Seattle, which was actually done in a very humorous way. Apparently Seattle use to be built at exactly sea level. This wasn't such a bad thing until they installed plumbing. They set up a system that was based on the tide. When the tide went out, all the sewage washed out. Unfortunately, when the tide came back in...so did the sewage! Ugh! Then in the 1880's, the 30-block downtown area burned to the ground. While not a single life was lost in the fire, the entire commercial district was wiped out. They decided to rebuild a bit higher in order to solve some of their earlier sewage issues. They first started rebuilding the buildings where they had been prior to the fire (but in brick vs. woodd), but they wanted to raise the streets up one floor so that they could put in a workable sewage system, so they built what basically turned into a 2-level city--the first level with wooden sidewalks and dirt streets and then the raised streets and sidewalks that we use today. It took 12 years to build the higher street/sidewalk system, then they actually utilized the 2 level city for quite a number of years. Unfortunately, they had an outbreak of the plague in the underground due to a rat infestation down there, and wound up sealing the first level up to get rid of the rats, and that remained closed up until the 1960's when there was a preservation movement. They've cleaned up a lot of the areas and much of it is used for storage. It really is quite cool. I could see them eventually reopening all of the first level areas as shopping because space is becoming a premium in the city, and I think they'll eventually get to using that area to a higher degree than they are doing right now.

After that, I walked down to the Pike's Place Central Market, which is the place of the world-famous Pike's Place Fish Market. I was able to watch them toss the fish around and do their famous chanting of orders. It was fun to finally see it after reading the books and seeing the videos they have on positive work environments.

After that, I went up to the famous Space Needle. Although I told Steve that I went up to the very tippy top of the Space Needle, I have to confess that that isn't quite true. I only went as far as the elevator would take me, which is about 520' above the ground. You get a nice 360 degree view of Seattle, but I didn't make it up to stand on the point of the needle. I'm much too lazy to scale up the extra couple hundred feet on that slick roofing--I'm not afraid to admit to that. Afterwards, I walked around underneath the Needle. They actually have quite a complex going there--the Science Museum, a Science Fiction Museum, an interactive Music Museum, a fun park, and a lot of other things.

I was getting tired by then, so I went to dinner then decided to go see the LDS Temple. It was very pretty with Nauvoo-like statues all over the gardens--all bronze statues of different family scenes. I decided to go in and check out the inside as well. It was the first temple I've ever been in that didn't have beautiful grand staircases leading between the floors. Instead, they had these skinny, functional escalators back in the corners between the floors. It certainly wasn't as beautiful, but it some how gave me the feeling of floating up to heaven, so I thought that was pretty cool...especially since you had to go up 4 flights to do a session...I was pretty thankful for the escalators by the time I reached the top! :)

Then Sunday, I decided to go to church to check things out in case Microsoft makes me an offer I can't refuse. There are actually 7 wards that are in the town I'm staying in -- Bellevue, WA. I was shocked that there were that many Mormons up here, but that was a good sign in my opinion. I asked a woman at church about a mid-singles ward (meaning 30 - 50 year olds), and she said it had been disbanded about a year or two ago, but that there are lots of mid-singles in the area and that they are pretty active in doing things. She was very encouraging. She appeared to be in her 50's and told me that she had just gotten married a couple years ago, so she kept whispering words of advice to me throughout the meeting. I thought it was quite funny. Apparently she met her husband online, so she was a big proponent of online dating. I had to laugh at all of her unsolicited words of wisdom! People get soooo concerned about telling me how to find a man.

After that, the relocation specialist finally caught up with me. I had hoped the tour would be quick since I don't really plan on moving up here--kind of like the timeshare presentation when you take one of those vacations and you have to spend 90 minutes getting the hard sell. Unfortunately, it wasn't a quick tour. It took over 3 hours!! She showed me several homes, which I thought was weird since was hadn't talked about what I wanted at all, but it was interesting seeing some of the different communities around here.

It's very hilly here....some of the hills have a 45 percent grade!!! Talk about STEEP!! I thought I was back in San Francisco! There are TONS of trees and it's very green here. It also was cloudy and rainy about 85% of the time I was there. The sun did peek out every now and then, but it was never for long. There are LOTS of lakes, and of course Puget Sound, so water life is big here. If I was an outdoorsy person and didn't mind doing all my outdoorsy stuff in the rain, this place would be perfect for me. Unfortunately, I tend to get depressed in the cloudy, rainy weather. Not sure I want to be depressed 85% of the time! I would, however, like some more time to check out a few more things here in Seattle.

Well, the interviews went fairly smoothly on Monday. I was warned by the recruiter that Microsoft often ends the interview process at the mid point if they figure you may not be a fit. I was kind of hoping that I would be one of those people since I'm not really interested in moving to Seattle, so that I would have more time to go out and explore. Unfortunately, that was not my fate. I wound up doing all 6 interviews. At the end of the 3rd interview, they had a "heart to heart" with me to let me know that I was being "too verbose" during my interviews. Although we spent at least half of each of the interviews talking about the other individual plus answering questions I came up with, I was apparently spending too much of my job interviews talking about me. So, in the last couple interviews, I really tightened up the answers I gave, but the interviewers wound up looking at me like "is that all you're going to say?". I just couldn't seem to strike the right balance for these interviewers. I just had laugh!!

Even though I didn't get out of my interviews until 4 p.m., I still had plenty of time to go back into downtown Seattle to do some more exploring. I was able to get into a couple of museums near the Space Needle that I had seen on Saturday. I went to something called the "Experience Music Project" that gives the history on rock/popular music. They had a really cool special display on Disney music that I really liked and how music really changed Disney cartoons and films. There was a 60' tall tree made out of guitars which was something quite spectacular to see. But the thing I had the most fun at was the music studio. It was an interactive area where you could learn to play all different kinds of band instruments, and you can even make and purchase recordings of the music you create. I learned to play the drums, an electric guitar and a key board. I really stank at all of it (well, I could do the keyboards), but I don't think I'm going to plan on being in a band as my next career move. I stank so badly that even little kids mocked me...not out loud or anything, but I could see it in their eyes! (Just kidding!)

The other museum that I got to see with that same ticket was the Science Fiction Museum. Now this isn't the museum I would normally choose because I can't say that I have a great affinity for Sci-Fi, but since I had already paid my $15, I was gonna check this out to get my money's worth. It was a total crack up to me. There seemed to be a large contingency of Star Trek fans there--they were definitely excited about the Star Trek displays, which I found highly entertaining. (Sorry, Mom, if my jokes at Trekkies hits too close to home! You know I love ya!) There was a pretty cool display on television/movie sci-fi cities. They showed everything from the Jetson city to the Matrix and several others and explained what they all represented and the way they were designed sent social messages. It was a huge display and it almost felt like you could be in it. I also liked the sci-fi TV/Movie robot displays....everything from Robby from "Lost in Space" to R2-D2 from Star Wars. All of the rest was a bit harder for me to relate to, but I was glad that I went and checked out.

The plane ride was long--not only was it a Red Eye, which I hate, we were delayed about an hour taking off, so we were stuck on that darn plane an extra hour. Then we had a medical emergency on the plane. I was afraid they were going to make an emergency stop to get the woman off the plane, but there was a doctor on the airplane, so he took care of things until we landed in Boston. Of course, then there's always the fear that they DON'T stop for the midpoint and you wind up riding around with a dead person. That would REALLY have freaked me out!! I am not sure if she was having heart or breathing problems, but there was a lot of running around by the stewardesses and the doctor spent quite a bit of time on the phone talking to people on the ground in preparation for landing. Always a little excitement going on. by the time I got home, I had hit the wall, so I took a nap for about 2 hours, then got up and worked from home for the afternoon.

This weekend was great, and I'm glad that I siezed the opportunity to get to do something I always had wanted to do. I'm very sad to lose my friend and co-worker Scott, but I hope that I'll continue to honor his memory by remembering that time is precious and that I need to be more willing to make the most of the time I have and to stop putting off the good things in life. I hope you all go out and make the time to do something you've always wanted to do. Remember that the only things you get to take with you when you leave this life are the relationships and experiences you've taken the time to make while you were here. I hope you make lots of great ones of both--relationships and experiences.