On Redmond (or, There are Giants in the Land)

Some quick facts on Redmond for you, courtesy of (what else?) Wikipedia. It is a suburb of Seattle located across Lake Washington from the Emerald City. The population is around 46,000, as is the price of the average car. As "the bicycle capital of the Northwest" (and I think that's saying something), Redmond has bike trails all over the city and also has the state's only velodrome (I've just learned recently that a velodrome is a bike racing track with inclined corners like an F1 race track). The East Lake Washington school district had four entries in the 2006 ranking of top high schools in the country, and in Redmond, there is actually an Albert Einstein Elementary School. Doesn't Jimmy Neutron or somebody go to Einstein Elementary? Help me out here, someone. Redmond also has 23 public parks totaling over one thousand acres, including 17 miles of trails for biking, hiking, and horseback riding, which is not bad for the size of its population. You can read the whole article here. The point is, by pretty much all of the common statistical measures of desirability, Redmond is a pretty sweet place to live.

But life isn't run by statistics, not really, so there are things that we're excited about in heading to Redmond and things that are a little less desirable. Obviously, if the pros didn't far outweigh the cons, we wouldn't be going there, job or no job, but we still have to be realistic.

First of all, the crime rate in Redmond is famously low. It's a very safe city, and the legendary status of the Seattle area as an ideal place to raise a family is still pretty accurate. The schools are amazing. The climate, no matter what anyone tells you, is pretty awesome. (Grey a lot, rainy for a portion of the year, paradise most of the time.) All of that sort of general things. As for our place specifically, there are a lot of things that we really like. It's right across the street from Marymoor Park, which is 540 acres of fun. They have a big amphitheater there, the bike track, a free climbing wall, wifi coverage, baseball fields, cricket fields, all of that stuff. Plus, you know, trees and grass and everything. We're also just over a mile from work, and there are bike paths the whole way, so I've posted my car on Craigslist, and the first potential buyer is on the way over tomorrow morning to look at it. We'll keep Kirsten's, but just getting the chance to slim down and simplify by getting rid of one of the cars (and its monthly payment!) is a breath of fresh air. We also live a few hundred feet from a Chipotle, a Whole Foods, and the Brown Bear Car Wash, for whose logo I will unashamedly use the word "cute." Beyond that, ten minutes' drive will get us to anything we need. Groceries, a really nice library, bagels, a cool outdoor mall, etc. Plus the easy proximity to Seattle. So yes, the word is Location. And the public transit is extensive, clean, and cheap. I could go on and on, but it would just be babbling. Redmond is a nice place to live.

At the same time, though, there are drawback or difficulties, both practical and intangible. First of all, like any city that booms pretty suddenly, there's a whole lot of traffic around Redmond. It's a strange city for us, and we don't know how to get around very well or what the best things are to do, and when you add crazy traffic to that, it makes the adjustment that much more difficult. We also know Meghan and Ryan, who are really cool, and no one else. It's not like you usually get a break knowing everyone in a place before you live there, but that's still another thing that will give us a challenge when we get there. Meghan and Ryan are great, but it's not like they're going to be around every minute of the day, so we'll have to make some more new friends.

The bigger issue that we'll have to come to grips with, though, is that Redmond, no matter how you slice it, is a yuppie town. The median income is in the 70's, I think, and there are European luxury cars every time you turn around. New housing boasts "From the low millions!" as a selling point, and apartments commonly go for upwards of two dollars per square foot. It's not that I'm opposed to living with wealth around me, and I'm certainly not jealous. I have a salary that pays our bills and still makes us live on a budget and watch where we spend money, and I'm fine with that. Living in an affluent place brings up a lot of complicated thoughts, though.

I don't want to be a yuppie. If I end up doing well in my job and getting raises and making a nice salary, that's fine, but I don't want to be eaten by my career, either. I'll work 40 or 45 hours a week, maybe 50 in an occasional week when there's a lot that needs to be done, but I refuse to sell my soul. I'll have a family at some point, and I'm not going to abandon them. And after the job, I'm still going to be surrounded by a lot of people who have no grounding whatsoever in reality. (I don't mean all wealthy people. I'm just saying that it's easier to be a snooty rich person when you're rich.) I don't want to be in a position where I never have a chance to touch the lives of people who are needy and troubled and desperate. I believe in vulnerable, authentic community. I believe that anyone who says that they believe in Jesus and all that He lived and taught is either willing to get their hands dirty and be His hands or is delusional. Given the choice, I'd rather live across the street from someone who's desperately trying to get over their addictions and fix their ruined life than someone who's never known a truly difficult life. This all means cultivating a life of attentiveness and diligence. There are needs everywhere, and people that are hurting. It's just a lot easier to ignore them and stay put when "the bubble" is staring you in the face. It's so clear that God worked all of this out, getting us to Washington, giving me the right thing to say in an interview, giving me a great job that pays just enough, giving us a place to live... We're so excited knowing that He has very big reasons for all of that. It will just have to be a daily discipline to walk it out every day and not just say that I believe in it.

Another challenge that comes with living in a boom town is that it will sometimes be difficult for me, personally, to be accepting of everyone. It's an ideal of mine to love everyone, but I'll be honest: I'm too critical a lot of times, especially if I think someone is pretentious or conceited. I know that rich people are just as lonely and in need of real community anyone, but I think I have the tendency to leave that to someone else sometimes. I wish this wasn't a part of who I am, but I'm afraid it is. And really, if the lifestyles of some of the people Jesus encountered didn't lead Him to write them off, where on earth do I get the right to dismiss anyone out of hand? I usually assume the best about anyone, but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's snootiness. That does not give me the right to assume the worst, period. It's easy to vilify anyone that you don't see eye to eye with, but it doesn't make it right. So keep me accountable on this, won't you? I have no idea what it will mean, practically, to keep me accountable, but I'll let you all brainstorm.

At the end of the day, the question has to arise: "Kent, you used to be so punk rock. You used to stick it to the man at every opportunity. You were an archetype of the modern revolutionary. And now this?" (There may be variations.) Don't think it hasn't played across my mind like a Vegas marquee ever since I first entertained the thought of moving out here. Why live where there's traffic? Why work for The Man as just another workforce sheep? Why live in such a complicated place? Why not just keep it simple, be free from corporate monsters, and run a bakery or something? Or, worst of all, why not be a writer like you always wanted to be? Well, I can't say I have the conclusive and comprehensive answer for all of that. I can say, and call it a cop-out if you want, that I have prayed my way here and believe with all of my heart that God has taken us exactly where we're supposed to be. I can tell you that I still want to be a writer, and I still will be. I can also tell you that while it's easy to champion folks who find a creative way to start a family and break free of all that modern culture dictates at the same time, that doesn't make their actions morally superior. When I was 16, I wouldn't have listened to what I'm saying now, and I can tell you that my heart wants to explore its angst over growing up and see what's valid instead of just dropping the issue altogether. Most of all, I guess I can say that it's not all fun and roses, and it's not easy in some ways, but that I don't regret taking the steps that have brought me here. It's just something new, and just like any other time of my life, I have to decide every day to make the most of it and leave a trail of improvements in every area I touch. I guess in that sense, it's no new challenge at all. I'll do my best to keep you informed along the way.

Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry for the length. I'll get some more pictures soon, and more great reporting. Stay tuned.

Kent

...and the food was fun, too.

Preface

You should go to Redmond some time. It's pretty nice. And you can come and visit us there, because we're moving. Soon.

I

My interview was yesterday at one in the afternoon. After some communication with the hiring and managing people for this job, we set up the interview time, and I started studying. I read about SQL. I read about XML. I read about Microsoft, and about Siemens, and about Xbox, and about Redmond. Since it takes about two hours to drive to Redmond, and traffic, sometimes unpredictably, can be horrendous beyond words, we left just after 9 yesterday morning. What we planned on doing was to drive to the office where I was interviewing so we'd know exactly where it is, then call our friend Meghan and hang out until the interview. The directions were good, and we found the office, then caught up with Meghan. She and Kirsten dropped me off at the office and went to hang out. I called Mike, the contact between me and the two people I was interviewing with, and during the ten minutes he took to get down to the lobby, I got over my jitters. I had been pretty quiet and reflective all morning, kind of going over my thoughts in my mind as Kirsten quizzed me on the way over. Mike took me up to the third floor to the Xbox conference room, and there were two pretty friendly guys in there ready to ask me some questions and hear what I had to say. And I left my quiet, pensive self downstairs and gave them all of the energy and passion and enthusiasm they could have wanted. I was so happy with the way the whole interview went. I was able to take my time to think clearly, and they asked some things that I had prepared for. Ultimately, these guys are smart enough to know if I'm not the person for the job, no matter what kind of answers I feed them. If I'm good for a job but not this one, they could figure it out. So in that sense, the pressure is a little smaller. So I told them about how I'm a very curious person* and how much I'd love to work there. I wish I could remember some of the specifics, but I really don't. Not any of the interesting stuff, anyway. About 40 minutes after I started the interview, we were shaking hands and telling each other how much we enjoyed meeting each other, and then Mike took me back downstairs to the front door. We talked a little on the way out, and he told me that he thought I'd done well and that he would let me know by the end of the day. (Wow!) This was a good sign in my mind. First of all, if I'd completely blown it, I'd probably have some idea myself, for one thing, but he'd also run it all by the other guys as well. Secondly, if they had a lot more people to talk to still or hadn't eliminated some of the previous interviewees, it would take longer than three hours as well. So it sounded positive. Well, sure enough, thirty minutes after my interview ended, my phone rang. It was Mike. He asked how I felt like the interview went and then offered me the job. All of the paperwork, salary negotiation, etc. is still getting moved along, but once we get through all of that, it looks like I finally have a job! It's so exciting. They'd like for me to start at the beginning of this coming week, but we have to find a place to live first, and then move there, so it may be more like a week from now. Either way, we're on our way across the water to Redmond!

II

I've already been asked a couple of times what I'll be doing exactly. I don't know every single detail of the day-to-day job just yet, but I do have the fortunate position of having a job I can actually explain, unlike a lot of the people in Redmond. First of all, it needs to be said that I'm working at the world headquarters of Xbox. If that's not cool, I don't know what is. The people who run all of the operations of Xbox Live and manage all of the data going back and forth are all really brilliant, and they're great at what they do, but the issue that they have to deal with is that all of this great knowledge is sitting inside people's heads. This makes things difficult sometimes, so I will be working with all of these brilliant computer nerd types to get all of the information from their heads into some kind of deliverable format, either on the Web or in print. They need to have troubleshooting steps documented, installation or update processes recorded, etc., so that's what I'll be doing. I'm excited, because it means that I will always have something more to learn, something to do, some area of technology that I get to come up to speed on straight from the mouth of an expert. One of the questions they asked in the interview was why I wanted to leave my job teaching. I told them that I didn't. Technical writing, to me, is teaching. I get to take ideas straight from the source and help to share them with someone else in a form that will help them understand. Ideas are just waiting to fly around, get shared, and make things happen, and I get to facilitate all of that exchange. I can't wait to get started. I imagine I probably can't take a bunch of pictures, but I'll make sure to report on as much as I can to give you an idea of what the place is like.

III

We have friends in Redmond (Meghan and her husband Ryan), so we joined them at the end of the day for a little celebratory dinner at a place called Trader Vic's. It's a little fancy, but it's one of the many, many places around the area where Ryan gets a discount for working for Microsoft, so we got to enjoy it. I asked our server whether I should get the Phad Thai or the Lamb Curry, and he said they're both good but that the lamb curry is "funner" because there were things I could add to the dish myself. OK. I went for it, and it was the coolest meal EVER!! It was indeed funner. The lamb curry stew was in a plate with a rim, and there was another dish that fit around the edge of it and had several little sections for various toppings/accoutrements, some of which made sense and some of which were a little more unlikely (but still tasty). There were also raisins, which are the worst thing in the world. The WORST. I ignored them and went with the other things. It was fantastic. A little of this here, a few more sunflower seeds there, maybe an additional flake of coconut on that spoonful... Every bite was customized. Fantastic. I didn't get a photo of the meal, so I drew this version once we got home. I've preserved all of the intricate details the best I was able, but it should be noted that both the stew and the chutney looked a good deal less amoeboid than my drawing. Click to zoom. For, you know, detail.

IV

So now we're on the hunt for a place to live in Redmond. It's like hunting for a job, except that you apply to give someone a ton of money instead of applying for them to pay you. There are all kinds of nice places around Redmond, but it can be pretty pricey, so we have to weigh our options before we jump into something. They'd like me to start working on Monday, but it may be a few days after that before we can get settled. Wherever we end up, I'll make sure to give you pictures and a full report. We're really excited, and the way everything has come together, it's really clear to us that God has brought us here and has things for us to do in Redmond. It will be great to see how it all happens. When I have a chance to sit down and put it all down, I have a lot of thoughts about Redmond and the new culture we're jumping into. Some happy, some apprehensive. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading!


* - I gave them my spleen story:
I am addicted to Wikipedia. Not in a spend-tons-of-time-daily sense. Just in the sense that if I don't know a particular fact, I am all over Wikipedia like trucks on highways. So when Kirsten and I were engaged and I wondered aloud one day exactly what a spleen does, Kirsten had to slow me down and have me rein in my curiosity, almost on a dare. I asked her when I could check, and she said, "After we're married." That was about four months away, so I just stuck the question in the to-do stack of my mind and got on with my life. Skip forward a few months. Kirsten and I stumbled into our new home after traveling a full day or so home from Prague, I set my bags down, got a drink of water, took out my computer, and looked up "spleen" on Wikipedia. I imagine I slept better that night than I had for months.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

To my left, the "Ascot Opening Day" scene from My Fair Lady is playing, and it's as priceless as ever. If you have never seen this movie, see it. Immediately. Even if you're the sort of person who doesn't like musicals. If you are the sort of person who doesn't like musicals, there are a couple of songs you'll want to skip ("On the Street Where You Live," anyone?), but on the whole, you'll still find something to love at least three times a minute through the entire excessive duration of the movie. Promise.

Anyway. Kirsten's mom gave us Mariners tickets for the game today vs. the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, so we took the ferry over and walked to Safeco Field. We discovered on the way over that it was LUNCHBOX DAY (!) for children 14 and under. Or, in Kirsten's case, for children at heart who smile largely and say "Hello!!" to the high school kid who's working at the gate and thinks they're cute. I think I may use the lunch box at work in the future. It's a nice souvenir. Kirsten likes it too.
We were on the top deck on the third base line, and it was nice view of things. It looked like this:
We were sitting just a couple of rows in front of a boy named Gus, who had the privilege -and I don't know just how he got it- of stealing second base during the seventh inning stretch. There was a corporate sponsor for it, of course, and he got to run out of the break in the outfield wall, charge down to second base, pull it out of the dirt, and bring it back to his seat as a souvenir. I never played baseball as a kid, and I've never really been a big fan myself, but this made me wish I could go back and fix things because... Well, gosh, second base!

Jock: I totally caught this foul ball!
Ten-year-old Gus: I stole second base.
Jock: I'm ashamed of my arrogance.

The scoring started in the third inning with a home run by Tampa Bay. Seattle answered with their own home run in the same inning, and then from there, I don't remember exactly what happened when, but a bunch of bad pitchers from Seattle gave up some nice hits that were handled poorly by fielders of both in- and out- persuasions, and by the end of the afternoon, they dropped the game 9-2.

If you haven't been keeping up with the Mariners (and I haven't, I've just been informed), you know that it's been a tragic season. Three games out of first place, and then they dropped 15 of 17 games and they just can't pull out of the nose dive. (Root, root, root for the home team / if they don't win, it's the same...) But it was still a ton of fun to watch. The stadium's nice, and the crowd likes to cheer, and it's just a cool spectacle. There are also legendary garlic fries. When you eat them, insects and wives keep their distance for weeks, and you have to buy a new toothbrush. It's pretty awesome.
There are also salmon things and fish and chips and clam chowder and clam strips as well as the normal concessions like hot dogs and pizza. It's very Pacific Northwest.

The mascot for the Mariners is the moose, and he wanders around through the whole game giving high fives and posing for photo ops. He also delivers prizes to people whose seats are chosen at random, and someone fairly close to us got the coolest prive ever today: 121 bags of Chee-tos. Incredible. He was picked for the prize over the park PA and the scoreboard, and then, "Let's see what he's won... 121 bags of Chee-tos! Brought to you by another corporate sponsor."
It was a really fun day, and I'd go again. I'm not stepping in line to pay a ton for season tickets, but it would be fun to go back every so often. Especially if we start winning. Come visit us some time, and we'll take you too.

And this is more or less without context, but Kirsten snapped this picture of me when I was looking at the Sound from the Bremerton ferry dock. I'm used to these telescopes costing a quarter, but Washington is cooler than other places, so it's free.

The Onion Strikes Again

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8

Photos

I thought it would be good to show you a few pictures I've taken since we moved here. After all, I've told you how the area is so pretty and everything. I definitely haven't taken pictures of everything pretty, but I'd like to give you a little taste of life up here and the scenery.
A couple of weeks ago, we drove from Port Angeles, where Kirsten's Grandpa lives, 90 minutes or so away, up past the Olympic National Park, past Crescent Lake, to one of Kirsten's favorite spots, Second Beach. (We also passed First Beach, but we stopped before Third Beach. For real.) Crescent Lake is amazingly blue as well as amazingly deep. There's an old story about a couple in the 20's who went from Forks down to Port Angeles (or something like that) and drove on the road that goes a few feet away from the edge of Crescent Lake. They were buying a washing machine. The folks who sold them the washing machine were the last people to see this couple alive. Somewhere between the appliance store and their home on the other side of the lake, they ran off the road and into the lake. And this lake is deep enough, and the sides steep enough, that some divers just recently found the couple, their car, and the washer at the bottom of the lake. I may have botched a small detail or two, but that's more or less the story as we heard it from Grandpa on the way past the lake. It was a beautiful day, and it was hard to tell the difference between the reflection of the blue sky on the surface of the lake and the blue of the water itself. I took this picture out the car window as we drove past. Click to zoom in a little bit.
We got to Second Beach, and even though the weather there was really grey and a little cold, I could still see what a special place it is. After a mile-long trail through the woods of an indian reservation, we came out onto the beach at a huge pile of sun-bleached driftwood that we had to climb over to get onto the beach itself. Again, click to zoom.
The rock formations and cliffs in and near the water made it look like pirate ships should come into view at any minute. As far as I know, the Pacific coast west of Washington and below Alaska is not exactly a pirate-infested area, but it was still fun to think about. Check out the pine trees way up on top of this solo rock. (Click it.)
There was also a little hole in the rock where the tide came from two directions and splashed up all violently every so often and sprayed every which way. Pretty cool.
Second Beach also has a bunch of tide pools that fill up at high tide as well as big rocks sitting in the shallow surf, and both of these have a bunch of little creatures and plants to check out and, in some cases, avoid stepping on barefoot. Kirsten found a really cool little creature, an Ochre sea star, Pisaster ochraceus. There were quite a few of them around. We spent about two hours at the beach altogether, but our toes were freezing, and the wind was making it pretty chilly, so we didn't stay the whole afternoon. Second Beach is a really great place, though. The next time any of you visit, we'll have to see if we can take a trip all the way over there. You'll like it.
A little closer to home, in Bremerton, is Gold Mountain Golf Course. Kirsten's dad offered to treat us both to a round of golf recently. I'd gone right after we got here and made solid contact on about three swings total (That's out of eighteen holes, so close to... let's see... 200 swings altogether?), so I was about ready to take a pass on one round and be Kirsten's caddy. It was nice that way, and much less frustrating. It was a nice day, and the course is beautiful as well. Here's a picture from a spot where I remembered that I had a camera in my pocket and snapped one before running to catch up with Kirsten and give her the right club.
And here's Kirsten teeing off on the next hole. Notice the new haircut.
Aren't golf courses pretty? I think so. Frustrating, awful, godforsaken, and whatever else you want to call them, for sure, but pretty.
And that about wraps things up. Kirsten did take this picture of me offering resumes to anyone that wanted one from me in downtown Seattle. I was hoping someone would come by, take one, and offer me a job on the spot. No such luck, but it's a fun picture.
We've said on many occasions that we should be taking more pictures of our life. If we start taking our own advice more, maybe I'll do a photo blitz like this again. Stay tuned. I hope you enjoyed a little glimpse into what we've been up to. (A lot of what we've really been up to involves lying around the house like unemployed slackers with no friends, reading books, or watching excessive amounts of Food Network, but that's not nearly as exciting.)
Tune in Tuesday or Wednesday for interview reporting.

Kent

Phone calls, bus routes, and crash courses

Well. After weeks and weeks of nothing at all, it looks like the job search may be getting somewhere! How exciting! I think most everyone who reads this has at least a bit of personal interest, and I know that quite a few of you have been praying for us as we get settled here, so I'll give you the whole long story.

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from my cousin David, who does something or other at Microsoft. He doesn't park next to Bill Gates or anything (mostly because he lives in Atlanta), but he's been at things for a little while, and he oversees projects of various sorts. He's associated with some people who developed a sort of training program a little while ago. A few of Microsoft's partners, project managers, etc. got a hold of this program and liked it, so David and the Adventos crew wrote version 2.0. Four hundred and something people at Microsoft started using the second version, so Microsoft bought the whole package and commissioned the creation of version 3.0. David contacted me to see if I'd be interested in editing the documentation for the whole shebang. It's great experience on my resume to have Microsoft contract editing experience, and it's also helpful for me to learn a lot of terminology and technology that's in use in the IT world. I barely understand all the concepts myself even after editing and doing rewrites on the whole thing --actually, I don't think I've got quite all of it-- but if you're more technologically inclined than I am, or if you're just curious, you can go to the website at www.sdlcinabox.com to see information on the program. It really is pretty interesting, I promise.

Fortunately, it looks like these lines on my resume worked the magic that my other experience couldn't quite do. I got an e-mail last week from a job I didn't even remember applying for. (Not really saying much; there have been time since we've been here that I've put in five or six resumes a day for a few days at a time. I lost count ages ago and lost track of specifics before that.) Siemens IT Services does consulting work for Microsoft in Redmond, and I've been told that I applied for a Technical Writing position with them. The recruiter sent me a preliminary interview questionnaire, which I filled out (and edited for typos, grammatical problems, and formatting issues) and sent back with an updated resume, and then the next afternoon, I scheduled a phone interview with the hiring manager. Went through that phone interview, sent writing samples that the hiring manager asked for, and then today, got another e-mail requesting a face-to-face interview at Microsoft in Redmond this coming Tuesday. Sweeeeet... It's all gone pretty quickly up to this point, which makes me think that there aren't loads of other people in the running. All the same, though, I need to make sure to go in and really impress them. The job is in Microsoft's offices in Redmond, and the position would be working with a team of Microsoft employees under Microsoft managers. So I'm guessing that the interview process might just be similar to Microsoft's infamously grueling process. I don't think it'll last eight hours like Microsoft's typical interview, but I'm preparing myself for difficult questions and a lot of thinking on my feet.

I'm also preparing myself to back up my claims of basic reading knowledge of XML, JavaScript, and SQL. I think I know the basics pretty well, but my idea of basics may be a little different than theirs, so I've been looking up tutorials and practicing my coding and basically devouring every reference source I can get my hands on. By Tuesday, I'd like to be able to see my skill as thorough reading knowledge and passable practical knowledge. That's my biggest item of homework over the weekend. That and figuring out exactly which bus(es?) I need to take from Seattle to Redmond to avoid walking several miles. Can't show up late, you know.

The job itself is pretty nice. The team that developed the Xbox is basically a collective of some of the brightest minds at MS, and the complex technical issues of system and software development for the system are almost entirely in the heads of these programmers and engineers. Microsoft needs a technical writer to take this stuff out of a bunch of heads and put it into deliverable document form, so that's what I would be doing. It probably wouldn't be too tough to transition from a Siemens contract job to a full-time job at Microsoft, and from what I hear, it seems to be an exceptionally great place to work.

Between the first contact on this job and today, I've had one and a half other interesting contacts. The first is with a company called Attenex. They do some sort of document review and capture software that I didn't take a long enough amount of time to really grasp. (Not that I think it would take long. It just looked wicked boring.) They're looking for a technical trainer to go places and teach clients to use their software. The job would pay very well, but I think that the amount of travel would make it less than desirable. I went ahead and replied to the recruiting e-mail by applying, and I'll see if I can get some more information, but I just get a little too much of a marriage wrecker vibe at the moment.

The second contact was from a tutoring company that is recruiting new tutors. It also pays well, and I'd have the option to work as much or as little as I like as well as doing house calls or working online. If it's legit, really pays what they say it does, and has enough demand out there, I may even do it a few hours a week from home. If any of you out there want to check it out, maybe even apply to do some tutoring yourself, the web site is www.goodgradesnow.com. We can keep each other informed on the whole thing.

OK. So, not a lot of entertainment this time around, but there's some news for you. Thanks SO much to all of you who have shown an interest, prayed for me, asked about how things are going, or just stayed where you are instead of moving out here and clogging up the job market even more. (Of course I'm joking. You should all move out here so we can see you.) Thanks for reading this too. Amanda told me that she follows the news closely, and I told her I would give her a shout out for it. So... Hey Amanda! Thanks for reading. Express your devotion, kids, and you could get your fifteen seconds of internet fame next time. Cause blogs do LOVE comments, for serious.

I'll try to remember to get back on here Tuesday soon after the interview and let you know what happens. In the mean time, if you have any interviewing tips for me, by all means, send them along.

Love you all. Take care of yourselves.

Kent

Not Pine Country

Did you know that pines aren't native to the Northwest? If you just said yes, remind me to to reprimand you the next time I see you, because no you didn't. Kirsten's grandpa (and I get to call him Grandpa too, which is great, because it's been a while since I've had one of those) told me so, so I know it's true. The evergreens you see here are mostly firs. I was surprised and intrigued.
Anyway, pines or no pines, this area is beautiful this time of the year. It's been overcast maybe four days since we've been here, and it's gotten up to the low 80's a handful of times. For the most part, it's just paradise. And there are parts of the year with a fair amount of rain, but for the most part, it just gets grey a lot, so we're really happy to be here.
We've both been around the house quite a bit, because I still don't have a job, and we don't know many people. We've been reading a lot (Kirsten sat down the other night and didn't get up until she had read The Great Gatsby cover to cover), and we're both getting pretty good at Guitar Hero (I'm two songs away from getting five stars on every song on hard on GH2). But it's not like I haven't been doing my best to become employed. I make daily checks to the careers section of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Nordstrom, as well Careerbuilder, Monster, and Craigslist. I've also made three trips to Seattle to make a big resume blitz and cold-call a bunch of businesses. If you can think of any resources I'm not exhausting, I'd love to hear about them.
In the mean time, it sure is nice to have someone like Kirsten's dad. He's letting us stay with him, and we buy some of the food, do some cooking for him, keep the house nice and tidy, and hang out in the evenings. It's a great provision. All the same, it is going to be nice to have our own place and feel like we're really settled in. More news as it unfolds.