Just got married now on to Seattle!

i’ve never known anyone that loves mexican food like joe loves mexican food. really, he should live in chicago- cause we haven’t found any great mexican places here in seattle. its sad. when we dated, i learned to make mexican rice, vegetarian refried beans, enchiladas, tostadas, breakfast burritos, but i shied away from the more complex dishes. unfortunately, a taco stand opened up three blocks from our house & joe found he loved chili rellenos, which are deep-fried cheese-stuffed chili peppers. so we tried them on our own this evening & with team effort they turned out pretty tasty! it’s official, the best vegetarian mexican restaurant in seattle is… erin’s white-girl kitchen!

this week our friend tosh sent us our wedding pictures! thanks tosh. and also to everyone that pitched in to make our wedding day so much more special than either of us ever imagined!

my minor achievement this week was finishing my first pair of socks. about a year ago my friends lorraine and maggie inspired me to start knitting, so i bought a book & taught myself. when i went home for mothers day last may, i found my grandmother knitting socks on a single circular needle. so cool! plus it sounded more doable than double points for a novice like me. so again, i bought a book.

9mo later…

at least joe is impressed.

my next projects are listed on my ravelry page.

Hey gang, things are going well here in Seattle. I am happy to announce that I am employed and just finished my first week of work. I have been hired on as a contractor at a early stage startup called Cloudant. I am actually the first employee/contractor (again, I was the first at my last job too). The startup is based in Boston but one of the founders is here in Seattle. It’s a good group and I am working with some really smart people. I am also excited about the company and what we are doing. We are building a distributed database system.

From wikipedia:
A distributed database is a database that is under the control of a central database management system (DBMS) in which storage devices are not all attached to a common CPU. It may be stored in multiple computers located in the same physical location, or may be dispersed over a network of interconnected computers.

As for other things going on, I have been riding more lately and getting back into shape. Erin started working out too. Also, regarding the wedding photos sorry for the wait I am waiting to hear back from Tosh on it. I’ll post ‘em as soon as I have ‘em.

Hope everyone is doing well in Belleville, Murphysboro, Chicago and the greater Columbus area. Louisville too!

While you are out playing on the internets go check out Dan Bischoff’s photos from his volunteer work in Rwanda and photo’s from Mike Lanyon and Erin Smith’s trip to Egypt and Israel (you might have met them at the wedding).

i got daffodils & joe got mexican food. the cats got to go outside on the porch. everyone is happy.

this week in seattle…
i started my new job. its so awesome! and daunting. i can do anything i want to do, within the scope of the lab. which is a lot more freedom to investigate things that interest me than i had in the past. but also, its all incumbent upon me to pick interesting questions with the potential for growth. its been very exciting to delve into a completely new area of immunolgy, but talk about feeling behind the 8 ball! its like i’m a first year grad student all over again. i feel really slow. but all my lab mates are helping me catch up. and my new boss (also named mike) has suggested one preliminary experiment that suits something i already know how to do. so that should give me a place to start.

also, joe release merle, his erlang memcached client. memcached is is a useful way to speed up applications & web servers because it retains lists of things in the RAM memory of a computer, instead of putting them on the hard drive. his program interfaces with memcached in erlang (a new computer language). seems like people are excited about it. joe is excited that it works!

and motorboat went on a diet. he’s fat and he loves to eat. so this diet thing is actually kind of difficult, considering mira’s proclivity to graze all day. anything she leaves behind he vacuums up like a pig. so we have to put down breakfast & dinner separately, and now he gets locked in the bathroom for meal times. poor big football-shaped duder-cat.

finally, we’ve been watching “the elegant universe” all about the history of physics & development of string theory. cause working on open source elang & immune complex-mediated antigen presentation projects doesn’t make us big enough dorks.

the movers finally came on monday & dumped everything into the front room (don’t use mayflower). i thought i got rid of enough junk, but it became clear it was gonna be a tight fit! joe got a drill & hung the bikes up in our storage space downstairs. i sorted through DVDs & kitchen utensils. we have more to go to goodwill, but right now we’re about 3/4 of the way unpacked & things are shaping up to be pretty convenient. unfortunately, motorboat lost his house to my baking pans, but he prefers the dirty laundry hamper now anyway. dresser will come next week & then we’ll finish up putting away clothes & stuff, just in time to start my new job. happy 2009!

With moving into the new apartment it was inevitable that Motorboat would find a new place that was his. In the past he has claimed the bathroom as his domain, the new bathroom does not seem to be of his liking although he still likes toilet water. The first few days we heard a knocking from the kitchen but wasn’t sure what it was. Soon enough we found Motorboat was the cause, entering and exiting the same cabinet before and after naps. He has officially claimed a bottom cabinet of his own. Rather than fight it I put some towels in there for him and knock before entering.

we agreed not to worry about christmas gifts for each other with everything that we had going on this month, but still we managed to find a few things to make our first xmas together special. just watched a movie & will have some christmas veggie lasagna later. yumm!

rolled into seattle tue afternoon & picked up the keys to our cozy new apartment in ballard. glad to be done driving. the cats too. now they are making themselves at home. motorboat sleeps in the empty kitchen cabinets. we’re not really sure when any of our stuff will show up since the streets are iced over. right now we’re camping at home- sleeping on a leaky air mattress & eating with plastic spoons. we’ve been exploring our neighborhood, which has a bunch of coffee shops & restaurants. and also orienting ourselves to seattle & working on new projects.