08 JUL 2005 : Friday
Um, I dunno. Amanda and I must have worked. We managed to go to the farmers market a couple of blocks away from us and bought some berries and a candle. Amanda also found out that she would have the entire weekend off; Sunday was a scheduled day, and she got Saturday off as a bonus because she had no patients.
We ate a Cafe Flora for dinner to celebrate Amanda’s two days off and the fact that she is getting paid now. It is a vegetarian restaurant down the street from us. I cannot make up my mind if I think it is a good place; we also went there with Lainie. It is a little pricey, but the service and desserts are great. And its a vegetarian restaurant that we can walk to… I suppose that makes it worth it as Amanda could eat anything.
09 JUL 2005 : Saturday
Amanda made blueberry pancakes for bfast. She decided to run errands today because when else can we do them? First we headed to the Toyota dealership and got our new plates for our car (we bought a new car a few weeks ago… crazy eh?… I still have to recap that). Then we headed to REI for a variety of things: slick tires for Amanda’s bicycle, random perusing of bicycle stuff, maps and trail guides for the area, blah blah blah. We thought about going for a dayhike today to tomorrow, but decided to see how things shook out.
Then we headed out to Tukwila (south of Seattle) for a consumeristic spree. We stopped by the big mall here to see what how it was and to get lunch. Then we slowly made our way to IKEA. Slowly in the sense that we stopped at many many many furniture stores to check out sofas. Getting a sofa is problematic as a suitable one seems hard to find. We also stopped by Petsmart to get piglet some one calorie cat treats in between all the sofa shopping.
Lunch poisoned me, so the sofa shopping was kinda unpleasant, but eventually I started feeling better.
Now that I think about it, we also went to Target to get random household items.
We made it to IKEA and got some french fry snacks. On the agenda here was to get another shelf unit and a flower vase.
All of this stuff took a shocking amount of time. We had sushi and udon noodles at home for dinner. We watched Predator, or maybe that was the next day…
10 JUL 2005 : Sunday
We briefly thought about going hiking, but decided not to as the weather was lousy and going east on I90 (where we wanted to go) would probably be hellish as one of the bridges across Lake Washington was closed for maintenance.
Anyways, there were moer errands to run. We went back to REI to return Amanda’s previously obtained slick tires because they were a little too small for her rims. This simple thing ended up taking an outrageous amount of time because the new tires we got were not in the system and chaos ensued at the checkout line. We got out of there and went back to IKEA because we also need to return the shelves that we got because they were too big; we just got a narrower model.
Amanda put together the shelf and I did something (probably a combination of work and cleaning) when we got back home.
We met up with Mike at Cactus in Madison Park. I had a special salmon dish served over corn risotto topped with a mushroom sauce. It was really pretty good. I like Cactus (we had been there with Amanda’s parents), but it is a pain to get into as they do not take reservations for parties under five. People in Seattle seem much more tolerant of waiting to eat. I personally hate that. It is a little pricey, too, but maybe that is just Seattle for you.
I had to figure somethnig out for work, so I did not really sleep much that evening.
11 JUL 2005 : Monday
Work. Lainie called me up and I talked with her for hours getting her router and wireless stuff set up in her new apartment. It was tricky to talk her through everythnig as I was unfamiliar with her brand out router and her nwe notebook was not using the standard windows stuff to control her connections. Most of the time, I just had her on speaker phone, though. Eventually, we got it working. Hoohah.
I am tired but am thinking about working out. Amanda has not come home yet. She bicycled to work though, so I do not have to pick her up. Perhaps I will page her to get her ETA.