31 OCT 2009 : SATURDAY
Saturday was Halloween. Our house is not on a well lit street and there is nada on the other side except gravel, stored construction equipment, etc., so we don’t get trick-or-treaters.
Amanda was on call all weekend, and while she did not get called in for a delivery, the hospital was full so rounds in the morning took, well, all morning and part of the afternoon. So, I dropped her off at Swedish and took Lonan Kai to the aquarium. I actually got there before they opened, so the Kai and I wandered about the piers; he threw rocks into the water while I made sure he did not throw himself in.
We stayed at the aquarium for quite a while. Many of the workers/volunteers were dressed up in costume. Surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of visitors there, but that made it more pleasant for everyone else.
I ran into Laura, one of Amanda’s fellow doctors at SIHB there with her family.
The Kai managed to almost rip off one of his fingernails pounding on the exhibits or somesuch. It was going to fall off anyway (he had smashed it somehow and it had gotten infected a week or so ago), but it was now bleeding and the Kai was concerned. I did not want to rip it off, because what if it was more attached thanI thought? The Kai would not be pleased. While he guarded his injured hand, he did not seem to be in pain, so I decided to leave it and maybe it would take care of itself.
We had lunch at the aquarium cafe. The Kai did not appreciate me washing his hands, especially the injured one, and he castigated me in no uncertain terms. I called Amanda to see what was up, but she was still busy, so I bundled the Kai up and took him home for a nap.
I worked on finishing my grad school application while he slept. Amanda eventually came home. Once Lonan Kai woke up, she just removed the dangling fingernail. She’s, like, a professional.
We then went over to Ann and Mike’s. Her mom was there visiting for a few days, and she watched Liam while the rest of us walked to Columbia City for trick-or-treating. Lonan Kai wore a duck outfit Amanda’s mom made, and Connor wore a tiger costume.
There were a lot of people trick-or-treating at all the businesses. We probably went to a third of them; no need to overdose the kiddies on candy.
We returned to Ann and Mike’s house and stayed for a couple of hours. Mike and I played a silly swordfighting game on his Wii. They had a few groups of treat-or-treaters come. Ann always buys candy that she doesn’t like so that she won’t eat the leftovers, but the stuff she bought Amanda and I love (sweet tarts, nerd, etc.).
After the Kai went to sleep I passed out. I had not really slept the night before due to stomach pains. I imagine Amanda slept as well in case she got called in.
I got up around 4am. We returned to standard time, so I got an extra hour of sleep. I continuing futzing with my grad school application as it was due on November first.
01 NOVEMBER 2009 : SUNDAY
Amanda went in to round after bfast. I entertained the Kai. We read books, ran around the house, sang Beatles songs, went to the garden, walked around the neighborhood, went to Safeway, etc..
Amanda came back as the Kai went down for his afternoon nap. I don’t recall what exactly happened in the afternoon. I did incorporate some of Amanda’s suggestions into my grad school application. We did try to keep the Kai up until his “normal” bedtime (which was a hour later due to the time change), but he was tired.
Amanda had to go into the hospital after the Kai was asleep, but came back quickly. We then reviewed my Statement of Purpose; Amanda is really good at writing these sorts of things. I submitted my application online with two hours to spare.
02 NOVEMBER 2009 : MONDAY
Amanda spent the morning roasting and canning the remainder of our garden tomatoes. I had picked them green a while ago when the weather started getting cold and wet. We had been trying to ripen them a bit in paper bags with bananas and apples, and it worked rather well. Amanda also roasted some peppers and added it to the tomatoes.
03 NOVEMBER 2009 : TUESDAY
A normal day. Except Amanda went out to dinner at Verve with Laura and her clinic’s R3s. I had a dinner of rice and lentils with the Kai. The Kai did not want to eat out of his frog bowl and instead wanted my food. We played Rock Band afterwards. Lonan Kai requested “walrus” and “oompah” (“I am the Walrus”), “sun” (“Here Comes the Sun”), “baby” (“Twist and Shout”) and “blue” (“Tangled up in Blue”).
Amanda played with her new cell phone when she got home, but she was tired and fell asleep on the couch. Before she fell asleep she was wondering if we should take Lonan Kai into her clinic tomorrow morning to get the H1N1 vaccine; they only have seven doses left of their shipment that came yesterday. Does her kid deserve it more than, say, a pregnant woman? I do not know what she will decide. She got vaccinated, though, as a health care worker. Apparently, the only type of flu she sees now is H1N1; no one is coming in with the seasonal strains.

I took this picture of Armando with Amanda’s new cell phone that just came in the mail. It is has a much nicer digital camera than most phones (which is why Amanda got it). And it is through AT&T since she gets a price break on it through Swedish. Tomorrow we will get a new phone for me as well and transfer our numbers from Verizon.

I had to go to King County Elections today since I lost my paper ballot. The coming election is the first here that is entirely absentee. When I got there, though, they said that I could get another paper ballot or I could just go ahead and vote. They have a few Diebold voting machines there for those with vision impairments, language issues, or, say, people like me who lost theirs. I went ahead and voted because why not?
They asked for ID and stuff, which I thought was not allowed due to some voting rights thing.I used to be considered smart.
I have not had a lot of entries for various reasons. I still want to rectify that. I never did finish summarizing our trip to Victoria a month (!) ago.

We will be heading back home tomorrow. I did take some notes on what we did so I can write about it later. Although as of now I have completely forgotten what happened on one day last week. We lost one of our camera batteries and never replaced it, so we have no photographic evidence of the latter half of our trip.
We will be taking the a ferry from Sidney to Anacortes tomorrow (not the one we took here). Should be back before late afternoon. We did manage to spend practically all of our Canadian money on this trip before leaving.

I am in Victoria, BC right now. It is quiet and everyone else is hopefully sleeping. Actually,I am in Langford technically and not Victoria proper.
28 SEP 2009: MONDAY
Mandy came over and she and Amanda canned a lot of salsa. They used a recipe from one of the vendors at the Farmers Market. They also got most of their ingredients from the same vendor. It was tasty. Neither wore gloves while cutting the peppers so both were suffering from burning hands for quite a while.
30 SEP 2009 : WEDNESDAY
After five or six months (I really don’t remember when we started), our mortgage refinance finally is happening. We met with Bihn of Pacific Northwest Title Company… our escrow company… downtown to sign all of our documents. There were some minor inaccuracies (e.g. a $90 fee was not included in a couple of documents), but Bihn seemed to think (and I guess he would know) that we could go ahead and sign everything anyway. The loan would not close until 05 OCT for the state mandated cooling off period in case we change our minds after reading the documents, but of course we will be in another country. I did not bring payment, so I would have to return with the money to close. There were lots of papers to initial and sign, but not as much as our last loan.
We had to valet park across from their building, but that was alright since they validated parking.
01 OCT 2008 : THURSDAY
In the afternoon I went downtown to get a cashiers/bank check from BECU to pay for our refinance fees. It was a significant amount of money since real estate has tanked and we wanted to have 20% down (again!) to avoid mortgage insurance. I was not sure if there was a 24 hour wait for the withdrawal, so I made sure I would be able to get one before we left town on Saturday.
I went to the BECU office downtown. I had never been. They don’t have $$$ there. If you need cash you have to use the ATM. Simplifies things. I did not need 24 hours for the check, so I had it done up immediately and walked the eight or so blocks down 2nd Ave to the escrow company. I dropped the check off, waited for a receipt (it was a lot of money after all), and walked back up to Pike/Pine. I almost always park in Pacific Place if I happen to drive downtown instead of taking public transit.
I stopped by Nordstrom Rack to look for cheap stuff, but there was none to be had.
02 OCT 2009 : FRIDAY
I spent most of the day in preparation for our trip to Victoria. A huge chunk of time was going to get my drivers license renewed. The BECU guy yesterday helpfully mentioned that it was expiring in a few days which would not be good since we would be in Canada.
Washington does not have a singular DMV where auto stuff is handled. Instead there is a Department of Licensing which as one might expect handles licensing and ID issues. Another place handles titles, license plates, tags renewals and the like (curiously, I think they are also managed by the DOL but are called something different). I had to go to a DOL. The state/county recently closed down the Rainier Valley office which was very close by, so I had to venture off to the West Seattle one.
Before heading to the DOL, I stopped by the AAA office in West Seattle to get a map of Victoria.
Aside: the Greenwood office where I got my license when we moved here in 2005 was also closed. I apparently was too busy with moving and work and whatnot to write anything about it. When Amanda and I went there to get our Washington licenses we had to take a written/computer test to prove our knowledge. Amanda passed easily since she actually studied a little while I hadn’t bothers. I forget exactly how the test went, but I believe one had to get a total of twenty questions while missing fewer than five. I just so happened to miss four out of the first five which made the rest of the test more interesting than it should have been. The fact that two people beside there failed did nothing to improve my state of mind. Anyways, I did manage to answer the next nineteen questions correctly.
The questions I missed were very specific questions about things like the penalties for drunk driving (isn’t it enough to know that they probably are bad?) and questions involving school buses that I always screw up.
Anyways, I was at the DOL for a long time. There were a lot of people there. A hundred? More? One basically goes in, tells the person in the front what you are there for, they give you a number and you wait until you are called. There are separate queues for various things which is why the person up front is there.
I am glad I just had to get a renewal as everyone else there seemed to be waiting even longer than I. A guy next to me had been there four or five times previous but always had to bail out and go back to work as he been away too long.
I was a little foolish and did not look to see what I needed to bring. I assumed that all I would need was my old license, and fortunately I was correct. I forgot they don’t take credit or debit cards, but also fortunately I had enough cash on me.
I waited a long time to actually renew the license and then had to wait even longer to get an updated picture. They queue up a lot of people for picture taking all at once rather than taking them as people go through.
Eventually, though I left with a temporary license and will get the real one in the mail later. I decided to go to Southcenter to get another pair of jeans as mine have been tearing enough to be unwearable. I took surface roads because I don’t drive in that area much and it would have been a hassle to get back to I5 anyway.
Jean obtaining was successful. I saw a jacket I wanted to get, but, hey, I don’t need it.
On the way home I stopped at Urban Vines to get a gift certificate for Mandy as she would be looking after our cats again while we were gone.
At home, I did a lot of cleaning, a lot of landry, etc. etc. etc.. I finally got a skype account so that I could check phone messages and call people in the US while we are in Canada.
After picking up Lonan Kai and Amanda, we all had a simple dinner of fake chicken burgers. We had been eating all of food in our refrigerator the past week (and not doing any usual grocery shopping) to clean everything out before our trip.
The main point for going to Victoria is to accompany Ann, Mike, and Connor. Ann wanted to deliver her kid in Canada so that he could be a Canadian citizen, and it is far easier to do a dual citizenship thing if he is born there (Ann is a Canadian citizen herself). But I don’t know the details. As it turned out, she had Liam right before they were about to leave on Friday. It was good that it did not happen while she was on the road.
After dinner Amanda went over to their place for a visit. I was going to try to meet up with Karl and Randy who was up for the weekend, but I could not get a hold of them and Amanda had the car anyway.
Ann and Mike were still up for going to Victoria anyway, which I found impressive since she had just given birth, so we made plans to caravan up the next day.
03 OCT 2009 : SATURDAY
We did final preparations and packing and headed out to Ann and Mike’s at 9am. I did end up going back home a couple of times to get stuff I had forgotten. Ann looked great. Liam looked like he was born yesterday which of course he was. We helped them pack up the car and we left town around 10:30 or 11am.
The trip up to Canada went much quicker than I thought it would. I sometimes forget how close it is (not as close as when we lived in Buffalo, of course). We only stopped once outside of Bellingham to allow Liam to nurse.
The border crossing was easy enough. I still find it odd that all we needed for Mr. Kai was his birth certificate. Ann and Mike got across easier, too, even though Liam did not have a birth certificate being two days old and all. They did have all of his paperwork from his birth with them, and I guess it was enough.
I liked the fact that once we crossed the border all I had to do was press a button to convert our speedometer from mph to kph. Neat!
We picked up the ferry in Tsawwassen. We choose to drive to BC and then take a ferry rather than pick up one in the US because the US ones have much more limited schedules. We parked in the loading line and then let the kiddies run around outside while we waited. While it was a sunny day, it was pretty frigid outside due to the wind. The ferry docks themselves were nice; there were park like areas in between the docks where one could hang out plus a restaurant/market area plus restrooms plus playground area.
(to be continued)
(hopefully)