Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Little Update

Okay, so I've gotten lazy. If you were to ask me what I do all day while Glenn is gone at work, you would wonder how I can manage to not allow some space within a 6 hour time period to update the blog a bit. I know, I know, it's kind of amazing but that's just how I am. Seriously though, I haven't been up to much. It's a lot of the same stuff. I sleep in, take the dog out, eat breakfast, make the bed, read, search for jobs, read some more, eat lunch, read some more, do the dishes, then patiently wait for Glenn to come home. Sometimes I'll throw a workout video somewhere in the mix to keep things lively.

It's been about two and a half weeks since we moved in, so the fact that I don't have a job is frustrating, but I just try to remember that if I were still in AZ, I wouldn't be going back to work until the 19th of July, so technically, I am still on summer break. I'm just tired of feeling like I don't pull my weight. Washing a few dishes and making the bed don't really make up for that gap. Glenn says that I should volunteer somewhere to keep myself busy. It also doesn't hurt that it would look pretty good on a resume. Right now I am just looking around to see if anything looks interesting, so we will have to wait and see!

Aside from that, life is pretty good here in Seattle. Glenn and I are still having fun exploring the city without a hectic timeline, like when we're on vacation. Not too long ago we wandered all over the city and made it out to Pioneer Square, and that's roughly 1.5 miles from the house. We walk A LOT here and we love it! It's really neat to be so self sufficient. If we need groceries, we have our pick of stores or markets to walk to and pick them up. If we want to go shopping, it's like we have an entire outdoor mall within minutes of our house. Movies? There's a handful of theatres around, also within walking distance. It really is nice to be able to use our legs to get us places instead of the car. There's always the added benefits of exercise and not paying for gas!

That's it for now, I will be back tomorrow with some pictures from the trip we took to Olympia a couple Saturdays ago. I hope all is well for everyone, we miss you and love you!

Monday, June 21, 2010

Scammers

It seems as though everyone's favorite Nigerian scammers have infested the birthplace of Craigslist. Of the 7 jobs I have applied for, two of them have revealed themselves as scams. It is really annoying! Ugh. Anyway, I figured I would post the two emails for everyone's entertainment. In case you have never actually seen one of these, you'll notice they both follow the same format. Both emails are overly detailed, grammar and spelling are terrible, and they both ask for fairly detailed personal invitation. As a side note, if you ever get something similar when you are trying to sell something on Craigslist, IGNORE IT! These offers always have the same "too good to be true" look, and trust me, they are.

Email #1 (all spelling/grammar errors have been left in for humor):
Our Company Name is Kalibre,We are a Swiss based trade association that deal in the sales and distribution of wrist watches.The primary goal of the Administrative Officer is to provide local customer assistant to our clients within North America. You will be assisting our clients within North America, the assistance to be provided will include: payment collections and customer service.

Your duties will include:
- Collecting Local Payments
When a buyer in United States decides to purchase an item through an online auction from our sellers he has the following payment options: paypal, Money orders, international wire transfer, international check, or local wire transfer. The quickest option of these is local wire transferring. Local wire transfers are the option that the sales support representative will provide to the clients.

- Managing Data
Along with the payments received from buyers you will be receiving details for these sales. These details will include items sold, price, and buyer's information. You are to file and maintain these purchasing records and transactions.

- Forwarding of the Payments
Once you receive each payment you will be keeping 10% as commission and forwarding the rest to the seller or representative, whose information will be provided prior each transaction. It is crucial to complete forwarding of the payments in a time efficient manner.

- Fees, and Transferring Procedures
All fees are covered by the company. The fees for transferring are simply deducted from the payments received. No client will contact you during initial stage of the trial period. After three weeks of the trial period you will begin to have contact with the buyers via email in regards to collection of the payments. For the first three weeks you will simply receive all of the transferring details, and payments, along with step by step guidance from your supervisor. You will be forwarding the received payments by wire transfer.

Additional Information:
Salary:
During the trial period, you will be paid 2,000USD per month while working on average 3-4hours per day, plus 10% commission from every payment received and forwarded. The salary will be sent in the form of wire transfer directly to your account. After the trial period your base pay salary will go up to 2,200USD per month, plus 10% commission.

Taxes:
You will receive a monthly invoice stating your total income. All applicable taxes are covered by the company.

Your First Primary task (Collection of Payments):
1. Receive payment from our Customers or Clients.
2. Cash Payment at your Bank or any cashing facilities near you.
3. Deduct 10 % which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed
4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the offices you will be contacted to send payment to, you'll have a lot of free time doing another job, because this job schedule is flexible, you'll get good income .But this job is very challenging and you should understand it.

In acceptance of this job offer .Please kindly fill your details below and email it to jtxadservice@gmail.com , so that you can get started.

Personal Information

Full Name: ________________
Address: ________________
City: ________________
State/Province: ________________
Postal Code: ________________
Present Occupation (if any): ________________
Age: ________________
Resident Phone Number:________________
Mobile: ________________
Please note that your information is not for public use but for our records.

We request that you email us back to let us know if you can begin your first task on June 21, 2010

Regards.

Head Human Resources Dept
Robert Williams


Email #2 (all spelling/grammar errors have been left in for humor):

I'm Dorothy brentford, originally from Australia, but I have spent a whole lot of my time here in United State. I'm an Architect by profession and I have been pretty successful in a handful of ventures I get involved in; from the Angel Investment Network in Canada and United State to various welfare and community service programs, I most very often get my hands occupied, so it is imperative for me to have a worthy assistant who can monitor and keep me up to date with my activities.

As my assistant, your activities amongst other things will include;

*Running personal errands, supervisions and monitoring.

*Scheduling programmed, flights and keeping me up to date with them.

*Acting as an alternative telephone correspondence when I'm away.

*Making regular contacts and drop-offs on my behalf.

*Handling and monitoring some of my financial activities.

Basic wage is $500 per week

This position is home-based and flexible, working with me is basically about instructions and following them, my only fear is that I may come at you on impromptu sometimes, so I need someone who can be able to meet up with my irregular timing.There is also a very sensitive issue on trust and accountability which I believe will resolve itself as time goes on. This is only an introductory e-mail, as time goes on we should be able to arrange a proper meeting to get things started officially.

I'm currently in south London Area of the United Kingdom(England)for a project am handling here, however I do have a number of things you could help me to start with if you will be available for me. This can act as a stable foundation to our working relationship.reply me back with your contact address as follows if you are intrested in working with me

Your full name
Contact address
State,Zip code
Cell phone #
Age
Present Ocupation

I look forward to hearing back from you soon

Regards.
Dorothy brentford.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Home Sweet Home

Daytime view from our apartment.

Searching for an apartment is not very fun. It's also not very easy when you have a dog. It's especially difficult when your wonderful puppy happens to be a mixed breed, part of which is on the restricted list. Can you believe that?! We went at least three different places that wouldn't allow us to have Rally there because he is part German Shepherd. That was really annoying. Every place we went we had to ask if they allowed dogs. If they said yes, then we had to ask if there was a weight limit. If Rally fit into the weight limit we had to ask if there was a breed restriction. Sure enough, a good chunk of the places would not let our sweet pup in. Oh well, their loss, not ours. We finally found an apartment that seemed to fit all of our criteria. They were dog friendly and had some sort of pet friendly deck, within walking distance to Glenn's work, close to public transit, had a parking garage, and within walking distance to Downtown. Ladies and Gentlemen, let me welcome you to the Archstone Belltown Apartment #1413.
I really like our purple door. The colors alternate on different floors. Even number floors have purple doors and the odd numbered floors have a mustard yellow door. I'm glad we are on an even floor.
First, is our nice little kitchen. When you first walk in the door, you step right into the kitchen. I feel like aside from the smaller amount of storage, this is an improvement from Phoenix. Our old galley kitchen made it really difficult for both of us to be in there at the same time. Not that I cook or anything, I just like to be able to help every now and then :o)
Off to the side is a nice little pantry. It's really nice to have a separate place to put food and other stuff, like my baking pan that's too big to fit anywhere else!
This little doorway is to the bathroom, obviously. It's kind of a bummer not having two bathrooms, but oh well.
The bathroom is nice and updated, and the medicine cabinet has enough room for all of our stuff.
After our target trip I decorated a little bit. I decided the color scheme in here would be bright green and fuschia. It looks good, and not too girly.
Despite the place being quite small, we have an AWESOME walk-in closet. At first I thought it was wasted space and would have been better distributed in the living area, but I actually love it. It's really nice to have so much room to store stuff without it having to be in the living area. You can't see it in the picture, but there is actually room on either side in the back to put shelving or drawers.
Finally, here is our living area. It's not huge, but it is doable. I actually think it will be a lot of fun trying to maximize the space and being creative with furniture and what not. I'm still waiting for my fancy new flat screen Sony TV, but that will have to wait until a few paychecks down the road :o)
So far, we are really liking the place and are quite happy here. The location is fantastic and the view is really nice. Best of all, it's wonderful to have a place to call home that isn't a ghetto hooker hotel! (Motel 6 in Tukwila)

Our New Bed!

As you probably already know, when we moved up here to Seattle, we didn't have a lot of time. We heard about Glenn's job offer on Thursday, June 3 and we were on the road by Saturday morning, June 5. He was due to start work on Wednesday, June 9 ( our anniversary!) Needless to say, we didn't have a lot of time to pack or make any real moving arrangements. We did our best to determine all the essentials and packed as many rolled up clothes as we could in our biggest suitcase. Since all of this was going in our tiny hybrid, you can probably figure out that there wasn't any room for furniture. When we finally picked the apartment we wanted to live in, we had to go out and find a bed, because I was NOT going to be sleeping on the floor.

After about three mattress stores we were getting really discouraged. Two grand for a mattress? Is it made out of cashmere? I don't think so. We decided our best bet, and most budget conscious choice, was to head over to IKEA. We wandered around the store for a few minutes before we found the right section and we began plopping ourselves all over the beds. We were pros at it by this point. The first one we laid on was our favorite. It was firm, but it gave in all the right places, and it was made of eco-friendly latex foam. Sweet! Next was a bed frame. There were a couple of really cool ones that we liked, but again, we were going for budget friendly here, so we found a nice modern looking one that suited both of our tastes. About 45 minutes later we had our items purchased and set up for at home delivery.

Well, let me tell you, the at home delivery sucked! They called first thing in the morning and told us they would be there between 3:52 and 5:52. Okay, not bad, only a 2 hour time frame. We waited and waited...and waited. Finally, they showed up sometime around 7:30. That was really frustrating, but I guess they got stuck in traffic or something. A courtesy call would have been much appreciated. After a trip to Target for some essentials, like bed sheets and pillows, I got to work on assembling the bed. Just me. All. By. Myself.
I'm quite fond of my cute little pink toolbox that Glenn got me for my birthday last year. It has come in handy many times and has helped me assemble quite a few pieces of IKEA furniture. I'm really becoming adept with tools.
Rally wasn't really pleased with me taunting him with the big boxes. He's still terrified of them. I wonder why? I guess me chasing him around with them on my head doesn't really make matters better :o)
I had to get creative with the awkwardly shaped boxes. They were a little difficult to open without all of the contents sliding out.
Luckily there were only 4 main pieces, so figuring out which pieces went where wasn't too difficult.
Once I got the frame all set up, things were starting to look up.
Unfortunately, there like a million different screws, and my tiny electric screwdriver was getting very tired, even when it was plugged in.
Bed frame assembled? Check! Stabilizing bars? Check! Now what?
The wooden slats. These were entirely too awkward. IKEA couldn't have packaged them any worse. Instead of making it so all I had to do was lay one down and unfold the rest, I had to unfold a few and then lay them down and repeat about 5 times.

Finally, it was all done. Now it was time to put the sheets on the mattress and make it look like a real bed.
Ta-Dah! I finished at around 11:30pm and I was tired. Let's go to bed.
Rally enjoys it too. Despite the fact that we devoted a fair amount of car space to bringing his nice fluffy bed, he spends most of his time lounging in the sun on OUR bed instead of his own!

It's My Turn Now

I figured it was about time that I got back on this blogging thing and let everyone know what's going on in my head. It's still kind of hard to believe that just two weeks ago we were back in Phoenix, and now we are actually living in Seattle. Everything is still a little bit surreal to me, but little by little, I am starting to feel like I am settling and things are returning back to normal.

On Monday I decided to go out and explore the city while Glenn was at work. I did so much walking! I looked at google maps to approximate the distance I walked, and I would ballpark it around 5 miles! That's nuts! Basically I left the apartment and headed South into downtown where I checked out the Macy's and Nordstrom's (I was looking for MAC makeup), then I made my way to Ross and Nordstrom Rack (looking for some cute pajama pants) and then I went even further South and checked out the Gold's Gym. The GM there was really nice and I liked the gym itself, so we went ahead and transferred our membership there. Our first workout was yesterday, and I am SO SORE! After all of that walking it was about time for Glenn to get off work, so I met up with him and we walked home.

Tuesday was less eventful for me, I basically just did some laundry, more job searching (more on that later), and then I ran over to a pet store to get Rally some treats as a late birthday present. He turned 3 on the 14th. This time Glenn met up with me and we walked over to the gym so he could check it out before we made our decision and then we came home. We also decided to start watching LOST now that is finally over. I totally get what all the fuss is about! It's a really good show, and I am only 4 episodes in!

Yesterday was another quiet day for me, nothing new in the job search department. I mostly just played with the dog. As far as the job search goes for me, let me fill you in on what I have found. I am mostly looking for a job as an Administrative Assistant, pretty much the same as what I was doing before. I've found about 8 prospects so far, all of them in a pretty decent pay range. My favorite one though is for a private high school called Waldorf. The job is almost identical to what I was doing before, and honestly, they would be crazy not to hire me. I would get to work the same awesome school year schedule as I did before, but adjusted to the Seattle school system. The best part is that it is right across from the Seattle Center, which is right by our apartment! It would be so awesome if I could walk to work! We'll see though. Right after I applied I got an email from the director at the school that said they were reviewing applications all week and would be selected candidates for phone interviews. If I don't hear from them by Monday, then that would mean I wasn't selected. I guess we will just wait and see!

Today I walked over to Queen Anne and had lunch with Glenn at Kidd Valley (it's a hamburger and shake place) and it was so nice! I loved being able to have lunch with Glenn! He seems to really like his new job and it sounds to me like he is fitting in there wonderfully. We're going to go out and try to find him a man purse today because he needs to wear his jacket in the morning, but it's a little too warm to wear it on the way home. Plus he has his water bottle to carry and whatever other gadgets he likes to carry around.

That basically sums up my week! I hope everyone is doing well!

Love,
Bri

Sunday, June 13, 2010

On the road...Day 2

When I think back to my decision to leave I-5 in favor of US-101 I can't quite figure out what I was thinking. I guess I figured it was better to be on the road an extra day than to impose on our friends for another day in Washington. Whatever I was thinking, I should have gotten us going earlier...MUCH earlier.

We were probably on the road some time between 10:30-11AM. This drive took us through Oakland, across an (pictured) expensive toll bridge, and up past Napa, the drive-thru tree, & the hill people of Northern California. We were starved as we went through town after town in search of something not named McDonalds or Burger King. Around 4pm we found a Subway in some one-horse town that was part of a gas station/CS. Strange employees & customers did not deter us & we were back on the road in 15 minutes.

As we neared the coast and the Oregon border things started to get a bit tense. Hairpin switchbacks ascending and descending, around 300-year old redwoods with semi-trucks approaching every oncoming encounter with a little more reckless abandon than their predesessor, only to be made worse by a rolling fog from the sea - this was to be our final hours in California. By the time we reached the boarder it was almost 9 and the sun's light was being stretched across the sky by the light cloud cover above us. We had two options: 56 miles up the coast to a Motel 6 in Oregon or 106 miles through the forrest to Grant's Pass and the (safer, wider) I-5. Fearing the fog would get worse along the 101 we headed towards Grant's Pass hoping for a clearer route. What we found was a beautiful river-lined passage where we only encountered 10 other cars in an hour. It was extremely dark and I was on the lookout for wild animals darting into the road. By the time we reached Grant's Pass I thought for sure the power grid had failed. We hadn't seen a streetlight or electric sign in over an hour. The glow of the town was enough to make our eyes hurt.

As we pulled in to the motel, I had never been so happy to be in Oregon in my life. What I thought would be a scenic bypass with a couple additional hours drive time turned into an all-day stress test. I've driven from Tacoma to Salinas in 12 hours...I covered half that distance today in the same amount of time. Disgusting.

I was determined to make day 3 end in success.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

On the road...Day 1

As you can see...the dog blocked more of my rear view than any of our stuff did.

Driving up was needlessly complicated. The normal boring PHX-LA trip didn't see much action. We stopped in Valencia for lunch. Then stopped outside of Bakersfield at the Murray Farms for (pictured) Rainier Cherries & boysenberries. We finally stopped in some farm town a few hours south of San Francisco.

The entire place smelled of fertilizer & there were bugs everywhere. The motel was nice and it was surrounded by food options but ultimately the town was uninteresting.

Day 1 went off without much complaint.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

Leaving...

If someone asked youto pack all of the important things that you would need into a car...could you do it? What if your car was a compact hybrid? Well that's what this is...every "essential" item in our family's life. It was a tight fit but our run-through last summer helped us figure out what we really needed to get by.

No real furniture. A lot of clothes, some kitchen gadgets, a couple laptops, a fan, a house plant, and a bunch of board games all came along as our supplies. The dog had just as much stuff: 8 toys, a bed, food, jacket, harness, and some bowls. He packed just as much as we did.

Are there things I wish we had brought? Yes. Are there things we didn't need in retrospect? I'm not sure...doesn't feel like it yet.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

The move

Well we're starting to get settled in here in Seattle. Since things have been crazy, I thought I'd take a few minutes to update with some pictures and comments. So keep an eye out for those throughout the day.

Love you all!
-Glenn

-- Sent from my Palm Prē