Life in the great Northwest!

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for reading our very first post!  We’re glad we’ve finally gotten around to putting something up after telling everyone for weeks that we’d have something “soon”.  Things have been pretty busy around our happy little home.  We’ve planted a patio garden (pictures to come, we’re very proud caretakers of green onion, lettuce, garlic, carrots, and a very unfruitful strawberry plant), setup our furniture (thanks, IKEA!), settled into our work, gotten callings in our new ward and have enjoyed good weather so far.  This post will probably be long since there’s catching up to do…so be warned!

Our New Home

Our new place is a two bedroom apartment across from Microsoft main campus, we’re about 15 mins down the road from the LDS Seattle temple and 20 mins from Seattle (in good traffic).  The apartment is pretty cozy, we use the second room for Jon’s office.  We’ve bought a couch with a pull out bed in anticipation of visitors (so please visit us!)  The complex is really nice, they’ve got a nice workout room, an outdoor pool and an indoor pool with another pool house to open sometime this Fall.  We haven’t met too many of our neighbors yet, but we’ve been told a couple other people in the ward live in the complex too.  Then again the complex has over 25 buildings, so it’s no wonder we haven’t run into anyone yet.  

Our Work

I’m settling into work pretty well, it’s a lot more intense than the internship was, but I’m glad that the group trusts me enough to give me important work right from the beginning.  It seems like I’ll have a lot of opportunities to grow professionally in my role.  This past week I was even selected from the group to go to a product fair and demo our product for our top customers and answer questions as well as take any suggestions on how things can be better.  It was a little scary, but after the first 30 mins it was pretty exciting.  I’m working on the Office Communicator Mobile team right now.  CoMo is a mobile IM client for Enterprise users who use Microsoft’s Unified Communication Servers.  I’m pretty proud of the product and I really enjoy my team.  Microsoft is a great company to work for even if it’s challenging at times

Jon’s been chugging along with his various projects.  He’s always thinking of ways to make things better and thinking of new ideas.  If I was 1/2 as hardworking as Jon I’d probably be a VP by the end of the year : ) He’s been attending some entrepreneur groups in Seattle and Bellevue in hope of meeting some contacts and getting tips that’ll help him along with his businesses.  It seems like Washington is a great place for new ideas and young businesses.

The Fun!!!

Redmond is way kicking compared to Provo so we’ve been keeping ourselves busy.  I don’t want to bore you with all the details of everything we’ve done for the last 2 months, so I’ll just caption some of these pictures. There are more pictures (wedding, honeymoon, silly) at gallery http://gallery.boogly.net/ if you have any quesions about those go ahead and e-mail us 😀

A few weeks ago we went to this Japanese cultural festival at Bellevue Community College.  We’re always looking for free things to do.  The festival was pretty fun and they had all sorts of activities.  They had taiko drumming, kimono displays, martial arts demos, food, history displays, a flea market and a lot of displays of Japanese art.  These pictures of the flower arrangments reminded me of my mom’s flowers when we were in Singapore.  

There were lots of fun things for kids too.  Next year, we’ll get there a little earlier to beat the crowd.  It’ll also be a good opportunity for me to wear my kimono 🙂

About half way in between the temple and our house, there’s a blueberry farm!!!!  They let you pick blueberries from the bushes for $1/lb.  It’s crazy.  When we first got here we went and got 1 1/2 of berries and it took us about 2 hours.  But a couple of weeks ago we went again and got 3 lbs in only 45 mins!  It was crazy!  I guess we just picked a good row to go down or something.  It’s great because all the berries are fresh and they’re sweet!  Jon and I make a great team because Jon can reach the really high ones and I’m small enough to crouch down and get the ones other people miss.  It seems like berries are easy to grow around here because a path behind my office has tons of blackberry bushes and we see wild berry pushes on the side of the road all the time.  

Well, that’s all for now.  I’ll post again soon!  We look forward to sharing our adventures with you!  We’ve been taking pictures all along in anticipation of our blog so we have an idea of what we’ll be showing (it’s mostly food, haha).  We miss you all and hope you’re doing well!

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