Good morning friends!

So, I know it's been a few days since I've written and a lot has happened - I'll do my best to give a brief summary.

My last day of driving, while very pleasant, was cut sadly short by snow over the pass on my way out to the Oregon coast, so I had to come back across the state and take Interstate 5 all the way north from that point.  Portland seems like a neat city (at least looked it as I drove through) but it rained hard all the way from Portland until nearly Tacoma (probably 150 miles).  I would love to check out some of the sites along the 5 in that area when I get the chance to go back down south.

Unfortunately, as I had arrived early, no one was at the new place (in fact a family friend came over and gave me a key), so I had to spend the next 4 or 5 hours checking out the local area around Federal Way.  It's your pretty basic suburb with lots and lots of shopping areas about 5 miles away from the house.  The best thing about it is that there is Free Municipal Wireless Internet in the city center so even though there is no wireless at Wendy & Lowell's place*, I have been able to use free internet in town.  I also took a little preview trip up to Seattle to check that out. 

*it is not entirely true that there is no internet.  Just two days ago I found an unlocked wireless signal that is accessible only from a small few foot radius in my bed.  Needless to say, I'm writing this from there so it can be posted online once completed.  However, not having reliable internet at home means no internet for my desktop and very sketchy wireless for my notebook - which sucks!

The day after I arrived (and spent a good part of the night cleaning up the place.. it truly is in the depths of being remodeled), Wendy and Lowell Stone (the homeowners) arrived to do some work.  They are really nice people and we got along very well.  Wendy showed me around Federal Way (some lovely vistas and roads around here if you know where to look).  I spent a lot of time on the 1st and 2nd helping them with throwing away trash and moving stuff out to their rented truck to bring out to their new home in Yakima (which is about two hours to the east in the desert part of WA).  Wendy is a midwife and works long hours at her new job at a hospital out where they've just moved.  Lowell is a, get this, retired postal carrier (as if we've not met enough of those recently... and yes, you know who you are.).  They also have a son, Jessie, who is an iron worker, currently on a project for Microsoft.

Just before they left, they helped me get in touch with a very nice man who lives up in the Greenlake district in Seattle, not far from the University and I drove up and met him and we had a nice time walking around the UofW (Ewe of Dub) and going out to a coffee at a kick ass place called Zoka Coffee.

Zoka has all these fresh, homemade pastries (any one of which looked like it would be a great treat) and excellent espresso drinks.  On top of that, they offer high end single estate coffee tastings where you can buy a cup of an offered reserve coffee and they'll brew it for you singly.  I've always thought coffee places should do that and I think Zokas does a great business on it.  I sure as hell know I'll be heading back there to give some of those a try in the future!  But Al Wirtz (the guy I went up to meet, who's a middle-aged recently divorced electrical engineer who works on fish-tracking sonar) and I had a great time talking and he was able to give me some great ideas for how to handle the commute and parking for when I got there.

I found out, after looking at the bus routes, light rail and commuter train routes, that using public transportation would require at least 2 hours each way to reach the university.  A bus trip would require 3 transfers and would even require a 5 mile car ride to start with.  Basically, it isn't going to work commuting up from down here 6 days a week while trying to get all this studying done.  Wendy and Lowell both agreed that it would be very difficult for me to commute up to the campus from Federal Way and offered that I could stay here until I was able to find another place.  They have been wonderfully kind and helpful and I can't thank them enough!  And.. since then I have diligently been responding to 10-15 housing ads a day on Craigslist, only to get a couple of replies.  I'm meeting with someone today at 2 - we'll see how that goes.

So I had my first class last night and I have to be honest.. it's going to be a really tough month and a half.  I'll be having class 3-4 hours per day and probably doing a consistent 6 hours a day in extra-class study.  I'm not scared and I'm feeling good about it... but it will probably mean that I won't have much to post here... and it probably won't happen as frequently as some of you might like for a while.  And if nothing else, like this post, it will be mostly business and not as much of the fun tidbits you've come to know and love from me ;-)  I'll do my best, but between moving and searching and studying and commuting, I'll be swamped.

Good bye World... see you in March.