Bryant and Kelly in Washington

Kelly: “I don’t know. There’s no way of knowing. But you can’t live in fear.”
Bryant: “Yes, you can.”

Hah. I guess he’s right! ;)

Yesterday I found out that our nephew Finn has been standing in front of the mirror, sticking his belly out as far as he can, and saying happily, “Look, Mom, I’m becoming like Uncle Bryant!”

Kelly and I are playing Settlers of Catan for the first time. Well, maybe not the very first time. I think we both played once or twice at BYU when everyone else loved the game, and I think we both were thoroughly confused because everyone else already knew how to play to trounce the newbies without remorse.

So now we’re actually trying to learn. We’re using the Starting Set-up for Beginners, and we were really careful to match the example map exactly. We didn’t even let two mountains be in opposite places from each other. We even made them face the same way as in the picture.

We’re gonna be so good at this.

Kelly just said, “That’s the problem with change: you get used to it.”

Just a few minutes ago, in the kitchen, Bryant and I were having a conversation. At one point, we said exactly the same thing in exactly the same tone of voice and exactly the same rhythm. And here’s what happened:

B: It’s kind of disturbing how often we do that.
K: What? Finish each other’s sentences?
B: Yeah. Or just say the same thing as each other. We didn’t used to do that.
K: We didn’t?
B: No. We didn’t. {his eyes widened and his face became very severe} It’s something that happened to us since we got married.

B: Which one is your favorite?
K: Huh?
B: Which one is your favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?
K: Um. {pause} I… I don’t know that I have a favorite.
B: My favorite used to be Michelangelo, but it’s definitely Rafael now that I’ve grown up.

And there you go.

On the news this morning the weather forecast said that the next few days would have some rain, but not much. Then one of the newscasters said, “Well any rain is good compared to what we’ve been getting.”

And it wasn’t a joke. They continued to talk about how there hadn’t been much snow and how we weren’t getting much participation.

Are they living in the same place as us? The place where you can’t even walk across the parking lot to take the garbage out without getting your pant legs soaked? Where it’s so wet that moss grows on the highway and street signs?

If this is a dry winter for Washington then it’s a good thing we moved here this year. The Utah-Washington transition might have been too much to handle if it weren’t so dang dry here this year.

One week and one day after Kelly and I came to Worshington we got an apartment. We had a little bit of a race with another couple to get the place, but we won out basically because we don’t have pets and because we’re so good-looking. We got to move in yesterday, and by move in I just mean that we’re allowed to sleep here, because we won’t get our stuff for another week. We are really happy with the apartment, and as nice as it would have been to spend Christmas at Motel 6, we’re really grateful to have a new place to live.

We’ve got some big news. No, Kelly’s not pregnant. We’re moving to Seattle, Washington. Soon.

Kelly’s planning on going into UW’s Physician’s Assistant program. That’s a big change from her Economics undergrad, so she’s got a lot of prereqs to take care of first, but she’s really excited about it. I’m excited that she’s found something she’s excited about. When I told my work that Kelly was going back to school they asked me to stay on with them and to telecommute to work. That’s pretty exciting and flattering, and very stress-relieving that I won’t have to worry about finding a new job when we get up there.

It’s all been happening really fast, and now it’s just over two weeks until we move. In fact, it’s happening so fast that we don’t even know where we’re going to live. We’re basically just packing up all of our stuff and taking off, and we won’t know where we’re going to land until we get there. We don’t even know anything about the area at all to guide us. Kelly’s never been to Seattle and the only time I’ve been there I was 7 years old and too busy finding quartz crystals in my great-grandpa’s yard to notice anything about where we were.

The apartment that Kelly and I live in is really just the basement of a house. We have some concrete steps going down to our basement on the side of the house, and those steps turn into a death trap for everything that dares to go down there (except for us, hopefully).

I think gravity (or witchcraft) sucks everything in the neighborhood down into the landing at the bottom of our steps. It fills up with leaves and snow and rain, and in the winter it’s basically 4 inches of icy water that protects the apartment like a castle’s moat.

Besides simple inanimate things filling up the moat, it seems like every bug in the area decides that our hole is the place it is going to crawl down in order to die. We’ve had spiders, snails, about a million (give or take 3) roly-polys, and most recently a katydid. I don’t know if they’re intentionally choosing the moat as their final resting grounds or if somehow they get trapped down there. It does seem to happen regardless if the moat is wet or dry at the time, so if they’re getting trapped then it is probably some unknown cosmic force that is doing the trapping.

I just hope that no humans coming to visit us ever wait at the bottom of those steps for too long, or I’m afraid they’ll end up like the snails and katydids.