Heartbreaker in Seattle

I had planned to put up this blog post after the super bowl and I was optimistic in that I had planned to put it up after the game because I knew I'd be too distracted to study. Turns out, I am too distracted to study, but not because of jumping around, smiling and celebrating a huge Seattle win...but because it was such a sad loss...

Anyway, here's what we've been up to since the last post.

The Glassman family had a big occasion on the 26th to celebrate. Julia turned 21! It's hard to believe that the first time I met Julia she was still in middle school and now she's more than half way through her college career!

We met up at Ann's house to celebrate with Ann, Paul and Julia.

Julia received an unplanned theme of gifts this year – it was all Seattle gear for this girl this year.

We sang happy birthday surrounded in the glow of her 21 candles on the #12 cupcake ;)

We were met by spring-like weather in the middle of January this year. It topped out at 61 degrees I think. I took advantage of the somewhat slower pace of psychiatry and (instead of dining inside the work room) I headed out into the sunshine by the Harborview helipad to enjoy my lunch in the sun

I was greeted by an amazing view of the mountains (the pictures don’t do it justice)

the Seattle skyline

and by crocus plants peaking through the soil in the planters

It turns out I get a gorgeous view of Mt. Rainier most days from the med student work room. I’m able to look over my right shoulder as the sun is rising and see it out the window as I read up on how my patients did the night before.

Then Friday afternoon we were met with this incredible fog that came over the city. I was sitting in traffic on I-5 and got this snap shot of the moment. Just imagine the image without the window glare, the cars in the foreground and the pixelated quality and you can see how amazing it looked in person.

Friday also marked an occasion I look forward to every year (but I don’t always get to take-part in): the annual brides-against-breast-cancer dress sale! They’ve changed their name to Brides For A Cause now, but it’s the same organization Tom and I have volunteered for in the past. This year, instead of volunteering to help brides find their gowns during the sale, we volunteered to help set up the sale (it’s only fair to give someone else a shot at helping brides find “the dress” right?).

 

Tom and I got all the tulle veils in place to cap off the night.

The sale was taking place at a venue I had never heard of before: the Cedarbrook Lodge in SeaTac. It was GORGEOUS. After setting up the event (mind you Tom had driven up from Olympia and I down from Seattle in the traffic ) we felt exhausted. So, we decided to go out on a limb with an impromptu date night and have dinner at the hotel restaurant without looking at the menu before we sat down. 

Little did we know, this place was fancy-pants and pricy. We learned we’d be in for a treat when they brought us our amuse bouche. (We hadn’t had an amuse bouche since we ate at Canlis!) It was filled with an apricot jam with onion-garlic reduction and it was GLORIOUS!

And, we knew we were in a fancy place because of this obviously fancy centerpiece on our table: a frog riding a snail with reins….. Huh?

I had “Salmon Bacon” with a balsamic reduction and potatoes (turns out salmon bacon is just salmon filet sliced in the shape of bacon)

And for dessert we had huckleberry ice cream with fresh huckleberries served on a bed of waffles! Waffles—for dessert! It was between that and a pot-of-hot-chocolate-for-two with homemade cinnamon doughnuts. I had a hard time deciding between those two, so we might have to go back to enjoy that one.

And if we didn’t already have enough dessert we were finished off with a complimentary cranberry-cinnamon soda with lemon shortbread cookies and brownies

This is Tom’s: “If this is a brownie, then I am a GIANT” face :)

After all of that, we spent the day on Saturday getting a lot of work done. Tom has class on Saturdays from 9AM-4:30 PM (because of having to be in Olympia 3 days a week). So, needless to say there’s not much “moving” that we do on Saturdays (i.e. exercise is not built into it). So…we were craving ice cream after dinner when it was pitch dark outside, but we were  also feeling guilty for not having exercised. So what does that leave you with? Well, a 3.5 mile jog round-trip to the Metropolitan market on the Burke Gilman Trail with head lamps of course!

We had on goal: to get cookie dough ice cream. It turns out, ice cream motivates me to jog…at night…in 40 degree weather…who knew?

It was wonderful. Then we woke up ready to cheer on the Seahawks in the superbowl. I meant to get more pictures, but this is all I got—Tom dressed up to help me with my home-made pulled pork (I didn’t want to get the bbq sauce on my white Wilson jersey) and we had a great time up until the last 20 seconds or so....

I’ve got two weeks left of Psych and I’m not going to lie…it’s going to be a lot harder to go into work tomorrow coming off of that loss. I know it’s silly, it’s just a football game, but that loss kind of sucked the energy right out of Seattle…it’s palpable here.