Seattle beaches

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Last weekend we visited a few beach-y areas in West Seattle, Alki Beach Park and Lincoln Park. The weather is in the lower 50s here now so it makes for good outdoor exploring. I am trying to finally fully heal my left hip, which I injured in the Grand Canyon in 2011, so for a couple of weeks I need to take it easy. Hopefully it does heal and I can hike more this spring/summer with gusto.
My x-ray from this Thursday:

Valentine's Vase

Awesome handmade vase by Brad Sondahl that Dustin got me for Valentine's Day, from a local vintage store in Ballard called Revolver. The plant is from our back yard.

weekend nature

This weekend was rainless and ~50 degrees (F) so we went to a few local parks, Discovery Park yesterday and the Seattle Arboretum. Here are a few shots of the mossy wonderland that is Seattle in winter, and other scenes from the weekend. More on Flickr.

engagement, and ring

We got engaged (officially, despite being living as basically engaged for a while now) on December 15th 2012. We meant to do it on November 17th as the 5th anniversary of when we started dating, but a variety of factors delayed the date and the ring aquisition. On 12/15 I was having a 1.5 hour thyroid scan, and my brother was arriving from San Francisco to visit for a week the next morning, so we were running low on time but we pulled off an awesome evening. (This wasn't a surprise, obviously :) ). Dustin picked me up from my scan with a single big flowering kale flower. He took me home and presented me with our finished ring that had been in production for several weeks. That night we opened a special bottle of wine and had an amazing dinner at The Book Bindery.

Our ring was custom made, designed by Dustin in collaboration with Sally of Fancy in Seattle. It's a pure palladium band set with eight sapphires and three fine silver dots/rivets. The eighth sapphire is set on the bottom side of the ring and is orange in honor of Mizmo, as a fun way to represent him in our shared life. We originally designed the ring while he was still with us but he passed away during the fabrication, so this stone took on even more meaning. One of the stones on the front is a color-shifting sapphire that looks light green-blue in sunlight but turns a light lavender color in incandescent light - very awesome. The silver dots are meant to look like moons around the "planet" of the center sapphire.

There were a few techinical issues with the ring that needed to be corrected, so after we took the ring back to Illinois and announced the engagement to family, Sally took it back and fixed some things for us. Now it's ready to share on the internet to the wider world!

We don't have a wedding date yet but we're working out what we want to do. We're super thrilled to finally be officially engaged and thank everyone for their love and support throughout our relationship so far. Looking forward to the what the future brings!

walking in Queen Anne

These are some shots I took wandering around Queen Anne last week. There are some really cool houses and views to be had in this neighborhood - we haven't found anywhere we want to love more quite yet, but we still have a lot of exploring of the other neighborhoods around Seattle to do.

Seattle moss

In the winter Seattle gets even greener in some ways. There is moss everywhere, I love it. Here are some examples of moss and other groundcover types of plants in and around bricks and paving stones in Queen Anne.

New Year's Eve 2012

Some photos I took around my parents' house on New Year's Eve -- we went to a nearby(ish) Japanese supermarket to pick up supplies and made our own sushi, something we've done a few times before that's always really fun. My mom got me the baboon sculpture for Christmas, and my father hand carved the two Santa figurines several years ago. The Space Needle collection is one of my father's more recent endeavors (they are all vintage figurines from various years).