Twin Falls Trail

Yesterday we hiked withs some friends around Twin Falls, about an hour outside of Seattle. The weather was perfect. The Pacific Northwest is seriously beautiful!

Jellyfish at the Steinhart Aquarium

Earlier this month I took a business trip to San Francisco to visit Netflix HQ and talk to them about AWS Support (they are a huge customer of AWS and of one of my features in particular). I got to spend a couple of afternoons with my brother, who lives in Mountain View. We visited the California Academy of Sciences one of those days -- here are a few jellyfish images, more pictures to come later.

Port Townsend - part 2

More pictures from Port Townsend trip - this is the day we went on the whale watching tour. We saw a few gray whales, California sea lions, and Steller sea lions (pictured last). My new binocoluars were pretty sweet too.

Port Townsend - part 1

This weekend we visited Port Townsend, which is on the northeast part of the Olympic Peninsula. We came to check out the town and to go on a whale watching tour as part of my birthday weekend.

Some pictures below from the town on the day we arrived -- we had lunch at The Fountain Cafe, where Dustin gave me my birthday present (a Kite Shield Ring from Dorothy Cheng, an awesome local Seattle jewelry designer), and then walked around the charming little downtown. We learned later from our whale tour guide that Port Townsend was originally intended to be the major port city (the "Seattle") of the region, but because they never finished building the railroad all the way up to its location, it stayed a small port town (current population ~10,000). We visited a few small shops and a great antique mall (more pictures of my finds there later), then had dinner at a Japanese noodle restaurant. Finally, we discovered some local deer hanging out brazenly in the yard of the house we were staying in. More from day 2 of our visit coming soon...

spring light cats

It's springtime in Seattle and the longer days are very welcome. (Some of our shortest days over the winter were less than 8.5 hours, with sunrise at 7:55am and sunset at 4:20pm.) The light has been really interesting recently when it's late in the day and the sun reflects off of Fremont/Phinney Ridge to the north, a great view from our living room.

Our cats are also slowly but surely getting better at snuggling with each other, and I managed to capture them being extra adorable in their perch this week. We had them at the vet today for checkups and booster vaccine/microchip for Margot, and we learned that Rowen is currently 7.7 pounds and Margot is 10.3 pounds.

one more cat update for the weekend

Margot is a creative lounger, as I mentioned earlier. She was being extra cute again today in the office perch. Not to be outdone, Rowen had her own sleep-stylings going on in the lounge chair.













Lastly, we came back from the market today to witness this adorable scene through the window. We were originally worried the cats would only ever tolerate each other, so to watch them growing closer every day, rather quickly too, is fantastic and we are thrilled. We're so lucky to have two healthy, unique, lovely, affectionate cats. We are cat lottery winners.

Rainy Sunday at the Noble Fir, merging the cats

Last Sunday we went to Ballard and had a drink at our favorite bar, the Noble Fir. The Sunday Market was going on so it made for good people/dog watching.

The big news however is that our two cats are finally living together most of the (day)time. They chase each other a lot and get into occasional spats, but there is also mutual grooming happening, and they'll even share lounge space with Dustin on occasion. Margot loves to lay on and with Dustin in that chair, it is super cute. We keep them apart at night but hope to have full cat-merge in effect over the next week or two. So far so good!