New Life

We've been here a month! I now have a sense of my new life, and feel that I can distill it in a blog post.

I start most days having coffee in our breakfast nook. Often, Shilpi is there, and we chat:



Then I go up to the Jamglue Lair:






Sometimes, I go outside and stare at our house, because I am enamored with it:



Then I cook food in this amazingly huge kitchen:





Using ingredients that I get to store in this luxurious pantry:



Once, we had people over for a BBQ in our backyard, which feels like the wilderness because the trees are enormous and dense:





I also get to bask in the glow of old friends and family; we have seen Gautam's parents at least once a week, and I've seen my mom twice (and dad once ) in the month that we've been here. And all our friends in DC have been warm, welcoming, fun and fantastic. And I've started making new friends too!

I've also gone to two shows at the 9:30 Club and I am in love with it.

And now the bittersweet:

Everytime I think about my Seattle friends, I feel both extra-warm, and like I'm going to throw up. I spent my entire adult life so far in Seattle, and I am so proud of the person I have become as a result of all the relationships and experiences I had over the past 6 years (that's should be taken as a compliment to the influencers, not just conceit!). I miss you guys so much...

Road Trip

We took an epic road trip. Here was our route:


View Larger Map

I tried to keep a video blog, but only remembered to do it three times:







And we also took a bunch of crappy pictures. The trip was really fun - way more fun than these pictures and videos indicate. It went by really fast, and we got to see lots of good friends and family along the way. The best part or the trip was New Mexico. The worst was the first leg of the drive - it was long as hell.

Highlights of the trip (all a far second to the awesome hospitality of Jay, Laura, Jacob and Margaret, Anu and Sameer, Sunil, Ben and Melissa):

• seeing Ratatat at The Filmore in San Francisco
  
• staying in the "Coming to America" room at Planet Hollywood
• the Grand Canyon (exceeded expectations)
• staying with a cattle rancher/doctor (and his awesome wife, who owns/runs a meat processing plant) in New Mexico, and seeing first-hand how farms and small business in America are being destroyed by rising gas/food/energy prices
• the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock
  
• the Stax Museum of American Soul in Memphis
• Lexington, KY; it reminded me a lot of Utica (the motherland)

blog switching!

I'm switching to blogger, largely because I have issues embedding stuff (videos, flash objects, etc.) in my livejournal. This is not because I have a new life now.

For reference, here's the old Snoopy Cache.

I do not promise to blog any more frequently than I did in the past.

Also, please note that I update facebook pretty often, so that's where some of my blogging energy is going...