A busy time of year

It's amazing that June will start tomorrow. Unlike last year, summer has definitely come early to Seattle: it's been sunny and in the 70's every day for the past 2 weeks.

Today was our second sailing lesson and we had a blast. We're now qualified crew members and can go out with our friend Pavel - which we'll do at the earliest possible time.

We also went to a baby shower - the first one Anya or I had ever been to - for our friends Robert & Katia, whose baby is due in July. It was a lot of fun; they didn't do any cheesy games or anything (I've heard stories). We just ate some great food, drank champagne, and enjoyed another beautiful day.

This will be my last post for a couple weeks. We're leaving in a few days to visit Anya's family in Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. But before that, my parents are coming - they're taking care of our house & their granddog while we're away. Pretty nice gig for everyone...

Mike & Maggie

My cousin Mike and his wife Maggie came to Seattle for Memorial Day weekend as part of a big trip down the West Coast. We had absolutely perfect weather for showing them around the city, going for a little hike in the foothills, and having a picnic on the beach. Everyone had a great time, and Tuesday came way too fast.

Mike has an awesome camera and took a lot of pictures; I'll link to them once he posts them. For now, here's a set we took while picnicking at Golden Gardens.

Sailing lessons

The major cities on the West Coast are special for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their unusual proximity to both mountains and the sea. It's been two years since we've moved to Seattle (time flies), and in those two years most of our outdoor recreation has focused on the mountains. That's as it should be: I love the mountains, and having lived here I can't imagine moving to a place where there aren't any.

But the other part of the equation is the water. With that in mind, we decided to take some basic sailing classes. The aim isn't necessarily to go sailing by ourselves - at least not at first - but to serve as an able crew for our friend Pavel, who's done quite a bit of sailing.

Seattle is on a strip of land between a large freshwater lake - Lake Washington - and Puget Sound, which is salt water (in geographic terms, a "sound" is basically a large inlet off the Ocean). You can sail on either of them, but we're taking our classes through a sailing club at Shilshole Bay Marina in Ballard (on the Sound side of Seattle). Sunday was our first class.

"Sailing" itself - and by that I mean the act of harnessing the wind to move the boat - is actually a relatively simple concept. In calm seas and light winds, which we had, it doesn't take too long to learn the basic technique. The difficult part of day one was getting a grasp on all the terminology, learning to tie the correct knots, and going through all the safety regulations.

We had nearly perfect weather and learned a ton on our relatively basic 25' boat. It was also very enjoyable to get out on the water. Now we have to do our homework before our next class in two weeks.

I used the few free moments we had to snap a couple pictures.

Stanford

My good friend Matt recently got accepted to pursue a Master's degree at Stanford. I'm excited about this because it will make it much easier for me to see him - his current home in Vermont is quite a slog from Seattle.

He boldly accepted his spot at Stanford without ever having been there - actually, he'd never been to the state of California at all. Last weekend I met up with him there to scout out his new surroundings. I didn't bring a camera, but Matt has a really good photo album of the trip on his site.

We stayed in San Francisco and took the train down to Palo Alto for a day to visit the school. It's the most beautiful college campus I've ever seen; it's like a cross between a botanical garden and a living museum of Mission-style architecture. A very pleasant place to visit for any of you who know Matt.

Of course San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, and hanging out with Matt there was great. It was really hard to go back to work on Monday morning...