Musings on an Assortment of Subjects

Whew, the past few days have been a whirlwind. I got here around 9 p.m. Saturday evening, was picked up and brought to the MVS house on Capitol Hill, where I met lots of people and moved into my temporary abode in the TV room (until the end of this week when some of the old VSers move to their new residence). On Sunday I spent the morning unpacking, then wandered around the neighborhood for a bit before getting picked up for the Grand Tour of Seattle.

Jill, the local MVS coordinator, ended up taking us on a 5-hour tour of many parts of Seattle. We started by heading a ways south down Rainier Ave. to visit a couple peoples’ assignments (including a quick detour to see Lake Washington),

then swung past the stadiums,

stopped at the Uwajimaya market,

headed on through downtown,

past the Space Needle,

and up to Queen Anne hill which offers a gorgeous panoramic view.

Then on up across the canals, past the Fremont troll,

to the Ten Thousand Villages in Roosevelt. And then west to Ballard and the Chittenden locks

before swinging back past the University and home again.

On Sunday evening I walked to Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral for its well-known Compline service, where I met a friend from Goshen who I brought back to see the MVS house. And then today was my first day at ONE/Northwest–a day of meeting neat people who are passionate about technology and about helping environmental agencies engage their constituents, of setting up a new computer and learning about how this organization does things, and of actually diving into a bit of programming alongside my illustrious colleague Andrew. Oh, and I can’t forget this evening…one of my housemates managed to get some free tickets to the Mariners game from her work, so we headed down to Soldier field to see the game. Sadly, the results were not as desired (Oakland had two grand slams…TWO!), but it was still a fun end to some exciting first days in the Emerald City.