Leaving Silicon For Seattle
I'm sitting near B10 in Seattle/Tacoma International, starting my recovery from one hell of a trip. If you don't follow my pseudo-miniblog, you'll probably be wondering how we popped up in King County. For the last 72 hours, Jen and I have been on a non-stop, point-to-point, apartment search. Yes, that means that Team Revyver is moving to the Emerald City.
The prospect of moving to the Seattle Area has been floating for a few months. Before then, Seattle had never crossed my mind. However, ever since I had a particular conversation with Mr. Newsvine about his new condo earlier in the year, the seed was planted. It sprouted a few months later when Jen and I decided that we couldn't live comfortably in Silicon Valley. Call it a fault of our personalities or our stubborn nature, but we couldn't see me going back into the workforce to justify staying--the novelty would fade pretty quickly.
We threw around a few ideas, striking out Los Angeles and moving back east pretty quickly. All we knew is that we wanted to stay on the left coast. As we studied the prospect, we got extremely excited quite quickly but managed to keep things quiet to reduce the risk of jinxing anything (don't laugh).
The reasons we're moving to Seattle are two-fold, the first being what I just wrote. The second is the fact that Jen recently changed her educational focus from art to Japanese. As a quick aside, obviously people who know me personally know my love for Japanese music--the explosion of which is courtesy of Jen. Jen's been interested in Japanese since she was 13, and has always had a love for anime and more recently, Japanese pop music. When we first met, she was already in school studying art and continued to do so while we were in the valley. However, she got more and more frustrated with it as the terms passed. It was a hard decision to make, but in the end she made the change to Japanese, putting her dream of being a magna-ka as something she can pursue after becoming fluent in the language. Baring any major roadblocks, she'll be attending the University of Washington in the winter pursuing a degree in Japanese Linguistics.
Even with all the excitement around the move, I'm going to be leaving behind my first after-college home. I love Silicon Valley and definitely saw Jen and I settling down in the area, it'll just take a little longer to actually happen. I'll be leaving behind two great experiences with two great companies, awesome friends in people like Scott, Jina, Dustin, Chris, James and the atmosphere that has made living in the Bay Area so awesome. I'll miss the ability to pass Yahoo, Intel and Google or enter Infinite Loop. I'll definitely miss the great stores that knew us by name and the arcade that brought me back to the world of DDR.
This will be the first move that Jen, myself and our four cats make together. It's really the start of something new for us, and as I said, we're really excited about living in the area. This holds especially true after seeing it for the first time over the last three days.
Jen has been in awe over the surroundings, as they are completely foreign to her after growing up in Los Angeles. Myself, well, (specifically) Mount Rainier leaves me with a bit awestruck since I've never lived next to any majestic mountains like that living in New Jersey, Rhode Island or Southern California. We'll be looking forward to taking everything in and maybe plan a trip to Vancouver while we're at it. Oh, and I have to admit, I'm pretty anxious to sneak into Newsvine and Blue Flavor.
Our journey to Seattle starts around September 1st, and we both feel like August is going to go by extremely quickly.