Busy Weekend

Hello everyone. It's been quite a good weekend! The weather has been absolutely excellent; we've been getting highs of about 30 degrees (84F) and it's typically about 25 right through the day. It's even warm in the evening!

On Friday I stayed in the office till around 7pm (I think) before wondering what the hell I was doing there on a Friday evening. I left shortly after realising this and got home. I was pretty knackered as it was a bit of a roller coaster day. I ended up missing the group lunch (of about 14 people) and the trip to see the troll never materialised, which was probably for the best as I had a tonne of work to sort out! So that evening I just sat up watching ninja warriors before having beans on toast for dinner and getting a relevantly early night. On Saturday I had a lie in but eventually mustered the energy to get out of the house. Shaun and I walked down to the mall to go clothes shopping. More importantly we had gone to buy sun glasses. Since the day we got to Seattle, we've been squinting as soon as we walk outdoors, and without failure we've both said we'd buy some sunglasses "tomorrow". Four weeks after arriving we finally got some. It was just in time as well as I don't think my eyes could have survived another day out in this sun. Whilst we were in the mall, I also bought a new pair of shorts and a new shirt. The purchase was also influenced by the fact that we would be going to Jess' party that evening. After browsing the usual shops (Video games, gadgets and expensive things) we got some late lunch. We went to a 'pizzeria' which was an open fronted store that had a selection of huge semi cooked pizzas. The idea being you order a slice of one of the pizzas and they put it back in to the stone oven to finish it. The slices were huge and easily made up for a lunch. I know I'm supposed to bite my tongue when pointing out differences in America due to the high number of US readers but I think it is my duty to tell the folks at home that pizza does not come with a tomato base as standard. So after choking down our gargantuan slices of dry stuffed base pizza and 'regular size' 14oz sodas we went back to the apartment.

After spending 3 minutes enunciating my name and address down a terrible phone connection I managed to order a cab. It arrived late which we weren't too fussed about as it was warm waiting outside. Unfortunately the cab driver said he had been trying to ring us for several minutes to tell us he was delayed but I guess that's not too much good when you're outside. He had to spend several un-metered minutes finding Jess's address in his (paper) map but eventually we were on our way. When we got to the complex of townhouses, the cab driver was quite insistent the address I had given him was for a townhouse 50 yards down from Jess' house. I have actually been to her townhouse before so I was fairly certain her house in the corner with her number on it was in fact her house but he was having none of it. After spending five minutes convincing him he went on his merry way. He was very friendly and was obviously concerned about ditching his fare in the middle of a cul-de-sac 10 minutes from the nearest major road and 30 minutes from the nearest store. Can't complain really but it was quite amusing.

Jess' party was good fun and our plan of 'not getting stink-o by drinking unpalatable Heineken Import' worked out pretty well. There was a good sized group of people there and everyone had a lot of fun playing Guitar Hero 2 and Nintendo Wii (needless to say I was undefeated at Wii Tennis). Jess had just bought a new 50" high definition television which was, well, sodding huge to be blunt. We managed to order a cab to pick us up at around 2am which went very smoothly. We were home before 3 and after watching several minutes of Terminator I headed off to bed.

This morning I felt really tired and didn't do a whole lot. Eventually I managed to make it out of the house as Shaun was going to walk around Bellevue and take some proper pictures using his DSLR. The weather was still searing, and the heat coming from the pavement, walls, roads and buildings made it feel like walking through an oven. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have quit a bit of red on my arms tomorrow! We got to see Bellevue in its finest as the weather was so good and hopefully the pictures do the day justice. But instead of doing the usual "here's a nice picture" post, I've decided to treat you all using the power of Google!

Click here for the interactive tour of Bellevue!

By using Google Map's new community functions I've plotted out the walk we took accompanied by placemarkers that show where all my pictures were taken! Clicking on any of the placemarkers (the little icons) you can see thumbnails of the pictures I took standing in that location. Clicking any of the thumbnails will take you to the full size picture in my Google Picasa web album (you can enlarge any of the pictures using the magnifying tool to the top right of the picture). Let me know what you think. I'm pretty sure I'm going to start adding all my pictures to locations in the map as it makes it much more fun to use!

Well we're heading out for dinner tonight as we're both too tired to cook. I've got a busy week at work this week so I may not have many interesting posts, but I'll try and post when I can!

Speak to you all soon!