Seattle

One thing that's pretty constant though, is my hypersensitivity to anything baby/pregnancy related. For the last 8 months it seems like everywhere I look there's newborns and pregnant women. I love Facebook, but it kills me some days. I'm totally happy for people, of course, but I won't lie and say it's not just a bit painful to see everyone's pictures of their babies. Sigh.

Marc and I had our "recon" appointment with our doctor after work on Thursday. It looks like they ended up culturing all our remaining embryos to Day 6, and three of them actually made it to the expanded blastocyst stage, and probably would've had a good shot at becoming a viable pregnancy. Problem is, all three of those happened to be affected embryos. So the doctor thinks our lack of success this time was just a case of bad luck - none of the unaffected embryos seemingly made it to a more advanced stage of development. The promising thing is that we did have some that developed to that point, so she thinks it's just a matter of being persistent and hoping for a better roll of the dice. Hopefully, persistent = one more time and not more.

Anyways - after the appointment, we drove straight to SFO to catch our flight out to Seattle. We flew on Virgin America, and it was my first time (no pun intended) flying with them. Pretty nice airline, although the seats weren't as comfy as Jet Blue or even Southwest. Still an improvement over United though. The personal TV with Dish Network was awesome though - I ended up watching "Divas Live" on VH1, which had Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks, Leona Lewis, Jennifer Hudson, Adele and Miley Cyrus performing. Talk about a "which one of these does not belong" line up. I mean, I actually like "The Climb," but I think that's in spite of Miley, because all the Pro Tools and Auto Tune in the world couldn't make her voice pleasant to listen to. So she was predictably wretched and off-key live.

We arrived in Seattle at around 10:30pm, picked up our rental car (which took forever), checked into the hotel, and crashed for the night. We slept in a bit on Friday, and didn't get out the door until almost noon. We drove down to Pike Place Market, had lunch, and walked around for a couple of hours. The flowers they had there were amazing. And cheap! Saw the very first Starbucks too.

The weather was great - nice and sunny, so we walked to Pier 52 and caught the ferry to Bainbridge Island. Really nice area - there were lots of cute houses on the shore, and we got a chance to walk around downtown. Marc totally wants to move there now (I wouldn't be entirely opposed to the idea). We found a fudge shop called "Bon Bon Confections," so of course we had to go there, and Marc insisted on taking a picture of me standing underneath the "Bon Bon" sign. They had great fudge, too.

In the evening, we went to a place called Salty's for dinner. It sits right on the bay/harbor, and we got a table by the window, so we had a great view of the water and the city, including the Space Needle. I had a 2-pound dungeness crab, which took me forever to eat. We told our waitress we were there for an early anniversary celebration, and after our meal she came out with a slice of white cake and two small glasses of sparkling cider. Pretty cool.

Saturday morning I got up at 9 to watch the Cal/Minnesota game. At first it looked like it was going to be a blowout, and I was thinking we could head out at halftime, but the game ended up being close until the fourth quarter. So we pretty much watched until the end, then left the hotel a little after noon. We had some pretty good subs for lunch at a place called Jimmy Johns, then went to take the Underground Tour.

Back in the early 1900's, there was apparently a huge fire in downtown Seattle that essentially burned the entire city to the ground. They rebuilt a bunch of the buildings, but at the same time decided to raise the entire city about 12 feet. So they raised the streets, but had all the sidewalks and buildings 12 feet lower. Eventually they built over the buildings and everything got raised up, but they still had these old buildings and sidewalks underground. It was pretty neat - the tour was funny and kind of a cool Seattle history lesson.

We walked around a bit afterwards - tried to find the cafe that they supposedly replicated for "Frasier," but didn't have luck. We did find a cafe at the location it was supposed to be at, but it looked nothing like the "Frasier" one.

We went back to the hotel for a little bit, and then it was off to the Mariners/Yankees game at Safeco Field. Nice ballpark, and Marc got us great seats. We were at the Terrace Level, which felt kind of special, because you had to show your tickets just to get in, and there was a whole sports bar and all sorts of concessions just for that area. It started to rain early in the game, and they have a retractable roof that they extended over the field. Cool! It was otherwise perfect weather for a game, and we had fun munching on kettle corn and eating ice cream in helmet cups.

Sunday morning we got up, got packed, and drove back to downtown. Did a little shopping at the market and had Pike Place Chowder for lunch. Super yummy. We went to the Space Needle and then the Science Fiction Museum next door. Then we went to the Museum of Flight - got to go in an old Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One as well as an old Concorde. Both were pretty cool.

By this point we were pretty tired, so we went to the airport a little early, had dinner, and just relaxed and watched the football game (I napped, mostly) at the gate. We got back to SF, picked Bandit up from my parents', and went home and crashed. I did catch the tail end of the Emmys (glad to hear Michael Emerson won a much-deserved award for best supporting actor) and we watched last week's season premiere of "The Office," which was pretty hilarious.

SO TIRED this morning. But it was truly nice to get away for a little bit, and just relax and enjoy stuff.