Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Yeah for the Zoo! One day we decided we wanted to go to the Zoo since our earlier attempts to get there failed. We had followed the road signs, but never found the place. But we were sure it was near our apartment. So we found a map, got directions, found free parking and walked our way to the zoo. Before we even walked in, we already had a full year membership. What sold us was that we got free admission to over 150 zoos across the nation, including the Zoo in Salt Lake City, so we figured it was worth the price, especially if we went lots of times. Which we have.

The zoo was lots of fun. They have a fantastic gorilla exhibit with two families of gorillas. I could watch those apes for hours. Some of them came right up to the glass to look at us while we were looking at them. My favorite one is Nina. She sticks her tongue out at me!

What fun we had! Rebecca had to plan out an entire evening of things to do until exactly 8:30 when the surprise party would be ready. First we went to a Greek restaurant to satisfy our cravings for the next year. One thing that is lacking in the Utah area is good Greek food, so we ordered up Souvlaki, some Saganaki, a big lamb salad and plenty of other fun dishes which we won't be able to get for a long time. It's a shame that we haven't really lived in a place since Michigan that has good Mediterranean food because we get the occasional craving for some tasty hummus and pita.

After dinner, Rebecca got out all her post-it notes which she had carefully written down directions on. The next stop was a Troll hunt we were going on. We drove out to the Fremont area, a small bohemian spot of Seattle west of where we live. Underneath a major bridge, the Fremont area had commissioned some artists to build a sculpture to use that normally unused space underneath the bridge...so they built an enourmous TROLL. It was fun to climb all over the troll and before we could take any pictures, our rechargable batteries died! But before we left, we walked down to a magazine store, bought some fresh batteries and came back to take some nice pictures of the troll under the bridge.

After the troll, we got back into the car and drove to the Gasworks park. Gasworks used to be a gas plant for the city of Seattle but they turned the shut down plant into a beautiful park that overlooks a bay in front of Downtown Seattle. It really was one of the best views we've seen in this town. Wayne opened his presents alongside the water.

A few days ago, we had wandered into a book store and couldn't help ourselves from buying two really great art books for Wayne and the last A.A. Milne book that we didn't own: When We Were Young. Since Wayne wasn't going to get any presents this year on his birthday: Part One, Rebecca wrapped up those two art books even though he knew what they were. However, she also snuck in a third book that he didn't know about and really surprised him. It's a book by Sam Brown, author of the website www.explodingdog.com. He was very happy.

After playing around the Gasworks park until sundown (there were some protestors of the Iraq conflict up on a hill for some reason), we drove back to our apartment to find a Surprise Birthday party that Rebecca had organized. Wayne was mostly surprised and we had a great time playing with friends.

The past two weeks have been very busy for the two of us. Last week was moving week, our plans were to originally leave on Friday morning or Thursday evening, but we readjusted those plans because some friends of ours wanted to have a dinner party and have us come in order to say goodbye. So we readjusted our plans and decided to leave Friday evening after dinner and drive down to Jon and Faith's place in Salem late that night.

That's what we decided early on in the week. The middle of the week was Wayne's birthday. You can read about that here.

Wayne had a great birthday, but since we had to fit everything into our car on our move back to Utah, we decided to tell everyone to mail Wayne's presents to Utah. This meant that Wayne would have to have his birthday party in two parts. Thursday evening, we packed and cleaned. And packed and cleaned. And packed and cleaned. By 9:30 at night, we began to wonder if we were going to be able to finish everything in one night and get it all into our car the next day, as well as pass our cleaning check. Lucky for us, the manager was a good friend and really great to us, passed us on our cleaning/move out check at 10:30 at night and we were set to go. [I'm actually amazed that we got it all done in just those 4 hours, but then, we had minimal belongings with us in Seattle to begin with... -beck] Moving is always difficult and stressful. More than living without all our things, moving makes us realize how much we need to simplify our lives and get rid of all the non-essentials. Rebecca commented that if we can't move everything we own by ourselves, then we probably own too much. Of course, that will probably not be true when we have kids, because they need things too.... :)

Friday night we had a great dinner with friends before we left. It was hard to leave the Seattle area because we've made such good friends (friends who love to play games with us) and we enjoyed the area so much. That evening we drove down to Salem, about a 4 hour drive and fell asleep right away. We were worried about our cat because she didn't seem to stop crying in her cat carrier like she did on our way out to Seattle and when we arrived at our friend's place, they have a cat that wasn't too friendly to ours. But things worked out fine in the end. [a little hissing never hurt anyone!]

The funniest story was that we had brought with us a bag of cat nip. We left the cat nip up in our bedroom. When we went upstairs, we saw Jon and Faith's cat lying in a HUGE pile of cat nip all over the place. She had torn open the bag and been rolling in it. Kitty looked so funny, not even flinching at being caught. She enjoyed the trouble she was in.

Saturday morning, we went to the Zoo and had a good time immitating the monkey sounds. There were some Siamang monkeys that were swinging all over the place and making huge leaps from rope to rope and branch to branch. And the polar bears in the polar bear tank were swimming right in front of us, so we got some really good pictures of them. Those were the best two parts of the Zoo. Afterwards we went to lunch together and then came back to Jon and Faith's house and played games the rest of the day.

All day Monday we made the 13 hour drive to Preston, ID where we spent Monday night at Christy's house, one of Rebeca's friends. We originally got our cat from her, so it was lots of fun to chat with her and watch Star get along with her old cat friends. After a lazy day on Tuesday, we finally got back into the car and finished driving back to Utah and to our new apartment. It's a basement apartment with lots of space, so we'll see how we can use up that space. [or just trash everything and enjoy having empty space... :) -beck]

But it's been an exhausting week and we've still got to move all our belongings from Springville to here. We love you lots and hopefully we'll make it through this move!