My Christmas Present 2011

Last Christmas Dwayne surprised me by buying us two Coldplay concert tickets which was a incredibly great gift in and of itself, only he took it one step further and bought the tickets for the Seattle, WA venue because he knew I always wanted to visit Seattle. So off we flew and landed in the middle of the grayest town on earth. There were a lot of cool things about Seattle and there were also many things I did not find appealing. Here is a summary of the good and bad.

Good:

 -Hotel Max- Our incredibly swanky hotel located smack dab in the middle of Seattle was the most artsy and unusual hotel I've ever stayed at. All the walls were painted black and all the room doors had painted strange pictures on them. The hotel had doormen and stained glass windows in the lobby. The room was small but stylish and the bed was wonderful.

 -The Monorail- Why oh why can't Phoenix's light rail be as wonderful as Seattle's Monorail? We used it the entire time to hop from place to place in a flash.

 -The Space Needle- Much more impressive than Phoenix's Compass Room, the Space Needle's 605 foot observation tower gave us fantastic views of the entire city. We had an lovely lunch in the rotating restaurant then headed up to the top to take a dozen pictures.

-The Coldplay Concert- After two lame intro bands, Coldplay finally took the stage around 9pm with the energy of Aiden. Chris Martin (married to Gweneth Paltrow)

had a lot of Vegas style entertainment including light up wrist bands that blinked in rhythm to the music and two thousand pounds of confetti but he did not sound as good as he does recorded. We had quite the surprise when Chris showed up about 20 feet from our seats to perform an encore complete with his piano.

-Starbucks- Every corner has a Starbucks. I'm not kidding. Besides Starbucks being started in Seattle, I think the main reason for so many Starbucks is to caffeinate to locals to keep them out of depression while they live in the grayist town in America. Good for me though as coffee is one of the great pleasures in my life.

-Art and Architecture- The city surrounds itself with art as it is required by Architects to spend a portion of their developments in art. -Ivars Seafood- kind of a chain, it's yummy white fish Cod and fried clams were quite the delight

 The Bad:

 -Homeless/vagrants,beggars & druggies- Every corner we were asked for money from junkies with cigarettes. Annoying. -The rain- I'm thinking that the locals don't even notice the non stop rain anymore as NO ONE in Seattle uses an umbrella as they wander the city street. Me however, did not care for the bleak, depressing weather which made it impossible for my hair to look good the entire trip.

 -Dirty City- Perhaps I'm just a too bit accustomed to the Anthem bubble where everything is shiny, clean and bright whereas Seattle is dirty, dingy and a bit smelly too. Granted we never went outside the downtown metropolis but even downtown Phoenix looked like Disneyland in comparison. Having not seen the sun for days on end may have also skewed my opinion of the downtown streets.

 And that pretty much sums up our trip to Seattle. I got rest, a luxury in my book. The best part of the trip was getting to spend three complete days with my wonderful husband which in the past several months has been a rarity. It was worth a million bucks to re-connect with the love of my life in our vacation in Seattle.
 

Meet Khar

From afar Khar looks like your typical Czechoslovakian Shepherd but what you may not notice at first glance is the big pup is a certified officer that ranks higher than Dwayne. Dwayne is now an officer K9 SWAT team officer. While its been a stressful transition week, Dwayne is quickly bonding and gaining a whole new understanding to the thorough training process. It is entertaining to hear Dwayne call out commands to Khar in Czechoslovakian language. As much as the kids are dying to have a pet dog, Khar is not a typical family dog and must be supervised around kids. The previous K9 officer had a family with kids and told us that Khar totally was a family dog for them and loved his kids who were really broke up when Khar was transferred to Dwayne. We are taking it slow and steady, today was the first day we let the kids in the backyard for 5 minutes with Khar while we made sure everybody was safe.