Seattling into a new home

Well, the Ling shindig was enjoyable -- all 45mins of it! :D I caught a ride with Steve, one of the ling phd students, and we got a bit lost, but we did get nice tour of downtown as we drove and drove in search of partying linguists. Eventually we followed the sound of people practicing pronouncing an umlaut "a" on a beer bottle, and hey presto! There was the clan. Unfortunately the party was mostly over by the time we found it, but it was actually no biggie, as it gave me an excuse to get home and do some last minute homework. Plus I got to meet a couple of the other ling grads, and all was well.

So! I should start where I left off earlier. Or more to the point, where we left off last Tuesday! After a marathon last few days in Tucson, saying good bye to friends and places, and packing my worldly possessions in a few suitcases, Mom, Nikki, and I headed off to the airport, bound for the great northwest. Manu, Jared, Michael, and Amy joined in the farewell party, as well as a random airport stranger who snapped our pic. :) The flight up was rather uneventful, but I always forget how much fun Nik and Mom are to travel with. Sample dialog:

Shauna: "This doesn't look like the runway anymore... are we taxiing into the desert??"
Mom: "Maybe we're driving to Seattle!"
Nik (in smooth 'pilot' voice): "If the passengers will look to their right... they can tell me if I'm clear to get over."

One highlight of the flight was an unbelievably breathtaking fly-by of Mount Rainier at sunset. Nik attempted to get a pic through the plane window. The grandness of it isn't quite caputered here, but you can kind of get the gist of it.

I believe I'll make the rest of this brief so I can move to more recent developments, but Alissa picked us up from the aeropuerto that night, and we had a lovely evening of wine, meats, cheeses, and girl talk. The very next day was to be the beginning of a potentially long quest to find housing near campus, but it was before noon when we were walking down 18th ave and spotted a "rooms for rent" sign on a large, beautiful house about 2-1/2 blocks to the north of the campus. As we approached, who should be arriving from the other side but the property manager herself! I think some things are meant to be. :) The house has hardwood floors in the community rooms, new tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, and carpet in most of the bedrooms. Heavy, old-style molding surrounds the large, charmingly old-school windows, and new appliances have been installed throughout. With the addition of Alissa and Alan's old furniture (thaaaaank you, guys!!), I have an extremely comfy room on the second floor, not even a 10 minute walk through a lovely, tree-filled neighborhood to the main campus. Serendipity in action. :) On nice days (which have been quite frequent, btw), I can step out one of my windows onto the roof above the front porch, and sit and watch the neighborhood go by.

(Photo: Mom snaps a pic helplessly from the backseat, while Nik and I tear around in Alissa's car)

We spent the following couple of days with Mom and Nik helping settle me into the room -- runs to Target, Walgreens, and Trader Joe's -- while I took the occasional hiatus to go to the Compling orientation on Mon and Tues. There were 17 other grads at the orientation when I arrived. I actually didn't get the chance to really meet many of them, as we didn't get to interact much, but I was looking forward to getting to know them better later in the quarter. The faculty, however, were instantly likeable. Very smart, very articulate, and very approachable. I think I'll like the place :)

It was, not surprisingly, hard to see Mom and Nik leave on Saturday. I'd been kind of dreading that moment since arriving, and it was tough, but fortunately short lived; almost immediately after they left, I ran into one of the other new compling students on campus, and was forced to be distracted from my own Pity Party for a little while. Turns out, it was the aforementioned Steve, who I'd actually met at the EMELD conference in Detroit last year, July 04. We both remembered eachother from that conferece and hit it off a bit, so we spent the rest of the afternoon finding books, visiting the registration office, and basically taking care of administrivia. One of the advantages of having other out-of-town students is that they're not so dug into their lives yet that they don't have time to run around campus with you. :)

Since then, I've been settling into classes, and getting to know the campus, housemates, and surrounding areas. Things have been much busier than expected, thank goodness! I'd like to tell y'all a little more detail about classes and campus so far, but this particular entry is already entirely too long, so I'll start a separate one for UW pics.