Beethoven In Trance - Episode 68

Today is 05/22/2018. We are in Seattle!

A year in motion

2017 started off great. I accepted a job offer and moved to Seattle in March, while my family stayed in Ohio to sell the house and wait till my daughter to finish the school.

As part of the relocation package, my wife and I came to the state before the final move date to check on the housing and Washington state in general. We spent 3 days in Seattle and looked a few houses and visited our friends. After 3 days, I checked into the company assigned apartment (as the part of the relocation package). 3 days is really short considering that 1 day is used on transportation and moving to the new apartment. We did enjoy our short stay and looked forward to the final move. My company is a big tech company. The hiring philosophy is that the new hire needs to be 50% better than the existing one in the same job. The caliber of the team varies among groups but I appreciate the opportunity nevertheless.

Living by myself in an apartment was new to me, as I always live with my wife since I came to the states. I definitely noticed my shopping behavior scaled down along with my personal consumption. It was a pretty steep "ramp up" (as it was called internally) due to the complexity of the business my team dealt with. I was working week days and weekends to catch up.  It was not too difficult though because I was alone and life was relatively simple. I commuted by bus and it was about 1 hour in and 1 hour out. I didn't find it too bad though, as I usually took a nap on the bus or just simply clear my head sitting on the bus.

3 month in the job, I felt better about it because I realized that no one else would be able to do what I do, and if there is one, then that person is not doing it for the salary that I was getting.  That's when I stopped working in the weekends.

After six week, I moved into another apartment that is close to where my wife would be working. In early June, my family finally came joining me in Seattle. Our furniture came about two days after my family landed, as well as our cars. We had to rent a storage unit because we are limited by space in our two bedroom apartment. If we were doing it again, we should have sold most of the stuff back in Ohio before we move, as our Ikea furniture doesn't worth much and it's easy to get second hand furniture at bargain price here in Seattle. A lot of time I can even get them for free. There are a lot of people moving in and out in the area and it's easy to find free stuff if you keep an eye on things. My company even has an internal email listing for employees to sell their stuff. I have been using it to get rid of stuff that I found little or no use in Seattle, and at the same time, hauling free stuff from people all around Seattle. We paid over 2K for all the stuff about 10 month, but the stuff itself might not even worth that much. We did get convenience but, it did cost us.

We didn't get the chance to do any vacation this year. We did go to state parks in the Summer. Alice loves the beach park where she could flip over rocks and find crabs. We even found a live sea star one day on the beach. We also hiked a few state parks and saw water falls. The best part of the summer is that I got the chance to swim in the lake after work then go home for dinner afterwards. It was a fun summer outdoors.

In Oct, I had an opportunity to travel to Luxembourg for work. It was my first trip to Europe and I enjoyed it. Lux is pretty. Amazon office is located in a park setting, I even got a chance to run around the campus. After the business in Lux, I traveled to Berlin to visit my good friends from high school. It was a great time with them despite the weather in Berlin was miserable. 

While living in the apartment was easy on my wife's commute to work and I could use company shuttle bus to work. We are not complete happy with the school district and the public transportation. My parents were still limited to where they can go. We were actively looking for houses and kept exploring the region to find the perfect location that suits all of our needs: easy access to the public transportation, good schools, and easy commute to work. We finally decided on Mercer Island as it check off a lot of boxes on our wish list. The price tag is hefty but my parents pitched in and made it possible for us to finance the purchase. At the end of the 2018, we finally bought a house on the island and were scheduled to move in the next Feb.  Moving into the house means more time spent on maintenance of the house, which I will talk abut in the next annual letter.

There is a iMax movie theater in downtown and is close to my office. I took the advantage to take the afternoon off and go watching movie, then went back to shuttle bus to go home. iMax is awesome. I watched Bladerunner 2047, and Dunkirk there. I wasn't disappointed. Another movie worth mentioned is Windriver. The best Oscar worthy movie is the three billboards outside of Ebbing Missouri.

While my settling in in Seattle was moving forward, my career wasn't advancing as I hoped. My team was broken apart after 6 month I joined. My team then was merged to another group, my responsibility extended but not in a good way. At the time of this writing, I am looking for opportunities in other groups. My observation of the people in the company so far is that there are a lot of people with interesting background to show for during the interview, but that doesn't translate into their work performance.

I sometimes asked myself if it was worth to move out here. From my career stand point, right now, it was not a step up, but a step down. I told myself that sometime one needs to move down in order to move up. My parents are having a much better time in Seattle than in Ohio, and we believe the big city will provide better career opportunities for our daughter in the future as well. The quality of living here in Seattle is better, it costs more, but the city does have a lot to offer.

Another benefit of living here is that we have two good friends here in the state. We continued our tradition of annual backyard party in our apartment. It was a great time despite the limited space.

In 2018, our focus will be settling in the new house, change my job in the company, and start enjoying the life is Seattle. It would be an interesting 2018.