"snow" day

Today the school district canceled school due to snow, except the expected snow never came. Bryce worked from home since it did snow a ton in Everett. It is 9:23 PM and it STILL hasn't snowed a bit all day. I spent the day noshing on xmas cookies and getting chores done.

Feds drop interest rates to near zero

Ok the gov is making it awfully hard to NOT want to buy a house with the money we've saved for NZ. Now I'm falling asleep at night dreaming of fixing up cute little ramblers in Woodinville...

Poor plants

Here's a before picture of our banana trees, sometime in November.


Here's an after picture I took today after temperatures in the 20's for the past few days.
:-(

The agave (in the back) actually isn't doing too bad! I want a ton of agave when we get a house.

Cookies and Ice

Sunday morning we took an icy somewhat dangerous walk to the sculpture park.




Then I took an icy, somewhat dangerous drive to West Seattle to bake Christmas cookies with Christine and her coworker, Kelly, at a church kitchen.

Cookies and Snow

Saturday was fun. I baked linzer cookies with Kari, which are my new favorite cookies to make. They have cinnamon and lemon zest in them which make them smell soooo yummy when they bake. Bryce and I got these weird jams while we were in Hilo. I put starfruit-lime marmalade in the linzer cookies, it was actually pretty good!


It snowed that night in nice big puffy flakes. Ryan was over and we all headed to the deck. There, I took the best picture ever!

more NZ discussions

I admitted to Bryce that I'm not a big fan of going to NZ during their winter (if we don't end up moving there). For one thing, I'd miss out on Seattle's summer (the best time to be here) and I'd rather be in NZ when it's warm. That leaves my winter break... which isn't long enough...

Now I'm even wondering if we should go to NZ on vacation (as a back up plan if we don't move there). If we don't move to NZ, we are in a good position to buy a home. NZ is expensive and we should probably use the NZ $$ for the home instead of a long vacation.

We only have the studio until the end of March.

It would be strange to be in NZ for several months this summer while paying a mortgage (assuming we buy this spring). We could buy a house when we get back, but that means more temporary housing and more moves.

hmmm

No job in Wellington

I finally heard back from Geoff at the NZ contracting agency, the job in Wellington is no longer available. From my own research, I think that the job was in a group home, so I'm not too terribly disappointed about this particular lead. However, despite getting accepted by NZSTA, we're getting pretty pessimistic about actually moving to NZ. Geoff admitted that the economy in NZ is not doing very well, but more jobs may pop up after the new year.

Bryce and I have discussed that after all this planning, we should still go to NZ for an extended trip this summer if we don't actually move there.