Ella's 6th Birthday

Yesterday was Ella's big 6th birthday.  Sarah threw quite the party, I think 17 kids were here in the house for Ella's Princess Pajama party.  Everyone wore princess pajamas and Sarah had them all do some activities, some games, then after eating some pizza, they all watched Princess and the Frog.

Setting up a saltwater aquarium

Well the last few weeks have been occupied with setting up a saltwater aquarium.  Sarah promised Ella a fish if she would stop sucking her thumb.  Sarah thought it would be a simple Beta fish, small, easy to take care of.  But Ella showed me a clownfish, no doubt due to Finding Nemo.  Saltwater are significantly harder to setup and maintain than a simple beta fish, but I have a tendency to overdue things.

Max's new tattoo

Max celebrated our move to Seattle with a new tat.  He took off and was gone all day, and now we know, this was some serious ink.

He also took on a new costume for his late night crime fighting.

A Hatred for Bank of America

I really hate Bank of America, I really do.  This all started when it was next to impossible to get access to my money in the local BOA branch, it took manager approval.  You see accounts in Florida, are very different than ones in Washington.  Each state is treating seperately (I didn't look into why, but there probably some stupid laws that our over bearing government have passed at some point).  So the easiest thing to do was to open a new account here in Washington.  But most of our money is still in the Florida account.  All I wanted to do was go online and transfer my money from the Florida account to the Washington account.  Something that in theory sounds very easy to accomplish.  Well I ended up in a live chat with a bank representative, which I post here for your enjoyment.  Hopefully you will also see the absurdity that this is just to get money from one BOA account to another, both of which are in my name.  And, in my haste, my spelling was awful, so I hope that makes it a little bit funnier.

Our Olympic Adventure

We decided to head into Vancouver yesterday because we are so close just to check out the Olympic atmosphere.  We had some grand plans to check out the city, and then go to one of the venues to see if we could scalp some reasonable tickets.  I looked online when we decided to move to Seattle and tickets were crazy expensive, so we passed at that time.  Things didn't quite go as planned.

We got a late start and left the house a bit before 11am, expecting a 2.5 - 3hr drive.  Well, after a short stop for lunch, and an hour long delay at the border, then finding parking, it took us 4 hours to get into Vancouver.  Ella got a hold of the camera and took a great picture of someone getting a ticket in her boredom.  And we had to park quite a ways away on the street.  We parked close to a subway station and rode the train into the city.

Our first order of business was to check out the Olympic torch.  We got sidetracked on the way there by some shopping.  After spending way too much money getting outfitted in the official Team USA Olympic gear (except for Sarah, she couldn't find anything that she liked), we turned our attention back to goal number one.  When we got to the site, it was absolutely packed.  It didn't help that they have the whole area fenced off.  You can only get about 75 - 100 yards from the torch by pressing up against a big fence.  They had an elevated viewing area, but the line for that was probably an hour long.  It would have been a lot smarter to have fenced right around the cauldron, then put security around it (which they had anyway).  It is in the middle of a big plaza that was not being used, so all the people needed to cram into a little space to try and get a shot of it.  It was really nice looking in person.