Saturday, August 28, 2010

East Coast Visitors

As I write this blog right now some of our friends from West Virginia are getting married! Congratulations Emily and Jarrod Marozzi!! Welcome to the journey :) It is truly a blessing and we love you guys!!

Last weekend we had our very first visitors from the East Coast - Jenny and TJ. Jenny and TJ quickly became some of our closest friends when we lived in Morgantown and we were thrilled when they started talking about visiting us before we even left. They were only here three full days so we packed in as much as we could.


Day One: We rode the Ferry from Anacortes, WA to the San Juan Islands, specifically San Juan to visit Friday Harbor and Orcas for the amazing view!














A lighthouse on Orcas Island. Later, our goal was to watch the sunset over an incredible view in Moran State Park on the top of Mt. Constitution, but even driving 40 mph up a hill to 2,409 ft with 227 hairpin turns along the way and everyone in the car yelling, "DEER!" around every turn, sadly we did not make it before sundown...thus I have no pictures...










Day Two: We took them on a tour of the area including Tacoma, Olympia, Lacey, Steliacoom, and Base. This is a view of Mt. Rainier from Joint Base Lewis- McChord.














Hello Cupcake! We stopped in a local cupcake shop where Jenny and I tasted 4 of their delicious goodies.














Day Three: We saw the sights of Seattle. This of course is Pike's Place Market.














Thank you again Jenny and TJ for taking the time and spending the money to visit us! We love you both very much!!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Jobs and Cars

Tara thought I should write a blog to update everyone on what I do and why exactly I had to move us 3000 miles to do it. Well, I can't tell you, it's secret army stuff.

Ok, so that's not entirely true.

I officially started my Family Medicine residency out here at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma in July and began seeing patients both in the hospital and in the clinic almost immediately. It's a very weird thing to go from one day being a medical student, having no responsibilities and becoming very good at PlayStation3, to being a resident, responsible for the decision making process in your patients' health.

Every month is different during residency. And I don't just mean in the "you never know what's gonna walk through the door" way, but rather, an example: The first month was Family Medicine inpatient and outpatient stuff, this month is all Pediatric Inpatient with a half day of Family Medicine Clinic appointments sprinkled in per week, and next month my job is to welcome all the newborns into this world with their first physical exam and making sure they are doing alright initially. It goes from there: ENT/Opthomology month, Labor and Delivery month, Family Medicine Inpatient month, Sports Medicine month, Cardiac Care Unit month, Dermatology month, and so on and so forth for the next 3 years.

It's a really interesting process and creates a lot of opportunity to make mistakes...er,uh, I mean learn through doing. So far it really has been a great experience, albeit the long hours and a STEEP learning curve.


Now for a fun story about car shopping before I wrap this thing up...

Tara and I are in the market for a new car, not necessarily new,new... just new to us. We only have one and it's becoming a hassle for both of us, especially since my work is now 40 mins from the house AND traffic can turn that into 2 hours rather quickly around 5pm. So, we went to SEVERAL places and test drove a few cars here and there and ultimately decided we liked the new Kia Sorrentos the most (plus they are at least $10,000 cheaper than comparable cars of Ford or Toyota). We looked again and again and on our third visit to a certain Kia dealership which will remain nameless, we finally decided on a 2011 Kia Sorrento that was Snow Pearl White. It was nice, they even let us take it home for one night and it sat in our garage and looked beautiful and then we took it back and after 3-4 more hours of deliberation and price negotiation we had decided we were going home with that car at a very reasonable price.














After we signed every piece of paper and were ready to swipe some credit cards, it was discovered that this particular car was RDR'ed last month. Now this acronym means nothing to me, but apparently to them it means that they were a few cars short of being the #1 Kia dealership of it's type last month and marked a few of them down as SOLD, even though they still sat on their lot unpurchased, so it looked better on paper and they could take first prize. This would cause no issues at all except that the cars marked as sold no longer qualify for any dealer rebates, which means that all those nice rebates that made this deal a good deal no longer applied.

So puff up your stats to become #1, at the expense of the customers ability to get the discounts they are entitled to with the purchase...

I know, sketch, right?!

The resolution of this story is we walked out since it was now way out of our comfort price range. They called us personally to apologize, which was appreciated, and also to tell us they could find us another non-RDR'ed version but it would take a couple days. I may have been jaded by the first experience but I lost just a hint of trust for the dealership as a whole and respectfully declined their offers.

So we had to walk away, once again forced to carpool for the time being and back in the market for a new car...not new,new, just new to us.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Adventures

When we first talked about moving to Washington neither of us had any idea how close we were to so many great places or how much there was to do. With CR's schedule we have not gotten to do a lot, but we have started exploring. Here are some pictures of things we have done so far:





Tolmie State Park is 105 acre park with 1,800 feet of saltwater shoreline on Puget Sound. It is about five minutes from our house and Ty loves to go there in the evenings to swim and play. So peaceful and beautiful!





We went camping at the base of Mt. Rainier, which is the largest active volcano in the contiguous 48 states and the highest mountain in Washington. We wanted to hike some while we were there, but the only trail that allowed dogs was buried under 8 feet of snow - bummer! Rainier was breath-taking and constantly had us in awe.









Most recently our friends Mike and Soobin Kim invited us to tag along with their family to the San Juan Islands. The San Juan Islands consist of three different islands, Orcas, Lopez, and San Juan. We stayed on Orcas Island in this amazing beach house Mike found and rented for us, and as the name suggests we also went whale watching which was incredible!

Just a quick look at some of the exploring we have done so far...More to come soon!