Happy Turkey Day

Pumpkin Pie - Thnxgiving
Originally uploaded by ebs1123.

Here's something to get your bellies geared up -- flickr's pumpkin pie stream. Yum! We're out of here for the holiday. See you on the other side. Looking for something to do? Seattle Times has this round-up including a few events of note. We'd freeze through the parade Friday morning if we were around because we're corny like that.

10 Mercer: Great place for wine-by-the-glass

Speedy post here but we wanted to share. 10 Mercer -- in addition to having a groovy ladder-aided wine tower -- also offers one of the best selections of wine-by-the-glass of any restaurant in Seattle. It's also a good place to catch a late meal after a movie at Uptown Cinema -- we loved the mussels and (don't laugh) the salads are wonderful treats that make you forget about the space you're wasting on lettuce.

-- j

Leaving Uptown Seattle

Afternoon (wide)
Originally uploaded by Sunburn.

We've been kicking around admitting something here for a week or two. This post to the Slog is a good wall to bounce the thoughts off of. We're part of the statistics in the post -- 83% of residents downtown are single. Technically, K & I are single but we've recently decided to change that and the next step is finding a home together to become un-single and raise a family. We both harbored naive hope that we would be able to make a go of it in the city's downtown. We don't see a lot of kids downtown but we wanted to change that and to make the city's social, art and political structures part of our family's roots. We knew that we'd pay a price for this -- if nothing else, it would be more financially expensive let alone the other types of costs and burdens. But we believed the benefits would outweigh the effort.

Now we know it just ain't going to happen. We've looked. And looked. But there isn't an option for anybody looking to make the next step. Downtown is full of small condos and apartments and the few larger living spaces are designed not to provide an option for families but, instead, an upgrade option for the extremely wealthy. Mind you even these people (whomever they are -- K's a lawyer and I work for a large software behemoth) aren't getting a useful space -- they are buying a downtown luxury space with the extra room added in features like humongous bathrooms.

We are leaving Uptown even though we were willing to dedicate ourselves to being part of the structure and contributing to its changes. Now we know downtown Seattle just doesn't have a place for us. We still hope to be part of the city -- but our roots will be planted in some other neighborhood, away from the core and away from the heart and soul of what drew us here. Poor, poor Uptown -- we could have been friends.