I've been here for 9 months now and I'm starting to get a little lonely. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE spending time with Robb. However, our schedules are very different which means that I have a lot of alone time. And the friendships I maintain through email and phone are sometimes not enough when you're hanging out by yourself. As an Army Brat you would think that it would be second nature for me to move around and make new friends easily. But it's different when you're an adult. And I'm not exactly a social butterfly, although I try! As a kid you meet people your age and with similar life experiences in school and classes. And in college you're thrust into living together with complete strangers who somehow become a huge part of your world. Even in grad school I managed to make a couple of friends through classes and work. And if my friends weren't around, I always had my family to lean on, especially when I was living in Florida.
But now, Robb and I chose to move across the country to a place where we didn't know a single soul. And I no longer have school to give me an automatic friend pool to choose from. I've tried to get creative. I've joined a young political organization for King County. And I regularly go to their meetings and have even become a board member. But the first problem is that King County is very large and most people in this organization live a good 30-45 minutes away from me. The second problem is that I'm at a different place in my life. I'm married and have different responsibilities. I was never a big "partier" in the first place, but now I'm definitely beyond it. My interests and life experience tends to be different than others my age in this organization. I thought that my job might lead me to meet new people, but this is also very difficult. First I am MUCH younger than the people I work with. Second, even if there was someone younger and who I could relate with on a friend-level, I work an hour away from where I live. That's not very conducive to creating a good friendship. I sometimes check out Craigslist activities and other internet postings to see if there's a group out there that I'd be interested in joining. But there's never anything that sounds both interesting, close by, or at a time that I could attend (remember I don't get home until after 6:00 and I work Saturdays).
So I spend a lot of time by myself. Robb had to work today; the weather was beautiful and I wish I could've gone hiking, but that tends to be a little dangerous for a girl to go to the wilderness on her own. So today I went to the movies by myself for the first time (hence the melancholy posting). I'm still very happy that we moved here. We still love this area, I just wish there was someone else out there that I could enjoy it with when Robb's not available to play.
Two weekends ago Robb and I decided to head to Pike Place Market Saturday afternoon to partake in the Seattle Cheese Festival. It started out awesome because we found an awesome parking garage right next to Pike Place Market that is only $6 on the weekend (see the picture on the left to see how close we were)! What a find! Robb and I have become quite the cheese connoisseurs, so we were excited about trying samples upon samples of free cheese (almost free, we donated the suggested dollar per person. Oh, and then I bought a Cheese Festival shirt.) The streets were packed. Everyone was out to enjoy cheese and sunshine. The weather was unseasonably hot (not only unseasonable for May, but unseasonable for the Northwest in general); I'm talking 90 degrees here! I have to admit that I did complain a bit. I don't really like crowds and I don't like the hot weather. (Yes, I know I lived in Florida, but there is a reason that I decided to leave.) But we came up with a system where I would stand back and Robb would squeeze in between the crowds to grab two cheese samples to bring them back to me so we could try them again. Yummy cheese. We ended up buying a couple of different cheeses for bargain prices.
We didn't want to go home after the Cheese Festival and it was getting cooler as the afternoon/evening wore on. So we decided to head to a restaurant we've been wanting to try in Phinney Ridge. El Chupacabra outdoor seating, burritos, and strawberry margaritas: the makings of a perfect evening. We were impressed with the restaurant. It had an eclectic mix of patrons and pretty darn good burritos with decent heat to them. It's a keeper. 
