Dave has moved to Seattle just as I moved back to Boston. Come on, man, cut it out! This is twice now we’ve crossed paths…

He asks for advice today about places to eat in the market. Here’s my comment, reposted from his blog and annotated with past experiences from mine:

I like the Pike Place Brewery—their beers are outstanding and the pub cuisine is good. For fish, honestly just go to the Market Grill and get a salmon sandwich—spicy. It’s hot sitting at the grill and you have to wait a while but it’s outstanding.

For the best sunset and happy hour appetizers, Maximilien’s has a great view of the sound and an assortment of fantastic $2.50 plates, including really excellent mussels and pate.

Outside the market I like Etta’s—next block over, great seafood creatively done—and Anthony’s Pier 66, down on the waterfront.

Heh. I thought I had more links than that. I never once wrote about Pike Place Brewery or Maximilien’s… To make up for it, here are bits about some restaurants I didn’t mention in the comments: Zoë and Wasabi Bistro.

Unveiling time: I’m moving back to Boston. Starting Saturday, I’ll be doing a cross-country drive from the Seattle suburbs to the Boston suburbs (with a several day layover with my inlaws in New Jersey).

This has been in the works for a while, but for various reasons I didn’t think the time was appropriate to break the news. Now I’m packing up from my temporary digs; I got the car checked out; and I have my Triptik and my copy of Roadfood. I’m ready to go.

Returning to Boston is a little bit of a dream come true for Lisa and me, because it’s much closer to both our parents and my extended family, and because quite frankly we love the town. Plus we like Dunkin Donuts and heavy snow.

Finally, I have to point out the irony that I’m moving back to Boston just as Dave Winer has finished his stint at Harvard and is looking for a new gig elsewhere, since Dave moved to Boston just a few months after I left. I’m not stalking you, Dave, honest. I’m actually stalking David Weinberger. (Joke, folks. Laugh.)

I spent what I can only hope will be Seattle’s hottest day this year touching base with some old tourist landmarks, beginning with the Pike Place Market. I came away with four good photos to reward my Saturday sweat.

The a cappella quartet in front of the original Starbucks in the first picture should be publicly acknowledged Seattle treasures. I first saw them in 2001 when Lisa and I went to our first Mariners’ game, and they can be found alongside Pike’s Place most summer weekends, even when it’s hotter than a red-assed bee outside. I especially like the Asian tourist with the Burberry hat and purse peering through the window behind the quartet. As I snapped this picture, the lead singer (leftmost) was calling out “Even at Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spices, I’m gonna let it shine.”

Loback Meat Company: Quality Always in the second picture. I always wanted to get a good clear photo of this. I didn’t want to use a flash, so I had to steady my hand to adjust for the slower shutter speed, and took three or four pictures propped against a nearby pillar. I like the backsplash of the red neon on the ceiling paint, and there’s something thematically appropriate about the steady sign contrasting with the blurred faces below.

Next is today’s silly phonecam picture, taken outside SAM (where I had just seen the Van Gogh to Mondrian exhibit). I wanted to contrast the big Borofsky sculpture with the shorts-clad tourists. (Also good in the museum this time: the two oversized Joseph Cornell hommages by Curtis Steiner and Galen Lowe; discussed at the bottom of this article on the untold story exhibition.)

Finally, the old barefoot guy in shorts. I liked this man’s face, and the baby being pulled up the hill next to him.

Just got back from the Seattle Weblog Meetup. Lots of old familiar faces there tonight—Anita has the full list. I was bummed not to see Jake there, but I got to meet Samantha, Chaz, Ian and Mary. —Yes, Ian as in Ian Spiers of BrownEqualsTerrorist.com fame. We all had a lot of fun taking pictures of each other and then asking each other for ID as a result. (That’s a picture of Ian to the right.) Ian described his feelings of wandering around the Ballard Locks watching other tourists happily snap photos after his encounter with The Man as feeling as though he had been “raped at Disneyland”; we promptly decided that that phrase would have made a much better title for his blog.

I also met Manuel, who actually road-tripped down to LA for the opening of the SENT exhibition. I tried not to mention the exhibition, feeling somewhat photographically overshadowed with tyd, Tara, Jeff, and Flipdingo there, but Jeff was kind about the photo. Manuel and I got into a conversation about the experience at the exhibition. (In a word: alienating unless you’re in the right crowd. And no matter how tall you think Xeni is, she’s apparently taller.)

All in all, it was a pretty good time for my last Seattle weblog meetup. But that’s a story for another time.

As promised, I finally made it (after two years) to Salumi, and finally got around to posting my writeup. It’s easy enough to find, being right across the corner from the intersection of 2nd and 3rd Avenues South. —Yes, I know, but it’s Seattle and here parallel streets are allowed to intersect. Even at 2 pm the line was out the door, so we decided to get our sandwiches to go.

The physical set-up for the restaurant is like something out of the North End. Long and narrow—just wide enough for one table for two to be separated from a four-foot-wide counter service area by a low wall, and just long enough for a counter with a window area and seating for 12 in the back. Curing salumi hung in a walk-in cooler next to the counter inside, where three different sandwich guys struggled to keep up with the line.

By the time we got there, they were out of tongue (which I was dying to try) and a few other things. But I got the culatello, which came on a crusty roll with a little olive oil and basil and some marinated onions, and was transported immediately (well, after I waited in line for half an hour and then paid) into ecstasy. The meat was lightly salted, almost sweet, with a soft mouth feel followed by a massive flavor explosion after a few bites. Unbelievable. I also picked up a hot soppressata with homemade fresh mozzarella for my drive south to Portland, which was similarly impressive—alternately hot and sweet with an assertive slightly salty body.

I once complained that there were no sammiches to be found in the Seattle area. I hereby retract that statement. There are sammiches, and world class ones, but only between the hours of 11 and 4 Tuesday through Friday in a little storefront restaurant run by a retired Boeing engineer.

(Oh, almost forgot: I had a brief conversation with Armandino himself. He asked if I was enjoying the experience, and I told him how thrilled I was to finally be there after two years. I also mentioned that I had dragged all my co-workers along so I wouldn’t be missed. He asked, “How many?” I said, “These nine folks.” He looked significantly up and down the line—at that point there were at least fifteen people waiting inside the store—and said no more. I think he was genuinely bugged to have such a big crowd, because he disappeared to the back after that exchange. —Oh well. As someone once said in another context, he doesn’t have to be the most personable host. His product speaks for itself.)

I’m just about to head to lunch at Salumi. For those who aren’t familiar, Salumi is run by Armandino Batali, Food Network Mario Batali’s dad and retired Boeing engineer, and it’s only open for lunch four days a week between 11 and 4. Batali cures all his own meats, serves amazing Italian specialties, and you can even adopt a prosciutto. For more info, check out the drool-inducing review in the New York Times. I’ve been trying to get to this restaurant for almost two years, and finally decided that if I didn’t take time out for a long lunch today that it wouldn’t ever happen.

Afterwards, I’m driving south to visit Shel and Vik in Portland. It should be an entertaining visit, as I will be good for approximately two hours of consciousness for the whole weekend and fear that I’ll spend the rest of the time in either drooling repose or (worse) making unconscious zombie-like conversation that I won’t ever remember or understand. Thank goodness they’re old friends.

Tonight was supposed to be Eastside Sing night for me—the Haydn—but instead I ended up meeting Tom Harpel for a drink at the Stumbling Monk. This is an obscure (in a more literal sense than normal—there’s not even a sign outside) bar in Capitol Hill with no food, no decor, and mostly Belgian and Belgian-inspired beers available. So naturally I had to go, and it was close to where Tom was so it was even convenient.

Tom brought pizza (see the part about not serving food) and we chatted for a while about various stuff—object oriented programming, SQL skillz, beer, east coast vs. west coast, celebrity spotting—and had a relatively conservative number of beers each. I had a Dick’s Silk Lady, an Oregonian beer that contrary to their claims is not exactly light but certainly carries the classic Belgian esters, though with little of the associated complexity on the palate. Better in that department was the Liefman’s Goudenband, the classic darker Flemish beer that is considered a classic of the Oud Bruin (Old Brown) style. It was good but sweeter than I remembered, though still sour enough to raise an eyebrow.

The real danger, of course, was the Monk’s proximity to Half Priced Books. Fortunately I escaped with self control mostly intact. (I couldn’t pass up the Ivor Noël Hume book about Martin’s Hundred, having grown up next door, and the illustrated Comus was a steal.)

Anyway, on the way out I thanked Tom and noted in passing that I would be at the Sonic Youth show tomorrow. “Oh!” he said, “I’ll be there too.” Apparently Rachel is quite the fan. So this is turning into Tandoku week—never a bad thing.

Here’s what I didn’t write about while we were shipping the Microsoft.com Blog Portal last week.

First: Spider-Man 2 at the Cinerama. While I should definitely have gone to an earlier show (I was, shall we say, a zombie by the end of the 10 pm show), I thought this was a very well done film. A touch heavy perhaps on the “poor Peter Parker, his life is so hard” schtick—but then without that it wouldn’t be Spider-Man. And it was nice to see Dr. Curt Connors (“The Lizard”) and John Jameson (“Man-Wolf”) make appearances, though I don’t think either of them would be a big enough bad guy to carry the third film. That honor is clearly going to go to Harry Osborne as the Hobgoblin.

Second: had a great time at the Cyclops on Friday courtesy Arvind and Kim (who sent the Evite) and Peter, Catherine, Jay, and Ravi, who came and hung out for a while.

Third: thanks to Erikka and Jeffrey for the fabulous Sloan barbecue.

Fourth: looks like it will be a busy week. The East Side Sing will cover some good Haydn; Sonic Youth on Wednesday; and it looks like I will be heading to Portland to hang out with Shel and Vik on the weekend. So much to do, so little time.

A story from the weekend I haven’t told yet: I had to stop by the U-Haul on Saturday to take care of my grill’s propane tank. When I stepped into the store, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was playing. And all the clerks—the long-haired one who appeared to be in charge, the tall thin taciturn black-haired one messing with the reservation computer, the heavyset guy running back and forth to the lot getting rental trucks ready—were singing along. I found myself unconsciously singing too: Magnifico-o-o-o… And the guy who walked in a second later behind me started doing it too.

And here I thought that only happened in the movies. Apparently it happens in slacker Seattle, too.

It’s a crazy few days—a full day offsite on Friday that was bookended by some frantic product plan production. I’m back now and should be able to blog uninterrupted for at least a few days. Then we go to Boston on Wednesday to stay with Charlie and Carie through Sunday. The offsite, incidentally, had some cool stuff. It was at the Blue Ribbon Cooking School, where they showed my new work team how to make paella (and supervised us as we actually cooked it). Among the things I learned: both my boss and his boss are big Wim Wenders fans, and both think, along with me, that Until the End of the World was one of his best films.

It’s been a long (albeit fruitful) day at work, and I’ve had no time to blog at all. All I have to say is, this is an interesting week in the blogosphere to be away from the blog. More later.

It was pretty nasty yesterday afternoon and evening, the first real East Coast-style wind/thunderstorm we’ve seen since we moved out here two years ago. My first clue of the intensity of the storm was a lightning strike directly outside the office across from mine, so close that I could feel the hair on my arms stand on end and my forearm muscles clench. (As my next door neighbor said, “Suddenly I don’t mind not having a window office so much.”)

The drive home was slow, compounded by downed branches. Fortunately, having recently had our trees pruned, the damage in our front yard was minimal—lots of downed leaves but only one branch. The back yard didn’t look too bad, a lot of small clusters of branches off the enormous pine tree, but as I fed the dogs I watched and heard more and larger branches fall. Then a few minutes before Lisa came home we lost power. A few minutes later the storm was over, and it still took an hour and a half to restore the power, but it was still a little adventure.

I had a long weekend, pretty exhausting. It started out well, with a good lunch with Tom Harpel. He covered our discussion pretty well (clarification: my site is run on Manila, but I use NetNewsWire as my primary posting tool). If it’s any consolation, Tom, I get lost at RedWest all the time. In addition to Tom’s commentary, we discussed his experience as an “embedded” ops guy on a product team.

The concert went well. UPC organist Joanne Stremmler proved that Bach is still the master with her organ rendition of “Come, Sweet Death,” which set up the Brahms perfectly.

From time to time, I forget how emotionally and physically taxing singing can be, particularly the “warhorse” masterworks. The Brahms is particularly insidious in this way, because while the music is not especially complicated (the fugues, while tricky, are nothing compared to the nightmares in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis), it’s emotionally so powerful that I was drained after three movements and totally exhausted after the seventh and last.

Saturday the dinner party went well—our new stove did meatballs, meat sauce, lasagna, eggplant sandwiches, and sugar syrup for lemon granita without breaking a sweat. We, on the other hand, sweated.

Today I had three services this morning, performing the Robert Shaw/Alice Parker arrangement of “Ride On, King Jesus.” Then home to collapse for a while before I went out to get a nail puncture in my tire patched. It turns out I waited too long to do it—I had driven on the underinflated tire (though I diligently kept it topped up with air) too far, and had damaged the sidewall. Plus the rear tires were too worn to go too much further. So I’m now hundreds of dollars poorer but with four new tires.

You know, I think the week actually might be more restful than the weekend was.

In particular, I’m having lunch with Tom Harpel of Tandoku.com (and sometimes of local band Onalaska, it seems). Looking forward to hearing about his Microsoft experiences as well.

Not much posting this week. I’ve been fighting both health issues (a cough that migrated upwards into my sinuses; I could hardly hear anything at all last night during choir practice) and computer issues (my work laptop melted down) for several days now. Hope to clear the logjam shortly and get back to the rhythm of things.

In the meantime, a quick pointer to fellow Microsoft blogger and MSCOM teammate Peter Svensk, who was once an EditThisPage.com blogger like me.

I’ve been a bit under the weather for the last four or five days; a weird kind of cold that started in the throat, with totally clear sinuses, but which has in the last day migrated up into my face. At least I’m on familiar territory.

Our guys have completely recovered from their “tutoring” and are once again making pests of themselves in the garden. We haven’t yet succeeded in training them to only uproot weeds. Maybe with time.

Thanks to my cold, I’m feeling a bit basso profundo. Thankfully I have another two weeks before my first solo at church—if eight notes total are considered a solo. After that, it’s not a full week until our performance of the Brahms Requiem (also known as the German Requiem, but it feels silly calling it that when you’re going to perform it in English).

A local man (from Bothell) won the Beerdrinker of the Year award in a competition about beer knowledge (no, it’s not about volume).

I read this article in the print edition of the Seattle Times yesterday and (to my surprise and shame) thought: “This is going to be on Fark, and the tag is going to be ‘Hero.’” Sure enough…

I’m baching it again this week, but with a twist. In the past I’ve been lonely and depressed with Lisa gone. Now I’m nervous, anxious, and harried—and happy, chasing after the puppies.

And I’m buried under the weight of 183 subscriptions and 577 unread headlines… At least the guys seem to be settling in for the evening. This is all by way of apology—blogging may be light for the next day or three.

Oh, and though I almost think it would be a bigger surprise if I did show up, I won’t be at the Weblog Meetup tomorrow for the same reason.

Among the things I consider a good prelude to a day skiing, being awakened every hour by a dog with a bad stomach does not rank high on the list. In fact, I’m not even sure it appears on the list. Our little girl puppy had a really bad night and kept us up, so by the time morning came I was discombobulated and non-functional. We decided not to feed them (Jefferson, our boy puppy, had been throwing up as well), so I left for work feeling guilty and leaving Lisa, who hadn’t slept any better than I had, to care for the puppies.

I soon realized how out of it I was. When we got into the shop and I started to put on my boots, I realized I had brought Lisa’s ski boots rather than mine. So it was another fun filled day of rental boots...

It was a beautiful day at Snoqualmie, though it took a while for the guilt to wear off enough for me to enjoy it. We found some fun runs I hadn’t experienced before, including a trail that led around the back of the mountain through the trees. Unfortunately, when a few of us went over to Snoqualmie Central to check the trails there, I ended up on a black diamond run by mistake. Fortunately after some trial and error (and considerable support from my partner in crime and fellow product manager, David Gordon), I managed to ski my way to safety.

This morning was a little better with the dogs. After a trip to the vet yesterday, the dogs got shots and pills and we got the go ahead to start feeding them again on a bland diet. They’re sleeping now. I think today will be a better day.

I didn’t get much blogging in today because I was out—at a work event. At Snoqualmie. This was anticipated; what was not anticipated was the one-two punch on my energy level of a morning skiing after a night of taking the dogs outside once every hour. (Story to follow later.) More stuff hopefully tomorrow.

After last year’s time with the Cascadian Chorale, I took the fall off from singing. I had started to realize during my therapy last year that part of the reason I kept looking to singing groups was to feel needed, and I had to break myself of that cycle.

But this fall I really missed being in a choir. And I realized I also wanted to explore my faith more, and to be in a position where my singing meant more than just applause.

So I’ve joined the Cathedral Choir at University Presbyterian Church. It looks like it will be a good group, both vocally and spiritually.

Lisa and I have finally found a worthy Italian restaurant in this mostly Pacific Rim cuisine city. Wallingford’s Asteroid Café, despite its non-Italian name, has some of the finest Italian food and wine we’ve seen since leaving Boston. Just down the street from Dick’s, with twelve tables barely fitting in the storefront in front of the open kitchen, the atmosphere was nevertheless festive and the food was spectacular.

Perhaps because of the mad cow scare, osso buco was off the menu, replaced with rabbit in a white wine, sage, and rosemary sauce with tomatoes and olives over polenta. Knowing how Lisa feels about polenta, it will perhaps come as no surprise that I enjoyed the rabbit while she had the duck, which was served with a sauce made from stonefruits and berries over balsamic-tossed cabbage. With such divergent meals (I kept quoting Looney Tunes in my head: “Wabbit season! Duck season! Wabbit season!”), and the 125 Italian reds on the wine list, we could very well have fallen into vinicultural disaster, if not for the timely intervention of owner and sommelier Marlin Hathaway. He recommended a fantastic Nebbiolo from Lombardy that was made with part dried grapes for an Amaronesque slight sweetness that played off the rabbit sauce and the cabbage. We had a great conversation with him about Italian wines, the difficulty of keeping a good white wine list in a restaurant that’s barely big enough to have a bathroom (you have to go back through the kitchen to find it but it’s there), frozen desserts, and the neighborhood (he remarked that I looked familiar, but maybe it was just because I resembled Dave Matthews, who apparently lives a few blocks away).

I think we’ll definitely be going back.

Looks like I’ve just slept through my third earthquake: we had a 3.6 just after midnight last night, centered at Bremerton (just about 20 miles away). For the record, the first two quakes I slept through were in the summer of 1995, when I was jet lagged and essentially sleeping with my eyes open in a conference room at Ridgecrest, California, during a 5+ magnitude tremblor; and of course in April 2002, when we had a 5.1 in Boston that almost woke me up.

Though I have them.

In the meantime, here’s a New York Times article about Washington State wines to keep you occupied.

I just got a reminder that the amount of snow that has fallen is never the issue; it’s how the infrastructure deals with it. In the case of the Seattle suburbs, that would be: not well at all. We’ve only had a few inches of snow here, but there are no snowplows, no sand trucks, no salt spreaders, nothing. I made the mistake of leaving my laptop at the office, so I had to go in and fetch it—and see the madness first hand.

I think I’ll get out of here before things get too much worse.

In the meantime, I found this Snow Storm Blog at the Seattle Times pretty amusing.

Lisa and I went back to Snoqualmie today for another half day ski. The difference is that we had our own boots and brought our rented skis with us, both courtesy REI. We are definitely getting into skiing as a serious lifestyle, and we figured ski boots were the right place to start investing in gear. Man, were we right. My feet feel so much better than they ever have after skiing.

The skis were a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we paid $10 less per pair than we would have at the mountain, and didn’t have to deal with the line (which cost us almost an hour on Monday). On the minus side, the skis were crappy. I don’t know if all Rossignols are bad, or just the ones we’ve rented. But then we did rent them on Saturday.

And, oh my goodness, it was freezing up there. Icy road conditions from Issaquah all the way to the summit, and about 7° F on the slopes. (Fortunately it warmed up. A little.) But good skiing, even a little fresh powder on the slopes, which for Snoqualmie is really saying something.