Headed West

Sometimes life throws you a curveball and you actually swing at it. 

In case you haven’t heard, we are moving to Seattle!  This is truly one of the most exciting and, at the same time, nerve-racking events of my life…On one hand, it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen — all the water and the mountains and the gorgeous old homes and the rows and rows of houseboats.  On the other hand, it’s SOOOOO far from home.  I mean, it’s in the Pacific Time Zone for crying out loud.  If you want to get to Europe from there, you “fly over the pole.”  The NORTH pole.  Like where Santa lives.  But, on the flip side, it’s only a five hour flight to Hawaii, so that’s a plus…

I guess I should back up and give you some insight as to how we got here.  Sometime way back in August, Heath got a phone call from a recruiter.  As a lawyer, this is really nothing new.  I used to get calls two or three times a week trying to entice me to jump ship and join another (virtually identical) law firm in downtown Dallas.  I always gave them the same response: “Why would I want to go down the street and do the same boring  job for the same ungrateful clients for the same pay at some random place where I don’t even know anyone?  At least here I have friends.”  Heath, conversely, always chats these people up.  When he was at the firm, he would feign interest and gather all kinds of good information (who was hiring, why they were hiring, how much they were paying, why they thought he’d be willing to leave the firm, etc.) and then he would take all that info to our recruiting department and gossip about it.  Clever, I must admit.  Anyway, now that he works “in house,” the calls don’t come as frequently and they are usually not your top offers (“How would YOU like to be general counsel of The Michael Scott Paper Company?”)  What I’m trying to say is that this particular call in August caught his attention. 

The recruiter was from Seattle and she was calling on behalf of Amazon.  Dot Com.  And they wanted Heath.  Not that that should surprise anyone that knows Heath.  He’s kind of a big deal.  At first the offer was very flattering, and we joked about how we would just dump our entire lives here and move to Seattle and drink coffee and wear flannel and discover bands.  Haha, funny, right?  But, as I mentioned before, Heath has a hard time telling these recruiters to buzz off, so she kept calling.  Eventually, we decided it wouldn’t hurt for him to interview with them, brush the dust off his resume, and maybe get a free trip out west.  Of course, the first thing they did was give him a writing assignment.  Oh, wait, this is not as fun as a free trip, I thought.  He worked on it really hard, though, as he does everything.  He even let me “proofread” it, and of course I went nuts and tried to re-write the whole thing.  I was surprised at how much I missed that stuff!  Short-story-long, he (we!) knocked it out of the park, and he moved on to the next phase.

From there, everything started happening really fast — he flew out there and met a bunch of people, they called his references, he was getting phone calls from all kinds of muckety-mucks at Amazon at weird hours (ok, Pacific Time Zone hours).  Pretty soon, I knew we had moved on from the “haha, funny, right?” stage to the “oh wow, you’re serious?” stage.  Before we knew it, he had a real offer and people were calling us about setting up a house-hunting trip!  At that point, I freaked out just a little bit.  I mean, I had never even set foot in the state of Washington!  So, Heath convinced them to call the trip a “decision-making trip” instead of a “house-hunting trip” and that calmed me down some.  Although all we really did on the trip was look at houses!

We took the trip a couple weekends ago and made the decision shortly after our return to Dallas.  We are both giddy with excitement and scared to death at the same time.  We’re trying not to be super sad about leaving our friends and family behind, but that is definitely the hardest part.  We are extremely lucky to have such supportive families and loved ones, who have kept the guilt-trips to a minimum and the promises to visit to a maximum!  Heath will be starting the job on January 4th, and Frank and I will join him as soon as the house is sold (hopefully around the same time!).  We just love the looks of Seattle and can’t wait to discover all the hidden charms. 

We were saying the other day that Seattle reminds us of a cross between Little Rock and Chicago and Lawrence and Estes Park and Blue Mountain Beach…in other words, the places our hearts go to when we are happy!