We flew in to San Jose on Saturday, which was one of those nightmare “everything you do only makes you an hour later than you should be” experiences. But we finally got here, settled into the hotel, and both Dave and Cate took naps. (I had consumed way too much Diet Coke, there were no naps in sight for me.) That night, we got to meet up with Cat, Tony & e-baby for dinner, which was great. I almost never get to see them more than once a year, so twice in less than three months is a real treat.

Yesterday, Dave and I went house-hunting. It’s an idea we’re kicking around – if he wants to stay at his new job long-term, it may require us to relocate to the Bay area. It’s not necessarily my preference. I love Washington, and I have friends there, so moving isn’t something I’d be terribly excited about. But if it’s important for Dave’s career, then that’s what we’ll do.

The problem is, the housing market here is so insane – we tend to think that the Seattle area is expensive until we come down here, and then it’s like, “wait, a 2 bedroom, one bath bungalow for $850K? Are you KIDDING me???” For what our nice big four-bedroom house on two acres is worth, we could maybe get a 2-bedroom condo in a sketchy neighborhood here. It’s unbelievable.

So we drove all over the place yesterday, and definitely found some places where we know we absolutely don’t want to live, but we found a couple of places that we could stand and which we might possibly be able to afford without selling any of our internal organs or our future children.

We ended up in Santa Cruz, which is one of the places where I would absolutely love to live – it’s a beautiful town, and there are parts of it that we could possibly afford, although the commute wouldn’t be very practical for Dave. While we were there, we went to the beach to dip Cate’s toes in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

As you can see, she was not fan of the beach at all. Hopefully we didn’t traumatize her too badly, but we thought it was pretty hilarious.

Oh, and I surprised myself at the beach with my maternal instincts. There were dogs running around all over the place, playing frisbee and whatnot. After we filmed that video and Cate was still screaming, I lay her on a towel on the sand to try to calm her down. This little Boston terrier came over, probably just to check out the small screaming creature on the beach. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm, but without even thinking about it, I yelled “no!” and shoved him away. Um, what? I normally wouldn’t touch a stranger’s dog, but I didn’t know the dog, I wasn’t sure if he was gentle or not, and my Big Ol’ Mama Bear instinct kicked in and told me to get him the hell away from my baby. His owners – two guys who were several yards away – saw me and called the dog back, and I thought about apologizing to them for pushing their dog. I know I didn’t hurt him, I just felt kind of rude. But then I decided that maybe they should have been more vigilant about making sure their dog wasn’t around any little kids, so whatever.

Oh, and remind me to tell y’all about how I scared the bejeezus out of some punk kids at our hotel. I’m pretty proud of myself for that one.

P.S. Pics from the trip so far are here. I’ll keep adding to that set as we take more photos.