About Us
Well fed and glowing, a photo from our honeymoon.
Our small home in Ballard - post renovation.
Enjoying tea in Kyoto.
Diana at the waterfront park near our home in Japan.
Diana and I met during the spring of 1997 in Seattle Washington. I was living in a derelict Victorian mansion on Capitol Hill with 9 other climbing bums, artists, actors, and musicians. Diana moved into an equally derelict mansion next door and one day we noticed each other. We really hit it off. Our courtship was not without its bumps and hiccups, but the fact that we shared many common friends who were falling over themselves to smooth our way helped things along nicely. We married the following year in the fall of 1998 on a terrace behind Diana's father's cabin in Whitney Portal, just outside of Lone Pine California. The cabin and its surroundings are beautiful beyond words and a nice place to have a storybook wedding.
We spent the next few years in Seattle working diligently and practicing being a married couple. We bought a small "fixer upper" in Ballard and managed to capture a meager but adequate portion the of tech bubble just as it was exploding dramatically. The small influx of cash allowed both of us to return to Graduate School and hit the "reset" button on our careers. Diana graduated from the University of Washington with a Master of Landscape Architecture Degree in the spring of '04, and I am currently in the final year of the University of Washington's Master of Architecture program - which brings us to Japan.
The UW Architecture department has an exchange scholarship with the University of Kobe Engineering Department in Kobe Japan. The scholarship provides for 6 months of language study followed by a 1 year period to research Japanese architecture. I applied for, and received, the scholarship last fall by proposing a thesis based on urban housing in contemporary Japan.
Diana, always game for an adventure, agreed to put her Landscape Architecture career on hold and our path was set. As of this writing we have been here just under 3 months, Diana is currently teaching English as a second language, and I am studying Japanese at the University of Kobe. We will be in Japan through March of 2006.
