This weekend, a woman that I worked with at Intel, visited Seattle along with her husband. It was a surprise time for his birthday. I was thrilled when they invited me to join them for dim sum on Sunday morning at the House of Hong in Seattle’s International District.
 
Because parking is scarce and I have an annual Metropass from Microsoft, I took the bus downtown. On the ride back, I sat towards the back and saw an advertisement for www.nwjobs.com posted inside the bus. It summed up the Pacific Northwest slant towards environmentalism, optimism and underlying disdain for hostile approaches to solving problems.
 
"Your new job I marketing pays so well you tip your waitress an extra dollar and she buys a lottery ticket and wins $1.8 million of which she donates $1.5 million to a build a nature conservancy that saves the red-legged frog which cause a bald eagle population explosion and the city swells with such pride that everyone goes to the Seattle Center Fountain in a group hug which inspires the entire world to call a cease fire and 135,000 lives are saved and the Virgin Mary status stops crying and global warming is reversed and the President steps down and our local millionaire geek takes over and we become the United States of Seattle."