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Just about two weeks ago, I was among the crowd of Seattleites (and those from beyond our city) who saw 311 play at The Moore, and if I were to drill down my comments about the show to one statement, it’d be that getting to see a band that legitimately had fun on stage and wasn’t looking like they were going through the motions was awesome – and unfortunately atypical.

Aside from the fact that I was able to walk up like an hour or so before the opening act hit the stage, it was a pretty solid crowd of fans that genuinely were into the band. I’d never caught them live before, but as a fan with all of their CDs and that can rattle off lyrics to some of the more random tracks, it was cool to be surrounded by a ton of people that (mostly) felt the same way. I’d always heard that they were an energetic crew on stage, and that definitely came through.

Frontman Nick Hexum definitely brought his “A” game, and seeing sometimes-frontman, always hyped-up fellow singer SA Martinez in action was a pretty good treat. But unlike a lot of other groups you might see, the whole band really kicks it up a notch, and I was amazed at one portion of their show, which I was informed was a staple – and have included a clip someone else in attendance shared. It’s a merge of “Applied Science” and a drum solo – probably not one that you’ve really seen before from other groups, even ones with tremendous drummers. Check it out:

Now I’m not here to post full-on reviews of concerts or anything, but I will say that I was more than taken aback by these comments from a fellow Seattleite who probably wasn’t too much of a fan of the band to begin with, and definitely didn’t dig the performance…at least the part she took in with her eyes.

I hate to say that it’s been nice being able to just pop into a few shows here and there in Seattle that I wouldn’t have gotten into day-of back in NYC or Northern NJ, but it definitely has – and getting to do it in a city with some pretty smart music fans makes it doubly so.

On Saturday morning, I headed out to Seattle’s Mobile Chowdown II, a gathering of some of the city’s best food of the mobile variety, which I stumbled upon via my Yelp addiction here in the Emerald City. I’d heard that the last event was crazy, with some of the vendors running out of food, the lines being ridiculous, and the facilities and things being a bit lacking, so I headed out to get there as it started up. As you’ll see in the first shot I took of the event in the Whrrl slideshow here, even that wasn’t enough to stay away from a long line for Marination, a merger of Korean and Hawaiian cuisines – but it was worth it.

I started it off with Marination’s shredded kalua pork sliders, on great buns with their super slaw (there’s a photo in the slideshow above). Let’s just say that two was most certainly not enough for this particular slider addict. Having not had breakfast beforehand (and really, why eat before this type of extravaganza), I headed over to Top Pot’s streamlined silver trailer and got my apple fritter on. I’d heard quite a bit of people rave about Top Pot, and after one item, I’d have to say I agree. Very good stuff.

What, you expected me to wash it all down with a little something? Well, of course I did it with local favorite Jones Soda, you know. I had the Jones Zilch Vanilla Bean (more on the sodas here), along with a Pomegranate a little later, and I’m most certainly happy that they’re very available now that I’m here in Seattle.

At that point, I kind of wandered a bit and took it in, wishing I was hungrier, heh. I closed out my “lunch” with a slice of Veraci’s pizza – pepperoni, natch. The crust was actually super tender – I’d heard a few people in the crowd talking about not really liking the crust, but I liked it as a nice mix between the foldable Brooklyn-style that I’m used to with my East Coast pizza mentality, and a more upscale, fire-cooked pizza. Not overdone at all, and not really needing the complement of seasonings that you have to add to some slices at your local pizza shop.

While I didn’t get to try out everyone’s stuff, now I have a pretty good idea on which trucks I need to be tracking down – if the lines were at all indicative of what people are into in this city for their street food, then I’ll be going “out” for lunch a little more often.

Let’s just get this out of the way up front — Lara and I are moving to Seattle. In about two weeks.

So, I’ve been putting this off for a bit as we’ve had so much going on at work and at home, but it’s about time that we shared the news. We got an amazing opportunity for me to join a great public relations agency, and I’m going to be starting up a presence with them in the Pacific Northwest at the beginning of November. My last day (sad!) at MTV will be Wednesday, October 21, and we’ll be getting our movers on for the next day or so after that, and we’re currently scheduled to get on the road for a cross country trek on Saturday, October 24th. Neither of us have ever driven the whole way across the U.S. before, so it’ll be a fun adventure to get to take.

We’ll be in our new home in downtown Seattle on Thursday, October 29th, and have to leave our awesome friends, family, and view of the Upper West Side back in NJ as I don’t think they’ll fit in our car, unfortunately. Lara will be continuing to work at her current gig, which is extra awesome, and I’m sure she’ll enjoy the amazing way her wireless card works (or doesn’t) as we cruise the highways and byways of America in a couple of weeks.

Lara will probably kick me for saying this as I’ve been so overly excited about the possibility – and the trip – that I haven’t really reached the point of being sad to move. On one hand, I’ve lived in NJ for all of my 34 years, and my biggest move has been a ride up or down the Turnpike or Parkway. On the other hand, I’ve lived here for all of my 34 years, and many of my friends, family, memories, and even where I went to college are here. So I’m sure I’ll be like “OMGWHATJUSTHAPPENED” after about 48 hours of having a new place.

In any case, I know I’m going to miss all of my friends, all the haunts (oh, don’t worry, I’ll probably post eight more times about random things to do at the Jersey Shore), cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, getting pissed off at bad parkers in Weehawken, and actually being on the East Coast and trashing the future television watching of my friends on Twitter and Facebook by posting status updates about what’s going on in our favorite shows. Damn. Now I’m one of *those* people who is going to be behind the PST curtain. Ha!

We’ve managed to find an extra awesome apartment smack in downtown Seattle, which we’re thrilled about. We had a great trip out to Seattle a few weeks back, and went to about 12 apartments in about 36 hours — with the one we chose being the last one that we went to, without an appointment, on a whim before calling it a day. And boy are we happy that we did.

I know there’s a whole bunch of you that I haven’t caught up with yet and you seeing this on my blog or on Facebook probably isn’t the way you’d like to find out, and we’re making our best effort to have breakfast / lunch / dinner / drinks / canapes on the lanai with as many people as we can before we head out of town. I’ll certainly try and be back this way as much as possible, and I know that Lara’s still dying to do about eighty thousand things in Manhattan that we never got to do while she lived here, so you haven’t gotten rid of us yet. It’s hella cheaper to fly from SEA to EWR than it is from EWR to SEA, amusingly, and Alaska Airlines still racks me up Continental OnePass miles, last I checked — and most of you know that I’m obsessed with my frequent flyer miles.

I’ll have more to say about this soon, so watch this space. In the meantime, we’re now accepting suggestions of random things people think we should try and do on the way. We’re currently looking at taking I-80 the whole way as I don’t mind the extra miles in order to drive straight into San Francisco and then up the left coast (I figured it was an excuse to “get used” to it), but have some diversion-time if we need to do something fun. So without further ado, I leave you to whatever it was that you were doing before this 750+ word blog post.

[update] And if you were looking for an apartment in lovely Weehawken, ours is available, and it’s awesome. We’ve got a ton of photos and the folks in the house are great to live with.

So it’s Thursday night, the last night of our trip to Whistler, Vancouver, and Seattle, and we’re staying at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel here in Seattle. We found an amazing room while shopping online a few days back, and given my penchant for the Fairmont (we ate dinner, tea, and a number of trips to the outdoor bar at the one in Whistler this past two weeks and spent some time with the awesome team over there), we figured it was a great way to close out our trip to stay at this hotel. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we headed out to Purple for some wine and dinner with a friend, and came back to the Fairmont to change before walking down towards the Puget Sound.

Upon, returning, let’s just say we got the excellent treatment from the staff here at the hotel. I’ll let the video tell the story. There’s an s-word or two if you’re into censoring those sort of thing, so cover the kiddies’ ears. Otherwise, enjoy Lara’s finest video to date.

We’ve got lots more video to come to share with everyone, but I thought this was just to rich not to post asap. Cheers!