Hey, Bales: 12 Days of Christmas (letter)

September

in which we celebrate our 5 year anniversary and some other stuff happens!

Celebrating 5 years with some
hay BALES we found

This year Nathan and I celebrated out 5 year anniversary. It was so much fun, especially because last year we spent our anniversary we were on opposite sides of the world on our anniversary. To celebrate we strapped our bikes on the back of the car and took a ferry to the San Juan Islands.

relaxing on the boat

my husband and best friend ever!

We stayed on San Juan Island, the biggest and flattest of the San Juan Islands. I'm really glad it is the flattest, because we did a lot of cycling and it was still pretty hilly (in my opinion, Nathan loves hills).

Taking a rest and enjoying the view.

lighthouse we cycled to

Oh look! Fall is happening!

Or big adventure was going on a whale watching trip to see some Orcas. Despite growing up in the Northwest the only Orca whale I'd ever seen before was at Sea World in San Diego. I was really excited about going out to see them in the wild! We went out on a little boat with a whale expert who could visually identify all of the whales we saw and was able to tell us about each individual's past orca adventures and their orca family members.

Whale blowing water!

More Whales!

We explored the island together and it was really fun to see all the different animals and landscapes. Washington is so different and it's fun to be back around all the trees and mountains and water.

a curious grey fox who came over to investigate us

View from the Duck Soup Inn where we had our
anniversary dinner together.

Madrona Bar and Grill where we enjoyed dinner and
drinks on the deck durring the sunset.

Signature Drink: The Fluffy Duck
(orange creamsicle inspired)

Mountain view on the ferry ride back to the mainland.

Other September happenings:

We hit 100,000 miles in Pilot! I guess driving
back and forth from Seattle to San Diego adds up

I traveled to San Francisco for the MobileHCI conference. I was lucky enough to be selected to be a student volunteer which meant my hotel and conference registration was paid for in return for volunteering at the conference. It was a really good conference with some awesome papers, I think my favorite was a mobile phone application, now in the windows app store, developed at Microsoft for teaching Chinese tone recognition.

San Francisco Skyline from the
reception hall

The Banquet was at the Exploratorium and it was fun to get to go and explore it with a bunch of other scientists.

about to explore with my friend Jessica!

Friends Jofish, Erin, and twins playing at the
GIANT BUBBLE STATION!
Babies + bubbles = win :)

September also had a couple Disney days.

This is my Disneyland face. :D

I was really excited to get to go with our old roommate LB and her fiance. We'd been talking about going all year and it was so much fun!

We met Aladdin!

Dropped 13 stories.

and splashed down a mountain!

I also convinced my friend Margaret to go to the Disneyland Halloween Party with me. It's the only time that people over 12 can wear costumes in the park and IT IS SO MUCH FUN! also there is trick-or-treating for everyone!! I was Alice in Wonderland and Margaret made a Jedi costume. We went with some other UCSD friends too who ranged from Harry Potter to Rikku from Kingdom Hearts.