One year! For reals, this time!

 Wow! I can't believe we've already been married for a YEAR! This has been the most amazing year yet(yes, even including my mission), and I'm working on a sum-uppance of all the things that have made this year great. For this post's purposes and in general, though, the best thing has just been being together all year! Two of my favorite things about marriage are waking up next to each other every day, and never having to drop each other off at different apartments every night. It's sappy, I know, but I just can't seem to ever "wake up on the wrong side of the bed" when the first thing I see every morning is my wonderful best friend AND husband waking up next to me! Probably helps that he is always cheerful, too!

Okay, so we thought deeply about what kind of romantical thing we'd do to celebrate the big first anniversary, and....

WE WENT WHALE WATCHING! 

If that doesn't sound like the most thrilling thing to you, then that is probably because you have not spent multiple hours watching the Nature videos on PBS...come on, doesn't everyone want to see a whale spout in real life?

We have actually been wanting to go down to this lighthouse place in Palos Verde for a while, because supposedly this is the place to see whales, and so Miles got off work early and we headed down. This also strategically gave me time to prep some of my dinner surprises. :)

Right as we pulled into the parking lot, I looked out the windshield and was pretty sure I saw a whale surfacing! We jumped out of the car, and sure enough, there WERE whales out there, and we saw at least a couple spouts!  Off to the left we saw a couple dolphins, and then Miles pointed out that to the right was a group of seals leaping in and out of the water. We were so excited that we were jumping around like kindergartners--there's TONS of things out here! We were both secretly expecting to just kind of sit around for a very long time, waiting for whales to show up, and here the ocean is apparently swarming with them!

It was kind of like this! Only the whales looked more proportional, not suspiciously like they'd been drawn in "Paint"

Weeeeell...turns out that we were just the luckiest little newlyweds in the world, once again, because when we started walking around and talked to the "whale society" people that had set up their camp and spyglasses(can I call them that? It sounds so much more fitting with the buttons they had pinned to their whale-watching vests and directors' chairs), they apparently had been there all day and had only seen four whales. TOTAL. Isn't that amazing?

We hung around to see the whales leave, and after a while of looking at boats through Miles's spotting scope , we took off for dessert.

Miles took this artsy panoramic shot. I think that cleft in the ocean is where all the other whales were hiding.

Since we had decided that making our own special dinner at home would be more fun than eating out, Miles was in charge of picking a special dessert place, and we decided to do that first. And the winner was...Cold Stone! Yum! We were kind of excited to see those little mochi there, and the server humored us and put some on top of what we got for free. Yay for anniversaries again!

I had been plotting for some time to make a special dinner, and decided to make what we'd had on our first date. Through a funny turn of events, Miles had taken me to SPARK restaurant in Provo to try to get some hot chocolate, but they didn't have any. Instead we had mango mojitos(NON-alcoholic, mind you), and, of all things, two kinds of edamame. I used my trusty friend Mr. Google to help me find out how to make those things, and then added chicken salad croissants to the menu, since that's the yummier version of the food we didn't get to eat at our wedding reception. Here's how it came out: