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:

Celebrating the New Year...Long Beach style!

We wanted to do something cool for our first married New Year's together, and we had two ideas, and two days off. Idea number one is that there's a bike trail from right by our house down to the ocean. We'd been wanting to do this for-e-ver, and finally had both bikes fixed enough that we could. Idea number two was that our friend Ernie lent us another full wet suit and some flippers, so we wanted to go snorkeling down at Laguna Beach again. Luckily Miles had me check the weather before we made our final plans. New Year's eve was set for the 70s, and the 2nd was listed for kind of sunny and ... 83+ degrees! Done and done!

The bike ride on New Year's Eve was super fun, and it took us down clear to Seal Beach...you know that pier that we've taken you all to when you came to visit? Yep. Rode there on our Huffys. We saw some crazy stuff on the way; weird pollution bubbles, weird pollution snails, burned palm tree trunks, and a whole bunch of snowy egrets and blue herons. I think Miles has all those pictures on his phone, though. Oh, well. It was a blast, and we figured out afterwards that we rode about 20 miles. Poor Miles had the hard seat most of the way, but we compensated for that by tying my jacket all around it to make it comfier.

Being the huge partiers we are, we rang in the New Year by going to bed at nine thirty and setting the alarm for midnight, at which point I woke up, cheered, and peeked through the blinds at our neighbors fireworks, and Miles made some grunting sounds from his side of the bed. :) YAY 2012!!! Really, we DO get excited for the new year, and we celebrated a little more after church with some homemade "Martinelli's" (Walmart juice + lemon-lime soda-yummier!).

Anyway, THEN came the really exciting part. On Jan 2nd, we drove down to Laguna Beach. The rest of the story is better told by pictures, and I've already written a lot, so I'll just put some little captions and let you look! Sorry about the strange lighting in a lot of them...our camera decided to change the settings for itself, and we didn't figure out what was going on until afterwards. It is especially a bummer in the video, but you can still kind of see what's going on. :)

We got the same sweet parking spot as last time...right behind us are the stairs down to the beach.

Remember those stairs I told you about? Here they are! It's this little "secret" cove called Shaw's Cove.
But you know how we are about finding secret places. Everyone else seems to find them, too.

Little would you know--right under the water are tons and tons of sea urchins! This was their actual color.

Oh, did I mention that it was FREEZING? We almost got out twice as soon as we got in, but then we got excited and stuck it out for about a half hour. It was so cold that the water gave you a head freeze when you went under!

Miles is an awesome diver. I usually just chill out on the surface. Less ear-popping that way!

Right in front of us! Miles chased them, but of course we couldn't get close enough to touch them

We finished up right as the sun started to set.
Boy did we luck out on times and temperatures!

Man, it was so much fun! Just writing about it makes me want the water to get warmer so we can dare to go again! We took a few videos, but between the strange light on our camera and our shaky hands from being cold, this (below) is the one I thought would be the most fun to watch. The color is pretty crazy and neon for most of it, but you can see the sea urchins, a few cool fish, and a star fish that we saw.

Happy New Year!

Surprise date night!

Yay! I know you are all excited for another blog post! well, here it is!

Okay, so no, we did not take either of the pictures above, but they could have been taken by us. If only we didn't always leave the phone in the car on these occasions. Shucks. BUT to explain the pics, last night we decided to go to Seal Beach. We live 15-25 min from the beach, and we decided that it had been way too long since we took advantage of that fact.

Anyway, we got there and walked down the beach a little, when suddenly Miles got all excited because he thought he saw a snorkeler. Here I should pause and explain that snorkeling is on Miles's top ten list of BEST things in the world. I looked closer, and no, it was a fin! SHARKS! There was a loudspeaker telling everyone to stay close to shore. But I was wrong again. What we saw were actually 3 or 4 dolphins, just swimmin along, only about 50 yards from us! Funny, I've never seen a single seal at "Seal Beach," but now I've seen live dolphins for the first time in my life.

The other non-sealy animal abounding at Seal Beach is sand crabs. One of Miles and my favorite pastimes is catching these little fellas. You dig around a little right after the wave comes up, and you are sure to find some of these. They're SO fun! Some are just teensy, like pinky fingernail size, and the biggest we've found was maybe a tad bigger than the size of the one in the picture. I have thought of making them my pets, but Miles wants to eat them. It looks like the latter option is more probable since a Hispanic family passed by with a catch of their own and told us how to properly fry them up. I guess we will add some seafood to our feast along with the watermelon, peas, and beets?

Man, we are so lucky to be here! We miss you all and LOVED having Miles's parents and Kira and Travis down this last weekend--we can't wait to see you all again, and we're looking forward to seeing my family at the end of July!