Happy Anniversary to Us!!

We have officially been living here in Portland for 1 year and 1 day!  It has been a great year full of lots of adjustments and new endeavors.

It's been a while since we've blogged.  The last blog was about how I was in my last few weeks of classes.  Well, I'm done with classroom classes and am now getting "schooled" in the real world. Here are some pictures of my last project.

These are pictures of my sugar showpiece.  It was fun to make, a little stressful at times, but really exciting too.  We learned a few techniques with this project: coloring and satinizing sugar, pulling sugar (the flower petals and bird wings), sugar blowing (bird body), casting sugar (the base and curved lines), bubble sugar (the hole-y green and gold sugar), ribbons and more pastillage work (leaves and vines) and attaching things to each other (the flowers and putting the whole thing together at the end). 

We've also gone to the coast since our last post.  We have learned to LOVE Seaside, OR.  We would recommend it if you are looking for a weekend vacation spot.  Lots of fun stuff to do, see and eat!   Here are a few pictures from our trip with Sasha and Mom. 

We played A LOT of Fascination!  If you've never played Fascination, you should get yourself to Seaside ASAP and "Roll 'em!"

We rented a 4 person surrey and rode around Seaside for an hour or so.  It was a lot more tiring than I thought it would be. 

We also teed it up at Ten Tiny Tees Mini Golf (I love that name!)  Mom and I tied and had to play a rematch the next day.  :)

A few weeks later I returned to the Oregon Coast with some of my lovely Seattle U friends to celebrate, our dear friend, Dan Strickland's birthday.  Dan passed away a few months ago in a tragic car accident; we thought it would be fun to celebrate his birthday and honor his life by going to the Oregon Coast.  Here is a picture of us with Dan's mom, Kerry. :)

                                                                                                                                                          Photo courtesy of Shawn Hays

He loved going on road trips and I was blessed enough to go on a few with him while we were in college.  Dan influenced a lot of people while he was here with us and still continues to do so!  Here is a cool video of how he has changed the lives of some Santa Clara students.

Looks like this is getting a bit long...I will have to update you on my internship in the next blog entry.