add it to my best places to watch the sunset....

Spot #21--My very own balcony!!!! This was the sunset last night, it was beautiful and I can't wait for a summer and San Francisco indian summer full of em!!!

midnight sun

I LOVE THE EXTRA LIGHT IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER!!! although we don't quite have 24 hour sunlight in Pacifica, like they do in Sweden and Norway, as I was walking to workout this morning at 5:30 am, I felt more energized that usual because it was already starting to get light outside...a big difference from the pitch black darkness i was walking to the gym in about 2 months ago. something about having light until 8 or 8:30 (and later as the summer goes on) and having the sun rise earlier gives me a little extra energy.

i can't believe i live here!

joe and I went on a walk down the staircase to the beach in front of our apartment complex today. i must have said "I can't believe we live here," about 10 times. we can see the ocean from our balcony and it is just a short walk to the actual beach. It is of course very different from the warm san diego beach, but absolutely breathtakingly beautiful none the less.

meals with my love

I have to brag, I am such a lucky girl, I have the sweetest, most loving boyfriend in the world and to top off all his wonderful qualities he is a great cook and of course my favorite person in the world to cook with. With my new job, we have had less time in the evenings for cooking and were getting sad about not cooking together so we started planning our meals for the week out over the weekend so that we are prepared with all of the ingredients that we need. We've created some pretty yummy things lately.

Christina's Catalina Bachelorette Party

I spent last weekend in Catalina-the F4l mecca hanging out with my favorite high school girlfriends and had a blast. The countdown is now officially on to F4l wedding numero tres of 2008. 5 weeks until the Boise Bitches(Christina's college friends) meet up again with the F4l(our highschool group of girls) to celebrate Christina and Lane's wedding. I can't wait! With Christina's crazy planning skills, I just know the wedding is going to be beautiful!

I must have the greatest high school friends in the world. It's been 8 years since we graduated (holy hell!) and we still go to Catalina each summer!!!

NPR's perspective

it's become a morning ritual of mine to listen to NPR on the way into work...i really love their reporting style and stories...one of my favorite bits on morning edition is called the Perspective. Each day at precisely 23 before the hour they feature a different person, not a celebrity, just an everyday person sharing a certain perspective on life. i love these bits every morning, but yesterday's was particularly inspiring for me.

a physics teacher from san francisco talked about how even though he only grossed 16,000 dollars last year (impoverished by bay area standards) he felt like he lived better than most that have gone before him...not for posh or extravagant reasons but for many simple reasons that I often take for granted. For example, he talked about how he lived near the ocean and was healthy enough to wake up and go surfing some mornings, how he had been able to travel to continents that even kings of the past were unaware existed, he gets to eat fresh fruit and vegetables every day, he doesn't have to worry about fatal disease like the plague, he has a healthy set of teeth and has plenty of clean drinking water so much that he actually gets to shower with it--an unheard of luxury except for royalty back in the day.

listening to his perspective gave me a sense of peace and a feeling of gratitude for the life l lead. I , like anyone get down about trivial things from time to time and it was wonderful to be reminded of just how rich most of us are here in the states.


On a side note, I saw the most beautiful flower today and found out that it is called a passion flower....I included a picture up top!

a month's worth of inspiration

the park at land's end...THIS IS WHERE I LIVE!!! how lucky am I?

Since beginning my new job as the Subscription Database Coordinator for the Hoover Press at Stanford in the beginning of March, life has been go, go, go and full of a multitude of ups and downs. On March 11 I began work. Just two weeks later on March 22nd Joe and I (with the help of a great friend) moved across town to Pacifica. The following weekend we flew home to San Diego for Niki and Ryan's wedding, in which I was a bridesmaid and the weekend after that Joe was off to Tahoe for a friend's bachelor party. By the end of these few weeks I was pooped!!! I came down with a gross cold/flu and was out of comission for a good 5 days, which was miserable, however probably also God's little way of forcing me to slow down, which I was in some weird way thankful for.

Moments of joy, stress, happiness, anxiety and about every other human emotion possible creeped into the activities that have filled our lives.

As I sit here today after a long awaited weekend comprised of the perfect balance of normalcy, relaxation and exploration, I have this overwhelming feeling of gratitude inside of me. I feel so blessed to be working in a place I am excited to be and with a group of people who have been so warm and welcoming. I feel so blessed to have been such an integral part of a good friend's wedding---a very important event in the life of Niki and Ryan. I feel so blessed to
just be healthy and to have energy to enjoy life again. And above all at the moment I feel so blessed to be sharing my life with Joe. He's an incredible man, so loving, giving, understanding, forgiving, interesting....the list goes on and on. I love our life in Pacifica, we are so blessed to be in such a beautiful place and to have one another and there isn't a day that goes by that I do not feel incredibly lucky.

I want to share some pictures from our life in the past month and a half...I hope to go into more detail about all of them soon...