Week of Celebration

I'm way overdue for a post, I know, but honestly nothing that exciting has been happening lately until this week! Certainly nothing photo-worthy has happened, and I'm sure you're all tired of my babbling with no pictures to break it up. So, finally, some fun stuff to share and I'm even including pictures!

Sunday was our first wedding anniversary. I can't describe how strange that feels! It hasn't been that long, we're still newlyweds right? We are both amazed at how quickly a year went by. Saturday we got to celebrate the wedding of some great friends and fellow servants, and we had the most fun wedding reception table we've ever sat at! Becuase of our friends' wedding, we didn't go out of town for our anniversary so we're going to Sausalito this weekend (more stories and pictures to come, I'm sure). But we still celebrated the whole weekend!

Friday night I arrived from a business trip to Sacramento (complete with the longest Sacramento Rivercats game in history - 16 innings! We finally left at the bottom of the 14th at 11:30 at night, but we had a blast. Moving on...) and we met my parents and sister and sister's boyfriend (Grace, I didn't say "family gathering" in your honor) for dinner. My mom was gracious enough to pick up our free anniversary cake from our wedding baker, so after dinner we came home and got to eat the cake that we never got to eat at our wedding. It was fantastic! I would imagine it was worlds better than a year-old frozen cake. Although, we took the leftovers to church for the high schoolers on Sunday and told them all it was the actual wedding cake that we had been saving for a year.

Sunday Danny and I went to dinner at Shadowbrook in Capitola after visiting friends in Santa Cruz. It was such a relaxing day and we were pleasantly surprised at how warm the coast was. We arrived at the restaurant a little early so I could take some pictures. This restaurant is the only restaurant in the country that you access by cable car. It's so cool. We took a friend's advice (thanks Janelle!) and walked down to the restaurant through the gardens and then took the cable car back up to the road.




My favorite part of the gardens was the herb garden. As I was standing there snapping pictures a waiter walked past us, hopped the fence, and started plucking herbs for the kitchen. That was fun to watch.

Tomorrow, of course, is July 4th, one of my favorite holidays. We're just so glad to have a day off together that we didn't plan much, but we'll be going to the A's game! We weren't even planning to do fireworks, but Danny came home tonight and suggested we drive to the A's Coliseum to see the fireworks after the game. So we watched the A's win on TV and then hopped in the car. We love living only 15 minutes from the Coliseum! I was very impressed with our spontaneity since we're usually about as spontaneous as a snail. We drove right into the parking lot and sat in the car eating more wedding cake while watching a spectacular show. The best part is we get to stay home tomorrow night and relax. We're planning to watch a movie like Gettysburg or Saving Private Ryan to actually commemorate the holiday. I don't know why getting drunk and barbequeing is the regular practice to celebrate our nation's independence, but I'll save that soapbox for later. (For the record, I do love BBQ on the 4th!)

I hope you are all having as joyful and celebrative week as we are! More updates to come, including stories from our weekend away. Happy Independence Day!