We had a wonderful Christmas this year! It started in Pleasant Hill, where we joined Beth in celebrating a few days early. It was festive and beautiful. She made us a delicious breakfast, adorned us with reindeer and Christmas lights headbands, and showered us with lots of thoughtful and wonderful gifts such as our new sushi, flame, and I Love Mom socks. We had a wonderful morning celebration before catching our flight to...

Salt Lake City was next on the agenda! Looking through my photos now, I realize that I completely failed to capture our adventure there (sad!), but we had a wonderful celebration with Jake's sister's family, then with Robert and Tracy, then with Grandpa George for his birthday. We stayed with Robert and Tracy in their beautiful house and felt loved all over!

The only photo I did get of our time in SLC was of the airport, where we saw lots of happy families reunited for the holidays, some greeting missionaries just as they arrived home. What a happy happy place, the Salt Lake City airport at the holidays! I could just spend hours there.

Everyone was warm and loving and wonderful and we were showered with gifts galore in SLC, too. One gift, from Grandpa George, was a giant, 17-pound ham which had been cured and sitting around in the basement to age for the previous 15 months. So we named her Pam, packed her in our luggage, and took her along to our next stop...

Kansas! In Kansas Pam the Ham came out of her shell and Jake spent a full 24 hours cooking her to perfection. She was delicious!

We also had a gift wrapping marathon in the basement, where I did the wrapping and Jake handled the artwork. So fun!

And of course, there was much love and family and warmth all around. I loved getting to see everyone of course but was especially thrilled to get to meet my new baby cousinette, Hope, who's 8 weeks old.

I miss everyone already! Until next year, Santa.

We enjoyed lots of fun and celebrations before the holidays even arrived this year. First, the Zillabyte team and several other local startups hosted Holiday Dinner and a Holiday Happy Hour, complete with Charlie's amazing homemade eggnog (thank you Charlie! Yum!). 

We attended several other lovely holiday parties too, like Steve and Kate's fun event in Palo Alto for instance and one fantastic party with real snow and ice skating in Palo Alto... but apparently I got a little lazy on the picture taking, so I'm just hoping y'all will have parties again and I'll have another chance next year :)

And then there were Christmas Cards! Here are the cards we sent out. This was a big deal for me since this is the first year I've done them as an adult. I must *really* be getting old, I guess. (If you didn't receive one then I must not have your mailing address - please send it to me and I'll make sure you get one next year! I wouldn't want you to miss out on real printed copies of Jake and me looking ridiculous in our Santa hats, after all. Or whatever next year's silliness will be.)

And finally, saving my favorite part for last, we *received* zillions of holiday cards! We are so fortunate to have so many thoughtful, festive, and especially good-looking friends (as you can see here). Each one made us smile, nearly all of them drew an audible "Aww!", and we put every photo we received up on display in our dining room. We feel so loved, thank you dear friends and family!

And that was just the getting *ready* for the holidays...

The rest of November was busy and fun. After our marathon, we enjoyed good friends, good meals, and of course lots of hard work on our startups. Jake and the Zillabyte team hit some key milestones and I embarked on my journey to code my own startup's website with Ruby on Rails (which meant purchasing a Rails Tutorial book and learning Rails from scratch). But we've been busy outside of work too...

Our good friend Tony (the person, not to be confused with the toaster mentioned in prior posts) came to visit us from Denver! We enjoyed sandwiches on dutch crunch bread (the very best) from JJ&F Market, hit up the Rose and Crown for a pint, played ping pong at the Zillabyte HQ at AOL, secured appropriate pre-Big Game gear, and even braved the rain to take the 7 dozen cookies I made to Mayumi and Elizabeth's very fun Big Game tailgate. Through this experience I learned that they now make holiday mint chip refrigerator roll chocolate chip cookies. Brilliant!

We also had a fun impromptu party to help My celebrate finishing up her midterms (that's us, always the helpful folks). We had so much fun we almost forgot to eat dinner, but I saved the day with my gourmet Cheerios and milk recipe and plenty of cookies to go around too.

I also managed to turn a white towel very blue by washing it with blue jeans in the dryer! The DRYER! Apparently it's important to separate colors not just in the washer, but in the dryer too.

At Thanksgiving we got a turkey (named him Ted), made mashed potatoes and stuffing and crab and cinnamon-flavored ice cream and Jake's favorite cherry/vanilla Coke Zero recipe (you know, the traditional Thanksgiving basics), got out the salads and cranberry sauce, put a fire in the "fireplace," and had Beth over for an afternoon feast! The three of us couldn't quite finish Ted off (he was 15 pounds and there were just 3 of us), so Beth cooked us up a post-Thanksgiving Ted soup feast later that weekend. Yum!

This Autumn has been pretty great. First, my cousin Andy and his wife Donna brought a beautiful baby girl into the world on October 28th. Her name is Hope and she is beautiful. I cannot wait to meet her.

Welcome to the world, baby cousin!

Second, I don't remember noticing the leaves changing colors when I lived in the Bay Area from 1999-2008. Maybe I didn't live near the right trees or I was just too distracted. But this year I'm noticing and it's beautiful. Here's a shot from right in front of our apartment last week.

And! Twice last week my lovable husband brought home huge bouquets of flowers for me, just because. He knows how to make a girl happy, he does.

A Happy Autumn to YOU!

Last weekend we flew to Savannah to participate in the Rock n Roll Marathon (Jake) and Half-Marathon (me). We first made plans for this with Heidi back in February after we completed the New Orleans Marathon (Jake) and Half-Marathon-Relay (Heidi and me). The Savannah event was finally here, so off to Georgia we went. Heidi's boyfriend Tommy came to race with her and Heidi's good friends Aliesha and Chris came to see Savannah and join the fun.

We stayed at a cute little cottage in Tybee island and we started the trip by exploring Savannah, even taking an official tour with a guide. We learned that Savannah only has one hill... but we sure went up and down it a lot.

This was the first year Savannah has hosted a Rock n Roll event, so there were signs up everwhere welcoming us runners.

On race morning, it was cold! We set off all bundled up and started the race.

Heidi and Tommy and I passed each other a couple times along the way and then ended up finishing together too, all in our Built for Speed shirts (with a turtle picture on the back). Heidi and I initially had these shirts made to identify us as team "Wogger" (walk-jogger), but I think we're about to graduate to full-on joggers after this race! We watched Jake finish his marathon and then headed back to Tybee where we picked up some post-race food on the way home. (Yes, the photo here shows just the food Jake and I got for ourselves... Heidi and Tommy were slightly more disciplined.)

Before leaving our cottage, we tried to get a group shot, but it wasn't meant to be - first the camera wrist cord got in the way and then the focus didn't work right. But I think you can see how much fun we had from these anyhow :)

Until the next race!

We hosted a party at our apartment for Halloween this year - the annual Blair Witch Project viewing in celebration of Jake's favorite holiday. Jake and Tyler made witches' punch - which looked crazy awesome, and just a bit scary.

Although most people didn't dress up, Mario and WaLuigi were among our guests. One highlight of the evening was watching Mario play.. Mario.

While we thought our party with our fancy punch was cool and I was pretty proud of the pumpkin I carved with My on my surprise party day, we also attended a Halloween party this year where they had some *real* (1,100 pound) pumkins being carved. Some were painted and lit with a blacklight to look extra spooky.

Happy Halloween to All!

Several days before my birthday this year, my friend Mayumi invited me over to carve pumpkins together. When she dropped me off after, I came inside to find all the lights off but our decorative pumpkin candles lit on the bureau by the front door. Always practial, "Hm," I think to myself, "that seems like a bit of a fire hazard."

And that's when it happens - a whole bunch of people jump out and shout SURPRISE!!! It turns out Jake organized a whole giant surprise party for me - he'd been planning it for weeks. He got my parents to come from Kansas (wow!) and Beth from Pleasant Hill and lots of our friends. There was pizza and choco tacos and Ryo made a beautiful fruit tart. I received gifts from family in Salt Lake City and Missouri and Kansas. And I got to spend the next couple great days with my parents. (Thanks to Dad for some of these photos!)

Such a wonderful birthday. Happy 31st to me!

Last weekend the Zillabyte Team and the ZillaWives and Tyler & Jean's ZillaDog ventured out into the great wide open for some good old fashioned car camping.

In the foreground it appears I've captured one of the rare species garbagium dumpsterium, right next to the pavedroadialus (in Latin). These are the things one sees out in nature, you see. There were real toiletia and hotshoweria very closeby too. But hey... you can see more traditional symbols of nature here too - like tress and stuff. Plus we slept in a tent. And went on a hike... to a lake!

Very pretty. Just check out that sky! (I really like nice skies.)

Jake and I made tacos for dinner and we had that traditional camping favorite, Choco Tacos, for dessert (dry ice really works). Jake made his signature peach camping cobler as dessert #2 and we had s'mores as dessert #3. Then Tyler made us fresh oatmeal for breakfast, and we stopped at a local pizza joint for lunch on the way home since we had such a loong (well, 1 hour) journey home. Yeah, it was basically really rough. But we toughed it out.

I also learned that if you throw an empty wine bottle into a campfire, it doesn't take long at all to melt and collapse. But it doesn't look very pretty afterwards, either. Now I know.

Go ZillaTeam!

One nice thing about living in the Bay Area is that we have family nearby! So once a month, we meet up with Beth for "Family Night." This month Beth prepared a feast of veggies and steaks (ok, Jake grilled those). And there was cake, lots of cake. I looove family night!

I'm so lucky. Next month I'll get a brand new baby cousinette. My cousin Andy and his wife Donna are expecting a baby girl around October 28th. So! Aunt Cheryl was kind enough to lend her home to my mom and me for a few hours last week while we held a baby shower for Donna.

She had guests from St. Louis and beyond, all excited to pamper her with presents and love.

There were a number of onesie artists who didn't even know they were artists...

Lots of great food from sandwiches to cupcakes...

Games... well actually just one game, Bingo for gift opening (congrats to Aunt Nancy!)...

And of course lots of gifts for Donna and Baby Crow...

Happy Baby Shower, Donna! I can't wait to meet my new cousin.