my husband decided to indulge my love of spontaneity.

... and this is what happened.
there will be lots of pictures.

august 22
we ditched homework, housework, and work-work at about 7pm to find a place to hike in the gorge.
end location: latourell falls.
best part: venturing as far as possible behind the falls without tumbling into the pool below.
... at which point joel decided to check his cell reception. five bars.
i, of course, ended up drenched - modeling the drowned rat look.

we ended the hike by enjoying the sunset from the edge of this unguarded precipice.
august 23
joel had to spend the day studying, so i decided that we should study at the beach. deeply concentrating on his anthropology text on the drive, he requested that we not listen to any music with english words. so we listened to french, latin, portuguese, spanish, and arabic ... oh, and mozart. :)
we spent most of the afternoon at my favorite cafe ever in the whole entire world. :)
i love this place. if you're ever in cannon beach, be sure to check out bella espresso.



of course, we did go to the beach too.
august 27
joel's birthday isn't until september 21, but we celebrated a little early. i surprised him with tickets to fiddler on the roof, and what a night it was!
we started with happy hour at portland city grill. this was our view.
this was my view.
we arrived at the keller an hour early because someone didn't read the tickets she bought (oops), and decided to find a starbucks. we managed to walk the one route across the entire area that contained no starbucks, a travesty which i blame on the starbucks planning people, the portland city planning people, the dutch mafia, and that stupid mermaid on their cups.*
starbucks incident aside, the show was breathtaking. i don't think i shut my mouth the whole time - my jaw was somewhere near my lap. my favorite line (not in the movie) was when tevye referred to the state of being "poor as synagogue mice". i'm still laughing.

august 28
in addition to being international "race your mouse" day, august 28 was also our anniversary.
we went to the zoo. just because.

there were many interesting things to see at the zoo, including one of my favorite creatures of all: the vw van.

we also went back to the church where we were married, sat in the car and watched half of our wedding video. partway through, the computer decided it wasn't getting enough battery from the car and flipped out, but we caught the processional, most of the message, and our vows. so i suppose at this point i could draw out a complicated metaphor involving marriage and the trials of life, but it is now 2:11am and i'm not going to.
finished off the day at papa haydn's eastside, where we both had vanilla lattes with hearts on them. joel kinda freaked out a little bit right after i took this picture cause i used flash in a dark restaurant. i won't share the one i took of him three seconds later - it's kind of scary. heh.
love you dear. mwah.**
*it is now 1:58am and i accept no responsibility for the coherence of what i write.
**did i seriously just write "mwah" in a blog post? i am so going to hate myself in the morning.