Kat's first par!

Dan finally convinced me to take golf classes this summer so I've been hitting the driving range two days a week at 8am to hit 100+ balls. It has actually been a ton of fun and our teacher has been great - giving me lots of tips and drills since I'm not as advanced as the rest of the class. The Stanford golf course is beautiful and offers great rates for students ($13 vs $117 for non-students) so Dan and I have been going once a week for the last three weeks along with some other friends. Needless to say, my scores have been pretty horrible (112!!) but I figure I can only get better. Last night on the 17th hole ( a par-3) I finally got my first par ... yay! Let's see if next time I can get two pars ... and not so many double, triple, or quadruple bogeys.

TWO YEARS!

I can't believe it has already been two years since Dan and I got married. The time has definitely flown by. Unlike our first anniversary, I didn't have to go to a conference this year so we took some time to celebrate. On Thursday (the actual day of our anniversary) we went to the Melting Pot for an amazing (and huge) fondue dinner. We were there for over three hours as we enjoyed our cheese fondue, salad, wine, cooking a huge array of meats and veggies, and finally demolishing the chocolate fondue (complete with cheese cake, brownies, marshmallows, and fruit). This dinner for two is definitely big enough for three people but we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Over the weekend we took a trip down to Monterey and Carmel to continue our celebration. On Saturday we started off the day with a trip to one of the frisbee golf courses at the University of California - Monterey. This frisbee golf course was awesome - set in a strange landscape of abandoned military buildings and athletic facilities with lots of challenging holes. After a quick picnic lunch we headed to the Monterey Acquarium. Although I have been here a couple of times since I was a kid this was Dan's first time. Despite the huge number of people (go on a weekday if you can...) we loved all the exhibits, especially the sea otters and the sea horses exhibit.
Sunday we continued our exploration of the Monterey peninsula with a loop around 17-mile drive through Carmel. This is a toll road that takes you by a ridiculous number of golf courses (including Pebble Beach), huge houses, and along the rocky coast. Although the coast was beautiful my favorite part was Huckleberry Hill where we found the bushes covered with tons of huckleberries. We stopped for about an hour and filled the tupperware container we had with us. We finished off the weekend with another round of frisbee golf at another course at UC-Monterey that was much smaller than the first but once again set amid a bunch of abandoned buildings (kind of strange as these buildings looked just fine and some still had remnants of furniture inside). On our way home we made a special trip through Gilroy so Dan could finish off the weekend with his favorite treat ... a Sonic slush drink ... a good end to a great weekend.

Santa Cruz Frisbee Golf

There is a serious lack of good frisbee golf courses in the bay area so yesterday we decided to head down to the coast to meet our frisbee needs. We woke our friendly neighbors Phil & Elizabeth early in the morning for the trip down. The course was in the wooded hills behind a middle school just outside of Santa Cruz. The course was on a very steep hill so we spent a lot of time wandering up and down the hills searching in the bramble for our frisbees ... surprisingly more enjoyable than it sounds. Sadly, Dan did lose one frisbee in a giant bush of bramble and poison oak, but for how intense this course was I didn't think that was too bad. This was Elizabeth's first time playing frisbee golf and although it was a tough introduction she did great and was catching on quickly by the end. She also packed an amazing picnic lunch for us which we enjoyed along the coast after we were done with frisbee golf. We finished up the afternoon with a bit of delicious ice cream before heading back to campus. I love frisbee golf!

Asian Volleyball Tournaments

One of my volleyball friends invited me to play in two weekend tournaments over the past month. I, of course, agreed but the piece of information my friend left out was that these were Asian-American volleyball tournaments ... not exactly fitting my demographic. Upon arriving at the gym for the first tournament I felt a bit tall and out of place although my friends assured me that "you don't have to be Asian to play." For the first tournament I ended up being the ONLY non-Asian in the gym. However, my team also seemed to have all of the tallest Asians in the bay area so we dominated throughout the day and ended up taking away the gold medal (which has Chinese text on it and cannot read).


Despite my non-Asianess I agreed to play in the second, larger tournament since the first tournament was so much fun. I was a bit relieved to find that there were a lot more non-Asians playing in this tournament so I was not completely out of place. For this tournament we had an EVEN TALLER team featuring Chuck who was well over 6'9'' and Danny who was a former Stanford varsity player. We had a blast playing during the day (I could set the ball anywhere and they would put it down) but we lost in the finals since we didn't have the greatest defense (although it is pretty entertaining watching all those huge guys dive for the ball). So I had to settle with a silver medal for this tournament which, once again, I could not read. Check out how short I look in the picture below.

First Outdoor Volleyball Tourney

Dan's volleyball skills have improved a ton since we moved to the bay area (playing two days a week at work with a former pro-beach volleyball player helps) and we both have been getting better at playing outdoor volleyball so we decided that it was time to enter our first outdoor tournament. We entered a "Reverse Hybrid Random Draw Co-ed Doubles & Quads Tournament" ... a mouthful which means that you play on a women's net so the women can hit from the front row and the men hit from behind the ten-foot line. In the morning they randomly match up the doubles teams to form teams of four and you play four different games with four different partners which seeds the teams for the afternoon single-elimination tournament.

We did OK in the morning and finished at #8 out of the 18 teams in the tournament. However, in the afternoon, we ended up surprising everyone (and ourselves) by making it all the way to the semi-finals. We probably could have made it to the finals, but I think we psyched ourselves out a bit against the last team we played who were both really big hitters so we lost 21-25. All in all, we thought that this was a very successful first outdoor tournament. Plus, I thought it was a blast that I got to finally hit on a women's net for the first time since moving to California.

ASME conference in Tahoe

Last week I headed up to Lake Tahoe for my first time since moving to California to attend the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Summer Bioengineering Conference. The conference was hosted at a beautiful resorts with a huge pool (complete with water slides and hot tubs) and tons of hiking trails which made it difficult to stay inside for the conference. However, while most conferences I've been to run from 7am-9pm everyday this one was only in the morning so we had the whole afternoon to go out and explore.

On our first afternoon off An and I joined with Tom Andriacchi's lab to go on a white-water rafting trip down the Trukee river. We were a big group and had 5 full rafts heading down the river. Since this was the first time I'd been rafting I was a bit nervous but for the first two-hours of the trip the water was so calm we spent more time in water fights than going down rapids. However, as our guide warned us, the last 20 minutes of the trip was by far the most intense - a series of class 3 rapids in rapid succession. Looking down the rapids I was sure that our boat was going to flip and I was going to be swimming in the freezing cold water. However, in the end, we all made it down safely with a few close calls but no one ended up in the water.

After a bit more stimulating conference talk, on our second afternoon we went for a beautiful hike up the end of the valley alongside a creek with a ton of waterfalls. Afterwords, we joined the conference to watch a group of 5 professors sing in their own band and enjoy some tasty food. That is one thing there is never a shortage of at conferences ... lots of tasty food. This conference also had an amazing hot chocolate setup with whip-cream and chocolate chunks that was to die for.

An and I were both excited for the end of the conference as Dan and Chuck were able to drive up and spend the weekend with us at the resort. We had Saturday morning off so we decided to ride our bikes from the resort down to Tahoe City for some breakfast. This was a great, easy ride with the reward of delicious huevos rancheros at the end. We also played a bit of tennis and swam in the pools before heading inside for the conference. That night we also had the banquet where I received an honorable mention in the abstract competition for my abstract "Crouch gait represents a simplified support strategy." I was pretty excited as this was my first conference award and I got a free copy of abacus, a finite element software.

Sunday the conference was over and Dan and I decided to drive around the west side of the lake and explore some of the parks along the shore. Needless to say, the lake was beautiful and we had a great time hiking and exploring the area ... I wish every conference could be this wonderful.

Graduation

Even though I finished my master's degree in December Stanford only holds one graduation ceremony a year so as of last Sunday I have now officially "walked" for graduation. My parents and Dan's mom came out for the weekend and we did a bit of exploring around the bay area. During one of our excursions we took a hike through the redwoods and I finally saw my first banana slug! Dan was right .... they do exist. We also headed down to Ano Nuevo State Park to see the huge elephant seals lying on the beach. There were a lot more males on the beach at this time of the year and the entire island off the coast was covered by elephant seals who were incredibly noisy. The actual graduation ceremony was a bit of a let down. They have one big graduation ceremony in the football stadium which was long, hot, and non-inspiring. Supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy did give a good speech, although it wasn't quite the thrill of Oprah who spoke last year. The department ceremony was even duller - enough said. I guess it just didn't compare to the school-wide ceremony from Mines. Oh well ... I'll give it another try in 3-4 years :)

Banana Slug!