Hello, I'm Miss Bear Cub! :)

Hi there! :)

I'm so excited to bee here with you! I'm Miss Bear Cub, but you can call me Miss Cubbie. I'm no good at introductions - I prefer to jump ahead to being friends! :)

I'll give you a bit of background on me, though. ;) I'm originally from a small town in southern California, but I moved around a bit before I graduated high school in Dallas. I got my undergraduate degree in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Southern California (Fight On!), and I completed my masters degree in Astronomy at New Mexico State University in southern NM.

While in grad school, I met my future husband - future Cubbie Hubbie! Mr. Bear Cub is originally from Portland, Oregon, but he went to high school in Belgium. We learned fast that we both love to travel, we love rain (really!), and gardening, and NPR, and hiking and camping and generally being as goofy and silly as can be!

Cannon Beach, OR Dec 2006

I chose to be Miss Bear Cub because the Mr. and I usually have our hands stuck in a jar of honey candy! We love love love baked goodies and sugery goodness in most forms. We also love salmon (it's my fave sushi), and we're smitten with the Pacific Northwest! (Mr. Bear Cub went to UW!)

We're currently in the thick of planning our September coastal summercamp wedding in Oregon! I'm a die-hard DIY-er, and we're both eco-geeks at heart, so we're trying to craft the wedding as much from scratch/sustainable sources as possible! We're firm believers in doing something because you want to do it, not because someone told you that you had to do it.

I also love to bake. A lot. Luckily, I love to run, too! I'm actually going to bake my wedding cake from scratch, and Sister Bear Cub, Momma Bear, and FSIL Bear Cub are going to help me get it juuust right.

I was so excited I was chosen to bee here with you, that I baked all of you a loaf of sourdough bread!

This is really from my kitchen, from today. Fresh bread is so tasty!

There's just one little snafu in our wedding planning process. We live in La Serena, Chile, and we're not coming back to the states until a week before we say our vows!

from here and here

After getting our graduate degrees, we were offered jobs at the US-owned observatories in the Southern Hemisphere. We live and work in an "astronomer compound" - a small community where english is the primary language, and our neighbors are from Brazil, Germany, Canada, Australia, and many more countries! We both love this unique experience (y también poder practicar nuestro español!), but it's definitely making the wedding planning interesting.

One of the coolest things about being an astronomer in Chile is that we can visit (and observe on) all sorts of crazy telescopes on the southern continent! A few months ago we visited the European Southern Observatory's telescopes at Paranal. This observatory (an array of four 8.2 meter telescopes!) sits high in the Atacama Desert - the location for the most recent James Bond movie!

The observers' sleeping quarters were blown up in the movie, so of course we had to simulate movie magic!

Mr. Bear Cub in a very convincing dash from the blast!

Look! Telescopes in the background!

That's more like it. (screenshot from the movie, credit here)

Paranal, March 2009

It was really awesome being able to visit this observatory in one of the most barren places in the world...

Pumalin Park, Patagonia, December 2008

...But we Bear Cubs rather prefer southern Chile. It reminds us of home in the Pacific Northwest. Even with all of the excitement in South America (including the addition to our little family of a kitten named Georgina and a golden retriever named Beauregard), we can't wait to move to back to Portland in a few years, and settle our crazy selves down a bit! (Not too much ;) )

Beau, December 2008

There's a little over 4 months before our wedding, and I've got so much to share with you! Weddingbee has been such a source of insight and support for me ever since [before] I got engaged last May. I can't wait to let you in on our secrets to having the awesomest, most laid-back and crazy-cool summer camp wedding ever!

Bear hugs for everyone!

-Miss Cubbie :)