Emily Allbaugh

Hello, you!

I'm Emily Anne Allbaugh. Not long ago I was "Emily Keach," but now I am officially "Emily Allbaugh." One of the best parts about my new name — besides marking my marriage to the love of my life, Jake — is that now my initials (EAA) sound like a crowd cheering for touchdown.

...Or maybe a dramatic championship point at Wimbledon. Whacking a fuzzy little ball around on the tennis court is life-giving(one of my favorite phrases) to me. So much so that I played on the tennis team for four years at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. As a 10-year-old first picking up a racket it seemed like a non-factor that I could play into my senior years, as my parents continually highlighted. Now, though I am nowhere near receiving social security, I enjoy still being able to hit and compete in.

I was born and raised in San Diego — more specifically, in a suburban town called Alpine, approximately 30 miles east of the coast. I am a daughter of two happily married, loving parents and a sister to one full-of-life woman, Lauren, five years my elder.

In college I studied English Language and Literature. Though it was a tough decision to major in Lit given my pragmatic nature, delving into literature gave me enough life (like that variation?) that I couldn't deny that it was the major for me. What I love about studying insightful literature is that it invites you to observe the many unseen factors that underlie the seen world. If you'll indulge a brief nerd-out session, I'll try to show you what I mean: Far more than a boring novel about the quest for a white whale, Melville's Moby Dickexemplifies the restlessness of continued existential ambivalence; Hawthorne's light and dark imagery in The Scarlett Lettercall out the complex relationship between human and natural law. I think studying literature has made me more attuned to seeing what is unseen in my own world.

Fresh out of college, I have continued moseying up the California coast and landed in Campbell, a cute town complete with twinkle-lit trees, in Silicon Valley. Jake and I enjoy driving on windy, redwood-covered roads with no traffic, exploring new places to hike and run, watching British shows such as Sherlock and Downton Abbey, and eating yummy food with friends.