Weekend in Wenatchee

Over President's Day weekend, Hollis and I went to Wenatchee to go skiing and visit my family. Our friends Owen and Lora came too. Hollis and Lora had never been skiing before, and so Owen and I were pretty excited to see them learn.

I knew Hollis would be good, but he surprised me. He just started zipping down the mountain way before I thought he would! He is a stud.

After a long day of skiing, Lora and I had amazing hair. So amazingly beautiful, Hollis just had to take a picture of us.

The next day (Sunday) was Valentine's day. I wanted to show Hollis, Owen, and Lora some of my favorite things about Wenatchee, so we went down to the Loop Trail by the Columbia River. I think it's absolutely gorgeous, but Owen and Hollis were missing the very green Western Washington vegetation they are used to.

We found this random cement thing, and we took pictures by it. This is Hollis successfully "leaning" (see the movie "While You Were Sleeping" for a complete definition).

Before we left on Monday, Hollis was making fun of my overly large coats. I like my coats to have sleeves long enough to keep my arms completely covered. Hollis insisted that we both could fit inside one of my coats.

Apparently we do fit.

Punk Rock Concert

Yes. I went to a punk rock conert. And yes, I did enjoy it.

Bowling for Soup came to Seattle. Allen invited a few people to come with him to the concert. Cassie, Allen, Jon, Hollis, and I carpooled to the venue. Jon was so cute - acting like a 12 year old little boy because he was so excited to see one of the bands that was opening for Bowling for Soup: Moneta! He yelled their name out about every five minutes or so. Allen captured Jon's excitement:

(L to R: Jon, Hollis, Me)

At one point, Jon and Hollis decided to have a contest. They agreed that they would walk into the bar area and not talk to anyone. But they would set a timer on their phone to find out how long it would be until a girl talked to them. Jon entered the bar area. He finally came out six minutes later, victorious. Hollis set his timer and strutted into the bar area. He was back very quickly - 45 seconds in, a man talked to him. Fifteen seconds later, a female said hi and touched his arm. He said hi back, felt victorious, and returned. I'm so proud of him :)

One of the bands that opened, Feverclub, played a number that they wanted us to slow dance along to. Hollis and I were happy to oblige.

After the song, the lead singer pointed to us in the crowd when she was thanking people (us) for dancing. We later went up to the band in their booth to tell them we liked their show. They totally remembered us. Said we were awesome. :)

My Man Hollis

Yep. That's right. I have a man.

Though it's been tempting, I've resisted acting like this stick figure.

(xkcd.com)

Of course, you should replace the word "girlfriend" with the word "boyfriend." But I completely understand that little stick guy's desire to drop the fact that he has a girlfriend into every sentence. I don't, but I often want to.

The fact that we're dating isn't a secret. In fact, the Institute was kind of buzzing about it for a tiny bit (not everyone, but, well, lots of people). Apparently there were several people who thought we should be dating (Allen Brand wrote a post on his blog that mentioned us - we're two of the four people he mentions).

This is a picture that Allen took of us. Apparently he thinks we're adorable. (To quote his caption on this picture, "Let's check: yep their adorableness just made me throw up a little."

Also, apparently Hollis and I don't really do "normal" faces in pictures. Not much anyway. These are two recent photos of us. I'm so glad that we learned how to smile properly. How else could we so fantastically refuse to conform?

And yes, the expression on my face is intentional.

Tacoma

Wednesday night Hollis sent me a text - When are you out of class tomorrow? Do you want to come to some museums in Tacoma? And of course, I said "YES." I love museums. And they were free that day.

So we went. There was this glass museum - we watched someone sculpt a glass vase. Then we went to a bigfoot exibit in the museum of natural history. The group of us then went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards, we ran all over this stone fountain because it was fun. Layne and Hollis ran and skipped on it before dinner, and it looked like so much fun, so we did it after dinner too!

(L to R: Hollis, me, Layne)

Tacoma is fun, but it did smell bad (just like people say).

Warm and Sunny Seattle

Can you believe it's the middle of January? It's so fantastically warm!

And yes, I know my face is kind of funny. It was really sunny.

Service Project at Seward Park

The University of Washington sponsors a day of service every year to honor the memory of Martin Luther King. As the member of the institute council in charge of campus relations, I had the opportunity to be a group leader for UW. I signed up for a service project at Seward Park. We were supposed to be planting trees. I signed up for that project so that we wouldn't have to pull up any nasty pokey bushes. But the week before the project, the design changed: we were now pulling blackberry bushes.

We were sad, but we went anyway! This picture is the "we're-going-to-be-pulling-blackberries-and-dominate!" faces.

(L to R: Jon, Hollis, Maren, Laura)

Maren didn't seem to have the intimidation face down. Just the "Yay! I'm excited to be here!" face.

To be nice, our group (the Latter-day Saint Student Association) volunteered to provide lunch for everyone. I had Maren head up the lunch-making committee and asked four people to help her.

(L to R: Hollis, Maren, [can't see her face], Jon)

The project coordinator told me that there were going to be 150 people there (our group composed of 32 or so). I prepared for 200.

Yes, that is a lot of lunches. The only problem was that there ended up being about 250 people there. We had to get creative and some of us went without lunches so we could get the last several people fed.

During lunch there may or may not have been a spontaneous dance party. We did get one non-Mormon to join us.

Institute Olympics

Our winter opening social came pretty quickly - the first Friday of the new semester! We had lots of planning to do, and we really wanted the activity to be fun for everyone involved. This was the awesome sight that people saw as they entered the institute:

(L to R: Maggie, Maren, Brad, and me)

These wonderful people were there to greet people as they arrived and give them their name tag. Each ward was a team, and the name tags were color coded by ward.

I was in charge of the first event - human curling. We structured it as a cross between bocce ball and shuffle board, but with office chairs. There was an X on the ground that was the target.

(Maggie trying to wiggle the chair closer to the target)

Sometimes, the chairs were so close that precise measuring was required.

(Jon and I using our bodies to measure the distance)

Next came speed sock skating. I thought that I was going to be schooled by the boys that I was racing against. However, I was the least massive, so my inertia didn't carry me wide. I was able to keep my feet better and I schooled the boys!

Our institute director and full-time teacher raced against each other. It was absolutely hilarious! The race was a close one (you can see them at the finish line here). Hollis declared, "And the winner is... everyone who just watched that!"

(L to R: Brother White, Brother Knowles)

The next event was razor scooter/nerf gun biathlon. Instead of participating in that, we choreographed our dance routine for the synchronized donut eating contest.

(L to R: Hope, Carrie, Me - Maren is the pink arm you can see behind hope)

Our performance was... well, not nearly as cool as we thought it would be. But not bad. Funny.

I stuffed TWO donuts into my face. It was pretty disgusting.

Happy New Year!

I got back from Wenatchee in time to go to the YSA New Year's Dance. It was so much fun. Carrie, Hollis, Maren, Rhea, Lizzie, and I went in a large group.

(Carrie and Me)

(Maren and Me)

I had a blast dancing! There were six of us in the group. We ate dinner together and decided to drive over in the same car. It was awesome. We had to do four people in the back seat, and I double buckled with both Hollis and Maren (as my parents taught me to). Hollis was really happy to be going to a dance with five girls.