We Survived.... it all

Well, the title pretty much sums it up.  At some point I will probably get around to posting some of the highlights of our summer, but for now, I'm just gonna fill you in on the last few weeks... they were quite the doozie.  So let's go back to Friday, August 19th.   It was a beautiful, sunny day, the birds were singing, the wind was blowing, or so I'm told.  I was in my lab, stressing out and frantically going through my thesis presentation trying to fix my animations that had decided to stop working exactly 30 min before my defense.  (on a related note, i have a curse when it comes to power point presentations, they just never seem to work for me)  Anyways, I got them working. and was able to give my presentation without shaking too much.  This picture isn't too good, but our camera doesn't do well in dark rooms.

And I passed!! So I am now a master of science!! woo hoo! and I'm way less stressed than I was for.... um... about the last two years.  So after we had that behind us we went out and partied, sorta.  We finally saw the last Harry Potter movie and went shopping for some stuff we've wanted/needed for a little while.
So then the next Monday, the 22nd, Dallin started his last year of law school! (which we are way excited about)  And I went to school and work.  We thought we were settling in for another normal week, but oh were we wrong.  Tuesday, I went to work in the morning and then ran back to campus for a few meetings that I had to wrap things up at school.  I finished with one meeting just before 2 and had gone back to my lab in to wait for the next meeting when the building started shaking.  Being from CA, I'm pretty used to earthquakes, and the shaking was pretty small (at first) so I looked around and thought to myself, "oh an earthquake, didn't know they had any of those around here".  And continued to sign on to my e-mail.
Then, it really started shaking, I mean, walls moving, dust falling from the ceiling, shaking.  I did a quick check of the room I was in.

• Pre-WWII building, sort of falling apart without any help.  
• Large bookshelf to my left with lots of heavy books and equipment on it, not anchored to the wall.  
• Large filing cabinet to my right, with lots of heavy equipment and tools in it, also not anchored to the wall.  
• Large bookshelf by the door, same story.  
• And finally, big glass fish tank, right behind me, and you guessed it, not anchored to anything.  

I quickly put on  my shoes, slip ons or I'd of left 'em.  Grabbed my bag, if the building was going down I wanted my stuff safe, forget about the $10,000 camera siting on the table next to me, I had a good apple in that bag.  And I ran!  Which is totally not what you are supposed to do in an earthquake, but given the circumstances, I felt justified, in fact, I was one of the last ones out of the building.  By the time I got out the shaking had pretty much stopped, so we all just stood around for a few minutes and then decided the building wasn't going to fall down after all and went back to our labs.
One of the great things about having a lab in a really old, pretty small, sort of neglected building on campus is that there was no one there to tell us not to go back in.  All the other buildings on campus were evacuated for 45 min - 1 hr, but no one even came to check on our building.  The phone lines were all jammed so Dallin walked over to my lab because apparently his office building was evacuated and then closed for the rest of the day.  And then we walked to our car which was parked at Dallin's school (about 4 miles or so) because the metro was packed and running slow, and the busses were packed and stuck in traffic that was much slower than walking.  It's kind of a mad house in DC when the entire federal gov., and lots of other businesses all shut down at the same time.  
It turns out the earthquake was only a 5.9, which isn't too terribly big, but they don't usually have earthquakes at all out here, so there was a decent amount of damage.  Actually, the last earthquake this size was about 100 yrs ago.  The Washington monument cracked, the national cathedral was damaged pretty badly, and the top of some of the spires fell off of the Washington DC temple.  A bunch of stuff fell over in our house, but nothing broke.
Then as if that wasn't enough, we start getting hurricane warnings on Wednesday.  Yup, a hurricane was headed straight for us, once again, doesn't normally happen.  So as this weekend started, and the storm continued on it's path right for us, we decided to batten down the hatches.  We cancelled Dallin's birthday party, since it was supposed to be outside.  Stake conference was cancelled.  We tried to move our cars away from trees (no easy feat here) and made sure our flashlights had batteries, etc.  Then we waited.  All of Saturday.  And... nothing really happened.  It rained a bunch, and was kind of windy, but by about 10:40 last night we decided to go to bed and just see the aftermath in the morning.  The eye passed to the east of us at about 2 AM and while it wreaked havoc on communities closer to the beach, the most exciting thing out here was the one tree that fell down in our friend's yard.  Thankfully it didn't hit the house, car, or power lines, but Dallin did get to go help cut it up and move it to the road to be picked up later.   So all in all.  We're doing good now and life is way less stressful, for me at least :)
But it still leaves us with one question.  Why does everything that supposedly only happen once every hundred years or so happen while we are here?  First there was the snowstorm that left everything shut down for a week, but it never snows like that here.  Then there was the earthquake, which again, apparently never happens.  Then the hurricane.   My friend Nic blamed it on Obama, but I might just blame it on Marcie, she did just move in.  In any case, as a public service announcement, we might be moving this summer and if we end up moving anywhere near you, you might want to stock up on emergency supplies, we seem to attract natural disasters. :)

Just wanted to say we're still alive... in case anyone was wondering and I defend my thesis in exactly 26 days, 23 hours, 26 minutes, and 38 seconds from this post... not that I'm counting

The long road home

So after Christmas we hung out in Yakima for about a week.  We had a good visit with Dallin's friend Erin and her two boys and just enjoyed relaxing a bit.  Dallin's siblings filtered out as the week went on and by New Years we were the only ones left.  We spent New Year's Eve night eating lots of food, watching movies, and playing Dr. Mario with Dallin's parents.

Then on Sunday we went to church and headed down to Portland where we got to visit with one of my old roommates, Alisa, and her husband Nathan.  I really enjoyed visiting with them since we haven't gotten to see them too much since they got married.  Monday we made the long drive down to Provo where we stayed with Jaron and Amy (thanks guys).  We had so much fun visiting with siblings, cousins and friends.  Landon and Kendra live just across the street from Jaron and Amy and they invited us over for dinner one night and some other people came too.  We got to see Duncy (Dallin's cousin) and Liz and meet their new little on, Mya, who is so precious!   We also got to visit with Nick (who Dallin grew up with) and Emily and their kids. Issiah who has gotten so big and their new little girl Elly, who is also very cute!   While in Provo we also enjoyed just dropping by and seeing people who had no idea we were going to be there.  We did this to a few of our old professors and it was good to see them again and talk.  Dallin decided to go sit in on one of his professors classes so I had an hour to roam the campus, it was fun.  We also were able to drop in and see the Carsons, who are family friends of mine, they had no idea we were coming and were very surprised when we walked in their door.  We also surprised Rob and Karina and their kids and Lisa and Blaire and their kids.  After being so far away for a year and a half it was so much fun for us to be able to visit friends and family, we just couldn't stop smiling.

After a few days, our time in Utah ran out and we headed out.  We stopped in Denver the next afternoon and visited with Liesel, one of my other bestest friends, and her two daughters.  As with most of my other friends from high school or college, I haven't seen her in forever so it was really good to spend some time catching up and to meet her newest addition to her family.  Then we got to go out to dinner with Jon and Alicia, other bestests friends of mine, and they let us crash at their house for the night.  While there Jon made us brownies, and we ate them with ice cream, it's kind of a thing me and Alicia have... and they were sooooo good.

From there on out the plan was to drive to about St. Louis the next day, stopping at the visitors center in Independence along the way, and then finish up the trip on Saturday.  However, we got bored of traveling by about 10 AM Friday morning and decided to try and drive straight through.  (There was also supposed to be a storm moving in and we wanted to beat that)  We traded off driving and sleeping and 27 hours later made it home!  Our car has about 7,000 more miles on it than it did, we lost a lug nut (not really sure how that one happened), one of our tail lights burned out as well as our trunk light, we had to add more power steering fluid, and we had to get our oil changed, but we made it in one piece and had a really good time.  Although next time we decide to drive across the country... it'll be in the summer!

Our trip (notice the long stretch from K to L!!)

Christmas Day

I was a little worried about Christmas morning this year.  I am sort of a morning person and I really like Christmas so I usually get up pretty early on Christmas morning.  Add this to the fact that we live in a time zone that is three hours ahead of Washington and I was afraid I would wake up at about 3 AM Christmas morning.... it would have been torture waiting like 4 hours for everyone else to wake up and it's pretty safe to say I would have been murdered had I woken anyone up before 6. Dallin's siblings like sleep apparently.  Luckily I slept until like 6 or 6:30 (I would have slept longer but we were in the same room with Andrew and Hilarie, and Andrew made a weird noise).  Dallin and I went out and opened our stockings and talked for a bit.  Then we got bored so we decided to wake up Hilarie and Andrew and went and jumped on them (pay back!).  Hilarie was very reluctant to get up though and tried to kick Dallin off the bed... I'm not really sure what happened after that but Hilarie ended up screaming and woke up the whole house for us!  I thought it worked out well, others were not so enthusiastic.

Christmas morning was a lot of fun, once everyone was up we distributed and opened presents.  It took a few hours I think because there were 11 of us there.  Then we went upstairs to have probably the biggest Christmas breakfast ever! (I know I took some pictures, but I can't find them)

Christmas night we went to Sue and Lonnie's house for Dinner.  This is the second Glenn family Christmas dinner I have been to and it was a lot of fun again.  We had a really good dinner and enjoyed visiting with Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  After dinner we had a pass around game.  We ended up getting a dehydrater (thank you Grandma and Grandpa) and then we all went upstairs and listened to some of the boys play guitar/sing Christmas songs for us.  We even convinced Grandpa to break out his harmonica and play for us!  It was a really good Christmas. 

Grandpa's Train song!!