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First snow day of the year on April 18!

thanksgiving {co style}

Some of you might be wondering how long I could possibly draw out the rehashing of one holiday. Oh, I can draw it out. It's the second day of March and I am just now bringing to you the second (and last, phew) post on Thanksgiving.

The morning of Thanksgiving, my parents delivered me to the airport in KC, and I flew back to Colorado. I helped with a few last-minute cleaning things, and Brian's parents arrived! It was great to go from thinking about a week or so before that I wasn't going to get to see any extra family to seeing quite a few!

I can't say I remember a whole lot of what we did. We did head to Target late on Thursday night to get some Black Friday deals on dvds and towels. CU women's basketball was hosting a tournament that weekend, so we went to their game on Friday and watched them win. This was the first women's game we had been to in a while, and we realized, wow, this team has changed. The game was very exciting. This actually kicked off a devout attendance for us this season, and it has been a really fun season of basketball. The team has been ranked for many weeks now, and is currently ranked #19; we are hoping to be able to watch them play in the NCAA tournament (either on TV or maybe we'll buy tickets to the first 1 or 2 rounds that are actually being held at CU and hope they play there). But anyway, Thanksgiving.

Brian and I had never done a turkey before, and we were glad to have a reason to try it! Saturday we spent quite a bit of time preparing food, and we ended up with a lot to offer: turkey, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, baked sweet potatoes, whole wheat rolls, salad, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, and then Bruce and Pat also brought MCC Sale bohne berrogi and sauce and verenike, for which I made a ham gravy. You know any day you make three kinds of gravy is a great day! (I had also made sausage gravy for our brunch on Saturday.)

We ate well, and then headed back to the events center for more basketball where we got to see the Buffs win the tournament! What a wonderful holiday it was.

thanksgiving {kc style}

Just one of the things I was thankful for during Thanksgiving season is that I got an entire week off from work. And I was glad that my break lined up exactly with Brian's, which would be nice for traveling...except that Brian ended up having a lot of work he needed to get done and decided it would be best not to travel during the break. I, however, decided that, instead of wasting my life away browsing the internet day after day (let's be honest) and not getting to see any of my family, I would fly to KC to visit Mark & Emily. They were gracious about accepting my presence at a busy time -- right in the middle of a move to their new apartment.

We checked out the Gear For Sports warehouse sale, where I bought a bunch of $10-$15 Under Armour hoodies for teams I don't care about / have never heard of. I mean, a good quality hoodie is a good quality hoodie. Plus, one of them was for Bethel University, which I thought was neat. I had to think of you, Tine, because, for whatever reason, there was lots of Huskies gear, but since my team is in the same conference, I couldn't bring myself to purchase any of it. :)

Mark & Emily hosted a Friendsgiving that was a major feast. Here's Mark with his first ever roasted turkey (it was delicious!)

Turkey protecting itself from aliens.

Mark & Emily got me and another of their friends hooked on the show Revenge while we were there, so we spent a lot of time on their sectional. I may have to subscribe to Hulu Plus now (and also because stupid Parenthood is only making their last episode available for free, and I can't very well miss 2 or 3 episodes in the middle of the season).

{UNNECESSARY UPDATE: Parenthood on Hulu is back on my nice list.}

The next evening, mom & dad drove up, and we had a Thanksgiving meal of our own. The father of one of Mark & Emily's friends smoked a turkey for us. Oh. My. Gosh. Smoked turkey is so yummy. I want one every year. We also had a bunch of leftover sides from Friendsgiving, we had made up a batch of our grandma's recipe for whole wheat rolls, and mom made pies!

Here's a fun activity for you: Go back and forth quickly between the next two pictures. 1. how we really spent a lot of our time. 2. when we realized we shouldn't look so slouchy for a picture.

my bro got married

Three weeks ago, my brother and Emily got married in Lawrence! We had a bit of a rough start driving out. We had to leave early on Friday to get there in time for the rehearsal. It had snowed the night before (which made it a crazy night to be getting a pedicure...walking around in flip flops with my pants rolled up, brrrr). We actually left on time to make it to the rehearsal with more than an hour to spare, but luck was not on our side. There was a wreck on our first highway, so that slowed us down. Wet stuff was coming down and the defroster couldn't keep up, and it was also freezing onto the windshield wipers, so we had to stop and scrape that off a couple of times so we could actually see. Then there was a crazy wreck on I-70 that shut down the interstate in both directions for a loooong time. I had never seen such a terrible looking wreck before. Something like 11 semis and 1 SUV were involved. The wreck was actually in the west-bound lanes, and they didn't open those back up until 5 that evening. I mean, seriously, check this out: click here. I can't believe only one person was injured.

But anyway. So we were late. And we missed the rehearsal, sad. But we did not miss the rehearsal dinner with amazing BBQ and mom's homemade pies (with peaches that I helped pick and put up this summer)!

Early on Saturday, we girls headed to the church to start getting our hair did.

You can't see it, but that Starbucks cup has a really sweet note written on it from Mark to Emily, aw.

And there was some eating of some yummy Druber's doughnuts, mmm. A guy who was our neighbor growing up and one of Mark's groomsmen brought a box of them to Lawrence for us.

The wedding was beautiful. Brian and I got to walk down the aisle together. We did not have our arms linked incorrectly like I did at prom once. I did almost forget to always keep my body facing the bride, but I remedied that quickly. And probably no one really noticed, but now anyone who reads this and watches the video will be looking for it.

After the wedding, the wedding party hopped on a party bus with this sign and drove to photo locations in Lawrence. It was freezing but fun.

The reception was a huge party! The food was delicious! The candy bar was fun! The open bar was appreciated! And mostly I got to see a ton of my family and family friends, which I loved!

Here is a picture of my hair from the very end of the night. It was really cool but apparently was looking kind of rough by this point. :)

ranked book list {take 2}

Original post here.

1. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
2. Columbine by Dave Cullen
3. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, with the first being my favorite, followed in order by the other two...but why read just the first one and not know how it ends? (unless, of course, we are talking about the Twilight series...) by Stieg Larsson
5. The Hunger Games trilogy, with the first definitely being my favorite, followed in order by the other two, by Suzanne Collins
6. Marley & Me by John Grogan
7. Julie and Julia by Julie Powell 
8. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Speak. I read this book because some of my students were reading it in their freshman English class, they were struggling, and I am always in the market for material being handed to me for my sessions. :) But, oh geez, I need to read some more mediocre books to push this one down on the list. The story is decent, and the subject matter is really important, so I am glad the teacher assigned it, but I thought the writing was horrible! And not subtle! At all. It definitely felt like the author tried way too hard to write with figurative language, and it just didn't work. Sorry to keep harping on Twilight, but reading this reminded me of its terrible writing. I maybe wouldn't have mentioned it, but I just looked up this book on Amazon for the link, and the movie version came up as well. Who plays the leading character? Kristen Stewart. I know I am judging a dvd by its cover here, but I just don't know that I could handle sitting through all of that.

ranked book list

Oftentimes, I am at a loss for how to pick the next book to read. So while this project won't help me in my quest, maybe it will benefit others who find themselves in a similar position. My posting is kind of spotty, so maybe I won't keep this up, but I thought I would keep a running, ranked list of books I've read recently. When I finish one, I'll repost the entire list with the newly added one highlighted somehow. And maybe it will help me in my search for the next book to read -- perhaps it will spur on commenters to leave suggestions for me!

1. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
2. Columbine by Dave Cullen
3. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, with the first being my favorite, followed in order by the other two...but why read just the first one and not know how it ends? (unless, of course, we are talking about the Twilight series...) by Stieg Larsson
5. The Hunger Games trilogy, with the first definitely being my favorite, followed in order by the other two, by Suzanne Collins
6. Marley & Me by John Grogan
7. Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

sometimes you just go along with what works.

I work with one of my students on recognizing signs that a conversation is over/nearing its end and then saying something appropriate to end it…and, of course, actually ending it (just saying, if you enter a conversation with this student, it can be difficult to get away). We were doing some role playing. The cue we were working with was one of the most obvious ones (i.e., I would say, “Well, I really need to get going.”). The student was pretty excited about coming up with pretend scenarios we could role play. In the first one, I was supposed to be almost late for a dentist appointment. After we finished that one and she was coming up with the next one, she asked,

“Do you have a dog at home?”

“No, but I have a cat.”

“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”

“Ok, pretend it has cancer and you have to get it to the doctor for its treatments.”