Misc. Catch-Up

Our awesome international lunch

Luke and

Nothing terribly eventful has taken place in our lives in the last few weeks that deserves a post of its own, just a few random happenings I'll throw out there.  In the last few weeks, we:

-went 'west coast swing dancing' (fun, but not what we were expecting)

-saw Pirates 4 (pretty terrible)

-Had several classes on Campaigning, Lobbying and Negotiating, and Framing, only two left ("Using the Media" and "Fundraising")!


-worked at Subway a fair bit (first paycheck in over a year= hooray!)

Professor Paul and his son, Master Luke

- On a related note to work and subsequent paychecks, we booked our flights to Geneva and Paris and our hotel in Paris !  We are anxiously awaiting our departure date, as the current weather on the continent looks much sunnier and warmer than the current drear of York... come on summer, pull it together!


-Jon has started working at the alumni center twice a week in the evenings. Timing can be a bit unfortunate when  I work all day and just miss him as he goes off to work in the evening.

3D Mini Golf

Welcome to Xscape!

-Last week my department had a kind of farewell/international lunch as people are starting to leave for internships, research sites, etc. and everyone brought something from the over 25 countries we represent.  I decided to make something easy and went with Hello Dollys, (also known as Magic Cookie Bars, 7 Layer Bars, etc.).  But, I wanted to make sure they were American.  So I researched their origins.  I found this article that stated they came out in 1945, the year after the musical Hello Dolly debuted on Broadway, at a time when several recipes were named after the show.  The article stated that the original recipe for Hello Dollys was first published in the newspaper of a little town in Oklahoma called Ada, the very same town which was named after my great aunt, after her father (my great grandfather) helped start the town !  (This consequently lead me into further investigation of Ada, my ancestors and the like, and my creation of a family tree on ancestry.com, which has been added to significantly by my parents and Jon's.  We also got to meet Paul's (our professor) son, who at 7 months old was the hit of the party.

Looks impressive, but pretty tame really

-Yesterday our youth group spent the day at Xscape, a giant complex with the following: indoor snowboarding and sledding, 3D mini golf, bumper cars, laser tag, rock climbing, cinema, bowling, shopping, and restaurants.  Fun day!

-Summer haircuts are on the horizon...I chopped mine off on Friday (quite pleased), and plan to cut Jon's this week (fingers crossed). I might even be bold enough to use the clippers this time.....

England's excuse for snowboarding

-My parents are moving to Salem after my dad recently got a job there!  This has/will include for them just some of the following chaos: about 3 hours with me on Skype going through my entire room asking what I wanted to keep and what I'd give away, four garage sales, packing up the house (expert packer that my mom is, the place will be packed up in a week tops, I'd say), moving the trailer from Gold Beach to Salem, and finding a house that will allow four dogs (or three and a half if we're being conservative regarding Daisy).  And obviously trying to get rid of our current house, in some form or another.  Good luck to them!