Oh dear, oh deer, oh dear, oh deer....

This was our pretty new car a few months ago...

This is the same car last night...

after hitting a deer...

luckily it was a small deer...

So we are in the middle of northern Missourri and since the deer attacked us on a holiday weekend and everyone is closed, we will be here for a while.  Any suggestions on what to do on New Years in the middle of nowhere Missourri?? 

On the bright side, the nice state trooper that stopped to help us said we could keep the deer if we wanted it.  Unfortunately the hotel in the small town we are in didn't have a big enough freezer.  If anyone wants some fresh deer meat, it's on the side of highway 36...

We are also very thankful that we were both unhurt, and for the nice couple that stopped to make sure we were alright and called the state trooper for us, also for the tow truck driver who we woke up in the middle of the night and who still took us to a hotel and helped us unload all of our junk from our car!

Occupy DC... or take back DC... or something like that

This is the reason I didn't get anything done yesterday (not because I was protesting, but because the protesters were so stinkin loud).  This is the biggest down side to having an office right by the white house.

Goings on

     So nothing super exciting has been going on lately.  We've been doing school and work.  I got a new, totally cool, phone.  And I tried to post an entry from my new, totally awesome, phone when I was in Boston for training.  But I couldn't figure it out, so no post.  I've never been there before, but I didn't really get to see anything except the office, because training was super intense.  It was really cold, also which would have been ok except I lost my coat.  Someone in Boston now has a pretty purple coat, and I hope they enjoy it and that they needed it more than me because that was my favorite.  The lack of coat also got me sick (or more sick) since I was a bit sick to begin with, which is why this post is a bit disjointed.  Anyways I can't think of anything else exciting.... oh wait there is one more thing... see this boy?

yup, that one.

there he is again (no not Jaron, the cute one in the front)

And here he is again (I'm not sure I posted anything for his actual birthday so this was one birthday celebration we had for Dallin with some friends, and yes his cake is partially eaten already)

And this was at BYU... like a million years ago

So anyways, this boy of mine he did something amazing...

He. 

Got.  

a...

a....

a JOB!!!!!!!!

      We are so excited.  The job is here in "the District" and although that means we will still be far away from family and the wonderful west coast beaches, we are so excited.  He'll be working at a really good law firm, with people that seem really nice (at least that's what he says, I won't get to meet them until the Christmas party).  We have a good friend who is already working there and he (and his wife) really like it. AND he'll be doing work that interests him and that will use some of his knowledge from his chemical engineering degree.  He is really looking forward to starting there, which isn't actually until next September.  And he is so relieved, he was starting to worry that he wasn't going to get a job after three long years of school, and rather hefty tuition payments, so he's breathing a lot easier now.  (I wasn't worried, I knew he would get one I mean look at him!)

       Now all he has to do is finish law school and pass the bar... should be easy right?

       Our friends out here are excited that we are staying and we are happy that we get to stay with them too.  That was going to be one big down side if we got a job out west.  We have made some really great friends out here and we would have been really sad to leave them.   We are really grateful for this job, especially since the economy still isn't doing so well.  We feel so blessed to both have been able to find jobs and we think that we are just meant to stay out in DC for a while.

         So, if anyone wants to visit, we've got an extra room, and will be here for a while.

Edit: Dallin just read this and claims that I totally ripped off one of Stacie's blog posts.  And going back and looking, I guess I kinda did (it is a bit different though, and totally unintentional).  So Stacie, if you are reading this, you are just way totally cool and I guess deep down I just want to be like you. 

Huh?

Have you ever come across something that just made you do a double take, something so ridiculous that you thought it couldn't possibly be true?  Well I came across this patent the other day that made me think just that, well actually, it made me laugh (out loud).  Literally.  While sitting in my office.  The secretaries probably thought I was going crazy.

The title is"Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force".  That's right, just in case labor wasn't uncomfortable enough already, let's swing you around in circles until the baby pops right out...  There's even a net to catch the baby so that he doesn't go flying across the room.   Now I'm not an expert in this, I haven't actually given birth, but I'm pretty sure there is not a snow ball's chance in a really really hot place that I would ever agree to do this. So I'm curious, for my friends who have recently, or not so recently, given birth, what do you think?

At least you'd qualify for astronaut training when you're done, it looks a lot like the g-force thing the astronauts train in.  Oh wait, we don't have a space program anymore.

And just in case you were wondering, the answer is yes and no. Yes a man is one of the inventors of this!  But a woman is another inventor as well...

Domination... well almost

 A few weeks ago, President Stewart approached Dallin and I after church while we were talking to some our friends and talked us into signing up to decorate our trunk for the ward trunk-or-treat.  We weren't too sure, but he bribed us with promises of fame, glory, and the really good prizes for the top three trunks.  And so it began... we thought, and googled, and tried to decide what we could do that would win us the totally awesome prizes.  Then it hit me (I may or may not have been in a work meeting at the time) we should make our car a dragon!  We have a fog machine and everything!  It was perfect, we were bound to win!  I was so excited, I jotted it down on my notepad, and may or may not have spent the rest of the meeting sketching out a car-dragon, trying to angle my paper so that no one could see the car-dragon on the notes I was taking, and deciding what we needed to buy.  When I got back to my desk and in cell phone range I texted Dallin, and the rest is history! Well sorta.  We decided to be the characters from how to train your dragon.  Dallin was hiccup, I was Astrid.  And we got some posterboard to make our car into a night fury.  We were so excited to set up our trunk that we forgot the candy, and had to go all the way back home to get it.  But we got to work real quick when we got there and by the time the kids came out to trunk-or-treat, we had this

It was pretty awesome, some kids were even afraid to reach inside because they didn't want to get bitten.  And apparently the judges agreed because we won 2nd place!  Woohoo.  The prize was a $50 gift certificate to mccormick and schmicks!
We've started thinking of next year... we think it will involve some more posterboard...

Virginia Day of Service

Last week was the state of Virginia's day of service which conveniently (and on purpose too) coincides with the anniversary of our church's welfare program.  So in true Falls Church Ward fashion, our ward, young and old, got together to give service throughout the community.  Dallin and I went out and helped to fix up community gardens at a senior apartment community.  It was muddy (it had rained the entire week previously) and there was a ton of dirt and gravel to move and a bunch of weeds to pull, but it was fun to work with our friends and to make the area better for the people that live there.  Here is a  video of our ward's service projects on you tube.  I think Dallin shows up in the video, he's shoveling dirt.  Anyways, it was fun and we're glad we went and very grateful that the rain stopped for at least a day to be able to do this service!

iso: Ark

I think we need to buy one of these...

We've been getting so much rain here that it seems like the streets have all turned to rivers.

This is a picture of one of the metro parking lots here.. notice the cars in the back, some are sunk and a few are floating...

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!!

Christmas (continued)

Well, good thing I didn't say when I would update.... I'm going to try and not make this a super long boring post about what we did for Christmas, the problem is we did so much... anyways, I will try and shorten it... a bunch.

so the last post had us leaving Illinois... from there we went to Iowa where we got to spend a whole day with one of my bestest friends, Taryne (T), and her parents.  We had such a good time there, mostly just hanging out and chatting.  Our schedule worked out just right so that we were able to be there for T's birthday! And I even got to give her boyfriend a hard time, over the phone because he was still up in Chicago where she goes to school (T, please tell Chad that I was mostly kidding, I just had to tease him, it's my job, and your dad was encouraging me). The next day we left Iowa and drove through Nebraska, which was unseasonably warm, and Wyoming which was kind of snowy, and stayed the night in Ogden.  This was farther than  we had planned on going that day but we were trying to beat a storm. It was okay though because the Ogden hotel had an amazing and free breakfast.  Then the next day we drove up through Idaho and Oregon and made it home a day early where we surprised Dallin's parents and Aubrie!  We also got to stop in Parma and visit family there.  We've missed our regular stops  there and really enjoyed seeing some of our cousins and Aunt Shari.

We were really relieved to finally make it to Washington, our car was super dirty, inside and out and our bums were incredibly sore! Dallin was so excited to see his puppy Joe and they spent some time running around and playing.  Jaron and Amy showed up a little bit after us with their own puppy Bianca and Hilarie and Andrew (or rather mostly Hilarie and a little bit Andrew) drove all night and woke us up the next morning by jumping on our bed at like 7 AM.  Apparently this was payback for the last family reunion, a year and half ago, when we did this to them... and I think there was another time as well... in any case it was well deserved. Landon and Kendra came a few days later with Sophie (sp?) to complete the group, and it was a very full house!

On Christmas Eve we went up to Leavenworth and had fun looking at the shops and eating.  Aubrie especially liked all the walking as she was still on crutches from her ACL surgery about a week before that.

Christmas (part 1)

Well it took a few days longer than I had said, but here is a bit about our Christmas trip.  But first a bit of a disclaimer... if we were near/passing through your home town, and we didn't stop and see you, particularly if you live in Utah we are very sorry but there were SO many people that we wanted to see and unfortunately we had a bit of a schedule to keep, there were lots of people we wish we had the time to visit but it just didn't work out.
So now, on with the story!

I guess I should start with the reasons we drove instead of flying in the first place.  There were a few reasons, the first and biggest being the fact that Dallin didn't want to fly because of all of the new security regulations, and I wasn't too thrilled about them either, so in true law school student fashion, we decided to protest!! sounds dramatic doesn't it, well it kinda was, I mean driving all the way across the country and back in December! We had several people question our sanity but we survived, more or less, so no harm done!  Now I wasn't totally sold on the whole stick-it-to-the-man reasons for not flying I mean going through security = not fun, but driving the 46 hours it takes to get to Yakima=not so fun either. The up side, and deciding factor for me, was the flexibility driving gave us.  If we flew we wouldn't be able to leave until the 23rd because that was the last day of my make up finals and I didn't want to risk missing a final, we didn't get any bad weather this semester so I was really done with finals on the 17th.  Also, we got to stop and visit so many people along the way.  We have missed our friends and family so much this past year and a half.  Last but definitely not least, I got to bring lots of clothes, at no extra charge, two pea coats (I thought about bringing three but thought it might be a bit excessive), and a whole duffel bag of shoes (no that was not excessive at all, it was necessary! plus Dallin's shoes were in there too).   So anyways on the 17th I went to my office Christmas party where we ate pizza, cookies, and played wii, and Dallin went to get snow tires and then we took off at about 3:00 in the afternoon.

Unfortunately, we live in DC which is the land of never ending and so unpredictable traffic, and true to form, we hit traffic as we left the city.  I swear someone watches every time we try and go more than a few miles outside of DC and diverts all traffic in our direction.  Anyways after about an hour we were probably 20 miles outside the city, and we got rid of most of the other disgruntled drivers and really started our trip.  We got through Maryland with no further incident, took a quick stop in Pennsylvania for a much needed bathroom break, snuck across the tip of West Virginia and then headed into Ohio.  It was dark through most of this trip so there really is nothing exciting to report.  We stayed just outside Dayton for the night and then got up early to get on our way again.

Dallin and I in front of the window where
Joseph Smith was killed

The next day (Saturday) was a little more exciting.  After leaving Ohio we went through Indiana, and on into Illinois.  We stopped at Carthage to see the jail where the Prophet Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith were martyred. It was freezing cold, but it was a neat experience.  It was really cool to see the old jail, the hole from the bullet that probably killed Hyrum is still in the door.  It was interesting to learn that a family actually lived in the jail as the keepers and that they trusted the prophet and other men so much that they let them have their bedroom instead of staying in the actual cell.

The bullet hole in the door

Carthage Jail

After leaving Carthage we drove up to Nauvoo.  We got there at about 3 in the afternoon and everything closes at 5, but we decided to try and get as much in as we could anyways.  We got to see the temple.  It really isn't very big, but it is so beautiful.  And the view from the hill that it sits on is amazing.  We were hoping to be able to go in to do some work, but we didn't really have as much time there as we had hoped, so we'll have to go back and do it another time.  We also toured Brigham Young's house, where we got to see the room where the apostles met after Joseph Smith was killed to decide what to do.  We toured Heber C Kimball's house, the bakery, the drug store, and another house, but we can't remember which one it was.  We tried to stop at the brickyard, but no one was there.   It was so cold and windy! It made us so grateful for our warm heated cars and for those pioneers who braved all of this before heaters and cars so that we could have the truth of the gospel!

Ok well I'm pooped, more later.  I would say tomorrow but we all know that would probably be a lie.

Home Sweet Home

So we made it home from our crazy Christmas traveling in one piece!  For those of you who don't know, we decided to drive home to Washington for Christmas... it was a lot of driving!   We were really lucky though and hit very little bad weather, and didn't even have to use our chains once.  I was going to post some stuff on here over the break but I didn't want to post  the fact that we would be away for three weeks on the internet... it's like hanging up a sign that says, we're gone, please rob us, and since I couldn't fit all my shoes into the car, I wanted to make sure they'd still be waiting here when I got back... our T.V. is kinda nice too. But anyhow, since I really haven't posted anything this entire semester, I'm gonna catch you up on our lives before Christmas break in this post and then I'll write about our Christmas adventures over the next few days.

We survived this last semester, but just barely.  Dallin took 17 credits, was working 20 hours a week (for free...) and is in the J. Reuben Clark Law Society Presidency so he was super busy. I was trying to wrap up my research and do all my classes.  I also had a conference to go to, but more on that later.  So we had a really hard time finding time to do anything fun, like eat and sleep.  And since blogging definitely comes after eating and maybe after sleeping, I have had to put this on the back burner.   We are really sick of eating out of Tupperware and of not seeing each other so this semester Dallin is taking only 10 credits and will not be working at the ITC anymore after he finishes up this last case he is helping with.  I unfortunately can't make my schedule any lighter as it is (hopefully) my last semester, but since Dallin will be able to do things like grocery shopping (our usual Friday night or Saturday afternoon date) we might be able to go do some fun stuff again.  Hooray!!

As I type, Dallin is putting finishing touches on his JLEP article.  We are so happy to have that done.  He has been working really hard on it since August, so hopefully he gets it published.  He is also going to be in a moot court competition in a week or so that should be pretty fun. His grades haven't been published yet (it takes forever at law school) so we're not sure how he did, but he is happy to have one more semester done.  He is now officially half way through law school. 

I had a pretty good, but extremely busy semester.  Both of my classes were project based and they took up a lot of time, but for the most part I enjoyed them.  I also made some good progress on my research.  I was hoping to have all of my data taken by now, but I still have a few more experiments to run.  Hopefully in a week or so I will be all done taking data and I can finish analyzing it. Yay!  In November I was able to go present at the American Physical Society's Department of Fluid Dynamics conference.  It was my first time presenting alone at a conference and it was kind of stressful, especially when my computer didn't work during my presentation!  But, I survived and since it was in Long Beach right before Thanksgiving, I was able to spend the holiday with my mom.  It was lots of fun, I ate way too much and shopped way too much.  I've also been accepted to present at another conference which will be in Canada this summer so I'm now busy working on the paper for that and a few others.  I'm also hoping to graduate in May which means I need to finish my thesis... ahh!!   I'm a little bit scared about all of that but I'm really excited to graduate.

Other than that we are just looking for jobs.  If anyone knows of an engineering job or a patent attorney job that is available this summer let us know.

Christmas news tomorrow... probably.