Un-Hallow-Halloween

Last year on Halloween, I tried to go looking for a costume. Bad idea. I guess I didn't learn my lesson, because this year we tried to get some pumpkins. We really didn't look any farther than the closest Smiths, so we didn't try too hard. There was one measly pumpkin in the whole grocery store. So we bought squashes instead, and some washable paints. We tried to find some unwashable paints, but everything these days is washable. Nothing will permanently stick to the furniture, your clothes, or the table anymore. Blast. It ended up being good though, so we could erase or fix our errors. Anyway, here are some pictures to show our very un-halloweeny halloween. Oh, and "our" means Valentina, her brother, and me.

I did, in fact, turn 21!

This happened quite a while ago, over a month, in fact, but it did in fact happen. I turned 21. Finally a real adult? I'm not so sure. But my roommates threw me a fun party. Lauren made homemade ice cream and a Kentucky Butter Cake, which everyone loved. But what made it the best for me was all the people I love! Drum roll, please...Ex-home teachers (above in black hat and below in light blue shirt), old ward friends who moved to another complex, and some people I've never met before.

A couple dancers buddies stopped by: Cody (above), and Aaron (below)
Ex-roommate, Cami, and her hubbie, Bret. They are the best.
My cousins! Melanie and Karl.
My favorite people from Wisconsin, Whitney and Emma
And, MY FAVORITE ROOMMATES! Valentina, Lauren, and Jocelyn. They really are the best. I can't believe I got so lucky to absolutely love the people I am living with for two years of my life. This college experience would definitely be a totally different ride without them in my life.

10 Days on a Tour Bus With Any Other Group of People Would Have Been Suicide...

...even considering four of the people on that bus had swine flu. Tour was great because I love all the people on company! They are all so fun. We just had a blast, as you will see by all the jumping pictures.
Most of these pictures are from the camera of Eli Bauer, a freshman on company who is an amazing dancer, and has an amazing camera. He took over 500 pictures on tour, and we took advantage of all the modeling opportunities we could.
This is what hours on a bus does to a person...
..and this is how they adapt.

This is Eli, the photographer himself. One day at a gas station, he asked me if I would marry him. I said yes, and we bought a pint of Ben and Jerry's to celebrate. To our surprise, Pat, our crazy director, then passed out spider rings to everyone on the bus, so we had our wedding rings. This is our engagement photo.We even were on our way to the Billings Montana Temple, fancy that. However, it was Monday, so it was closed, and we couldn't elope that day.
One of the best parts of tour was doing lecture demonstrations for elementary schools. This one was in Glendive, Montana. The lecture demonstrations are more interactive and we get to teach the kids a little about the aspects of dance. This picture is us playing rhythm tag. You can only run on the whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, or eighth notes, depending on what Pat told us. The kids loved it.
The generosity we received was incredible. Wards in each city prepared dinners for us. This was on of our nicest meals. They even served the tables! And here we were, wearing our sweats...
In Cody, Wyoming, we went to the Cody Mural Chapel. It's this old church building with a dome foyer and this mural of church history painted on it. A non-member researched the church and painted it. He's the same guy that painted one of the rooms in the LA temple, actually. It was pretty cool.

Tour Updates!

This is the sunrise we woke up to our first morning in Helena, Montana. Pretty beautiful...
That morning we had a stake fireside. There was a pretty good turnout. We played some games, taught them a part of one of our dances, and then we showed parts of the movie Onward, Alone, which I was a part of my freshman year.
From Helena we went to Bozeman, Montana, and on Sunday we took a drive to Yellowstone! It was a fabulous day, and we got there right in time to see Old Faithful spray.
This is just proof that I, too, was there. I never take pictures of myself. This is Jeremiah, my duet partner. And in his glasses is Cameron, one of our tech crew. And Pat, the director is off my shoulder.

TDC Retreat

Last Friday, we had a Dancers' Company retreat up around Sundance. Thanks to connections from our director, we got to spend the evening at James Christensen's cabin up there. (For those who don't know him, he's a painter out here in Utah. He does mostly fantasy work.) It was a pretty cool cabin with an awesome fireplace, circle beds in corners, and even secret rooms behind bookshelves. The first thing we did up there was set out on a hike to Stewart Falls. The trees in the mountains are changing colors and are really beautiful, making for a very pleasant hike.












Cool picture, huh?







So, after maybe ten minutes of the hike, we kind of got separated into two groups. There were five of us stragglers towards the back, along with our director. We got to a fork in the road, and even though the front half of the group had gone straight, our director, with the map, told us we should go right, and that he would go get the others. So we set off down the trail... about ten minutes later, after no one caught up to us, we decided we were actually going the wrong way. We hypothesized that this was the plan of our director, either to a) get rid of his least favorites on the company, or b) secretly split up the whole company in the mountains and see if we could find each other...as some sort of bonding activity. Then we started figuring out that soon enough we would start disappearing one by one. There was a killer among us. Lost in the mountains, no phone service, no map, it was getting dark... I was the first to go.













Turns out, there was no killer, there was no group bonding, our director just read the map wrong. So why not pretend to be Indians?


It was a very fun day. Go TDC!

World of Dance!

World of Dance came and went in a flash this past week. Dancers' Company performed three pieces, and I was in two of them. It was great to be performing again on the big stage. Here are a few pictures from the green room...

We had some really sour skittles.

Labor Day Weekend

This Labor Day weekend, my roommates and I packed up and moved to warmer weather. My beautiful roommate, Lauren, has a beautiful family who have a beautiful condo in the beautiful city of St. George, UT. Her whole family went down as well and they let us crash their family vacation. Once we got there, we immediately proceeded to get a badminton birdie stuck in the tree. The main event, however, was getting to see the Broadway musical, Aida, at Tuacahn theater. We got to the theater a little early and though my roommates (and sister of roommate) are beautiful, we were a wee bit bored.
Luckily, they had this awesome thing to occupy about 3 minutes of our wait.
Then we ended up waiting some more, mostly looking at couples walking around and trying to hypothesize what their relationship status was.
The musical was awesome. Great singers, a few good dancers, a sappy romantic story line, beautiful red rocks in the background, a river that flooded the stage (on purpose), an actor who never wore a shirt, a dancer who forgot to take off his Keds, and warm weather the whole night!