Recent Adventures, Part 2

So in my last post, I talked about our most exciting adventure in the past little while, and then since that story got long, I decided to share more adventures later.

But here's the problem: I don't actually remember anything else interesting happening recently. And it doesn't help that I've done a lousy job keeping up in my journal lately.

Nevertheless, I feel somewhat obligated to share what we've been up to, as boring as it may actually be.

~School. Yeah. School kind of hijacked our lives. Thanksgiving break was spent doing projects and papers for most of Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. It was . . . kinda lame. To make matters worse, every day from the day we got back from Thanksgiving to the last day of classes, both Kevin and I either had a paper, presentation, revision, review, or other assignment due (often multiple assignments in one day). Then during finals week, Kevin had 3 grad school applications due. So, we've been busy. But it's all done, so we're happy.

~Ward choir. Kevin and I are ward choir directors, and this year we had the fun experience of being in charge of a Christmas program. And it really was fun. But it was a lot of work, too -- coming up with a theme that wasn't too cheesy but still managed to be somewhat cohesive, getting additional musical numbers, making the choir sing "angels" correctly (sing it like you say it, folks. Please!), and just overall coordination that sort of stressed me out. But it was wonderful! Not wonderful enough to ever do again, but fun to do once. (Incidentally, you know how everyone has their dreaded calling, like Nursery instructor or Gospel Doctrine teacher? Mine has been Ward Choir Director. But so far it hasn't been too bad. At the same time, I think my biggest fear is that I'll always get shunted into this calling since I always feel guilty if I don't confess that I can play piano.)

~Um . . . have we done anything else? Pregnancy has been fine. I mean, I threw up more after 13 weeks than before, but I might be moving past that finally. Finally. Right now we're thinking of naming the baby LaHerqan, boy or girl. LaHerqan Duchesne. I don't know why Kevin has a problem with it.

~Christmas break. It has consisted of approximately 4 things so far: reading, eating, sleeping, and watching movies/TV. I am quite impressed with how quickly my brain was able to atrophy.

Wow. This blog post turned out even more boring than I anticipated. Sorry. One of these days I'll write interesting stuff.

Oh, and you ought to take a look at our family Christmas letter. (Okay, so it's not our family, and I'm pretty sure I'm not having twins, but other than that it's totally accurate.)

Recent Adventures, Part 1: Don't Punch . . . Our Car

The past little while has been . . . crazy. Quite crazy. Let's recap what I've been up to since the last time I blogged.

~The car. Oh, the car. So here's the story. I was driving Kaylie to Mountain View on November 17th (a Thursday) so she could see Children of Eden for her voice class. Just like every other road I've driven on in the past few months, University Avenue is undergoing construction. I don't quite understand it, since I remember it was torn up 2 years ago. Anyway, the median is gone, lane shifts happen about once a minute, and it's just a nightmare, especially when it's dark. As I was maneuvering through all this junk, I saw some cars up ahead of me going slowly. As I got closer I realized they were stopped completely. So I did what any normal person would do and stopped too, hoping to change into the other lane. But before I got the chance,

Crunch! Jolt! I felt someone smash into us from behind.

I looked at Kaylie. "Did that just happen? What just happened?" Did I just get hit? I may have looked back but couldn't see the car that hit me (except for maybe its headlights, which I don't remember). "What do I do, Kaylie? What do I do?" By this point I was no longer in thinking mode. I was in following orders mode. "Um, turn your blinker on, and go to the shoulder, and then we'll talk to the other car there," she told me. So I put my blinker on, and when Kaylie told me that it was safe, I went over to the shoulder. And I waited for the car that had hit me to show up right behind me. But it was gone. Kaylie got out and looked at the damage and said, "It looks kind of bad." Then I got out and saw the complete left back side of the car completely crumpled and I just about lost it. I called Kevin and asked him to tell me what to do, and could we get neighbors to take Kaylie the rest of the way to Mountain View. And I think I started crying.

By this point, a construction worker or somebody had shown up for the other rear end incident (the one I had had to stop for) and so when it was safe I went back to that lane and went up to him and pointed at my car and said that when the police came with a report to not forget about me and my car which looked way worse than any of the other cars. Man, I probably seemed like a wild woman. It didn't help that I hadn't eaten much dinner. (There had been an IEEE meeting which I went to because it had free pizza, but since a bunch of other people went for the same reason, there wasn't enough to fill my pregnant stomach, making me even crankier. After that dinner, I wondered if my evening could get any worse. Yes, it could.) So I went back to the car and sobbed some and then Kevin showed up with a kind neighbor who took Kaylie the rest of the way to see the musical.

The policeman showed up and after talking to the other accident people for what seemed like forever, he came over and gave me a report and asked if I knew who had hit me. "I just assumed they would follow me right over to the shoulder," I said lamely. "That's what they're supposed to do," he said flatly. Then he mentioned that he had seen a white car way up ahead that was stopped. There was white paint all over the back of my car, so maybe it was the same one. But the car was gone, and he hadn't mentioned any damage (I'm still curious how they were able to drive their car after hitting us so hard, since it seems like its front would have been hammered), so there went that lead. I filled out the police report and then Kevin drove us back home.

Here is a picture we took the next morning:

Not shown in picture: damaged internal bumper, damaged exhaust system, damaged alignment, etc.

That afternoon Kevin drove it to the repair shop and found out it was in such bad shape that he wasn't supposed to drive it home. Luckily he got a hold of his sister who picked him up. And that's the last we saw of the car until yesterday morning.

Well, I'd like to say this story had a happy ending and the person who hit us confessed and paid our deductible (which cost more than we were expecting thanks to a "depreciated muffler") and that we got the car back two days later because the replacement parts arrived so quickly and undamaged. I'd also like to say that they replaced the panel where some wonderful children decided to play tic-tac-toe with a rock two years ago (the car's been in the shop twice since then, and it's never been hit in the right spot to replace that. Alas).

But as it is, the ending isn't so bad. After 20 days in the shop, we finally got our car back! And it works! Complete with a brand new shiny exhaust pipe. (I think the people in Casa Dea right next to our parking lot probably think I'm crazy since I've been gushing about the shiny new exhaust pipe so much and so loudly.)

In those carless 20 days, we've had so much support from neighbors and family. There were neighbors who checked on us the minute they heard the news, neighbors who offered their cars while they were gone for Thanksgiving, family who also offered their cars, people who've offered rides, just a lot of stuff. And at least for the first few of those 20 days, it wasn't that cold, so I was able to walk to my doctor's office, El Gallo Giro, 5-buck pizza (hey, we were hungry and lazy those days, plus we had to eat at El Gallo Giro because we had run out of groceries and couldn't get to the store), and everywhere else I cared about. And since it got cold, we've still been able to get rides/borrow cars when necessary. (And Kevin did turn 25 in the midst of all this, so if we'd really needed to we could have rented a car.) Point is, even though this is definitely not how I expected the last 3 weeks to go, it's been a good reminder that we do have lots of wonderful friends and family.

And . . . I think this blog post is long enough as is, so I'll just save my other tidbits of life for another blog post.

So . . . yeah

So, if you didn't bother reading my last post because it started out way too nerdily for you or stayed nerdy too long for you, then let me tell you the punch line.




I'm pregnant. Due May 25th.

How's it going? Well, other than the nausea, fatigue, headaches, cravings, and mood swings, I can hardly tell I'm pregnant! In all seriousness, I think I've been pretty lucky. I've only thrown up a few times, though I've almost done it lots and lots. And who's to say that I can blame the cravings and mood swings on being pregnant? I've always had those!

There is one thing though that I will blame on the pregnancy. I call it "doing math for two." On the off chance I make it to my 8:00 class on time, it's usually because of a quiz. (Being places at 8:00 just does not work very well for me these days . . . it's nothing personal, Dr. Mazzeo . . . in fact, I really enjoy your class.) I've thought these quizzes have been reasonably easy, and yet I keep missing points for stupid mistakes.

Well, I started looking at my mistakes, and I realized that on most every quiz, I was doubling or squaring an answer at least once. On this last quiz, I did it twice! I knew the answer was 'X,' yet in the last two seconds I put 'X^2'. Why, you might ask? Well, I think this little baby inside just wants to have his/her say, too, and so when I put my answer down, the baby does too. So when I mean to write 1, I instead write 2. When I mean to write X, I instead write X^2. Hence, doing math for two. (Too bad I don't think I can argue back points with my theory . . .)

For the most part, things are going well. It seems like I've made it blatantly obvious what with my awkward questions and my not-so-surreptitious snatches of corn flakes in Relief Society on Fast Sunday (yes, I saw you watching me) and my refusal to do anything fun after 9 pm (because that's about when I start falling asleep) and my decidedly unfunny blog posts . . . so, if you suspected it already, I'm not too surprised.

So, yeah. 12 weeks along, life is good, no clue if it's a boy or a girl, and Kevin and I are both ridiculously excited!

Grad School

As you may know, Kevin and I are currently in a masters program at BYU in Electrical Engineering. I thought it would be fun to let you know some of the classes I've been taking.

670 (Stochastic Processes) This class is all about probability, especially for systems. When you put something into a system, what will you get out? If you only get what came out of the system, can you estimate what was put in? When can you ignore events that happened in the distant past? How good are statistical tests at indicating if something is present or not?

775 (Error Control Coding) This class talks about how to improve one aspect of digital communications. Whenever you use a cell phone or other wireless devices, the signal (like your voice) gets transmitted through the air to the receiver on the other end. But between you and the receiver there may be a lot of noise, which may corrupt the signal and cause errors. This class discusses how to "code" the signal so that on the other end you can fix the errors that were caused by the noise. So, it's basically a class on dealing with noise. And then some.

564 (Radar and Satellite Communications) Radar and satellite are all about detecting things. Is there a target there? Is it moving? Is what you saw a missile or the moon? How can you prevent false alarms?

671 (Mathematics of Signals and Systems) So this is basically a linear algebra class. Linear algebra is basically solving Ax = b, where A is a matrix (think of systems of equations from your algebra class in junior high). But from its humble beginnings, this class answers a lot of interesting questions. Like, what's the best way to solve the equation? If you have a bunch of data points, can you create a line or a curve which fits the data pretty well? How do you optimize things?

The cool thing is, even though all this stuff is pretty theoretical, it actually has a ton of applications. For example:

(670) Given that a test indicating the presence of hCG is positive, what is the probability that hCG is actually present?

(775) How do you deal with the noise caused by the construction across the street when certain limitations are set (such as not being able to use any of your preferred pain medicines for headaches)?

(670, well, all of them) How do you best filter out the noise to detect a signal with a rate of 150 beats per minute (particularly when that signal is buried under lots of junk and a louder signal with a rate of approximately 80 beats per minute)?

(671)  How can you tell if something is an inner product space? What properties does it take on?

(564) Given that you wake up nauseous every morning, can you detect when you will actually throw up vs. when you will be fine (that is, the nausea is a false alarm)?

and of course,

(671) Given that a body increases its mass by approximately half a kilogram per week, what is the best-fitting apparel for the curves that will soon be appearing and will change from this

to this by the middle of May?

(thanks to Matthew and Stephanie for letting me borrow their high-tech future camera!)



I'd say grad school has been a great preparation for life.
















(I guess I'm also taking a writing class. This post has been its application.)


(Kevin's in most of these classes with me. Except that instead of taking 775, Kevin's taking Real Analysis, which has been good for him in answering questions such as, "Is this really happening?" "When will this feel real?" "Do I dare analyze her mood?" "Am I really doing a 4th load of dishes in a row?")


Answers:
1) The probability is not 100%, since tests can give false positives. But not these types of tests, at least not very often.
2) Tylenol.
3) I dunno . . . the doctor used a nifty little radio/stethoscope thing that did it just fine.
4) In my case, something is an inner product space if it expands as the inner product expands.
5) Nope.
6) Whatever it is, I am going to have to buy it at some point.

...and not that any of you care . . . but I don't think I look as pregnant in real life as I appear in my first picture. I blame it on the shirt since I stretched it out by taking the second picture first. So you're not seeing a baby bump, I promise. Just poofy shirt and awkward angle and bad posture. And in my second one . . . well, hopefully the baby won't be as lumpy as it looks in this picture.

"Home"-coming

Like most of our brilliant ideas, our celebration of homecoming week began as sort of a sarcastic conversation.

"I want to go to homecoming, but I don't want to pay for it," I said sometime that week. "Maybe we should do it in the livingroom."
"We could do that," Kevin said facetiously. "And, like, move stuff so we could dance better."
"And make our own crepes and chocolate fountain, cuz that'd be the only reason to go to a sponsored dance."

You get the idea. By the end of the conversation we weren't being too sarcastic anymore. It was settled. We were going to actually celebrate Homecoming Week with a dance in our apartment. That Thursday I mentioned that neither of us had been to BYU Spectacular, and so we figured with the money we'd save on not going to a dance, we could go see it. So we did. And it was spectacular. And I felt so accomplished for having done 2 Homecoming activities. I think that's a record for us.

Anyway, onto Saturday. While Kevin was taking a math test I cleaned and cleaned and pretended I didn't have homework. Then I decided that I might as well decorate for the dance.

Okay, so they're not the classiest decorations, but still . . . Christmas lights! And tissue paper! And they're not coming down until January! (minus the fact that most of the tape has stopped sticking . . . ) (Speaking of not taking stuff down, hey, October 21st is coming up, which means the raptors will finally be coming down.)

Anyway, after our gourmet meal of . . . Papa Murphy's (my epic plans for some fancy chicken dinner went out the window about the time I vacuumed the living room and used up my domestic energy) and a shopping trip mainly composed of junk for the dance (which still cost less than an actual dance would have cost), it was time for the dance!

I would include pictures of us, but the ones I took of me look weird, and I didn't end up taking any with Kevin. Sad. Just know that we looked wonderful, Kevin especially.

As for the dance . . . it was awesome. We didn't really remember many dance moves except the samba routine from Dance 185, but we always had the deacon shuffle to fall back on so it was okay. After an hour or so of dancing, we decided to make our crepes and chocolate fountain. And by chocolate fountain I mean chocolate chips melted in the microwave. Add to that strawberries, bananas, whipped cream, powdered sugar, marshmallows, rice krispies, cinnamon bears, and oreos, and we just gave ourselves the best refreshments of any dance I've ever been to. Plus we put the crepes on our cake platter, which made it even classier.

About this time my sister Kaylie stopped by for crepes and chocolate fountain (we had extended an invitation earlier that afternoon), and then we continued dancing. Luckily, the songs on the playlist were the the more jumping-up-and-down kind (think "Friday," which has inexplicably won my heart), so she didn't feel like a 3rd wheel too much. In fact, probably my favorite part of the evening was when she favored Kevin and me with an interpretive dance set to Aerosmith's "Don't Wanna Miss a Thing." I wish we had recorded it. She is very glad we didn't.

After that, we decided to call it a night (we didn't want our downstairs neighbors to start banging on their ceiling). All in all, I think it was my favorite dance ever. I think Kevin and I should continue having sarcastic conversations.

Timp, Part 2

We were off to the glacier! The trail to the glacier from the peak was not much pleasanter than the trail from the summit to the peak in terms of scariness. The good thing was that it was shorter and a lot less crowded. As we walked, we talked and got to know Clarissa better. It wasn't so cold now, and spirits were high. When we got our first glimpse of the glacier and how it was almost entirely vertical, we all freaked out a bit, but my dad promised that there was a way around which wasn't as steep.

At one point, the trail almost scared me out of my mind. The rock was a lot blacker than the rest of the mountain (for some reason it reminded me of a volcano), and it was curved sort of inward. The path was a bit narrow, and if you fell, you would die. But no pressure. My dad warned Spencer to be careful and then we all made it across without trouble.

"That was the part I was most worried about," my dad said after we were all safe. It was probably better that he waited to tell us that instead of us having panic attacks in the volcano. I felt so relieved. The worst was finally over.

A few minutes later, we were to the top of the glacier. We all looked down it and decided there was no way jose we would go down it directly. I don't even like steep waterslides, let alone boulder-covered snowfields.

So we went to the left as planned. The last time my dad had come here was in 2004 when the landscape was quite different. Thus, it was a bit more challenging than he had remembered to go to the left. I was in front, and I found myself wondering a lot how I was going to make it down this ledge or that. But we all slowly managed to find our way along the left of the glacier, hoping that eventually it would level out so we could get on at a flatter part.

After one final jump, we were to a gravelly hill with lots of loose rock and boulders. It looked terrifying. Right about that time someone accidentally knocked a rock onto my neck, and it hurt a lot for a few minutes. If that little rock hurt that much, I didn't like to think what would happen if we got into fights with some of the bigger rocks.

But my dad and brother decided to give it a try anyway at one spot which looked easier. As they started to go down, they kicked some rocks, some pretty big. They kept going

and going

and going.

"ROCK! ROCK!" we all yelled, hoping that people sliding down the glacier could get out of harm's way if the boulder turned out to stop there. But it turned out fine.

We sat there for a few minutes, wondering how on earth we were going to make it down the hill. About that time, another lady in white who had been behind us scooted down the hill next to the glacier. She seemed to be doing okay. We considered following her once she was out of the way, but it still was pretty scary.

About the same time, Spencer got tired of us deliberating and just headed down. I did not have a good feeling about that at all. But he seemed to be doing fine -- didn't kick as many rocks down as he had on his first attempt and didn't seem to mind the steepness. When he was close to the bottom, there was a spot where we all wanted him to take a right. I don't know if he couldn't make it over or if he misunderstood, but he went left. I cringed. He went a few steps, then started shaking, a totally panicked shake. He went a few more steps down and then

"Aaaaaahhhh" went careening down a little slope there

My first thought was, "well, it can't be as steep as the top of the glacier, so he'll be fine."

But then he kept going and going, and I realized that he was sliding down into the rock field we had created.

Then he stopped screaming. My heart stopped.

Then, a dreadful bellow. "Aaaaaaargghhh!"

My dad: "Well, at least he's conscious."

Kaylie: "Spence, what's wrong?"

Spencer: "I have . . . frostbite!" and then waved his cold, red hands at us.

True, it was terrible to have to slow yourself down with your hands, but at least he was complaining about that instead of, like, a broken arm. I tried not to laugh.

He never cried, but he sounded pretty miserable so Kaylie went down next to be with him (after us yelling "move move move" over and over so he wouldn't get hit by any loose rocks she might have kicked down). She was a lot more cautious and took the same route the lady in white took, but I was still pretty tense. What if she slipped? How could we all get down all right?

"Is that blood on the snow by Spencer?" Kevin asked. I looked over there and saw a few small puddles surrounding him. I felt even sicker.

Well, Kaylie finally made it down. There was a spot where she froze for a good 5 minutes (to us it looked perfectly fine, so we had no idea why she was not moving, but we trusted her judgment) and then carefully inched her way down the same path Spencer had gone. I'm not sure how she made it without slipping.

Then my dad went down. A little faster, still cautious, went to the right rather than to the left as Kaylie and Spencer did, and then suddenly he was on firm ground. "This is the stupidest thing I've ever put my family through," I heard him mutter. Clarissa laughed.

I figured I might as well go. I inched down, backpack on my chest, sock on my right hand to make it easier for me to grip the ice, and scooted down, down, down, sometimes dislodging rocks, sometimes sliding a bit further than I had anticipated, but never really losing control. I think my dad was a lot more scared than I was. He gave hints about which rocks were safe and which were not, and then when I reached one rock he assured me was safe, I stood on it and then he helped me across over to the firmer ground. The rock was still loose and the hill was still steep, but I was able to sink my feet into the loose rock and walk with relative ease.

Clarissa was next, and she went even faster than my dad or me. Then came Kevin ("I love you" we repeated back and forth to each other, just in case he somehow lost his footing), and suddenly we were all past the menacing, slippery, loose-rock infested hill that had separated us from the flatter part of the glacier.

The labels aren't quite right -- the purple trail was through snow, not through rock. But you get the idea.

And then came the fun part! I sat down on the glacier and scooted down at a pace I felt comfortable with. I found sticks along the way which made it so I didn't have to use my hands as ski poles. My dad and Clarissa both opted for the slide, which was probably about as tame as a shallow sledding hill by then, but I was just fine dawdling along the little bumps and ridges that bruised and numbed me. (If you're numb, then you don't mind bruises.) Meanwhile, Kaylie and Spencer carefully walked down the mountain, since Spencer's leg was hurt and he couldn't sit down very well.

When we all made to the end of the major snow portion (Clarissa took off and went on her merry way to make up for lost time [oh  ps: the glacier is not faster if you spend an hour getting down one hill]), the emergency response team we had seen earlier was waiting for us on a pile of rocks. They sat Spencer down and put hats and jackets on him to prevent hypothermia. They cleaned off his blood-splattered leg (he had gotten a gash when he hit a rock on the way down, but luckily that was the only serious injury), bandaged it up, gave him some pain medication, and told us some horror stories from earlier that day which made us quite grateful that a cut-up leg was the only injury.

This is the smallest I could make this picture . . . sorry if you don't like blood.  It looked a lot better once it got cleaned up, I promise.

The emergency response team cleaning up his gash.

And then . . .we were off! I don't know how Spencer managed to walk on that leg the whole way down from Emerald Lake, but he did and he wasn't much slower than me. The walk down wasn't quite as fun as the walk up because I spent a lot of it on my own. I was too impatient to stay with Spencer, Kaylie, and Dad, and too slow to catch up to Kevin (who for some reason wanted to go inside the smelly outhouse), so I just walked by myself for miles at a time, worried that somehow one of my family members had fallen off of a ridge (yeah, I can be paranoid). And getting stuck within groups of scouts who refused to let me pass despite the multiple areas which could have fit all of them. Eventually I just found a shortcut and bushwhacked to get away from them (and was able to run for a while with all my pent-up energy). After 2 1/2 hours, we all finally made it back to the parking lot, exhausted but alive.

Then we ate Mexican food and yummy cake. And Spencer got six stitches in his leg. The end.

ps: remember how it was overcast and even rainy? Well, I still got sunburned.

Timp, Part 1

Part 1: To the Peak

"You're hiking Timp today! It's time to get up! You are so excited!" I groaned and turned off the alarm on my cell phone that I had made the night before. What was I getting myself into?

One hour and one carsick ride through Provo Canyon later (note to self: do not eat chocolate chip cookies, greasy popcorn, and snickerdoodle cake the night before driving to Aspen Grove), Kevin, my sister Kaylie, my brother Spencer, my mom, my dad, and I were in the parking lot, eager to hike Mount Timpanogos. Well, eager enough. I was a little upset that we hadn't brought sunscreen (in fact, I had remembered sunscreen but not bothered to grab it because I figured there would be some in my parents' car), but we figured we would just tough it out. So off we went.

The first part of the hike went smoothly. The trails were much better marked than they were 2 years ago when we ended up in a parking lot rather than on Timp, but that's probably because the main trail was washed out by flooding this year so they had to redirect people. As we walked we  enjoyed the sunrise (minus the fears of sunburn).

The switchbacks at the beginning weren't too eventful.  Kevin and I talked about engineering curriculum stuff with my dad while Kaylie belted out songs nonstop as I listened in awe (she goes running more than I do so she has better lung capacity). Sometimes I'd get a little embarrassed when she was singing around other people, but more often than not they would join in, which was fun. The whole first part was steep and green and calm and beautiful, and I absolutely loved the waterfalls. And Spencer's poses at the waterfalls.

As we made it past the switchbacks and into the meadows, the day became overcast and cool, even raining a bit. So much for needing sunscreen and two liters of water each, haha. As we walked through the meadows bursting with wildflowers, my mom would point out specific flowers and tell us their names. I was impressed.

After 2 1/2 or so hours of hiking, we made it to Emerald Lake. There, we ate and relaxed and watched my dad try to hand off food to random strangers ("The more you eat, the less I carry," he quipped). My mom wasn't feeling well so she decided to turn around while the rest of us went on. She was smart.

As we continued on through the snow and loose rocks, a young woman named Clarissa ended up walking with us for a little while. I listened to Kaylie get to know her better while I trudged onward, unwilling to expend precious energy for talking. Once we reached the loose rocks, she picked up her pace and said good-bye.

And then came the climb. I hadn't remembered how steep it was just to get up to the saddle. Once we reached the saddle, we took a quick breather,

and then continued to the peak. I had actually been terrified about this part for weeks. I had heard a few horror stories of people falling off the narrow paths, and in my morbid imagination I envisioned one of my siblings falling off the edge. But by the time I was there, the path was wider than I had remembered, and I didn't really mind the hike at all. Except that it was long, and steep, and long, and steep, and sometimes people accidentally kicked rocks down toward you.

And after what felt like hours (at least 45 minutes, I think), we made it to the peak! I collapsed onto some rocks and let my legs return from jelly to flesh. As we sat at the peak we ate sandwiches (complete with mayonnaise, courtesy of my dad) and looked over Utah Valley. And tried not to freeze.

And then Clarissa came back! She asked if we would take our picture at the top, and then she took ours.

Spencer is wearing mittens made from plastic bags that I had brought along. Note that I am the only one who remembered a jacket. I felt smart.

Just as Clarissa was going to head back down the way she came, Kaylie told her she should come the glacier way with us. (You can either go back the way you came along those narrow switchbacks of death, or you can go forward on a few more switchbacks and then slide down the glacier to Emerald Lake. My family has traditionally gone for the glacier since there's less risk of falling off the mountain that way.) Clarissa stopped and said, "I kind of wanted to try the glacier, but I didn't want to go by myself. Could I go with you guys?" We all said absolutely, and so she waited a few minutes for us to pack up. And then off we went!

to be continued . . .