White Coat Ceremony

Dane had his white coat ceremony.  He thought it was SO boring.  He calculated out that with an average of 35 seconds per person to be coated, receive a round of applause, take a picture with the deans, and receive their second round of applause. That multiplied by his 180 classmates... it took a while to get through the list.  Still I didn't mind since I spent the whole time chatting it up with my friends Amber and Katie.  My parents joined us and my mom wisely brought a few things to keep busy with. Including her iPad, the ensign, a book, a newsletter, and the church news.  That's one prepared woman.

 Dane and his classmates, Jeremy, Jenna, Ryan, Erin, and Kevin.  They are a pretty close knit group.

Whew! I could get used to this look. :D

The supporters/fan club! 

The happy couple! haha.

A few bonus pictures of other things we have been up to lately...

Like Dane having fun x-raying his finger with the dental x-ray machines at school.  He's jammed it so many times, he wanted to see if anything looked out of the ordinary.

 This was when Dane presented the research he did (over the summer) at an event at Tufts.  Dane just got back from a trip to Seattle where he presented that same research.  He gave a 15 minute presentation about the research to a group of about 120 people.  Dane was the only student to present.  The rest of the presenters were all PHD researchers.

 We went cross country skiing! It was so fun going with the George's. With only a few wrong turns, and going through a "closed" area, we made it out no worse for the wear.

Cancun

Dane emailed me one day and said, "would you like to go on a trip?" (Which is like asking if the sun is bright.)  I responded accordingly, and next thing I know Dane as booked us a trip.  He had been looking at deals on one of those sites, and found a deal that was hard to refuse.  The only thing with that is that he didn't tell me where we were going.  I was out and about by this point, and sent him a text asking if he was going to tell me.  That gave him the idea to not tell me, but he had already sent me an email with the details.  So, he got on my email and deleted the whole thread of emails, and then went into the deleted folder to delete that copy.  Tricky man.  He came home that evening excited to have a secret and try and surprise me with our destination.  He wasn't home for more that 5 minutes before he let it slip.   We were going to Cancun!!!! (He happened to mention that the weather in Cancun looked awesome.)  This guy is hilarious.  He can't keep a secret from me, (unless it's someone else's  personal stuff, then he's a vault! Don't worry, if you told Dane a secret - it's safe!)   

Two weeks later we were watching the news, and hoping that we would make it out of Boston before the big blizzard of 2013 hit! With the weather man predicting between 20-25 inches, we were anxious to get out of there. We checked our flights the morning of, and headed to the airport way too early in the morning.  Really no one should ever get up that early. (Thanks Ryan for driving us!) As fate would have it, we were the first and last flight to Newark that day! The second flight, which was scheduled to leave just 50 minutes after our flight, was cancelled.  We got to Newark to see that we were the last flight out of there as well! 

We were so lucky.  I guess it pays to get the cheapest flights. We booked a tour to Chichen Itza.  It was  so interesting to learn about this civilization.

This is the astronomy tower.  This culture was all about symbolism and astronomy.  Their whole architecture has some tie to astronomy.  The would build a new building every X amount of years. (I forget how many.) They would make additions to old buildings.  This tower has windows facing North, South, East, West, and also windows that you can see the solstices out of.  This is also where I got stung by a bee.  We were glad to see that I was not allergic after the initial swelling went down.

This was their temple.  If you clapped in the court yard here you can hear a squeeking noise that is caused by the echos across the courtyard.  Their priest would tell the people it was God speaking to them, and he would interpret what the chirping meant.

 This is another temple across the court yard from the first temple.  This was where they did human sacrifices. Crazy!  

This is a stadium of sorts.  The people would stand on top of the walls and the players would play a form of basketball/soccer with this hoop that you can see made of out of stone.  The trick is that they could only hit the ball with their hips.  They had to be very skilled to turn a hip check into a goal.  The captain of the winning team would then become a sacrifice, since you want to give the best to God. Dane said he would throw the game if he was playing. At the back of this picture you can see a small temple.  Where religious leaders would watch the match.  Inside of that temple is this engraving:

Our tour guide told us that this engraving is Jesus Christ, from when he came to visit the Americas.  He also believes that Christ did come and visit the Americas.

On our way home we visited a Cenote.  They are beautiful.  We wish we could have stayed there longer.  It was very refreshing to jump in on after a long day out in the sun.

I'm that little spec by the white mark in the water.  Here's Dane jumping off the side.  

We both jumped off there several times.  We couldn't do it at the same time since someone had to watch our stuff, and we didn't rent a locker.  

Beach day!!! We had fun in our beach chairs, and we also went snorkeling   We were surprised by how many fish we saw just off the swimming area.  It was great!

Our formal night.  We went to a Brazilian grill for dinner that night at our inclusive resort.  We also spend some time chatting out on our balcony one evening.  We felt like we had to enjoy every minute of warm weather we could.

We were sad to leave Cancun, but we were so glad we went.  We dodged the storm of the year and watched CNN from our room, seeing pictures of Boston just hammered by the storm.  By the time we got back the roads had been plowed and were mostly cleaned up.  We were lucky so lucky to have gotten out of Boston. We were so lucky to have taken this trip.  Thanks Dane for a GREAT Valentines Day present!