Rough Draft

Valentine's Weekend

Lynn and I spent Valentine's Weekend with her parents and their friends in Pittsburgh. Lynn's parents had been planning to visit their friends, and then asked Lynn if she and I would like to come. The main plans for the weekend were a contra dance on Friday and cross country skiing on Saturday, neither of which I had done before.

Contra dancing turned out to be pretty fun. Well, technically the dance we went to was contra squares. Normal contra dancing consists of 2 long lines of people dancing rather than the squares of 8 we did. Lynn and her parents showed me some of the standard moves before we went to the dance. At the dance, before a particular dance was done, the caller took everyone through the moves that would be done throughout the song. Overall it was pretty easy to catch on, and after the first couple songs, I felt like I was doing reasonably well. One other fun thing that happened at the dance was during the intermission four women did a very impressive clogging performance.

Saturday we went cross country skiing at Laurel Mountain, which is about an hour and a half east from Pittsburgh. Lynn's parents had brought a pair of skis and ski boots along for me to use. I fell down quite a few times, and my skis came off a couple times, but overall I made out fairly well. The main reason the skis came off was because I had a hard time attaching the boots to the bindings. It involved lining up 3 holes on the bottom of the boot with 3 pegs on the binding very precisely. We skied for several hours before making it back to the warming hut and having sandwiches and hot chocolate.

After dinner (delicious Italian Wedding Soup) we played a game called Ubi. It's a lot like Trivial Pursuit, only its mainly geography oriented, and all answers are found by locating a point on a map. It was an interesting game and pretty fun. After that we played a couple games of 15. I actually picked up a run in one of the hands.

It ended up being a really fun weekend, as I expected, and I managed not to embarrass myself too much trying all these new things.