Proposing to Sarah

The highly anticipated proposal pictures are here. Julie helped quite a bit (as the not-so-wicked witch) by taking Sarah on her quest to turn from a mermaid to human. She also stuck around to take some pictures after she brought Sarah to me.

Yes I did get down on one knee.

This is our candle lit dinner, the picture is kinda dark but it was really good.

(Special thanks to Julie for taking the pictures, driving Sarah around, and the awesome photoshop work and to Wendy for helping me cook the dinner.)

My roommate and I participated in the pond skimming competition at BYU-I last Thursday. We got to choose fun costumes which are shown below in the picture. Pond skimming involves skiing/boarding down a hill and then trying to skim as far as possible over a pond of water. There were quite a few wipe outs and some of the boarders made it all the way across. My roommate's wipe out was pretty good whereas I didn't really have a wipeout so it was kind of anti-climatic. It was a lot of fun though. If you want to see the video its posted on YouTube at this link:
Pond Skimming (Ethan & Gary)

Christmas Break

Well I got a wonderful surprise this new years. My parents helped fly Sarah up to visit us for four days before the end of the break. It was a lot of fun to be able to show her Hauser Lake and Couer'd Alene. I only got stuck once and that was when I slid off the road out at Hauser. I think it made dad happy though cause he got to put his new truck to use pulling me out. We had an awesome time exploring and eating huge desserts at the Couer'd Alene Resort. It was so beautiful up there with all the record snow for December. Everything was white. With all the snow came a lot of work however. We had to shovel the roofs of all the buildings. The lower garage wasn't too bad but we had to do it twice cause it doesn't have enough of an angle for the snow to fall off. The house was interesting with dad falling off twice, luckily landing in the soft snow. I managed to stay on the roof the entire time but that made my job last longer cause I had to shovel all the snow instead of it sliding off on its own. Having learned our lesson we used a rope on the upper garage, which turned out to be a good thing. One side let go immediately when my dad started and the other side slid off about halfway through the shoveling leaving me lying on the roof holding onto my rope so I wouldn't fall off. All in all it was an awesome break, but I am glad to be back at school.

Julie, Emily, and I in the backseat of the car on the way to a Spokane Chiefs games.

Dad and I up on the roof working on the shoveling.

Sarah and I modeling some shades in front of the house.

Mom, Sarah, and I on the roof of the garage, with Jaime cleaning up down below.

A beautiful picture of the house in the snow.