The Christmas Dance

A few weeks ago, Baby Sister went to the annual Hometown High Christmas dance. Which she apparently has time to do when she's not being a lead in a musical, doing face painting, or getting nominated for Best Supporting Actress by the Utah High School Musical Theatre Guild of People Who Nominate Other People. Or whatever they're called.

Basically, you will never be as cool as Baby Sister so you should just stop trying. The end.

For the dance, Baby Sister donned a teal velveteen top with a brocade skirt, a combination of her own devising. I took her to buy gold jewelry at Target and she did her own hair and makeup because, again, she's cool enough and skillful enough to do that. She looked like a million and one bucks.

All of this dance prepping reminded me of when I was Baby Sister's age and went to the Hometown High Christmas dance.

The Christmas dance is the only dressy uppy girls' choice dance at Hometown High, so you better believe I was careful about who I asked. I decided to ask the Good Guy, for reasons that you probably understand from the moniker that he is herein given.

On the day of the day of the dance I, like Baby Sister, wore teal. I'd borrowed this pretty dress from Bessie, who'd worn it to Homecoming the year before. The dress's best feature was arguably a strip of black lace around the waist. I wore it with silver jewelry and my official school dance shoes, which were black and satiny heels with little bows on the front. I was pretty excited to wear this ensemble. I was also very conscious of the fact that it was a borrowed dress, and I was determined not to get it dirty.

Now, the weather had been pretty bad that day. Not as bad as the weather earlier this week, but bad enough that Shutterbug's parents insisted on picking us up after dinner and driving us to the dance themselves.

There was snow and ice everywhere when Shutterbug, Etch-a-Sketch and I went to pick up our dates. The Good Guy lived on a fairly steep hill, so we went carefully, carefully up to get him.

Shutterbug pulled into the driveway cautiously. I stepped out of the car cautiously and took a cautious step.

Cautious, but tractionless. My official school dance shoes went one way, my torso went another, and suddenly I was sprawled on the Good Guy's driveway.

I heard the car door open. "Are you okay?" Shutterbug said.

I was okay. And the boutonnière I'd brought for the Good Guy was also okay. But the front and side of the borrowed teal dress were all wet.

And so, in my awkwardly wet dress, I trekked up the driveway so I could go inside and awkwardly complete one of the most awkward rituals of all time aka pinning a boutonnière to a boy's lapel while his parents are watching. And taking pictures.

Recently, the Good Guy found a picture of us at the dance on Facebook and shared it. You know, to be all, "Ha ha, do you remember that, Awkward Mormon Girl?" That kind of thing.

And I was all, "Ha ha DO I EVER."

It's Locked

Over the past several months, I've had several conversations where I've mentioned Nancy Drew computer games, and the people I'm talking to are like, "What?"

Apparently, there are a lot of people who don't know about these wonderful PC games. My parents didn't have a gaming system when I was growing up. So while my peers were playing Nintendo games where a plumber and his brother drive race cars with a dinosaur and a princess, I was solving mysteries and fighting crime with Nancy Drew, girl detective. And when I say, "me," I mean, "me and my little sisters who were watching me play."

So, lest you be unfamiliar with the ways of Nancy Drew, here are a few things you should know about these amazing games:
1. Nancy's always in danger.
Which you already know if you know anything about Nancy Drew. Girl's a danger magnet. Just look at these Nancy Drew game titles:

#2: Stay Tuned for Danger
#9: Danger on Deception Island
#14: Danger by Design

I'm just waiting for the game titled Danger. Or more descriptive, Dangerous Danger.

2. There's always unexpected entertainment.
Nancy says weird stuff. Like, really weird stuff. And she talks to herself a lot. And to inanimate objects. And every time she finds a locked door, there's this jiggling-lock noise. And then Nancy says, in this dreary monotone voice, "It's locked."

She does that every. Single. Time. She finds a locked door. Which is a lot of times. And as far as I can tell, they use the exact same sound clip in all 30+ games, so she says it with the exact same inflection every time.

Also, in one game, whenever you sent Nancy into the bathroom to wash her hands, she would quote another game. Or sing a song about a guy named Mystico.

3. You will be challenged.
When you're Nancy "Danger" Drew, you have to do all sorts of challenging stuff. Some of the challenges are things that the game provides resources to help you with, like organizing ancient Mayan artifacts or translating French words using a tourist dictionary. But some challenges come with zero instructions, like that time in Stay Tuned for Danger where you have to defuse a bomb. You have to figure out what tools to use to defuse the bomb, and how to defuse the bomb without blowing it up, and you have to do those things before the bomb explodes in your (well, Nancy's) face.

Also, sometimes the clues you need are extremely well-hidden. Once, we couldn't find a clue to help Nancy open an electric panel, so I decided to write out all the possible combinations that could be entered in the lock. We then tried each one of them until we found the one that opened the panel. The process was an exquisite mixture of agony and accomplishment.

4. You will feel smart.
The structure of the game allows you to try ridiculous things. Like putting poisoned jellyfish on other people's sandwiches. Or untying a chandelier and watching it break into a bazillion pieces. Sometimes, Little Sister and I will try something unbelievably ridiculous, only to discover that it actually is a good move. Once we clicked on a pair of chattering teeth like a hundred times. Imagine our surprise when we heard a clucking sound and found an Easter egg in our inventory! And yes, in Nancy Drew, Easter eggs are literally Easter eggs.

Also, at the end of every game, you confront and defeat the villain. Little Sister and I are quite fond of predicting how Nancy will beat the villain. We've gotten very good at it. Last time we predicted that a marshmallow-eating alligator, which was correct, but did not predict that said alligator would swallow the very valuable crystal skull, which happened. Well, you can't win 'em all.

5. But you will become even smarter.
Because Nancy Drew games are set in the real world, they contain all sorts of interesting information that actually isn't as useless as you might think. In the Nancy Drew games, I've learned information about world history, regions, and cultures that has helped me in school classes and in my travels. Which further emphasizes the truth that learning can be fun. And/or you can force people to learn stuff as long as you put it in computer games.

6. You will get creeped out.
The first several Nancy Drew games share most of the same soundtrack. The theme song, which plays in the background of several scenes in those games, goes something like this: "Doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo. Doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo. DOO doo, Doo doo, DOO doo doo doo-oo-oo."

And now that you perfectly understand my lyrical rendition of said theme song, you can agree that it's a bit creepy. It always made me and my sisters feel a little...uneasy. But we knew that Nancy was really in danger when the music would get really fast and wild with a lot of percussion and crescendo!

The summer that Baby Brother was born, Bessie stayed with us for two weeks while her parents were in South America. She watched us play Secret of the Haunted Mansion.

"There's a ghost that sometimes appears in that mirror," Little Sister and I told Bessie, "and it's really scary."

Older Sister was skeptical. "These games aren't that scary."

Then the ghost appeared in the mirror. Everyone, including Older Sister, screamed.

Well, there you have it. I hope I've convinced you of the wonderfulness of Nancy Drew computer games. Because they truly are wonderful. In fact, they are so wonderful that I feel about ready to do some sleuthing in real life.

Earlier this week, Little Sister and I had this conversation:

If we ever end up doing it, the first thing I'm going to do is test the lock and then announce drearily, "It's locked."

Sofa So Good

We got a new couch today. It was brought to us in the rain. It is the size of a small country, and it is as puffy and beautiful as Baymax. It almost didn't fit through the door.

One of our family friends, Bessie, and I used to be students of benchology. I once described benchology as "the study of benches. Many life lessons can be learned from the nature of a single bench: lessons about support, structure, weathering through all kinds of conditions..."

Well, fahgettabouhd benchology. Let's talk about sofalogy. Or perhaps not sofalogy so much as the study of people through looking at what kinds of couches they are drawn to.

As I said, this new couch is huge. It's bigger than my bed. It's softer than my bed, too. And it came with fat, fringed, matching pillows. It is the Lexus of couches; nay, the Humvee. Not that I really know what either a Lexus or a Humvee is like. Or anything about them, really. These are just words that I hear people say and then I use them in a vain effort to sound like a normal human who knows about human things.

The point being, I think my idea of the best couch ever is a small couch that is slightly fuzzy and which has a matching footrest. I would never have purchased this wonderful but gargantuan thing that wouldn't even fit in the houses of probably 30% of the world's population. I don't think the Seamstress, who obtained the new couch, would have chosen this one if it weren't used at a decent price.

But. The beautiful thing about used couches is that sometimes the owners leave things behind in the cushions. I went through the cushions of the new couch just now and found some lint, a couple of Cheerios, two M&Ms (both orange), an old piece of duct tape, and a gift tag addressed to "Elder Davie."

I've ruled out eating the Cheerios. I'm still deciding about the M&Ms.