October was a such a great month. To make it even better, Mary one of my dearest friends and housemates from PLU flew out to visit me for 5 days! What a wonderful way to bring October to a close. Mary arrived downtown so I picked her up and took her over to the evening farmers market where a few of my LVC friends and their band "With or Without Dan" were the musical entertainment. It was freezing, but a good time! 
Wednesday through Friday, Mary came to work with me at Open Arms. I love working for an organization that has a need for volunteers--anytime I have a visitor, I get to bring them along with me to work! The last month of work has been excellent. I am feeling more and more confident in my specific job role and appreciating the work that Open Arms does more and more. My job is a perfect blend of my creative, organizational and people skills: I get to make birthday cards for all of our clients for their birthdays, I help organize the packout procedure for meal deliveries each morning and spend all day interacting with fabulous staff, volunteers and clients. I loved getting to share Open Arms with Mary too-- she helped pack out food, deliver meals and make turkey hands for the wall!
After work, we got to explore Minneapolis a bit too. Biking of course, as Mary is the one who got me into biking at PLU this spring!
Wednesday night my friend Pieter took Mary and I out to Minnetonka to pick apples at a U-Pick orchard. For $5 a peck, we picked almost 38 pounds of apples which we plan to use for canning in the next couple of weeks. We enjoyed hot cider, and $3 hamburgers for dinner--it was such a fun evening!
Friday night, I left work a little early so I could take Mary out to Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles for an afternoon bike ride. We had about 2 hours, which was the perfect amount of time, except we had a little "incident" as I like to call it! Mary's bike was still at the Lightrail station about 10 blocks away, so we thought it would be a good idea for her to run down there to get the bike, and I would bike over to meet her so we could leave from there. This may have worked, except Mary didn't have her phone, I had the only house key and the key to her bike lock. For the next 45 minutes, we both rode/ran around the neighborhood to try to find each other, probably just missing each other. 
I ended up walking both bikes home, and when I finally saw Mary at the end of the block we hugged and laughed it out for the next 10 minutes. Let's just say, we never made it out to the lakes, but instead went over to Powderhorn Park by my house. We took pictures in this canoe on land and met a very kind man who taught with a guy named Mark Gravrock that Mary and I knew from staff training at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp. We shared a nice small-Lutheran-world connection.
Shortly afterwards, Eric and Hannah, other friends of ours from FLBC came to pick us up and we drove down to Decorah, Iowa for a weekend at Luther College! I have been excited to see Luther College for a long time, as many friends of mine are proud Norse. That night, we had a reunion of about 16 camp friends in the hallway of one of the dorms--so much fun! It was fun to be at a college again, and Mary and I really enjoyed staying in one of the dorms that night--it brought back memories from our Tinglestad days a few years ago!
The next morning we all met at Eric's house for breakfast and Balto gave us each a Luther shirt from his collection so we would be in true Luther style for the cross country Conference meet!
We enjoyed cheering on the 8 boys that we knew who were racing. I had never been to a running event before, and had so much fun!! It was a very exciting morning and Luther did great.
That afternoon, a group of us girls explored the downtown and had a nice lunch at the Angry Monkey (or another ridiculous restaurant name along those lines) and had tea at a cute little coffee shop. It was so nice to connect with such great camp people outside of Montana! The whole weekend was great.
I ended up leaving on Saturday afternoon to come back for our LVC halloween party with all the other Twin Cities volunteers. Eric decorated our house in cobwebs and helped make all the party food since us girls were out and about all day Saturday-it was great! For the past couple weeks, we have been brainstorming house costume ideas, and eventually settled on using our house name: Wellstone. We decided to be a variety of stones. I was Wilma Flinstone, Rebecca was a Rosetta Stone language learning book, Eric was Rolling Stones magazine and Emily was just a stoner. It came together so well!
All in all, I had such a wonderful week with my dear Marebis! Mary is a friend who's goofyness is compatible with mine and can talk about any and everything. We got caught up on months worth of life events, ate good food, explored my new city, and got in hours of laughter. So thankful for her friendship!!
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