Working on New Year's Resolutions

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to post to this blog every week. But this week, we've both been sick. Thanks to some lovely antibiotics and prescription decongestants, I'm doing much better. The jury's still out on whether or not Adam is getting better. So that's this week's report. Hope next week is better. :)

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2010! Hope everyone has a fantastic new year! We had a great time celebrating the holidays in California. It was wonderfully warm and sunny (I went jogging outside and didn't have my lungs freeze), the roads were delightfully free of ice (unlike the glacier that's forming in the parking lot and on the sidewalk in front of our apartment), and the company was, of course, delightful. The picture of everyone in front of the tree is on Dad's camera, but here's one with just the tree and the presents:


Every year, my family makes graham cracker "gingerbread" houses. Last year, Nathaniel (my sister Karen's husband) suggested a contest to see who could make the tallest house. (Dad's won the number-of-graham-crackers-vs.-height contest, but Adam's and my house ended up being the tallest overall.) This year, he suggested a contest to make boats and see whose boat could float the longest. The rule was that it had to be made entirely out of edible material. While I guess I've never technically heard of candied grapefruit peel, I figured it couldn't be that different than candied orange peel, right? Here's the boat Adam and I made:

It floated for quite awhile. My brother, Nathan, decided that he would rather put his efforts into something more artistic. Here's the boat he made (with a little help from others who thought it would be fun to contribute to the gingerbread pirate ship endeavor):

Now it's back to our cute little apartment (yay!) in freezing cold Utah (not quite so yay!) and back to another semester of law school and PhD-ing. Here's hoping it goes well! Happy new year, everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I got a lot of things done in October and November. Unfortunately, posting to this blog was not one of those things. Here are some of the things that have been happening:

Halloween was a lot of fun. The kids in primary have been telling me about their Halloween costumes for the past six weeks, so it was fun going to the ward party and seeing how they all turned out. There was a turtle, a firefly, a wizard, a number of princesses, and a Jedi knight, just to name a few. Adam dressed up as an etude, and I went as a fugue. We dressed in black, pasted sheet music to our clothes, and drew musical notes on our faces. Then we got our cell phones to play the pieces that we were. It was pretty fun. We also got to decorate our trunks for the ward Trunk or Treat. Some black fabric and kleenex and cotton ball ghosts did quite nicely for decorations. We also got to experiment with some dry ice. Next time I think we'll use more water and less dry ice, but our stock pot cauldron still looked pretty cool.

Thank you to everyone who helped or offered to help with my computerized music composition paper I was writing back in September. Apparently, the six-week panicked paper-writing project actually paid off. The conference accepted my paper! :) So it gets to go to Portugal in January. I probably won't be going with it, since I haven't managed to convince any on-campus organizations to pay for my plane ticket. But one of my graduate committee members is one of the conference organizers, so he said he would be happy to present the paper for me. My paper gets to go off to Europe and I get to stay home with Adam. I'm pretty happy about that.

Last Sunday was our ward's Primary Sacrament Meeting program. As first counselor in the Primary presidency, the program was my responsibility. I got a basic outline for the program written in October, but we wanted to have as many parts as possible in the children's own words. We tried brainstorming for parts in classes, but October was right in the middle of flu season so class attendance was down significantly. Fortunately, one of the benefits of living in Wymount is that it's a three minute walk to the farthest ward member's apartment. Between brainstorming for parts and helping everyone practice, I've now visited the apartment of every child in our primary. (We have such great kids in our ward! It was so fun visiting them!) The program went quite smoothly. The singing and the speaking parts were almost always audible and, in general, surprisingly well-delivered. I was impressed. The program was fun, but I'm glad it's finished for this year.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Nathan, Adam, and I went up to Wellsville on Wednesday night and celebrated the holiday with the Hatches. Uncle Jim and Aunt Ardyth drove up from Provo to join the celebration on Thursday, too. The food was wonderful, as usual, and it was fun being with family. Adam and I also got to do some Christmas shopping on Friday. We waited until 12:00 to leave the house, and were pleasantly surprised to find that we managed to miss the really insane crowds but still get some good deals on Christmas presents.

Now it's back to work for the last few weeks of the semester. Adam will be in extreme study-mode for finals in a few weeks, and I have a few projects I'd still like to get done before the end of the semester. Wish us luck!

King Benjamin's speech

This week I successfully completed my research area exam and defended my dissertation proposal. Yay! I've also got a week left before that conference deadline on the 21st. And since I was a little stressed, Adam was nice enough to teach my sharing time lesson this week. The lesson was on Book of Mormon prophets, so we had King Benjamin come to visit:

He talked to the children about serving others, the Savior and the plan of Salvation, and being a part of an eternal family. We sang songs to go along with each topic. It was fun having King Benjamin lead the music:The children sat more quietly for this sharing time than any other I've seen since we've been in this ward. I think I should have Adam teach more often. :)

Visit to Virginia

I'm a few weeks late in posting this, but we had a great time in Virginia while we were there. It's always fun getting to visit Adam's family. And, as one of the trip's adventures, I cut my hair. I've been meaning to cut my hair and donate it for a long time, and I finally got up the courage to do so. Rachel took me to a local salon and was nice enough to take pictures and videos of the process:

Here's me with long hair


Making the cut...


And now with significantly less hair :)

They styled it afterward, so it actually ended up an inch or two shorter than it is in this picture. But I love it! It's a lot healthier and easier to take care of. And it was so much fun cutting off nearly half my hair that I think I'm going to grow it out and donate it again.

The rest of the vacation was great, too, but we don't have quite as many pictures of the rest of our activities. We had a great time playing games, talking, hanging out, and admiring Rebekah's latest feline tenants.

Now it's back home and back to work. Adam started law school this week. So far, it's going really well. One week down, only fifteen left to go in the semester. And I'm rushing to try to finish a paper before a Sept. 21st conference deadline. Here's hoping the code I wrote this week produces good results when I finish the project tomorrow or Tuesday!

Sharing time

I taught sharing time in Primary for the first time today. It was pretty fun. I think the novelty of having a new Primary presidency wore off a bit this week; the kids were a little less crazy than they were last week. I was actually quite impressed with them. I'd guess that 90% of them spent 90% of the time in their chairs quietly listening to the lesson and answering my questions. Not bad for a group of 15 three to seven-year-olds.

Sharing time today was on keeping the Sabbath day holy. We talked about why Sunday is special, memorized Exodus 20:8, and put pictures of activities on a calendar based on what day of the week would be a good day for those activities. Unlike the last Sunday School lesson on the Sabbath that I attended, there were no heated debates about whether doing homework or watching television were appropriate Sunday activities. And the entire lesson took about 18 minutes. Even my attention span can last for that long. Teaching Primary has some definite advantages.

July happenings

This has been an exciting month. I missed posting the first week in July because we were up in Cache Valley visiting my parents and the Hatches. For the 4th of July, we joined them for tin-foil dinners up in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. And apparently, Cache Valley has their fireworks shows early - by the time the actual holiday rolled around, everyone but us had already seen them. But while we quite enjoyed the Freedom Festival and the parade in Provo, we still wanted to see fireworks. So we drove over to Brigham City. It was pretty cool! With directions from a gas station, we were quite easily able to find the right park. We found a parking spot 15 feet away from the baseball stadium where they were lighting off the fireworks. (A couple was leaving right as we got there, so they let us have their spot.) And the fireworks started roughly 30 seconds after we sat down. The show itself was great! And we were able to hop in the car and drive away before traffic got too bad after the show. (After we sang at "Stadium of Fire" a few years ago, we gave up on getting out of the parking lot and walked home after an hour of waiting for the cars to clear.)

And as of the 6th, I have been on this planet for a full three decades. So far, they've been pretty good ones. I'm hoping the next few decades go similarly well. Adam and another friend of ours serenaded me with a delightful rendition of "My Next Thirty Years" by Tim McGraw. We decided I might have a little trouble with that "not so many beers" line - I'm still trying to figure out how I could drink fewer than zero beers in the next few decades. But the "raise a little family and hang out with my [husband]" idea sounds like fun. :) Oh, and thank you to everyone for birthday celebrations, gifts, and well-wishes.

I missed posting last week because I was a little distracted with my new church calling. It seems they managed to locate another organist in the ward, so that left me free to work in the Primary. The new presidency got to run things for the first time today. It was a little chaotic, but the kids are wonderful! I haven't been in Primary in eighteen years, but I'm hoping I catch on again soon. I'm the first counselor, which means I'm in charge of the Ward Primary Program in November. If anyone has any advice about that (or about anything Primary-related, for that matter), feel free to pass it along.