EFY-ing

Currently I am sitting outside of my dorm building while the youth prepare their cheer and banner for games night. I was thinking about how exciting EFY is and how I have failed to share any of it with anyone who chooses to actually read my blog from time to time. I probably will only have a few minutes before I have to go set up, so I may not get very far, but I want to explain some of what my job is this summer.
  It's been really different being a coordinator. (that's my job) In short my companion, Braden, and I are the top people at our session of EFY each week. We do most of our work on the weekend and Monday. Saturday we get everything ready for the next week. Sunday we do counselor training and conduct the fireside. Monday we deal with all the upset parents because they think their kid isn't getting what they want. The rest of the week we conduct a meeting every other day and do whatever else people need done. The best part of the job is Wednesday at games night we get to be judges for the banner and cheer competition. We get to watch all of the cheers and judge all of them and the banners each group of youth prepare and pick 3 from each age group to do their cheers for everyone, and 3 winning banners from each age group as well. It's fun. Sometimes the cheers are really imaginative and funny. I feel bad sometimes that we can only pick 3 because there are others that are so funny and good. So being a coordinator is very different from any other EFY job I've had before. It's a lot fewer regular duties and a lot less teaching time, and a lot more time trying to find answers to questions I don't actually know the answer to. But it's been pretty good so far. We're working with a lot of new counselors so that's a fun adventure too. On one hand it's harder because they don't already know all the nuances of the job, but it's been really great for the most part. They are un-tainted by years of getting away with things and how it's been done in the past. Now we get to be the ones to mold them into the EFY counselors of our dreams. I hope we're doing an ok job.
 Anyway, time to go judge some cheers and banners! More to come about the adventures had here at EFY.

Ah, summer

Wow. What a spring. It was so full of surprises. And rain. It stayed downright chilly here until June. Really, I think June 1 was the first day with decent weather since finals week! I was so disappointed in the weather because it ruined all my plans for the month of May. They were to spend as much time outside doing fun things as possible. To fill my outdoors quota for the next 2 months when I'd be doing EFY. Now, I love EFY. I think it's a great job and I'm excited to get started again tomorrow. However it has a few drawbacks- no shorts, no time for hiking, etc. during the week. “Save it for Saturday” goes for hiking and swimming and many other things at EFY. So my plan was to get my fill of it in May then go happily (and tan-ly) into EFY come June. Well, I'm pretty sure there was still snow on most of the hikes up Logan Canyon until this week. No go. Oh well. I've been enjoying the wonderful weather this week, and I hope it keeps it up!

It's been especially nice to have the good weather while we've been cleaning the house and moving everything out. Most people think of fun and vacations and such when they think of summer break. I think of work and moving. That sounds really sad. But this year it's been a bit worse than usual. I have to think about work more than in the past since I'm a coordinator, and spent more time moving and cleaning and packing stuff than ever because everyone in the house was moving out. My roommate that owns the house, Becky, got engaged in December and got married to day to a man from Mississippi, Shane. So she's going to rent out the house as a whole and move to Mississippi. We didn't want to do that since 2 of the 3 of us would be gone all week to different camps, so we all just moved out. Kandi moved all her stuff back to her Mom's, and Dana moved in with our friend Alycen. I ended up with a unique situation. I have a friend, Cassie, who is doing EFY in Salt Lake & Orem all summer but was unable to sell her contract which goes through July. So she has offered to let me “apartment sit” since she doesn't have any roommates staying at the house right now. So I loaded all my stuff into the garage and now have somewhere to stay on the odd weekend I'm not housed by EFY. Lovely. It's really weird thinking that I won't be going home to Becky's house tonight. Oh well. Tomorrow I'll move into EFY and then things really get going. Ah, summer...

 (All my stuff excepting what I took to EFY stacked in Cassie's garage.)

P.S. This was intended to be published on Saturday, 6/4/11 but I didn't have internet access, so it didn't happen. Rough thing about blogs, you need internet...

Jane knows...

"What are men to rocks and mountains?"
You know, Jane Austen really hit it right on the nose.
I would just add a bit and then it would be perfect:
"What are men to rocks and mountains and warm summer days spent outside with a good book?"
Nothing Jane, nothing.


P.S. The book was "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society". Sounds strange, but is an excellent read. Excellent.

P.P.S. This was originally intended to be published on 6/2/11 but in the flurry of moving it didn't happen.

Wishlist

Since my birthday is less than a week away I'm assuming everyone who's going to buy a birthday present already has done so, thus making this wish list a little useless, but I thought I put it up anyway... It's pretty short, but mostly more expensive things that I wish I could buy myself.  So maybe it'll just be a general wish list to the universe. Hmm, and I guess since this is now just a general wish list to the universe I can include some things you couldn't really give as a birthday gift... Well, here we go:

Things I would like:

• Ukulele
• running shoes (new ones, mine are pretty worn out)
• rock climbing stuff (shoes first, than a harness and chalk bag)
• a road bike
• Bike repair/maintenance kit
• a trip to anywhere
• X-country ski poles (mine are too short)
• mp3 player (one has a screen like an ipod)
• gas for my car
• a direction
• a job (yes, I know they're out there, what I'm wishing for here is for one to just fall into my lap all ready to go. Not going to happen, I know... back to my applications)
• fresh yummy corn on the cob, watermelon, and bbq chicken.
• cooking school
• weekend backpack
• overnight backpack
• bike rack for my car
• a map of the world (political boundaries)
• map of the USA
• a case of root beer milk from Gosners = )
• ...

This is your life!

    So- this actually happened earlier today. It was great. Everyone else has little kid stories to tell, I have to do with the strange things that come out of mine and my roommate's mouths = )
    In honor of Prince William & Kate Middleton's wedding Dana announced that she wanted to watch "The Prince & Me", just for fun. I remembered and began to recount a conversation I had with a friend of ours named Court at our last FHE. I asked him if he liked car racing (it's a long story) and he said no, but it might be fun to drive race cars. Court works on his family's farm out in Richmond so when he said he might like to drive I had this image of him out on his family's farm racing around, which led me to another thought which I tried to relate to Court. There's a scene in the "Prince & Me" where the main girl's family does lawn mower race with their neighbors. So the conversation went as follows:

"I feel like we need to watch The Prince and Me in honor of William and Kate"
"Ah, the Prince & Me. At FHE I was trying to tell Court about the lawn mower races so I asked him 'Have you ever seen The Prince & Me?' and he said no..."
"Well yeah, he's a dude!"
"Well I don't know, maybe he had a girlfriend once!..."
At which point we busted up laughing. If you don't think it's funny try saying it with a different emphasis or accent... = ) There now, isn't that funny? Ha!
   As I was enjoying the funniness of my house I thought about how some people think that when we get to heaven there'll be a big 'life review' where we go over everything that ever happened in our live whether in book or movie form... (ooh, my life flashed before me eyes! 'Twas very boring...) And I desperately hope that when we do that God will be so kind as to include a blooper reel. A collection of all of the awesomely funny things we said or did. I hope they'll be as funny in heaven (of course he'll include only the ones that are truly funny). Just think of a better way to enter heaven than with a review of all of the awesome moments of life. I suppose it should not only include the funny things, but still, they would make a really good contribution.
Anyway, that's kinda a random post, but I felt like saying something cuz I haven't posted in a loooong time, and it truly was very funny. So just think of this next time something great happens in life. Maybe it will be in your "life review" one day.

Thought had while reading a book

So Pride and Prejudice, right. We're talking the original novel here. It's definitely an excellent work of literature and one of the most beloved novels of all time (Probably made so mostly by women who hope for some Mr. Darcy to come sweep them off their feet) (Though I've decided that a Mr. Knightly would  . Yet I don't think you'll ever see it among the list of book to read for high school English. (ok, you may see it on some reading lists, but I don't think it's one ever done as a class unit) In fact I think that if I proposed the idea of making a bunch of high school boys read a 18th century romantic novel to any administration I'd probably get laughed at. But here's my story-

This last week I was substituting for Mr. Weeks whom I had worked with last semester doing my student teaching in two of his geometry classes. I taught his class Wednesday and Thursday and because he offered to pay me, I went to parent teacher conference to hand out grade reports and record any questions or concerns I couldn't answer. Mr. Weeks teaches not only math, but also computer programming. Well, I don't know to much about computer programming and the kids were pretty self sufficient in those classes so I didn't really have a lot to do during those periods. On Thursday I was particularly bored during the last hour of computer programming and decided to read a book on the ipad that Mr. Weeks had left and let me use while he was gone. (they're pretty darn cool, but I wouldn't trade in my laptop for one...) There's an app on there that is pretty much a small library. I browsed through the available/suggested books and decided I should pick something I'd read before so I wouldn't get sucked into it and neglect my duties as his substitute to walk around and make sure no one had died. I selected one of my favorites- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Along with enjoying the story, for many reasons, I also find that I like the language she uses and the way that she writes. Her humor is so subtle some times I love it. Anyway- I began reading somewhere close to 2/3 of the way through just where the youngest daughter Lydia elopes with the insidious Mr. Wickham. As I read and continued to read during parent teacher conference I was struck by the variety of characters in the novel and the moral lessons each has for us. I'm not much of one to do the english class "What did the author really intend for us to learn here" as I think that most people probably just wrote a good novel, and as with anything we can learn from it and make application. This has become a really long paragraph. Allow me to break...

So, I'm reading and I realize, so many of the lessons to be learned from this book are right in line with the troubles ailing our society in general today! Silly people who only think about themselves and immediate gratification. People who are proud for whatever reason and see people and things beneath them that aren't actually. The importance of family and personal values. We see in so many of the characters the flaws that our society exhibits en mass. I wonder if high school students were to examine the behavior of Lydia and Wickham if they wouldn't see some of themselves, or maybe in the character of Kitty or Mary, or Caroline Bingley and Mr. and Mrs. Hurst. Even in comparing ourselves to the main characters of Elizabeth or Darcy there is good and ill in their characters, what do we have in common? What kind of person would we ultimately like to be? One of the reasons I so much enjoy this novel is because it's wide cast of characters represents almost everyone. Sometimes we'll be like different characters at different times in our lives, but they're very good generalizations of people as a whole. Now, Pride and Prejudice isn't the Bible or Book of Mormon that obviously teach us about what we should strive to become by teaching us about Christ and Christlike people, but you can't read the Book of Mormon in a high school english class...

Um, so there you have it. I think I've about run my course on this really strange post. Just think about that next time you dive in to a seemingly superficial book. You can find application in anything...

The flower

So, back before Christmas when Mom came up to visit she brought me and Ashley some amaryllis flower sets. They come in a box and have the soil (in a really cool dehydrated disk- add water and it expands to fill the whole pot! It's amazing!), pot, and flower bulb all ready to go. I took a really long time to getting around to planting it, but when I finally did, it sure did surprise! I guess Mom's was a dud and didn't grow much, Ashley's grew and bloomed, but was pretty short, but mine shot up like a rocket, two tall skinny stems that just can't quite stay straight. I had to rotate it every day to help it grow more straight.

See how pretty it is? Lovely. Crooked but lovely. If you look carefully you can see the 3rd branch shooting up behind the shorter one. All seemed to be going well until one morning we came upstairs to find the flower fallen over and a bunch of dirt spilled all over the ground. Well, it damaged the flower stems and they just couldn't quite stay upright anymore. So I gave it a little help:

 Note brown pipe cleaner helping one individual stem stay upright, the rope lashing the pot/bulb to the table to keep the bulb upright and the pot firmly planted on the desk so it won't fall over any more. And finally, the ski poles used to prop up the flowers so they wouldn't sag and break the stems. Lovely, no? Oh it get's better. It fell over again. All over Dana's guitar. But I was not ready to give up! The 3rd branch was growing still. I wanted to see it bloom! So I helped it out again!

Isn't is wonderful! Creative if you ask me = ) That's a broom handle shoved between the desk and wall to stay still. The flowers that fell off when it fell I piled up in the pot as a memorial to it's trials. And yes, yes those are kabob skewers taped to the flower with masking tape to keep the stalks from falling over. They'd sustained substantial damage in the most recent crash. The sticks were a great support. But the saga does not end there!

 Alas, the sight that greeted us in the morning.

 And the fix. The new blooms are quite delightful. Definitely worth keeping this poor flower in one piece for. You're probably thinking "Good gracious. How many pictures is she going to post of this one silly flower?!" Answer: only one more.

Um, I think I'm done fixing it. Thank you flower. You have been beautiful. You had a life of trials, but brought joy to many. R.I.P.