I made soup!

So, you might remember my last attempt at a Sunday-after-church-what's-in-my-fridge meal. It turned out something like a sloppy joe stew. It was odd, but not too bad. Today was a much bigger success.

Veggie soup! My upstairs neighbor was making soup when I got home, and I thought sounded so great, so I pulled out all my left over veggies from the cheese soup I made for the murder mystery and did pretty much the same thing, but without cheese and with more broth (I had a box of chicken broth just waiting to be used...) And with peas = ) It turned out really well! I used a big handful of Italian seasoning instead of parsley, and I think I could've gone with just a small handful instead since at the bottom of each bowl I was left with some broth and lots of  flakes of spices. I didn't have any meat on hand so it's just veggies, I didn't even think to add noodles, but that's ok. It's great on it's own. I'm so excited that I made something really quite tasty without a recipe. I don't really consider myself much of a cooker so this was a triumph.

A Permutation

There are n! ways to permute n objects. That means if I have 3 objects there are 3*2*1=6 ways that I can organize them in a line. If I have 8 objects, say people, and I want to put them in a line there are 8! = 40320 different ways. Now, if there are 8 books, numbered 1-8, and they are distributed to these 8 people and these 8 people sit down in a room in basically a semi-circle beginning at the door and following the wall around (there was a big TV on the other wall, hence the semi-circle) here are a few interesting stats-

There are 16 ways for the people to have sat in order 1 thru 8 beginning anywhere in the circle and going either direction around it. That makes a 1 in 2520 chance of that happening.

There are 2 ways for the people to have sat in order 1-8 beginning at either end of the semi-circle and going around the room (avoiding the break in the circle made by the tv). This makes a 1 in 20160 chance of that happening.

There is only one way for the 8 people to sit in order 1-8 beginning at the door and going around the semi-circle. A 1 in 40320 chance.

Guess what happened at the murder mystery last night...

P.S. It was a really fun evening. We did "The Wattersdown Affair." My character was an author who's murder mystery novels were praised for their incredible view into the mind of a murderer, naturally that means my character was in fact a murderer and had the audacity to write a "fictional" book based on it. Ha. In fact there were 2 characters who were confirmed murderers in the group and neither of us did it. In fact we were numbers 1 and 2 at the first. My friend Alycen has done 2 of these with me and each time her character has ended up being an American hussy. (We do not do that on purpose! You don't know until you get there all the dirt on your character) It was pretty funny. The game takes place in 1936 England, so we all got to dress up fancy and wear hats and talk with phony English accents. It was great! If I ever get a hold of some of the pictures I'll post them.

Why I love my job!

Lately I've been having a really big problem being motivated to actually get jobs. If any one who reads this doesn't know, I am currently employed as a substitute teacher for the Logan & Cache school districts. This means that, unless I am contacted by a teacher beforehand to teach their class, I get to get up at 5:30 or 6 am to get online and try and snag a job. Some days there just aren't jobs to be had, some days there's a lot. It depends a lot on the time of year and day of the week. Mondays are usually pretty slim pickings. Anyway, I've found that it's been hard lately to get myself up and not just let myself sleep in and do whatever all day long. So, since I have my prep hour right now for the class I'm subbing, I thought I would remind myself as to why I like being a sub.

• I get days off whenever I want them. No prior notice required.
• To some extent I get to choose where I work, and with what age group. (I avoid elementary school... the kids are swell, but they can't pay attention for more than 3 min, and I'm supposed to do things just like their teacher whom I've never met... It's stressful!)
• Even if the kids are brats and the day goes horribly, 99% chance I don't have to see them again tomorrow. Or maybe ever.
• I have nights, weekends, and holidays off, always.
• I get out of the school while it's still daylight. (Big thing during the winter in Logan. Didn't always see the daylight when I was student teaching...)
• I've never seen people so excited when I tell them I can do math as do the students in the math classes I sub, especially if they have a test coming up.
• It's actually pretty good pay.
• I get to know teachers at the schools and can see how they run their classrooms and lessons.
• I get to write on the whiteboard.
• I get to watch interesting videos and learn new things from the different classes I'm over.
• You learn a lot of interesting things when you have nothing to do besides read bbc.com and wikipedia.com for several hours.
• I never have to take my work home with me.
• I get a good laugh almost every day I sub. Students are sooo funny. Especially the middle school kids.
• I can deffer difficult questions to their teacher. "I don't know. You'll have to ask your teacher when they get back" is so lovely.
• Good days remind me why I wanted to be a teacher in the first place. Helping people learn to do math is fun!

So in summary: That's what substituting is, you know. It's not just a lesson plan and a roll and a whiteboard and markers, that's what a sub needs but what subbing is... what it really is... is freedom.
And that's why I love my job.
...Today.

Stuff that has happened within the last week II

Sugared bacon wrapped water chestnuts.
Holy smokes. So good.

I never realized what cut-throat business it was trying to get someone called to a calling. I had to rock-paper-scissors the RS 2nd counselor today over a sister in our ward (for who got her for their committee). We were sitting next to each other and the said sister was speaking and we learned that we both were requesting her for a calling. I totally won, but the RS is heavy and they're reluctant give her up...

I got sick Thursady. I'm better now. Shout out to ShaReece who went and got me some Canada Dry even though it was the day before her wedding and her family was coming over soon. Also to Nate who left work to come give me a blessing. Good people!

Pearl cotton thread doesn't fit in a regular cross stitch needle. Hmm.

"Just Like Heaven"- strange movie. She's not dead, but she's haunting her apartment? And they just let him walk away after he tries to steal her body? I mean really? Even if she did wake up from a 3 month coma they still wouldn't just let him walk away. I'm just sayin...

For those not on fb- I totally won a RSL jersey with my name on the back. I entered some Gatorade-RSL sweepstakes thing through text over a month ago one day while I was grocery shopping. I was hoping for RSL tickets, but I'll take the jersey for sure! I can't wait for it to come = )

We had a stake RS meeting today. One of the stake RS counselors talked to us about being good a good wife. I realize that it's a very important thing, but doesn't it seem like a strange topic for an entire stake of single women?

At some point I would really like the opportunity to see Ashley and I at the gym from an outsider's view. I think we're pretty funny to listen to, I hope they think the same. (Who has two thumbs and is a Hufflepuff? I'm a Hufflepuff!) ((youtube it.))

Um. that's all. Have a lovely day!

Dinner

So, I got home from church and thought "What should I make for dinner?" Unable to readily think of anything to make I promptly laid down and took a long nap.

Upon waking I thought "Hmm. What could I make for dinner?" and then went upstairs and played Parcheesi with my roommates.

After the game I finally entered my kitchen and organized a dinner.
It's moments like this I wish I had gone to culinary school. I didn't have much of anything that would make anything I recognized. So I just started cooking things that were sitting in or around our fridge...
brown some hamburger...
chop some carrots and potatoes...
um... boil some carrots and potatoes...
ah, umm... drain them and pour BBQ sauce all over them.
Add browned hamburger...
Eat.
It's not to bad considering. I think I'll have to devote a little more time to my cooking skills in the future though... If only I had access to the Food Network again! I would cook a 30 minute meal with Rachel Ray every day!
Or... I guess I could just make sure I have in my kitchen the ingredients in order to make things I know how to make. That would work too... I suppose...
Oh well. Good thing I love carrots and potatoes!

The Rest of the Summer (Abridged Version)

So the plan was to write about the mountains of fun and awesomeness that happened each week at EFY this summer, but now the summer has past and I have only taken the time to detail the awesomeness of 2 weeks... Well, that's how it goes. Now for the abridged version of my summer.(It may be abridged, but this is still going to be a mammoth of a post...)

  We had one more week in Logan, in which not very much happened that I distinctly remember. We only had 2 hospital visits for fairly minor things, it was terrific! I don't remember if I mentioned about all the sick people we had during Logan 1, besides the ones who went to the hospital. We had at least 10 kids get sick during the week and spend one or more days sleeping in their room. That first overnight week was just so special. But the problems seem to have used themselves all up and Logan 2 was just swell. That week during registration Braden, my co, and our health counselors came up with a plot to sneak out and go to the midnight showing of Harry Potter 7 part 2. I volunteered to remain behind in case something did happen and we began plotting. I told them we needed a name for our secret operation and Braden said "Operation Robot Unicorn Attack". Turns out this is an actual, really simple, ridiculous, fun, stupid, time wasting, addicting game. This game went on to take over our office for a week, then we all got better. But we even got our session director playing it during down time. We had a high scorer list on the board that we kept updated.
   During the course of the week I happened to discover the way into the attic of the institute that had a door to the roof of the institute. It was one of those ceiling drop down ladder doors and the first time we tried it I was lifted up by 2 guys on my team and pulled the little ring they had to open it with. As they were lowering me I had the thought that we didn't actually know what kind of ladder it was, and I had this image of a sliding ladder coming flying out and whacking me in the face. So my finger of my right hand was stuck in the ring to open it, I was being lowered down by these boys, and I was trying to keep my face from being smashed in by a possibly sliding ladder... I wish I had a picture of it. It would be really funny. But the ladder unfolds and no damage was done. During the week we even got to use it once cuz someone lost their volleyball on the roof. The best part though is that when we told our session director about it he wanted to come up with us and see the roof! on Friday after all the kids had left we took him up there, and he took lots of pictures of our team. = ) An example is given below.

If this seems really weird go check out http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com that website provided the theme for most of our 'family pictures' throughout the summer...

   So, Logan was good, but it was time to move south. We started in SLC with a bang and had, again, 4 medical trips that week. #1. broken wire on braces. Had to call a bundle of orthodontists to find one that could fix it immediately and for free... these requirements resulted in them driving clear to the south side of SLC for it to get fixed. #2. At games night a boy with a heart condition pushes himself to hard and his heart beats like it's going to explode. Eric and Braden rush him to the hospital. #3 During pizza night (same night as games) a boy who had been sick gets worse and they think he might have appendicitis and Laurie and Jay rush him to the hospital. (I spend the evening dealing with all the fun of stupid counselors letting their kids run around like loonies by myself cuz half of my team is at the hospital. It was an eventful evening. Boys in togas, sick kids... such fun) #4 was much less impressive and I can't even remember what it was. Maybe it was pink eye kid who we had to take to get diagnosed and get meds, but it turns out he just had really bad allergies in his eyes and it wasn't contagious... hmm...
   Besides the hospital visits and the toga boys I had to get mad at during pizza night  (this was our wild week...) we had troubles all week with counselors letting their kids do whatever they wanted. We literally had kids climbing the buildings. And on Friday the counselors allowed their kids to go running through the sprinklers and do a 200+ person bridge jump (We cross the Legacy Bridge on our route to and from the institute from the dorms. It was built for the Olympics, and it's cool. If you get about 30 or so people to jump in unison on it once you can feel it wiggle and it's cool. You get 200+ kids jumping on it a lot and you get really concerned, scared drivers going underneath it.) On the one hand (the 'I am the one that's in charge...' one) it was really bad and we were super frustrated with the counselors and the way things went. On the other hand, it was really really funny. One counselor sent us a video of the madness of all the kids running through the sprinklers (in an effort to alert us to the chaos) and I have to admit I laughed a lot at it. But it certainly was our wild week of the summer. It was craziness all week long.
   On a good note, we did have tons of fun babysitting the session director's daughter a lot. The rule is that if the kid is under 2 (I think) they can bring their child with them to EFY. I actually had this session director last year in Ephriam when their baby girl was something like 3 weeks old. Her birthday was on the Saturday of this session, so that was fun.

  Then we got a week off where I went to Bear Lake for the 4th of July with Alycen and Kandi and played in the lake in wet suits and little 2 man sail boats,

and then hung out the rest of the week and slept on Ashely or Alycen's couch all week... yay.

  When we got back to EFY things kinda normal-ed out. We didn't have very many more hospital visits or crazy kids. We impressed on the counselors the importance of being responsible adults and things improved. The last 3 weeks were pretty laid back and we just got to enjoy being at EFY, without all the emergencies and chaos. The 3rd week in SLC one of the girl BCs got the start of pneumonia, but insisted that she was on meds and would be better by Tuesday. So we didn't hire a different BC and I did her duties anticipating her return... She didn't return till the next week. But it was fine that we didn't hire a different person. I had so much fun being a BC and everyone else on the team helped when my BC and coordinator duties overlapped. It was one of the best weeks.
   On the day that HP7.2 came out Braden and the HCs came up with a sneaky plan to escape without anyone knowing they were going to the movie. They all left their dorms at different times and 2 of them went and waited at predetermined locations on campus. The 3rd then drove the car to each location and picked them up. We thought we were so funny and sneaky. When we finally revealed to the BCs that they went we were expecting some sort of reaction, but they didn't really care. So much for all the sneaky-ness...
   Um, what else interesting happened... I had a dad call and yell at me because his son didn't make it into the variety show (the son refused to change the song he was playing on the guitar, but the words to the song have profanity. EFY rules don't allow this in the variety show so he didn't make it in) for about 15 minutes straight (I mean, he talked for 15 minutes straight, I couldn't get 3 words in) until I broke and told him he was offensive and (in not so few a words) a big jerk and the session director took the phone away... That was special.
  I'm sure there's more interesting stories, I just can't think of them right now so y'all are spared.

   Finally, I ended up working in Sacramento my last week, as a counselor. I was excited to see the coordinators out there who I'm really good friends with. I was not excited to drive to California. But that's where the job was, I had 3 other girls carpooling with me, so I borrowed Mom and Dad's van and we drove to Sacramento. It was great. The kids that week were so nice and great and funny. It's so nice to get to just focus on a group of the youth instead of everything. We walked all over campus, crammed ourselves into the tiny-est institute building you've ever seen, and waited in the longest meal lines you've ever seen but the cafeteria staff were the nicest of anywhere I've ever been. They were so cool. Because of these things our schedule was always in flux and we never quite knew when anything was or where, but it was kinda fun that way. It was more of an adventure = )
   At the end of the week we slept most of Saturday and then drove down to San Francisco to eat dinner and see some sights with some other counselors. When we set the GPS for San Fran we said 'Yes, let's avoid toll roads'. Turns out that was a bad choice. We discovered, after about 2 hours in the car driving to who-knows-where, that you can't actually get to San Fran in a reasonable time without going over toll roads... Ha. So we changed the GPS and got there an hour later. We ate at the sourdough bread place, went to Ghiradelli square and enjoyed wandering around Pier 39. It was a fun evening, and I learned that even in the summer, take a jacket to SF. I thankfully had mine in the car, but the other girls all bought new SF sweatshirts. Actually, they all bought matching SF sweatshirts (mostly on accident) and 3 of the boys bought the same pattern but in t-shirt form completely by coincidence. So half our group was walking around with matching sweatshirts/shirts.
   Sunday we went to sacrament meeting at 10 (yes, they didn't have a 9 am ward, how weird) and then drove home. We listened to an audio book that one of the girls had on her ipod the whole trip, but the problem was it wasn't the only audiobook, and the tracks weren't labeled in any particular manner so the whole trip home my job, as the one in shotgun, was to find the next chapter of the book. At one point we skipped 10 chapters of the book without realizing it, but we didn't really miss anything so we just kept going from there. As we neared Utah we almost met with catastrophe. I couldn't find the rest of the book! We had about 5 or 6 chapters left and I couldn't find the next track! It was very distressing. But at last the track was found and we continued on. As we neared SLC we realized we wouldn't have time to finish the book so we skipped to the second to last chapter. Then as we got into SLC we realized we had to drop off the girl who owned the ipod first! We skipped to the last chapter and made her parents wait while we finished it. Ha. We had to know what happened with the main character and his girl! Anyway, it was a fun trip, but I don't think I'll be driving anywhere far away for a while. That was enough to satisfy for a while.

  Well, there you go. The abridged (yes, it was abridged) history of my EFY summer. Whew! If you just read all of that you deserve a pat on the back and a cookie. Congratulations! Thanks for reading!

Logan 1

We only had one week of SAH EFY as a team, so we got to start our over night sessions in Logan the next week. The big thing for coordinators each week is check in, and we were expecting a mess. Usually we'd take some time on Saturday night and go through the housing lists and try to head off housing problems before the kids arrived and made it all dramatic and complicated. We were expecting a mess because we didn't get the session info with enough time to do that. We were expecting a lot of upset parents and whiny kids. It didn't happen. It was magic. The only people who had housing requests were people who didn't want to room with their friend. One was really funny. A couple moms came up and asked us if they could move their sons into a different group. You see they were, by chance (really), in the same group as their other friends, which their moms weren't happy about. They wanted them to branch out and meet new people and not spend the whole week with their regular friends. But we couldn't let the boys know that their moms were asking us to move them. So we got to pretend that some other kids needed to change and so they had to switch rooms. It was really fun. I figured it was too easy and so something was going to happen during the week. I was right. It was a pretty special week. We had a crazy girl who (probably) wasn't taking her medications and was freaking out her whole group. We ended up putting her into a group with her sister and having the counselor watch her take her meds each day.
We also had a lot of medical problems. We ended up going to the hospital 4 times that week.
1. Complex migraine- they are commonly mistaken as mini-strokes. That was exciting because her aunt and uncle came and went back in the back with her, so Laruie the HC and I got to sit in the waiting room for some sort of word on what was going on. While we were there we got to meet some really lovely people. A 5-ish year old kid, that I really couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl, wrecked his/her bike and screwed up his/her wrist. The parents had a super adorable baby just learning to walk. There was our more intimate friend who was waiting to get stitches in her hand after she put a hole in it with a nail that was sticking out of an ottoman she was moving. Her husband and kids were at some relative's house, so it was her night to kick back, relax, and read a book... Then there was the amazing elderly gentleman who rolled his car down an embankment in the rain earlier that day, probably a good 5-7 hours before, and had only come to the ER because his wife wanted him just to make sure that his neck was fine. We had a lot of good conversation while we waited till late into the evening. Finally her aunt was able to sign for her and we came back to campus. She got better that night and returned the next day.
2. A girl with diabetes had extremely high blood sugar and couldn't get it down. I didn't actually take this one to the hospital, but from what I hear it was quite a miracle that she wasn't in a more serious situation. It had all the signs of being very bad and leading to a lot of time spent in the hospital, but she was just fine after they finally got her blood sugar down.
3. Thursday morning a girl got out of bed and went to walk and proceeded to fall flat on her face. She had a boot on her left leg because she had popped a tendon in her left ankle. She'd just gotten off crutches and was rejoicing in her freedom. Naturally her other leg was taking quite the beating because it was taking all the stress off the other one. She felt the pain behind her right knee, but Eric couldn't find any problem with it, off to the hospital we go. We had previously gone to the IHC hospital, but we weren't hurrying anywhere, so we went looking for an insta-care cuz we thought there was one at the specialty hospital. There wasn't one, but we went to the specialty hospital anyway. It was so great. They got us in right away. Our nurse, Eli, was great, he got Eric and I juice to drink while we waited. It was pretty fun. It turns out she did the exact same thing to her right leg that she did to her left and had to get a boot and crutches. Yes, she had a boot on both legs. She was a really good sport about it. She had fun getting pushed around in a wheel chair and dancing on crutches.
4. Friday a girl slipped off a curb and sprained her ankle. Eric confirmed that it was only sprained, but her mom wanted us to take her in to get it checked out. So at way to late at night we got to take her to the ER and waited around to find out that it was indeed only a sprain and get her some crutches.

Whew! It was quite the busy week. I don't really have a picture to post from this week. Sorry. It was fun being back to the over night sessions and all the fun that comes along with that (pizza!). Or session director was Bro. Anderson. He was definitely a teacher. He made teacher jokes. He did a "Tangled taking it home" lesson at the end of the week. Tangled really does work quite well as an comparison to our being children of God and our purpose on earth. It's fun to watch that movie trying to see how many gospel analogies you can find. Try it. = )