Softball

After a two-year hiatus because I couldn't find a team to play on, I weaseled my way on to my mom's office team.

Can I tell you how weird it is that the people I'm playing softball with are calling me Vanessa and not Venom?

Because of necessity, I played Riss's position in left-center. The first hit was a pop fly right at me. I was oddly nervous b/c it had been so long since I played. But no worries, it all went okay.

I made a lot of new friends tonight and had way too much fun, but I also got extremely nostalgic for all of my old teammates. You awesome people know who you are.

I told my friend that I want to temple marry Softball. Is that sacrilegious? It probably is. So maybe I just wanna have softball for eternity somehow.

the goings on surrounding the Oquirrh Mt Temple open house

Did you know that South Jordan is the only city in the world to have 2 LDS temples? I mean, it makes sense when you think about it, I guess.

The video that they show in the highly air-conditioned tents prior to entering the open house has a scene where the show the Vegas temple overlooking miles of suburbs. The words the narrator said at that moment? "The temple points as a beacon." Bepa's response? "Amen."

Oh, and when the topic of eternal marriage was discussed in the video, the scripture in 1 Cor 11:11 was brought up, "Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord." Brian leaned over to me and said, "You are nothing." I started to shake with laughter, Julie Rae glared at him. But it was funny.

The stone tiling in the temple is really beautiful. The limestone came from Morocco and Egypt. Brian said that the lighter sandier color obviously came from Egypt and the wilder design was obviously Moroccan. Logical, I know.

The fabric on the benches in the baptistry totally reminded me of a nice 1970s retro chic design (emphasis on chic).

Some of the chandeliers have a really cool, off-set geometric design. I'm not gonna describe it well, so you're going to have to go to the open house, or take my word for it.

The neighborhood that surrounds the temple has some nice home designs--totally not the nasty cookie-cutter neighborhoods that plague-like in Utah. The designs and the colors totally reminded me and Scottie of San Francisco. Thus, he started to sing the beginning of this.

Once Scottie, Mom and I were in the car, I set the shuffle on my iPod. The first song that popped up was some cheesy Peter, Paul and Mary song that my mom sang all of the lyrics to. Not surprising. The funny thing is that the next song that she song along to was Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by the Eurhythmics. It was really cute. What do you think? Should my mom cut her hair like Annie Lennox?

Scottie and I blabbered on and listened to music the whole way up and back. We tend to do that. The whole while Mom read a book called Jungle Love. No, just kidding, it was Bamboo and Lace, I think. Scottie thinks it should be called Pandas and Doilies.

My new favorite fear is

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

I don't personally suffer from this fear, but I think it has an awesome name.

And something cool about the number?

The beast number [stupid name] has several interesting properties which numerologists may find particularly interesting (Keith 1982-83). In particular, the beast number is equal to the sum of the squares of the first 7 primes

(1)

and satisfies the identity

Oh, and it seems that the number might've actually been 616, not 666, based on better information that we have now and translatable documents.

Anyway we go about it, I don't think it has anything to do with a microchip implant.

In case anyone was worried about the state of my soul...

It seems as though all is right in the world again. I finagled my way onto my mom's office's intramural co-ed softball team for this summer term. First game next week. All of my equipment is in my trunk, ready to go.

HELLo?

Oh sheesh.

The Melted Hose

So I like barbecuing. When I'm barbecuing I tend to lose focus on other things. A couple of Sundays ago I lost track of what I was doing and stowed some hot charcoals in a metal bowl, which was strategically right on top of the long hose.

Smart, no?

Well, to water the back yard, we need the long hose. So I set to work putting the hose back together. Our neighbor Cayd helped me while I used his dad's cutter.



After we got it cut, I started attaching the new ends to the hose, essentially turning 1 hose into 2:


Here's the finished product with the old, melted bits that I cut off in the background:


I had a lot of fun fixing my idiotic mistake. Stuff like this is fun and the fix only cost me something like $4. Pretty good compared to a new hose which was $25.

And if there's any doubt that Cayd is the cutest kid ever:

13

The 2 times in my life I've gotten a speeding ticket the cop clocked me at 13mph over the limit. Both times, though, the trooper was nice enough to lower the range so my insurance didn't get the low-down.
Weird coincidence, don't you think? Of all the numbers...

9 years ago today

It's *really* weird to think that nine years ago today I entered the MTC. Man, I loved my time in the MTC.

I was well supported by friends and family when I entered the MTC.

I'll try to come up with a good MTC story and post it. My best MTC stories came from the things I heard when I worked there for those 7 1/2 years. Good times, Good times. Genna's heard tons of them.


The last, I dunno, 4 months of my mission, this song was always playing on the radio. For a sisters activity, my companion, two sisters and I changed the lyrics to "Dormi na palestra," I fell asleep in the discussion. It was a wild success:

Enigmatic Posts Early in the Morning, Probably my Future Downfall...

Now it's 4am and I just woke up after having fallen asleep at like 9pm. So now I'm trying to convince my body that it's okay to sleep until at least 7am. I don't know if it's going to work. I was just thinking about how enigmatic my last post was, like what could spur on some crazy rant at 530am.
A long while back I had this crazy meal with some friends of a friend, anyway, to make what would be a long story short, I left said meal shocked at what these people were saying and professing, that somehow it was Bible truth. I mean, sometimes it was the opposite of what was in the Bible. I felt like standing on the table and screaming REPUBLICANS ARE NOT SATAN'S MINIONS ON THE EARTH. I was so frustrated. I mean, seriously, do these people think that my conservative-minded friends sit around all day trying to come up with ways to destroy lives? After that frustrating conversation, I think these people just might think that. And what really scalded me was that the whole time they were mocking and twisting and falsifying, it was under the banner of Christianity. oooooooo it chapped my hide.

I think when I'm annoyed that I'm awakened at a weird hour of the morning, I ruminate on unfortunate experiences. So, I'm thinking that this whole blogging between the hours of 3am-8am just shouldn't be in my playbook.

I guess, obviously, that I should just let that experience go--just like I should let the '98 Finals go, too. We'll see.


Oh, and sometimes when I think of that conversation, I always end up thinking about those silly silent movies where the damsel in distress is tied to the train tracks. I wish I had a copy of the 73rd Ward video to post. But this video, for lack of one from the 1910s, shows what's going on in my mind:

The dog woke me up

I can't sleep b/c the dog woke me up, so here I am.

I was talking with my friend Joe today about some random things. When I was a young kid and I first heard about slavery, I was in shock. Then a couple of years later I learned about the Holocaust (2nd grade). Since I was an abnormal kid, I spent a lot of time learning about slavery and the Holocaust. I've realized later that I did (do) this because I somehow think that if I can understand the reasoning for it, however skewed, and its history, I won't be so dadgum frustrated by it. And that, by understanding its history and reasoning, I can beat the next time to the punch, stop it before it starts.
Then Joe makes the astute comment, "Why would you want to understand hate?"

I've known that I'm like this for a long time. I do not understand how people can hate. I'm not saying that I'm not a hater. But I am saying that I do not understand it and have come to realize that I will not fully understand it in this lifetime. And I really don't understand how people can do it under the banner of Christianity or Latter-day Saint beliefs.
I know that my feeble efforts are not going to change anything grandiose and that people who use vitriolic speech laced with fallacies of logic aren't going to listen to me anyway. But there's also this thing inside of me pushing me on. Often I feel like I'm body slammed into a brick wall. Hmmph.

To be honest, sometimes whatever that thing is that gets me so emotionally involved in trying to stop things that are full of hatred or injustice really annoys me.
I don't know if another 30 years of life is going to change much though.
. . . sigh . . .


**oh**
And lest anyone think that this is all about world politics and policies, the no-call offensive foul that Michael Jordan committed on Brian Russell in the '98 NBA finals game 6 frustrates me every time someone shows the clip.

I have been sorely remiss...

I've barely blogged lately. There are myriad reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with another project that sucked all the hours out of my day (we're talking 3 hrs of sleep a night/early morning).

Lots of ideas had been floating in my head of what I should post, but I realized that Jarede has mentioned twice that I should be doing a Star Trek review. He's right. I should've done this forever ago.

I went to the IMAX with Andy to see the movie in HD glory. The movie was amazing that way, I'll admit. I was often wowed.

The best part of the opening sequences was when Young Kirk put on Sabotage in the (recently stolen) car's stereo:

This sequence leads to one of the overarching themes of the movie: hanging off cliffs and ledges. This seems to happen at a frequency of every 7.8 hours of a human's life. Okay, I'm being a hoser, but it happened all the time in the movie.

The movie had good action sequences and stuff. Some funny-ish introductions of characters like Scotty. Spock sorta brooded well. Kirk was, you know, lascivious and reckless. Uhura? Meh. Anyway, I could go on, but won't.

But the real trick is in the villain: a Romulan who got the terrible shaft and thus blames a major Star Trek character for all his ills. In order to avenge himself he decides he wants to cause Major Star Trek Character pain by destroying his homeworld with a terrible weapon. This can be seen in this clip/trailer:

Oh, wait, I meant this:

It was like Star Trek Nemesis all over again.

Sorry, I'm a bit snarky, but seriously? The same plot?

Star Trek 11 happens in an alternate universe so that they can play with the facts, mold things how they want. I just didn't see the need for it. Whatever. People died that shouldn't have. People hooked up who never had. Blah Blah

The movie was good as movies go, but with all of the background (wait? futureground?), they didn't do a very good job. Sigh...

And I was totally sick of people hanging off cliffs/ledges.

I guess I'm too much of a trekkie.

And I think this sums up my feelings of Star Trek: