In my soul

I go through musical obsession stages, where I get stuck on a genre or a few musicians. I eventually mellow out and my music gets more shuffled again. For months now I've been stuck on soul music and Motown, with Van Morrison thrown in for pure pleasure. I think I've been in the mood to rock my head around with some attitude.
To give you a bit of the flava of what I'm talking about:

Marvin Gaye:
Ain't No Mountain High Enough.
Got to Give it Up.
And we know who's dedicating this song to whom:


Gladys Knight and the Pips: (addendum at bottom)
If I Were Your Woman.
I Don't Want To Do Wrong.
And the best one:


Aretha:


Staple Singers:


Curtis Mayfield:
Move on up.


Temptations/Smokey Robinson:


Al Green:
Love and Happiness.

Van Morrison:
Moondance.
Caravan:




I hope everyone enjoyed that as much as I did. mmmmhmmmmmmm


For Emily:

Every once in a while you see something that leaves you shocked

You know, you're just sitting there, watching the television, then you hear something that you can't believe. Then you sit there for a few minutes in stunned silence:


Other species and ethnics?
Just in case.

For the Swenson-ish cousins: 4 Gens

L-->R: Grandma Margaret Bell Malcolm, her daughter Mary Malcolm Snell, Mary's daughter Blanche Snell Swenson, Blanche's son Garland Snell Swenson.
The picture was taken in 1923 somewhere in Spanish Fork.
Grandma Malcolm is my great great great grandma. The baby is Grandpa Swenson.

I know the picture's ripped and is missing G G G Grandma Malcolm's left foot, but I'm going to try to restore it some.
G G G Grandma Malcolm was one of the earlier births in Spanish Fork, April 22, 1860. Her husband, David Thomas Bell was one of the first, September 7, 1854.

Safety Dance

I bet you weren't expecting a Scandinavian renaissance Maypole party with a token lute-playing midget for a classic 1980s New Wave video.


Then again, for a 1980s New Wave classic, we probably shouldn't expect anything less.

Desserts, bungee jumping and ironing

There's this show on the Food Network called The Best Thing I Ever Ate. The last episode was about dessert.
Question: What's your best dessert ever?

It got me thinking, what would my best dessert ever be? I'm not a dessertmonger, but I do love a good pie. But thinking about it, I'm fairly certain that my favorite dessert is Gretchen's Gateau Basque. Many of you have had the pleasure of eating this lemon cream and almond filled circular piece of joy. (recipe on the bottom of the blog)

Okay, MO, there's this wonderful picture that you took that has my favorite dessert and three of my favorite people in it. I hope you don't hate me for showing off your photography. I can pay you in feijoada if you want remuneration for my thievery. But I wanna show off the gateau basque:
**If you want me to remove it, MO, I will.


Also, I love ironing, probably more than someone should. Although, I don't know how I feeling about this.



Here's Gretchen's recipe from her cookbook. Man, I've gone all plagiarizy in this blog entry.

Laurel murmured at breakfast this morning

Laurel complained that I hadn't had a poll in a while, so there are a few up now.
My mom's curious about the eggs.

What else do people regularly BBQ that I didn't put on the poll?



When I was a kid, like in kindergarten, I started to have this idea that the vowels a, o and u were girl vowels and e and i were boy vowels. I have no idea where it came from, but it's still like this innate idea that I have, even though the vowels o and u in Portuguese turn a word masculine.

Religion not vs. Science

I sit around and ponder. Sometimes it's all I do, so I don't get a lot done at those moments.

One thing that I've been pondering for years is the fear I've seen of scientific discovery, that somehow the Big Bang, for example, is this whole conspiracy on the part of scientists to disprove Divine existence.

I think, rather, that it's pretty cool that Heavenly Father has let us in on a wee bit of how He did it all. I mean, we're here to learn and progress, why wouldn't part of that be about how some things were done?

Henry Eyring, Elder Eyring's dad and renowned chemist, said something I think is spot on:

"Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men."

I admit it, I really don't understand the disdain for science and the truths that we learn from it. We're going to have to learn how to do it all eventually, right? Why not attain to some of the principles of natural law right now?

Sometimes I get hung up a bit on how it all fits together, but I always come back to the idea that some day I will understand how it all played/will play out.

The coolest thing? Sometimes I've learned in this earthly existence the why of something when I was expecting to have to wait until the next stage of my eternal journey.