Shine on, you prissy diamond

Okay. I read Twilight, and didn't like it. Gasp! I have big, big issues with "heroines" who are vapid, mindless satellites that exist purely to circle morosely (or giddily, depending on the day) around the sun that is their "love", and I also have bigger, bigger issues with fellow Saints who think just because an author shares membership in their faith they have a get out of jail free card for not thinking critically through a text. (I don't think we're supposed to celebrate lust, even if it is thinly veiled and not-so-graphically described. Let's be honest. Bella's a horndog.) But I read the first one, and attempted to read New Moon as well. I got about a third of the way through before I hurled the awful book across the room at the wall. When nice Jacob Black fell for brainless Bella, I just couldn't take it anymore and I quit.

So, imagine my glee when I found this amazing blog where all four (four!) books and the chapters of Midnight Sun are very snarkily synopsized! I can enjoy mocking Stephenie Meyer's magnum opus without actually reading the rest of them. See--I'm not a good person at all. And kind of a big hypocrite. But I gotta get a good laugh wherever I can find it right now.

Warning for the sensitive--this girl ain't LDS and she doesn't hold back with the profanity. F-words quite abound, and she takes the Lord's name in vain. Forgive me for corrupting you, but don't say I didn't warn you. Besides, "Twilight means never having to say you're kidding." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Enjoy!

http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/602881.html

The Pipe Queens at the 420 house

So, last month I made a cake for a silent auction, and as I was icing it in the wee hours of the morning, I was flooded with memories from my former life as a wedding cake baker back at USU. The great thing about any wedding services is that people lose their minds and all control of their money when their kids announce an engagement. I sometimes felt a little guilty at how much we were charging. It was a bit of a racket, I think. But it paid the bills and I'm grateful to have done it.

Anyway, all the fun stuff about being at Utah State had nothing to do with school. Should've taken that as I sign, I guess, that I was pursuing the wrong profession, but live and learn, eh. Some cake stories.

The first wedding cake Jamie and I did was quite literally prayed together. I was still living in Orem, Jamie was in Logan, and she had talked a friend of hers into letting us do her wedding cake for cost. She chose a lovely four-tiered fondant cake with a ribbon around each tier that she saw in Martha Stewart Weddings. Of course, she didn't know that we'd never done a wedding cake before, let alone a fondant cake. I drove to Logan the day before the wedding to knock this cake out. Future bakers of America--if you value your sanity, don't ever plan to bake, cool, ice and decorate a four-tiered wedding cake in 24 hours. Really bad idea. But how would we know? We started baking, but you really can't fill and ice the cakes until they are entirely cool or you end up with a greasy, sticky mess, so it was eleven that night before we started icing and decorating. Fondant is not hard, once you know a few little tricks to get smooth icing underneath it, and keep it from wrinkling and drying out. Fondant is incredibly frustrating if you are uninitiated (plus, it tastes like paste. Go with big swirls of chocolate ganache--not white, but infinitely more delectable) and we were definitely uninitiated. At 11:30 that night we had one butt ugly top tier, and 3 larger, more difficult tiers to go. We were in trouble.

This is why Jamie (and the Big Guy, too, really) is, has been, and always will be on my favorite people list. At 11:30, we locked the front door so no one would interrupt us, got down on our knees, and pleaded with the Lord to guide our hands and help us get a beautiful cake to this girl's wedding in twelve hours. We got up off our knees, and I swear, not even five minutes later Jamie's sister walks through the door. She'd done fondant before, and in less than a half hour she had filled us in on what we need to know about fondant. We busted that baby out, it was gorgeous, and we did not sleep a wink until it was delivered and set up at the reception center at 11 the next day. Jamie tried to force me to take a nap before I got back on I-15 to drive home, but every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was that beautiful cake, leaning like the tower of Pisa. I finally gave up, and groggily drove home.

That's definitely one of the hazards of the wedding cake biz--the possibility of an engineering breakdown that will result in collapse. Never happened to me with a finished cake, but I did send a filled (not yet iced or decorated, thank heavens) cake flying across the kitchen once. It actually was quite beautiful as it flew through the air, like it was in slow motion, and landed in a crumby heap on the linoleum. Too bad we didn't have a dog. Luckily, I had learned to bake and freeze well before the wedding, so time was not an issue. It did seem to be quite a waste though. A fourteen inch tier is a lot of cake.

Another hazard is the bride. They look so lovely and radiant on the wedding day, but don't let it fool you. Even under the calmest demeanor lurks a control freaky crazy woman with sometimes questionable taste. I did a goopy, heavily piped and swagged iced cake once, and the bride and her family promptly draped it with fake blue flowers and plastic grapes, the colors of which I have never seen in nature. That was fun. Or the hours of chocolate swirls drawn freehand with a parchment cone-beautiful, but agonizingly detailed. And here's a little tip for future brides and mothers-of-the-bride--I can't always match merengue flowers to a Pantone color chip, no matter how much you want the deepest possible red. Egg whites have a mind of their own.

My favorite moment, though, was when my friend Dustin walked in one day when we were decorating a cake, and hollered "Hey, it's the pipe queens!" Our address was 420 N, and our house had become known as the 420 house. I really think that folks could have gotten the wrong idea about us if certain people on campus started hearing about the pipe queens at the 420 house. One mood-altering addictive substance at a time, please!

I miss the days of three keys

I'm the world's worst blogger. I'm sure of it. I never blog. Oh well.

So, part of the reason I never blog is because I rarely have all that much time to actually sit down and eat a meal or sleep a good 7 or 8 hours. When did life get this crazy, and how do you all do it with families and kids to take care of and all the other divine complications? This week, this whole summer, really, I've felt like it just never stops--work, church, family. My life has become an endless round of things I need to get done, responsibilities to take care of, bills to pay, programs to host, phone calls to make, fliers to deliver...and on and on and on. I don't remember how to spell fun (phun?), let alone how to have it. It's been a bit discouraging, and I've been feeling it around the edges of my brain for a long time, but this week two seemingly meaningless moments brought it into focus.


The first was last Friday, sitting at Movies 8 with my darling little niece Mary. Once a month I have a day with one of my nieces. I take whichever girl has her turn that month, and we go to the movies, or go swimming, or to the park or whatever they want to do, eat junk food, and hang out just the two of us. Then we take ice cream cones home for everyone, and I'm sure Gina hates me for hyping them up on sugar and then giving them back, but oh well, that's my job. Anyway, Mary wanted to see Wall-e, but it wasn't playing anywhere, so we had to settle for Kung-Fu Panda. There I am with this delightful creature in my lap, who is dripping rootbeer from a cup almost bigger than her, and oohing, and aahing, and oh-no-ing at all the scary parts, and I love how she loves it, how it is just pure fun and escape for her. And I started wondering when I stopped feeling that. And then I started wondering how I get back to feeling that. I realized that since about January, I've been to the movies maybe four times, twice to see Kung-Fu Panda. I like Jack Black, but not that much. I've been hiking once this summer, and camping not at all. And I fear my life will keep me from going to a single football game this fall. Not great tragedies, I know, but how do you balance living with what makes you feel alive?


The second moment sort of symbolizes why I can't remember how to have fun, I think. I was at the Smith's on Monday night at about 10:30 (I can't decide if grocery stores being open all the time is a blessing or a curse) buying food for RS Enrichment meeting this week. I was feeling entirely overwhelmed staring down an endless and awful schedule of sleeplessness and craziness this week. It felt like standing at the foot of Everest without a sherpa. I handed my keys over to the checker to scan my fresh values card, who chirped as he handed them back "Wow, you've got a ton of keys. I have, like, three." I encouraged him to cherish these days of three keys, that someday he might really miss the weightlessness of it. And I started to wonder if any of those keys on my ring, or the worries attached to them, could somehow be retired.

I don't know what this means. There is a part of me that scolds myself for being selfish, for wanting to feel entirely weightless, hopeful and alive again. There's part of me that says if I were more devoted, more compassionate, less selfish and egocentric, I wouldn't have this problem. I would have joy in spite of all this. There's another part of me that just wants someone to go hiking and camping and footballing with, or someone to go with me to see Tony Lucca and Ray Lamontagne. Everything, even the chaos, is more fun when there's some kindred soul to do it with, and my kindred souls are all sort of far right now in one way or another. And part of me thinks if I could just fall asleep and stay asleep on a consistent basis, everything would look rosier. I don't know, but I'm holding on, praying my guts out that Lori is right--that it will get better.

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one. We're all feeling a little uncertain and anxious, I think. Most of you just seem to be handling far better than I. But if you do feel discouraged and miss having fun, God bless you. I still believe in the deepest part of my soul that He wants us to be happy, wants me to be happy. And He'll take our hands if we let Him lead.

Scuba with the Scouts

Joel's on my case about never posting on my blog. But I'm intimidated. His blog is hilarious. He finds the craziest (and also slightly offensive) stuff on the Internet and posts it with commentary on "The Greatest Blog in the Galaxy." If you haven't checked it out, and you are not easily offended by jokes about the WNBA, you really should check it out.

So, on to the real point of this post. For my birthday this year, I recieved SCUBA lessons at Scuba Ted's in Springville. This is one of those things I probably never would have thought of doing on my own, but now that I'm doing it, it makes perfect sense, and I thoroughly enjoy it. However, my scuba lessons are further proof that I have a terrible sense of timing, and God has a heck of a sense of humor.

I originally scheduled my classes for June 3rd, but that afternoon, Ted called to let me know that they didn't have enough folks to hold the class, and it would have to be rescheduled. No problem. The Monday/Wednesday classes wouldn't work with my schedule, so I told them I'd take the next available Tuesday/Thursday slot, which would start two weeks later on the 17th. Apparently there was some confusion about that, though. When I arrived at Scuba Ted's that evening, the instructor who was there asked me if I was in Jared's class. I said I guessed so, all I knew was that I was supposed to start my classes on the 17th, so there I was, ready to go. That's when Ted came in, and Ryan (the instructor) asked him about Jared's class. Ted said, "What class? Jared's not teaching a class tonight."

So, how bad can it be, right? There's another class scheduled, why not just join that one, right? Which was one of the options they gave me. Join Ryan's class, or reschedule again. I didn't want to reschedule again. What I didn't know, is that Ryan's class is a boy scout troop. Yep, you read that right. My scuba class is four 15 year old boys, their two leaders, and me.

I'm actually fairly certain that, like spiders, rodents, snakes and other creepy little critters, the scouts are more afraid of me than I am of them. Not that they're creepy little critters. In fact, they're kind of charming in an awkward, adolescent boy kind of way. They say crazy stuff about underwater torches and divers holding chickens (don't ask), and I swear we have to do everything three times to accommodate for the inevitably short teenage attention spans, but it has been fun. Not fun enough for me to open water dive with them at Blue Lake (where, apparently, you have to haul your scuba gear, tank and all, over the trail to get to the dive site) but fun nevertheless.

It's kind of ironic, really. When I asked the Lord to help me meet some new men, I meant fully-grown ones. Guess I'll be far more specific next time.

Sweet Sounds

I was drifting off to sleep about 1 o'clock last night when I was surprised by the sound of two birds singing in the tree outside my bedroom window. It started me thinking about sounds that I love. I've actually been thinking a lot lately about the sounds that I love, keeping kind of a mental list of them. I'm not talking about music, or words, really. Just sounds that I would miss if I never heard them again. So, without further ado, here they are...


1. Birds singing. One of my favorite things about camping is waking up in the morning. I wake up to cold sunshine and bird songs. A couple of weeks ago I pulled a bunch of blankets and pillows outside and slept in my backyard. I realized that your body after thirty doesn't quite handle sleeping on the ground as well as your body at say ten, but it was so worth it to hear the birds at dawn.


2. The wind blowing through the aspen trees. Another lovely thing about camping in Utah--the rush of the wind rustling through aspen leaves. Admittedly, the sound is enhanced during daylight hours by the way the light reflects off the leaves. It sort of sparkles. But sinceI've had my windows open upstairs, I've noticed that the sound alone calms me and helps me to sleep. I'm grateful for the trees in my backyard, even if they do create more shade than my tomatoes want.


3. Fingers sliding up and down the neck of a guitar. One of my earliest memories is my Uncle Lanny playing his guitar at grandma's house. I could hardly wait for my hands to be big enough to play myself. I clearly remember my dad taking me to the pawn shop when I was eight and buying me my first guitar. The guy at the shop said he could tell it was for me by the spark in my eyes. That first time I heard the squeak of the string under my own fingers it sent a tingle up my spine. I haven't played much guitar lately, but the other day I was listening to Foy Vance on my iPod, and in the middle of "Indiscriminate Act of Kindness" I heard it, his fingers sliding up the frets, and I got the tingle up my spine again. I went home and grabbed my guitar (which was severely out of tune) and played for the first time in a good while. I felt like an eight year old again. Eight was a good year.


4 Elvis Presley laughing. There's something boyish and silly and charming and sad about him cracking up in the middle of "Are you Lonesome Tonight?" If you've never heard it, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoObczRKMQI.


5. Anything out of the mouth of this enchanting little creature. This kid is quite possibly the most talkative, expressive, not-yet-really-verbal person I have ever met. She's got a few words down now, but it's the grunts and sighs and screams that make the most sense from her. And she is so passionate about communicating that I almost dread the day when the words entirely replace the sounds, and she starts thinking too much like the rest of us. Auntie Mar loves you, Me-me.


6. My Dad's heartbeat. When I was little, I would crawl up on my Poppy's chest when he was napping and lay my head just above his heart. I could hear it beat slow and steady, and I'd try to synchronize my breathing with his. Every once in a while, when I catch him at home watching the news and resting, I'll cuddle up next to him and put my head on his chest, and think how blessed I am that it is still beating, slow and steady.


7. Water. Anything from rain drops to the rush of a river in spring to the rhythm of little waves lapping the shore of Lake Huron. You must hear the lake.


I'm starting a mental list of smells now, too. Like rain on cement, popcorn popping, orange blossoms, bread rising, sun-warmed skin, bedsheets dried out on a line, lilacs...

The world is exquisite.

What not to say when you're playing cupid

So, after years of reading friend's blogs, almost all of whom are young mommies raising adorable little ones, I've decided to jump in and join the ranks of voluntarily exposed folks and publish my musings for the world to see. Does anyone else find this odd? Maybe it's a basic human need aided by modern technology--that desire to be known. I am at odds with that desire. Being known by those who are loving and kind is comforting. Being known by those who are apathetic or cruel just makes you vulnerable. Luckily, I've been blessed to come across more of the former than the latter, so I don't mind a few of the apathetic or cruel kinds.

Being known by people who love you is a wonderful thing, but like all human relationships, it's plagued by absurdity. Particularly absurd is the process of finding a mate, and it can be highly entertaining when people try to help. I'm single, LDS, and over thirty, and I do want to fall in love, get hitched, and have babies. My family and friends know this about me. And they want to help. Recently, I've had a flurry of offers to set me up with various single men my family and friends know. It's sweet and kind, and also most often unsuccessful. Which, don't get me wrong, is okay. My attitude towards set ups right now is basically two-fold. First, you never know. Just because all the set ups so far have been a little off, you never know when someone's gonna hit the jackpot and find you a gem of a man. It's sort of like playing the slots. No reason not to drop a quarter in as long as you're passing through the casino. Second, I'm so dang bored sometimes, so even an unsuccessful set up is appreciated as a distraction from my routine, and it provides fodder for blog posts.

However, I've discovered that there are good ways and bad ways of going about setting people up. Actually, there's only one good way, and it goes something like this. You think about the two people you want to set up, fully realizing that they are imperfect humans. You consider whether it's possible that they might enjoy each other's company anyway. If you come to the conclusion that they might enjoy spending time together, approach one of them, and have a very simple conversation. I would suggest something like this-

YOU: I know this great guy that I think you might like. Can I give him your (phone number/email address/whatever)?

At this point, it's wise to stop talking. Perhaps I'll want to know a little more about him, in which case I'll ask you. Or maybe I won't want to know more, and I'll say yes or no and that's it. Either way, now is a good time to let the person you are trying to set up take the lead.

Most folks who have tried to set me up, though, don't stop talking at this point. I understand why. They care about you, and they don't want you to be upset with them if you do end up going out and are disappointed. So they hedge their bets. This seems, in the heat of the set up approach, to be a wise idea. Lower expectations, less disappointment if you haven't hit it out of the park, right? WRONG! Trust me, anyone who's been single as long as I have already has low expectations. Don't need any help with that. In fact, your little insurance policy has a unintended effect on the person you are trying to help, one I'm sure you don't realize or you wouldn't ever do it.

Let me explain. That hedging of your bets usually plays out like this. Instead of a simple conversation, you might find yourself saying something like...

I know this guy I want you to go out with. He's an orthodontist. But he's kind of nerdy. Do you mind nerdy?

or

He has red hair, but he keeps it short. (Why would I have a problem with red hair?)

or

I haven't actually met him, but I work with his brother, and he has this single brother, and you're single, so it might work.

or, my own personal favorite

I'm pretty sure he's taller than you. (I like tall men, it's true. But that doesn't mean I don't like men who aren't tall. They just don't usually like me.)

Here's where it gets messy. While you're giving me every reason why I might not end up being charmed by this man, I can't help but think about what you are saying about me to the guy. I can hear you having the other edge of this conversational sword, and to me it sounds something like this..

She's smart, she owns her own house, and she's funny. But she's built sort of like a linebacker. You don't mind athletic types, do you?

or

She's cute, but she's talks a lot and she's way too opinionated.

or

She's got curly hair. Not like Medusa or anything, but it can get a little crazy.

or, my favorite again

I'm pretty sure she weighs less than you.

This is what inevitably runs through my head. And, I know on at least one set up, it must have sort of gone that way. One dear family member gave my email address to someone not too long ago, and I got a message shortly after. The gentleman introduced himself, and asked me to do the same in reply, since he had not been told much about me. In fact, the only thing he remembered was that I am 5'11" and tend to intimidate smaller men! Yep, that's how every girl wants to be introduced to potential dates. Honestly, Marden, you've known me for ten years, and that's the best you can do? Dude, you're supposed to be on my team!

Okay, it's time to hedge my bets. If you know me, and recognize yourself in one of the preceding scenarios, please understand that I love you for liking me enough to want to introduce me to other unlucky in love singles, and I am far more charmed than annoyed by your compassionate desire to hook me up. So keep 'em coming. I'll take any contenders. Even if they're nerdy. Or have red hair.