Adventures in Ririe (it's actually not the contradiction in terms you might think!)

I'm still amazed that you can see cows from Tianna's kitchen table. When we were getting ready to set off for our adventuring, BJ told me that if I went closer to the cows, they'd look at me. He lied. They ran away.

Today was the day when I finally got square ice cream. Despite the fact that it was freezing outside, we all went for square ice cream. (BJ and I had never had it!) We had fun:On the way home, we stopped to look at a feed gate header thingummy. (T indulges my amazement at all things farm-related.) Apparently, until a few years ago, this was the largest one in the world!I kept getting close to the edge so I could lean out and look at stuff. T kept yelling at me. (She totally cramps my style sometimes.) (Actually, now that I think about it, she was probably just trying to follow her latest directive from Kyle: keep me alive. She totally failed at the previous one...)Don't worry, though: I didn't fall in.

Why yes, I DO feel cool!

I'm in Ririe with T, BJ, and her family for Thanksgiving, right? When we pull into the driveway and start climbing out of the car, we hear the voice of a small child from the doorway: "Jessica!!!"

That's right. T's niece greeted me first. Before her actual family members. :D

...

Jess: I thought you told me Billy Black.
Tianna: Yes, but I had to get the approval to upgrade.
Jess: So we're upgrading to Billy Black.
Tianna: Yes.
Jess: From?
Tianna: Flärke.

Just in case anybody out there thought T and I were any less weird in SLC than in Orem. Or Provo, for that matter.

It's impossible to overstate how very much of a Monday it's been today.

• I set my alarm for p.m. instead of a.m., so I didn't start work until 11.
• The beaters of my new mixer got stuck and it took me at least five minutes to get them out.
• On my way in to work, I discovered a large tear in the lace around the bottom of my shirt. Looks like this shirt won't be worn to work anymore. Or anywhere I need to be presentable.
• I took my leftover pizza for lunch today. I just heated it up on some paper towels, resulting in me burning my fingers carrying it back to my desk. And then I had to sacrifice all the cheese that melted off the pizza, as it became all paper-towelly.
• I arrived at work to a chat from Jeri, yelling at me for not having my voicemail set up. Ok, I had no idea I would have to put in a ticket to get that done.
  
• This, of course, meant a call to the Unhelpful Desk, which always makes any list of Things That Killed My Good Mood.

That's all the non-work stuff. (Well, the voicemail issue was very much work. But still.) Not to worry, though! There was plenty of work mess, too!

• The missionaries came to me with a weird book. It contains the same info on the left and right pages, except that one is in English and t'other is in Spanish. Oh, and just to make it interesting, there are unique pictures on each page (just in case you thought it would be as simple as scanning only the English pages.) Aside from issues of organization and formatting, the OCR on our general book class is English only. We could set up one for Spanish, but it's impossible to process one book in two batch classes. So either way, the book would only be searchable in one language. (This issue is still unresolved, by the way. We're still trying to decide what will work best.)
• I had several fun books of my own to mess with. One refused to be imported into our software. (We've had this problem before, but that doesn't make it any simpler. Or less nonsensical.)
• Another book couldn't decide if it was volume one or volume two. Or possibly both. It depended on where you looked.
• Yet another book was three volumes bound into one book. The extra-awesome part was that its numbering was totally wonky. Volume one was pages 1-826, volume 2 was pages 1001-1848, and volume three was pages 2001-end. So bizarre.
• And, to make this all even more fun, my software kept crashing. This is even worse than it looks, since it's not a simple issue of restarting it. When you crash out, it takes the program anywhere from 5-20 minutes to realize it's not running anymore. As long as it thinks it's in progress, it won't let you restart. So it's like this: crash, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaait, restart. Process two pages. Crash, waaaaaaaaaait, restart. So aggravating! I finally decided to cheat. Take that, Kofax!
  

At least now I am home. I have had my yummy dinner, which turned out quite well (I'm learning how to use a crock-pot). Hopefully we'll have no further evidence of today's Mondayness to wrestle with.

Wal-Mart

Overheard at Wal-Mart: "You're scared? Say a prayer." This was said from one adult to another.

Seen at Wal-Mart: a life-sized Boba Fett, made out of Legos. Also, several different people posing with it for pictures (there was a significant amount of wandering done, in search of a hand-mixer, and we seemed to keep coming back to Boba Fett).

When Natural Instinct Fails

I almost ran over a quail on my way home. There was a whole flock of 'em in the middle of the road, but they all scattered when my car approached. Except one. Instead of running to the side of the road, away from my car, it ran down the road ahead of me. For at least 30 seconds. It kept looking back at me over its shoulder, plainly terrified. (Perhaps I anthropomorphize. Deal with it.) Eventually it figured out how to save itself, and fled to the side. It was weird. You know how generally, you don't have to change your driving if there are birds in the road, 'cuz you know they'll move? And do it quickly? Not so much this time.

Feelin' remarkably good...

I was recently paged to the hospital (I'm on the Utah County Rape Crisis Team, for those who don't know), and it sparked some thoughts. Since they were significantly different from the typical all-men-are-scum and life-is-just-too-horrible thoughts that occupy my mind for a day or so afterward, I thought I'd share. :)

This woman was an emotional wreck. Far more than I generally see–most of the victims I see are in a great deal of shock. But this woman was falling apart. Fortunately, she had two friends there with her. (I always feel extra-sorry for the victims who are at the hospital all alone.) In any case, these friends were amazing. It was wonderful to see them lend her their strength and really go through the process with her. Things like that are altogether too difficult to handle alone, and I don't think Heavenly Father meant us to. These women definitely didn't fit into the stereotypical angel imagery, but I honestly can't think of a better word to describe them and what they did. I felt blessed to be able to witness it.

This got me thinking about the friends in my own life. I generally have a really hard time opening up to people, and I'm one of the worst people I know about asking for help. But I've got a coupla friends I've learned to lean on, and they are likewise angels in my life. They give me strength to get through the times I wouldn't otherwise be able to handle. And I've been of the opinion for some time now that Heavenly Father put these people in my life for that purpose. You know how it's hard to see a beautiful sunset, or the fall colors, and not see God's hand in it? I feel the same way about people who accept the challenge of being somebody else's strength for a while. How cool is it that the love my friends show me reminds me that God loves me, too? Bless them. :)

My roommate is Bill Nye?

If you take the ice tray/bin/thingummy out of the freezer and put it on the kitchen table while you have friends over for dinner, you too can observe science at work! See, at room temperature, ice melts. And when you put it back into the freezer, all that water will re-freeze, fusing the disparate ice cubes into one ginormous lump! If you're lucky, you can stealthily observe while an innocent victim demonstrates more science by trying to get pieces of ice out of this frozen mass. As clearly shown, forces wrought by human hands, no matter the angle, are not strong enough to break the pieces loose from the whole. Chunks of skin are actually likely to break loose first. Finally, should the innocent victim be unwilling to retrieve and use a hammer on the ice mass, the entire thing will have to be dumped out. Needless to say, our victim does not get any ice. Cut, scraped, and bruised fingers, yes. But no ice.

The blasted things are EVERYWHERE!!!

There is a spider in my DVD player. It has crawled into the visual display and now spends its time obscuring the numbers. How did it even get there? More importantly, how am I to get it out?!