Wednesday, April 2, 2008

So long Elder Stiles

Today my family came into town. It is the first day of Chris’s mission. So we dropped him off at the MTC today. It was interesting. It was the first time I have been beyond the front room of the MTC since my mission. We went to the whole orientation meeting and watched ‘Called to Serve’ and then Chris…or now, Elder Stiles went out the back door and we went out the front door. That was it. Now he’s probably exhausted and sleeping in his bed as I write this. He better be because it’s past the bed time that he will soon have for the next 2 years. When I walked through I had a lot of flashback moments. It was interesting. I guess it was the start of one of the most significant parts of my life to this point. I thought back to all the things I learned the troubles I had, the spiritual experiences, so many things. Now Chris is going to go experience all that. But at the same time his experiences will be unique to himself, while at the same time being extremely similar to those of every other missionary. We it’s a strange thing. But he is going to have the best time of his life.
After we left Elder Stiles we saw Uncle Ken outside. He was a bit late, but we talked to him for a while. Actually everyone else talked with him and I got to play with Aubrey and keep her occupied the whole time. That girl started running around and must have covered a full mile! So much energy! She’s just an adorable little girl though. I love it when Melanie and Mathis come down, or I get to go up to Bountiful. I can just play with my little niece and it’s sooo fun. And now to make it better, my nephew lives up here too! Who happens to love his uncles! I certainly don’t have a problem with that.

Festival of Colors

For the final installment of this weekend’s activities I’ll talk about the Festival of colors. And this time there will be pictures! Joy. So there is a Hindu temple in Springfield or American Fork or some town down South of Provo. Every year at the beginning of spring they throw a party at the temple to celebrate the first day of spring. They let people look around the temple and then they sell colored flour. Yes flour that is not white. It comes in the assorted colors of blue, pink, orange, yellow, and red. So when the place is packed and the flour is all sold, they take a witch that they made and light it on fire. I guess that’s supposed to scare away the witches that come by in the spring. Well the minute that they light the witch on fire, everyone grabs those bags of flour and starts throwing the flour everywhere. Up, down, sideways, diagonally, and at your friends. It’s a blast. So within seconds you are covered from head to toe in all these beautiful colors. It’s quite the site. I had the lucky opportunity to be in the line of fire of some random guy running by who landed a big puff of blue in my mouth. That stuff tasted really gross. I was spitting blue spit for 5 minutes, really dark blue as well. It was interesting. It was perhaps the dirtiest show that I’ve ever taken when I got home. All the colors mixed together to make a gross brown color in the shower. It was quite gratifying to become clean though.

 
 
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Ward Talent Show

This last weekend was a busy weekend. I already mentioned the Frisbee scrimmage that we had. There were some other amazing events as well. Friday night was the talent show. It turned out to be a hit. We had about 20 numbers and they all were pretty cool, everything from people balancing books on their heads to a dude singing Brittany Spears ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’. I got to be the “tech guy” for the night too. I just took care of all the sound bytes that people needed and everything else of that manner. It didn’t go completely without problem but it all worked out. I also had two numbers that I was involved in. One was planned well in advanced. I played a song that I wrote called ‘No More Salsa’. It’s got a story behind it actually and I shared the story before I played the song. So I’ll share the story here.
It was a warm summer night in late August. Conditions were perfect and excitement was in the air. This night was to be a night of a legendary first date. The activities were superb and both parties got along with each other great. (Switch to 1st person). We made homemade salsa to start the date of. Straight from fresh tomatoes, onions, green onion, cilantro, and other secret ingredients that are only secret due to my lack of memory. So we made this salsa and it was a bowl of celestial goodness. Let me tell you. We were both in heaven and the best part was that there was leftover salsa. So we had some other plans that night, like horseshoes, and some Brian Reagan greatness. And my plan was to send the remaining salsa to her at the end of the date. Well we both forgot about it at the end of the date and I took her home. The next morning I realize my error and figured, well at least it’s a great chance to see this cool girl again and drop the salsa off. So morning made its appearance on Sunday and I popped out of my bed and went to the refrigerator to retrieve that Tupperware of sweet delight and bring it on over to that girl’s house. Well much to my dismay, upon opening the refrigerator, I discovered that there was no more salsa left. How could this have happened?! Did some little brother discover the addicting substance and devour it in a frantic frenzy? I hadn’t a clue, and my family was all gone to stake conference, so the mystery would remained unsolved for at least another 3 hours! What could I do?! So I went over to the piano to vent my frustrations about the loss of the tasty food and a perfectly good excuse to visit a cute girl. I started to pound minor chords and the result was this song, which has been appropriately named, ‘No More Salsa’.
Nice story eh? So I played the song and people seemed to like it. Or at least that’s what they told me. They probably felt bad for me after hearing about such a tragic event in my life.
Now I said I was in two numbers. The second number was even more fun. Here’s how it went down. On Wednesday morning I got a text from my friend Caitlin asking me if I had the music for ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’. Well I didn’t but I logged onto music-notes.com and bought it right then and told her that I did. The wonders of the internet are wonderful! So she said that she wanted to do it for the talent show. Later on that day I ran into her roommate who it turns out was the mastermind behind this plan. She also had plans to get other people to act it out. So Thursday night came and Caitlin came over so that we could run the song through a few times. It turns out that this song is a whole lot of fun to play. We had Tricia and Emily singing harmony and John playing the devil with Neal as Johnny. So we got to have quite the shin-dig for the last number in the talent show. Caitlin and I decided that we had the coolest parts of everyone. We just got to rock out the whole time. It was basically awesome.

Frisbee Shenanigans

So I’m a little behind and I’ve decided that in playing catch up I’m going to try to do many smaller posts instead of one larger post. Maybe that will work out. I’ll start with Frisbee golf. Basically that is one fun game. Well at least the way we play it. It turns out that the guys on my Frisbee team have a course that they have set up on campus. They have 18 land marks on campus that everyone has memorized and we go all around campus to hit these land marks with a Frisbee from a starting point. Every hole has a par and everything. We use some old junky discs because we wouldn’t want to ruin our nice ones by sliding them across the street. Well it turns out that I am not all that great at Frisbee golf. I’ve never been much of a long distance thrower when it comes to Frisbee. In fact I’m not all that great of a handler at any distance. But I’ve improved my short game a lot over the last few months. And my long game has gotten better too. However; I still have a lot of room for improvement. I was about 20 strokes worse than everyone else on the team. But that’s ok. I’m getting better, and I have other strengths in the game as well. Well… the Ultimate Frisbee game that is. Not really Frisbee golf. I’m all around bad there.
A little news from the Ultimate Frisbee team: BYU-Idaho came down last weekend and we we’re able to have a scrimmage game with them on Saturday morning. It turned out to be a lot of fun. And yes, we did win. A lot of the guys who came down were the guys who I played with a few months ago in the Vegas tournament. This time I was playing against them. It was fun to see the guys again. Even if we didn’t remember each other’s names right away.