Please stay tuned…

…we are experiencing technical difficulties.

Basically, moving to a new place, a failed logic board, and the local internet service taking a few unexpected extra days to get set up have created a break in posting. I should be back into it properly in a couple or three days, but until then, thanks for your patience.

What do you want from life?

The following is an excerpt from a conversation last evening between Jeanne and our 11-year-old daughter. They’d made a social visit to a woman who Jeanne’s assigned to as a visiting teacher, and she (the woman they visited) shared some cookies she’d just baked with them. On the way home, the conversation apparently turned to goals, and what our child wants to be like when she grows up:

	11-year-old:	Those cookies were really good.
	Jeanne:	Yeah, she bakes really well.
	11-year-old:	One day i want to be just like that.
	Jeanne:	You want to learn how to bake?
	11-year-old:	No. I want to visit teach someone who makes good cookies.

Teaching our children priorities and goal-setting: We’re doing it right.

Advantages of not fitting in

True story from our exile in Utah: Our then-4- and -2-year-old children would often play with groups of similarly-aged children outside, but we’d never have to worry about knowing whether our children had wandered away and gotten lost or not—we’d simply look at the gaggle of children, count to make sure that there were two heads of brown hair amidst all the blondes, and happily continue on.

Seriously, the number of people there who were stunned to find out that children are sometimes born with hair colors other than blond and eye colors other than blue…

Differences

Something i have learned: The most important difference between a ward’s executive secretary and its clerk.

When the ward clerk roams the halls during church, he’s generally trying to get statistical information, and so the leaders of the various organizations run away from him and hide. When the executive secretary roams the halls during church, he’s generally trying to set up interviews with the bishop, and so it’s everyone else that runs away from him and hides.

Falling in love with Uncle Sam

So the recently concluded Fourth of July celebrations led me to wonder why in the world Mormons* have become such a hyperpatriotic people. I mean, this is the country that tried to litigate us out of existence less than a century and a half ago, and that we had to leave to survive less than two centuries ago.

Anybody got any explanations?

* In the United States, at least. I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries.

Triumphant harmonies

I do have to say that i absolutely love the fact that even though the hymnal says to sing the chorus of “Called to Serve” in unison, congregations everywhere i’ve ever heard it sung still sing the line “as a triumph song we sing” in harmony—it sounds way cooler that way.