I Can Too Dunk!

My mom has told me a story about when I was in nursery. This is the 18 mo - 3 year group for children at my church, for those of you unfamiliar with this term in relation to people. I don't remember all of the details, but the story basically involved me teaching all of the other kids how to dunk the graham crackers they gave us as a mid-church snack into the little cups of water and then eating them soggy. I'm not sure where I learned that particular trick, but I still really enjoy dunking things. But not basketballs. I would probably really enjoy that trick if gravity didn't have it in for me like it does, but alas... I see no dunking of basketballs in my future.

I've spoken with several people that asserted that they have a harsh anti-dunking policy for themselves. Some people are very much against the crumbs, floaties and/or sinkies that are considered inevitable and acceptable occupational hazards for those of us who are habitual dunkers. Some people make a few exceptions. Like for Oreos, but only the name-brand kind, and the like. I like to consider myself a fairly open-minded person, and started to declare myself an equal-opportunity dunker, but realized that I don't like all dunking equally. Indeed, my preferences vary greatly depending on the dunked item and dunking medium in question. I think this means I'm dunkist. Sad.

Anyhoo... I started to ponder all of the things that I have dunked, and decided to make a dunking enjoyment chart. The columns are things that I have been known to dunk, and the rows represent the things I dunk the other things into. The number of hearts represent how much I enjoy that particular dunking combination. I wanted to use little smiley faces, but I don't have photoshop on my 6 yr old laptop so I can't get a higher resolution chart right now. Besides, the little white smiley faces ended up looking like blobs, and the little black faces looked like pumpkins. So little hearts it is!


You might notice some interesting things. Like for instance, that I really enjoy dunking saltine crackers into chamomile tea. Strange? Probably. This stems from the 15 months I spent in Argentina as a missionary for the LDS church. Chamomile tea is common there (té de manzanilla). When I first arrived in Argentina, my first missionary companion was an Argentine that didn't eat breakfast. I have always been a big breakfast eater, so I had to fend for myself. I didn't really know Spanish very well back then so it was a struggle for a bit. I found sweetened té de manzanilla and saltine crackers (with or without dulce de leche) to be a satisfactory breakfast. It grew on me, and I enjoy it to this day.

Milk and Hot chocolate (preferably with a little Pero mixed in to cut the sweetness just a bit) are fairly interchangeable with a few exceptions. Milk is superior for bread dunking (especially chocolate milk... Mission influence again. Chocolate milk and fresh bread was my regular dinner for 6 months or so), but hot chocolate is better for ladyfingers and shortbread. Bits of buttered toast should only be dunked in soup, just like french fries should only ever be dunked in a milkshake/frosty. Preferably chocolate. I don't dunk donuts. Even Dunkin' Donuts donuts. Call me crazy, if you must. Just doesn't do it for me.

And despite the original use of water as a dunking medium, it ranks pretty poorly now that my dunking world has expanded to include so many other things. It'll still do in a pinch, but it is not preferred. I have dunked my phone in water, but that was entirely unintentional. And not very tasty. So it didn't make the chart...

My Favorite Picture of Dad...

I absolutely love this picture. It is just so representative of my dad. He sure loved his sheep! I took this picture a few summers ago back in Clint, TX. The grandkids were there and he went and got a baby lamb for them to play with. It was super cute. Yesterday was Dad's birthday, and I've been remembering him and his big heart and gentle spirit.

How to clean your basement

1) Find a cool place to live right next to a huge park.

2) Make sure whoever installed the sprinklers for said park does shoddy work.

3) Move into house that has incorrectly installed sprinkler main for the park right next to basement window well.

4) Lie in bed listening to peaceful sound of rain early one morning. Preferably a Tuesday morning at about 7 AM.

5) Wait... it's not raining! Run down the stairs to discover 6 inches of standing water in your basement.

6) Put shoes on. The window well filling up with water will put enough pressure to break even a double-paned window.

7) Quickly move everything irreplaceable up to your 2nd story bedroom.

8) Keep removing the leaf bits/other debris that keeps clogging the drain. The drain that is stationed at a high spot on the basement floor.

9) Carefully pick up all visible shards of glass and place in unused plastic trash can.

10) Not-so-quickly begin the process of moving everything else upstairs.

11) Take a breakfast break.

12) Feel overwhelmed. Carry one thing around while you pace the basement trying to figure out what to do next.

13) Greet the landlord and his general-contracting/carpet cleaning buddy, Von, as they come survey the damage.

14) Direct the extra hands the landlord brings in to help move stuff around.

15) Move love-sack into upstairs hallway (where you will have to jump over it every time you want to go in or out of your room) to make more room in the living room for boxes.

16) Once basement is empty and the cement has sucked up all the water it can, sweep to get as much debris off of the floor as possible.

17) Watch an episode of Scrubs and eat lunch while Von 'power cleans' the basement with his carpet-cleaning equipment.

18) Begin long process of washing all fabric items that got flooded.

19) Leave carpet-drying fans in basement for 4 days straight.

20) Step back and enjoy how clean your basement is!

Not to drop names or anything but...

So guess who I got to hang out with last night? Brandon Sanderson! He's an up and coming Sci/Fi-Fantasy author who I discovered a few years ago. And it turns out that he lives just around the corner from me. I just got invited to a book club and this month's book was Brandon's first published work, Elantris. I had read it before, and while it doesn't quite grip me the way that his newer trilogy-in-progress (Mistborn) does, it's still a good piece of work. And it's a stand-alone book which is refreshing to me in these days where it seems every writer feels compelled to write books that only come in packs of 3 or herds of many, many more than that.

So we all read the book (and some of us finished it) before book club last night. I have never been a part of a book club before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. There were eight or nine people there total, including Brandon and his wife, Emily. I don't think they are a regular part of the book club, but one of the girls is the VTer of Emily and so decided to pick his book to read, and then somehow he got roped into coming along. It ended up being a lot of fun.

Brandon is a very nice, very down-to-earth kind of a guy that obviously loves what he is doing. He has put a lot of thought into these stories and patiently endured over an hour of questions and comments from our little group. He was very gracious at accepting our criticisms too. Maybe having his wife there kept him on his best behavior, but I get the feeling that it's just because he a decent sort of chap. A big nerd, admittedly, but a good guy all the same.

He explained some of the thoughts and feelings he's had on writing book #12 of Robert Jordan's extensive Wheel of time series. He was chosen by Robert Jordan's widow after his passing to finish off the series. A daunting task, especially knowing the kinds of fans that have followed this series for the last 18 or so years. According to Brandon, people are mostly supportive. There have been a few threats of what people will do to him if he screws it up, but having read the 4 books he has published as well as the copy of "Dragonsteel" that resides in the HBLL, I have confidence that he will do a fantastic job. Maybe not what Robert Jordan himself would have done, but good nonetheless.

The book club should be fun. People were great, and I was the youngest one there! Not that that's a huge thing, but it's kind of nice to be 28 years old and the youngest one in a group setting in Provo. We're reading Robinson Crusoe for next month. Odds of the author being at that one are pretty slim. I'll let you know how it goes in any case.

Think Greek!

Hi. My name is Karen. (hello Karen) And I am a food addict. (clapping)

I seriously love food. And as a way of enabling my habit, I celebrate cultures that celebrate food. Take the Greeks for example. Every year they hold a festival in Salt Lake City that revolves around food. Oh, there are some people that dance way off to one side of the ginormous tent they have set up, and you can take a tour of the Greek Orthodox church (not so common in Utah), but mostly people just come for the food. And some tasty food it is. Mmmmmmm

The end of the food line was outside the ginormous tent and had so many people in it that it reached the end of the tent and then wrapped around for about half the rest of the outside the tent line. Nicole, Sara, Caren, and I wandered around until we realized that yes, this was the food line. We got in the line, wrapped around, finally got in the tent, got to the other side of the tent, went through some crazy switchbacks, and finally got into the cafeteria-style food serving place. We all loaded up our trays with things like Domathes, Fasolakia, Kefthethes, Gyros, and Spanakopites, and Diet Coke. We payed the nice little greek ladies, and made our way close to the little dancing stage way at the other side of the parking lot turned greek madhouse.

We took a seat, admired our food for a bit, and then started to gorge ourselves silly. After the main course we took a little break and watched the dancers. And made some observations of our own. Some of the greek men got really into the dancing. They were stomping and jumping and doing the greek man version of a kick line. The expressions on their faces were all kinds of intense. It was great! The women did their fair share of jumping around, and had some great moves too. You maybe can't tell from the picture but it struck me that traditional greek costumes for women don't seem to include... *ahem*... adequate support. If you know what I mean. If I had been contemplating learning greek dance before, this was enough to dissuade me. Seriously...

After our bellies had rested for a good 15 minutes or so, I went off to get some dessert. I couldn't decide, so I got one of each thing they had at the dessert stand. Don't worry, I did share!

All in all it made for a fun night. It was fun to see Caren again, and I'm glad Nicole is back from her years up north! And it was fun to get to know Sarah a little bit better! I only wish I didn't have to wait another year for it to happen again.

A Quick Trip

Because it's summer, and because we live in beautiful Utah, we decided to go camping about a month or so ago. There was quite a group that we pulled together, and we had decided to go up to Mirror Lake up past Heber. We all work and have school and the like, so we were going to meet at 5:15 to leave at 5:30 so we could drive the hour or two up to the mountains, and then hike to a lake and set up camp before dark.That was the plan.

Unfortunately, things seldom go as planned. Due to peoples' lives being crazy, we left an hour or so late from Provo and we headed up the canyon. We were meeting up with someone a little past Heber, and he was running a little bit late so we decided to go back into Heber to pick up a quick bite to eat. We parked along the main strip next to a variety of fast-food places and split up. Some went to Wendys, some went to Sonic, some went other places. Because this was going to be quick, right? The whole concept of fast food. But no. It took 45 minutes for people to get their food at Wendys, and somewhat less than that for those of us who chose the Sonic option, but regardless, what was supposed to be a quick detour ended up taking an hour.

Well, with spirits still high we collected our extra person, dropped his car off in Kamas, and headed towards our destination. A half-hour later we go under I-80 and realize that we had missed a turn off way back when. The only one in the group that had actually gone up to Mirror lake had gone 6 years earlier and wasn't 100% clear on the directions. So a different car took the map and the lead and headed back.

We found the turn off we had missed and headed up into the mountains. We finally reach the parking lot at the trail head about 11:00 and we load up, take a quick picture and head off.
Ten minutes later: But wait... this doesn't really look like a clear trail. Are we sure we went the right way? Nope. We totally had gone hiking off randomly without a trail. We all backtrack and then re-start the hike. On the right trail this time.

So some people in the group were pretty experienced backpackers, and some of us are decidedly not. But everyone was really good about keeping the group together for the first few hours of hiking. About 2-ish, when we figured we were getting pretty close to where we would be settling down for the night we decided to split up. The 'fast' hikers were going to go ahead and set up the tents and get a fire going, and the 'slow' hikers (and those nice enough to stay with us so we didn't inadvertently wander off a cliff or something) were going to haul our worthless carcasses the rest of the way somehow. Fast forward about 40 minutes. We were sitting down, taking a rest and eating a few well-deserved granola bars and fruit snacks, when all of a sudden a few guys from the 'fast' group come upon us from behind. Without their packs. Somehow they had gotten off of the trail without realizing it, but had run into a nice little lake so had decided to set up camp. After quite awhile they realized that the rest of us hadn't made it there yet, so they sent a few people to investigate. Who found where the trail had turned but they hadn't. So they continue up the real trail and find us. We had hiked about 20 or 30 minutes more than we had to. *sigh*

We hike back, and help finish setting up camp. It's around 2:30 by the time we all settle down around the fire. Some of us busted out the S'mores making goods, and others bust out the tinfoil dinners they had carted in. We all had a good time and don't make it to bed until around 4 in the AM. Wherein we discover that we had miscalculated the tent/people ratio. Four girls ended up sleeping in a 3 person tent. Yikes!

My sleeping bag says it was rated to 30 degrees, but my feet were cold pretty much the entire night, and the ground was really hard. Which explains why I decided to give up on trying to pretend to be asleep around 7 o'clock. I was the first one up and decided to go and wander a bit with my camera. I had a lot of fun with my macro setting and got some really great pictures just as the sun was coming up. After an hour or two I headed back to camp, and joined the others in their breakfast efforts. After which we packed up camp and hiked out. Because we were meeting our ward group to go inner tubing down the Provo River at 3. Where I almost got myself killed... but that's another story for another day!

It was a quick trip, but ended up being a lot of fun! Good times!

Vanity Plate Envy

Even though it's a U of U license plate, I still want one. :)