Time? Time? Where does it go?

Let's revisit one of my goals I set for the semester: not overpacking my days. Hmm. What's my typical daily schedule?

4:30 AM- Alarm clock rings.
4:35 AM- Alarm clock rings again (I hit the snooze).
4:40 AM: Alarm clock rings yet again. This time I get up.
5:40 AM: Head out the door to teach early morning seminary.
6:05 AM: One student (sometimes two) is present for the start of class.
6:55 AM: Seminary ends and everyone rushes out the door. Someone generally gets left behind, so I end up joining the high school car pool line.
7:30 AM: Finally get home and change into running clothes.
8:30 AM: Done with running. Time to get ready for work.
10 AM: Suddenly very hungry while sitting in office. Why? Oh yeah-- I've already been up for almost six hours.
12 PM: Wonder where the morning went. How could a meeting with no point to it eat so much time? Realize I have a conference presentation to write, a stack of papers to grade, and a mid-tenure portfolio to compile.
2:30 PM: Hungry again. Who has chocolate? Time to wander the building and see.
4 PM: The minute I intend to get out the door to go home and rake leaves before it gets dark, three students stop by with emergency situations. Happens every time.
4 PM on Wednesday: I'm teaching until 7. Hungry again by 5:30 PM.
6 PM: Hopefully eating dinner.
7 PM: Working on tomorrow's seminary lesson. Also catching up on e-mails and whatever phone calls need to be made.
9:30 PM: Whoa! Where'd my evening go? Time for a shower and getting ready for bed.
10:30 PM (hopefully): Bedtime!

This actually doesn't look all that busy, but it seriously feels like the minute I wake up four hours have suddenly vanished. Don't get me wrong: I love teaching seminary. I'm wondering, though, how I did it and grad. school at the same time. I thought this semester's pace would be slower. Boy, was I wrong!

I think ultimately what matters is that my priorities stay in the right place. I'm coming to terms (well, sort of) with the fact that I will never, ever get everything done that I want to do. What matters is that I pace myself and do first things first.

Good night!

Any costume ideas for these hats?

First, let me give some background. A week ago, I was in the creative arts building on campus for a friend's double-bass recital and saw signs for a pre-Halloween costume sale in the costume workshop. I was hoping for the makings of a Renaissance costume. Either lots of other people were as well and got there first, or there weren't any Shakespearean costumes up for purchase. Instead, I bought three hats for a quarter each.

Let me also apologize for the lousy facial expressions. I couldn't figure out the timer feature on my camera, so I was just trying to get pictures from arm's reach.

So here's the game: what costume would you suggest for each of the following hats?

First, the hat I have unofficially named the "itty bitty hat":




Next, a hat that looks much better than the photo suggests. It's lavender and the veil extends all the way down if you let it:

Finally, my favorite (although you'd never know by the facial expression)-- I have named it "pansy fantasy":

Okay, send the suggestions!! Maybe I'll use one next Halloween!

Sushi Night!!

I've been wanting to put together a Relief Society cooking group for months. A week ago we finally did it. Yay for sushi rolling in my dining room! Look how much fun people had:



One person knew what she was doing. The rest of us just played around with seaweed, sushi rice, veggies, and bamboo roll-up thingies. We mostly stuck to California rolls so that we didn't have to risk some kind of weird food poisoning due to poor seafood handling. A few brave souls put smoked salmon or fake crab meat in their rolls, but mostly we did avocado, cucumber, and Daikon radish. The wasabi peanuts Jen brought weren't a hit with everyone. Some of us got a little addicted, though . . .

Don't these look pretty?

Look, a rare appearnce of ME on my own blog! My sushi rolls kept coming out square for some reason, but they still tasted good. The beautiful thing about sushi night: sushi's not so scary to make after all, and it's fun to cook with lots of people.

Next month: homemade pasta. Come learn with us!

Inefficiency Ramblings

First, check out this video: www.wimp.com/inefficientdrinker/

Once you've done that, the rest of this entry will make sense.

[Insert elevator muzak here]

Okay, done? When I first watched this video, I thought, "Man, what a funny/stupid cat! I can't believe it did that!" Then I started thinking some more. Uh oh. You know what happens when I start thinking more? I start drawing connections to my life. Yup.

So here's what I started asking myself: When do I do things in my life like the cat in this video? In other words, when do I get so bull-headedly sure that MY way is the best/smartest/most efficient way that I can't see that maybe my way ISN'T best?

Thinking, thinking.

Okay, pretty much all the time. Maybe not ALL the time. A lot of the time, though. I see a goal ahead, something I want, and think, "Okay, here's how I get there. Easy." In the process of getting there, I don't always choose the best way to reach the goal, though.

Example: Friday night was our ward autumn party/hayride at a farm about four miles out of town. The party started at 5:30. I had steel drum lessons until 6:45. I called a friend who was at said party to make sure it was still happening. Oh yeah, come on over. I'd forgotten, though, about the fact that it had been raining all day and that the road to the farm was unpaved. And narrow. And it was getting dark. The road ended up being washed out in places, full of puddles, and harder to navigate than usual. That combined with it essentially being a one-lane road presented problems. I should have just turned around at the first turn-out and gone home. But no, I bulled ahead, sure that despite the sudden return of a downpour, the party would still be happening. I ended up just blocking the way for lots of people trying to get home. And being cranky that I drove out there and everyone was leaving by the time I arrived. Plus getting lost on the way home. I was so focused on "I'm going to the party" that I ignored all the details that suggested going to the party wasn't such a good idea.

Not that the above event was a huge tragedy or anything, but it reminded me that I so often insist on MY way and MY schedule that I'm like the cat in the video, getting drenched and laying back my ears in discomfort while I keep sticking my head right under the faucet. I need to learn to wait a bit. I need to open myself up to alternative routes that might work better.

We Are the Knights Who Say Ni!!

Things I learned at the Renaissance Fair:

Two-year-olds wouldn't have been very good at defending the castle.

Attending the Fair in costume is a lot more fun. I need to make my own costume for next year. The ones they sell there are WAAAYY too expensive. (See? This is why you should learn to sew. You never know when you'll need a Renaissance outfit.)

History gets sanitized for the sake of pageantry. When they announced Henry VIII's royal court, they didn't say which wife this was. How many had already been beheaded by this point, huh, huh?

In staged jousts, the better horseman always plays the role of the bad guy. Here he is: the Italian champion who insisted on a joust to the death (which we didn't get to see because we had to go home). I guess I also learned that I gravitate towards the bad guy. Hmm.

The Renaissance Fair was a lot of fun. I also learned that a lot of people really have no concept of what Renaissance clothing looks like. I went to the fair on "Talk Like A Pirate Day," and there were TONS of pirates in the crowd. (I guess Sir Francis Bacon was kind of a pirate . . .) Really, this was kind of like a Trekkie convention except with older-looking clothing styles. It was an excuse for people to dress in costume. Lots of fairy wings for sale, along with elf ears and horns (hmm . . . what would Shakespeare have done with that?). I wanted to start quoting insults from Monty Python as I watched the joust, but I refrained.

Next year: Sheila goes in costume. There might be a blog entry or two about the making of the costume this coming summer . . .

And now for something completely different

C'mon, who got the Monty Python reference? (Tracy . . .?)

Friday late afternoon I had my first steel drum class! Yay! I've wanted to learn to play steel drums for years. Okay, maybe not as long as the lady in class who said she first wanted to learn steel drums after watching an episode of Sesame Street in the 70's. But a long time. I walked in the orchestra room, saw the drums set up, and thought, "Yes! Time to live the dream!"

There are 8 students: me, a mom and her son and daughter (who look to be ten and twelve or so), a high school viola player, a woman who's maybe in her 50's, a woman who's in her 60's, and a boy who's 8 or so. The teacher (I've already forgotten his name-- whoops) explained the different kinds of drums and then assigned us to what we'd play for the evening.

Steel drums are set up kind of like an orchestra. The lead drums are the little ones that people think of most when they hear steel drums played, and they play the melody. They're like the violins. Doubles are, well, double the size of leads, and one person plays two drums (as opposed to one person playing only one drum). The viola player and I played doubles. Our job was to play chords to go with the melody the lead drums played. Next biggest are the triples, which are 3/4 the size of a full drum (oil drum, that is, which is what steel drums are). They're kind of like the cellos in an orchestra. The mom and her son played the triples (they each played two drums at once). The woman in her 60's got to play the bass drums-- all six of them. She got the biggest mallets and the coolest rhythms. I hope we get to trade off once in a while so we get to play all the drum types.

Problem: The bass drums are almost the same height as me. I may never get to play them. Boo!

The teacher said he's never going to give us actual written out music to play. He clearly knows music, but he said the point of this class is to have fun, not to focus on learning to read music (several class members don't have much musical background). He taught us to play a scale and a couple of arpeggios, and then he taught us a song based on a C-scale progression and some rhythms.

Good thing the drums have the notes labeled so you hit the right note at the right time.
Good thing we played slowly.
Good thing I can memorize patterns quickly.

See, the way you get notes on a steel drum is that there are little dings hammered out in different spots. There are two octaves (almost three) on each drum or set of drums. The notes aren't next to each other, though, like on a piano keyboard. They're kind of all over the place. Octaves are near each other, but I can't figure out the rest of the pattern. I'm just memorizing where to hit the drum to get the notes I want.

Other things I learned:
Don't hit the drum too hard or you get a "bark" rather than a ringing tone.
You have to figure out the best spot (the teacher called it "finding the sweet spot") to hit to get the note you want.
Keep your thumbs on top of the mallets and your wrists loose.
Keep your elbows in (kind of sounds like using a portkey).
If you miss a note, just come back in at the right spot and nobody will know you messed up (except the teacher).
Not everybody has a sense of rhythm.

I like how the teacher would sort of chant out the rhythm he wanted us to play. He had a cowbell that he would hit with a mallet to give us the general rhythm, but he would also say it to try to get us to feel it. Several people had a hard time pushing the beat (does no one sing or play jazz anymore?). Our teacher is very patient and he laughs a lot.

Friday afternoons are going to be FUN!!

Remembrance of things past

Yesterday when I was checking Facebook updates of friends, one friend had suggested that everyone post a little blurb of what they were doing on September 11, 2001 when the planes hit the World Trade Center. I posted a little blurb, but I thought my blog would be a better space to say more.

We were maybe three weeks into my first semester of grad. school at The University of Iowa. I had just finished teaching a 7:30 AM freshman rhetoric class. I was sitting in the grad. student lab in the basement of the English Philosophy Building, finishing up a peer response sheet for the next day's peer review session on the first paper of the semester.

In walked a fellow graduate student. She looked terrible, and I asked what was wrong.

"Do you have any idea what just happened?"

Everything just sort of stopped. No more clicking of computer keys or anything. All of us in the room had been in class for the past hour, so no, we had no idea what just happened. When the newly arrived graduate student told us, we rushed into the reading center down the hall, where there was a television, to find out more. About 15 people, clustered around a TV screen, watched the second tower fall.

Good thing I was done teaching for the day and could go home. Everything felt surreal. I remember taking a walk through my Coralville neighborhood and wondering if the world was turning crazy. I didn't really know many people yet, although I did call my sister-in-law, who traveled a lot, to make sure she was okay and not stranded in an airport. I thought about all the missionaries who were in airports all over the country, trying to get to their mission fields (or come home).

That night I went to the Institute building for a choir practice. I was almost out of gas, so I stopped by the station near my house to fill up. What was with the big line of cars?

I woke up the morning of September 12th at 5:30 AM and thought, "Man, I hate getting up this early!" Then I remembered how many people would never be getting up for work or school again. Note to self: don't complain about daily schedule ever again. In my evening graduate class, we didn't talk about whatever was scheduled on the syllabus. One of my fellow grad. students had a cousin who was missing somewhere in Manhattan. We sat around a conference table and talked through possible explanations and tried to give her hope. (The cousin was eventually found in a hospital, knocked into a coma after being trampled on. I'm not sure if she ever came out of the coma.)

Friday afternoon, September 14th, I drove to Ames to visit a friend. We were still in shock. She turned on Duran Duran's greatest hits and we had a dance party with her kids in the living room. We needed to know we could still laugh.

I had to speak in Sacrament Meeting the Sunday after September 11th. I'd hoped I'd get out of it. I was sure the bishop would want to speak instead of me. When the second counselor in the bishopric called, I thought, "Yes! Here's my out!" Instead, he said, "We still want you to speak Sunday. Please make sure it's especially inspirational for the congregation." Gulp. So much for "Hi, I'm new in the ward and here's where I'm from and why I'm here." Somehow that didn't fit this setting. I don't remember what I talked about, but I remember it was hard to do.

Today, eight years and one day later, I spent the day at the Washington DC temple. I can't think of a safer place on earth. Lots has happened in the world in eight years, and our world still isn't a safe place. But WE can be safe individually and in our families. We can make sure our homes are holy places, places where the Spirit resides and keeps us safe. We can serve in the temple. We can live so that we always have the Spirit guiding us so that we're where we need to be at any given time. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is our only true peace.