Category: Guest Blogs

Yup! You are now twenty hmmm hmm. Wow!

Hope you have a nice birthday and a fun day.

Memories for enjoying… Declaring when you grow up you are going to be an elephant, singing in the bathroom, commentating family basketball games, being first mate on the boat, bleaching/dying your red hair with jello and koolaid packets, you reading scripture after scripture to us at Sunday dinner, always being the favorite of the primary song leader.. so much so you had a debut at 4 years old as the sacrament meeting chorister cause the ward thought it was so cute. Hanging up on me when I called from the school to ask mom if I could play with a friend after school. Fracturing your arm falling off a bar 4 feet from the ground. How’s that start… You are one in a million White Eyebrows!

Sis Continue reading Happy Birthday to You!

I read in the paper about a woman that was driving and saw an average, red, octagonal stop sign with a black spray-painted word written below the word “STOP”. The word was “GRAFFITTI”. She used the example to teach her 10 year old son about the concept of irony. Her article went on to talk about some irony in life.

I think we all experience irony in life. Continue reading Isn’t it Ironic?

“Patience is a virtue”. You’ve heard that phrase before right? So have I. I think I must have been born a very impatient person. Continue reading Patience a virtue?

Once when I was in 9th grade physical science class the vocabulary word “entropy” was introduced to me. As clear as day I can still remember in our text book a photograph of a teenage girl’s room a complete and total mess next to the paragraph explaining the relationship between entropy and work. It explained that entropy is a natural state and the universe has a tendency toward entropy. Continue reading The Entropic Universe

I work with the young women (girls ages 12-18) in my ward.  (church group in our neighborhood)  There are actually only 18 of them which is quite a small group.  They are all beautiful and talented and lots of fun to be around.  I have been doing this work acutally for 5 years now.  I love it.

Lately, though, there has been something that has been driving me nuts about teenagers.  It’s the “EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT ME!”  phase.  I am sure that all teenagers, even boys, go through this to some degree or another.  They are all so paranoid that someone is looking at them all the time.  They can’t stand in front of a group of people with out feeling self conscience, uncomfortable and awkward.  Many of them even forget completely what they were going to say. And hurry to sit down. Or worse…

Once when I was a teenager, about 14 probably, one young man, about my age, got up to give a talk in front of the ward.  Only about 50 people were there.  He got about 2 sentences into his talk and froze.  He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move.  He just stood there looking horrified.  All the sudden, just as the people sitting behind him began to get concerned and began to move to stand up to tell him “It’s okay, we’ll try another time.”  He fell over.  KERPLOP!  Right on the floor in front of everyone.  He was fine.  Just a short faint that he woke right up from. But I remember being amazed at his incredible stage fright.

I guess fear of people and their judgments of us is very common.  And very understandable.  For heaven sakes, even adults get stage fright.  We all may fumble for the right words and feel self conscience in front of a group.  So I guess that’s human nature to want to put your best foot forward.

However, it’s this same group of girls — that would rather eat worms than have someone look at them–  are the exact same girls that are constantly vying for attention over any given matter.  If it’s about boys it’s a competition about who has more boyfriends.  If it’s in FRONT of the boys.  They are all talking over each other to get the boy’s attention.  If it’s about grades, they vie for who made the best grades.  If it’s about friends it’s about who has the most friends, is the most popular, or has the closest friends.  If it’s during a lesson it’s the greatest thing to be chosen to read for the teacher, to stand up and write on the chalkboard, or to be the focus of a game to play.  I am amazed at human nature.  We all want to be noticed, loved, appreciated and special, but yet no one wants to step up, lead out, speak alone, or be focused on.  Why is that?

I originally didn’t intend to turn this political, but ’tis the season.  I guess that is why (and this is unbiased by WhiteEyebrows opinion of him) I like Mitt Romney so much.  He is not afraid to put himself out there and say I am willing to put myself in the public eye, be derided because of my past, present and future.  Be ripped apart because of my religion.  And he’s willing to say I want to be in office for the common good.  Politics is like that. I had someone say to me not long ago that they didn’t want Romney to run or win becasue they were worried about what people will say about the church.  They were worried about having to hear their religion bashed.  I recount with this…

I read in the BYU magazine a couple of months ago  related to this.  It was talking about being politically active.  The article was saying that we shouldn’t be scared to pick someone for office.  Too many people and members of the church take the “official church position”  (including my husband to some degree) to not take a side.  They figure since no one’s perfect and it would just be picking between the “lesser of 2 evils”  then they shouldn’t get behind a candidate at all.  Perhaps, not even vote.  The article pointed out that SOMEONE has to fill the spot. And SOMEONE is going to win the election so we shouldn’t be afraid to be involved and be active in seeking out and even promoting or campaign actively for the best choice.  If we are AFRAID of what people will say about our religion then maybe we don’t know enough about it, or believe it enough. We need to step up, step out of our comfort zone, and ‘let our light shine’ .  We must not be afraid of what others will think or say, as long as we are right with ourselves and our value system we can stand, lead, and be confident.  And stop worrying that everyone is looking at us!

When I was a kid I would read books and some authors would say something like “Andrea found herself standing in the store buying cookies.” When I would read this, I wondered how can you “find yourself” someplace. Weren’t you with yourself all the time?

But that happens to us I think. This week I was sitting at the kitchen table and my husband was sitting on the other side of it. We were having casual conversation. All of the sudden, I felt an in-body experience. Have you ever had one of those? All the sudden, I was aware of my true self being inside this body I inhabit and I felt this wonderment, WHY AM I ME? How did I get here, in this body, at this time, in this life, with these people around me, with these thoughts,feelings, habits, abilities, inadequacies. I felt my real self looking out these windows (eyes) to the outside world and feeling those weird words ring true “I found myself sitting at the kitchen table talking.”

Do we really know who we really are? I feel sometimes I may not know my real true self. I have had reactions or done things before that even surprise myself. Who am I? and why am I me? I wonder….

How was it back in the old days when people didn’t have mirrors? They could see everyone else but they couldn’t see themselves. How did they picture themselves? How did they perceive themselves? I am not talking about being vain or image-conscious, I mean how did people understand themselves when they didn’t have a visual image to associate with their view of self?

Maybe you’ve thought about that in a house of mirrors what is a true accurate reflection? What is truely who you are?

Yesterday I was on the internet browsing for a new swimsuit. (I am trying to lose weight for a trip to Puerto Rico in the spring and was motivating myself by telling myself if I did it I could buy a new swimsuit) My 2 year old (who wanted juice or spaghettios I am sure) came and climbed on my lap and said pointing at the 100-pound-stick-thin- swimsuit-models in string bikinis, “LOOK ITS MOMMY!” I of course had to laugh right out loud. I do not look like that, but she just saw a pretty, grown up woman and thought of mom. She doesn’t know or care about physical perfection. She just knows I am her representation of a real grown up woman. What responsibility I have! To be the standard of a woman to 4 young girls. I know I fall short so much and have been know to say in prayer “bless my children that they may be resiliant to my mistakes.”

People say that they wonder why we are here on this earth. There are many answers and many ways to look at it, but I think this is my current answer to this question….

We are hear to do our best with who we are — cause that’s all we came with and that’ s all we are going to leave with… that person inside.

Angie

Thank you W.E. for letting me be your guest poster… YEAH ME! Today I had to give the visiting teaching lesson. It was on being “of one heart and one mind” with all people. Ironically, we have had more problems living next to someone in the last 2 years than we have ever had before.

Scott and I are both peace loving people. We don’t really want to rifle any feathers. We just want people to get along. Unfortunately in our married life, we have had bad luck with neighbors. I won’t go into very many details, but we just haven’t had really nice, normal neighbors. Two years ago the people the owned the empty lot next to us, finally decided to build a house and move here. We were glad to be rid of the weeds. So we were excited. Boy was that a mistake.

Our neighbors are the kind that love to be in your business. They love to ask you about ever little thing that you do. They love to ask every day for a month. They love to borrow things, things that you may or may not ever see again. We have had to stop them from taking part of our yard and landscaping it into their yard, had to keep track of what we loaned them and had to stop them from putting plain gas into gas/oil mix yard machines. Overall it’s been a normal neighbor relationship. A little nosy, but fairly normal.

Until we decided to build a shed in our yard. They have whined and complained about every single thing we have done with it. The location, the height, everything. Then later I found out that they were telling everyone in the neighborhood how they hated the fence we had installed and the color and everything. I just told everyone that approached me about it, that if they had paid one dime for the fence then I might actually care what they think. We have worked with the city on the construction. We have worked with the utility companies on the construction and it’s all this mess that shouldn’t even exist. It was been very frustrating to try to work with them. It has been hard when we have really tried to be neighborly. We made sure that we talked to them before, during and after the construction and have tried to compromise and help. We paid our contractor $300 to move the shed to see if we would be okay with having the shed in another place on our lot (It was horrible so we moved it back yesterday– which of course started the arguement all over again) I have worried and stewed. I have tried to think of ways to make them happy. We have bent over backwards trying to please them and they are just mad at us because we won’t just yield and do it their way.

Other neighbors around don’t mind our shed at all . They thought it was very wierd when we asked them if it was okay with them that we have it there.

As we have worked with these neighbors more and more we have realized that they are very different in many ways. Very extreme political views. Very extreme social views. Even though they are very active members, have extreme religious views. I have always believed to each his own. I don’t mind if they have some very different views. But I am starting to wonder, how do I be “of one heart and one mind” with people like this?

I want to get along with everyone but how do you get along with those that aren’t cooperating?