Post #100. . . Woohoo!

~ Highlight of the Day: Paying 10 shekels to drive home from the Israeli Museum instead of walking ~
(best idea yet)

Guys. This is post #100. How crazy is that?! And it's going to be a pretty good one.

On Saturday President Monson announced that they are lowering the minimum age for missionaries to 18 years old for young men, and 19 years old for young women. The reaction in the auditorium where I was watching it (with all the other JC students) was crazy. It's definitely been some serious food for thought for the last day or so!

First of all, it's not going to influence if/when I serve a *mission. I'm going to be 21 this January anyway, and I'd already decided I wasn't going till the end of the summer if I did end up going. So my excitement stems from the amazing opportunities that have now opened up for so many of the people around me.

That being said, , if I do go I'll be going with people who are younger than me (not bad, just different), I'll be in the MTC (Missionary Training Center) for a shorter time, and the social scene at BYU is going to change drastically. 

*a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints includes dedicating 18-24 months to service and spreading the gospel. Young men go for 2 years, young women go for 1&1/2. We send our papers in to Church headquarters and are then assigned a mission based on Divine revelation and the specific needs of the Church. It could be in the United States, it could be out of the country. It could be English Speaking, it could be Foreign Speaking. The minimum age was previously 19 for men and 21 for women, so this change is very exciting to people who've been waiting and counting down the days till they can turn their papers in. . .
 

Anyway, cool stuff. Church history in the making :) 

How about pictures: 

 

 Outside Hezekiah's tunnel, in the water :)
 

 

 On the steps of the pool where the blind man in John chapter 9 washed the clay from his eyes
 

 

 My first bite of Guava. I ate the whole thing and still couldn't decide if I liked it. . .
 

 

 This is some tall grass (like taller-than-the-ceiling-tall) that I'm going to identify someday
 

 

 Temple Mount, cool arches.
 

 

 Awesome sundial on the cool arches
 

 

 Dome of the Rock

Aaaand us in front of the Dome of the Rock
 

 

 Coin from some Disney original movie I saw ages ago. It grants this kid some wish that changes everything and then he has to spend the rest of the movie finding the coin again and wishing it all back.Can't tell you what it was called. . . just that this coin was in it!
 

 

 The road to Jericho from Jerusalem. We walked along the top of a ridge above it
since we didn't have time to go down to the bottom, though that would have been awesome :)
 

 

 A TON of cats. They're everywhere, all the time. Some look friendly and adorable,
others could probably give you a myriad of diseases just by looking at you.
Unfortunately they all have flees, and cannot be touched safely.
 

 

 The t-shirt design (in it's early stages) that may or may not used for
our Fall 2012 Jerusalem Center shirt. . .
 

 

 a beautifully 'turtled' backpack :)
 

 

And for those of you who've never heard of turtling (or burrito-ing, as my roommate called it), you simply take everything out of the backpack, turn it inside out, put everything back in, and zip it up! It's great because it's harmless (mostly), way inconvenient, and super noticeable :)
 

 

How's that for a random order of things and events! Sorry. . . and happy 100th post! 

General Conference!

~ Highlight of the Day: Exploring the Tomb of the Prophets via candlelight ~

 

Well, it's General Conference weekend, and I am watching it live! We're watching it from 6pm-8pm, and from 10pm-Midnight. It's going to be awesome.

 

Today was good. I slept in till 7:50am, got to breakfast with time to spare (Saturday is the worst day to miss breakfast because they don't serve lunch, they serve an early dinner, so you're stuck without food till 4pm), walked through the Orson Hyde Gardens, past the Garden of Gethsemane, and checked out the Tomb of the Prophets. It was pretty cool. We met people from China, Finland, and Germany.

And now I get to end the day with *General Conference!

*General Conference is the biennial church-wide conference we hold in order to hear the words of the Lord as given to us through our prophet, Thomas S. Monson, and the twelve apostles. They are the best two weekends of the year, and if you're curious as to what we talk about you can find the most current one here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Busy Day

~ Highlight of the Day: Discovering that ginkgos make beautiful carving wood ~

Today I did a lot.

I went to my first All Staff meeting.

I explained Temples* and General Conference*.

I watered a bajillion salvia while wearing awesome sunglasses.

I learned how to recognize the mosaic virus in cannas

I got chocolate milk at a local dairy

(it was 5 minutes away,

it took us 40. )

I sent important emails.

I swept our nasty floor, and lots of spiders.

I ate dinner with 5 British, 1 Japanese, 1 Korean, and 1 American.

I taught someone to play three chords on the ukulele

(I bet you can't guess which ones :)

I did the dishes.

I asked "how do you play Cricket?"

I tried to understand Cricket. . . I'm not sure I do yet. . .

I stayed up way too late, and then decided I wanted to still post something.

*Temple: LDS building dedicated as a House of the Lord, has the Angel Moroni on top.

*General Conference: Big church wide meeting held every six months in which the Prophet, Apostles, and other leaders of the Church speak. In other words, my two favorite weekends of the whole year!

So. . . Tired. . .

~Highlight of the Day: Successfully making a lovely angelfood cake, and successfully not consuming a single drop while doing it! ~

So I've always been somewhat of an avid journaler. I got my first journal for my 8th birthday, along with a selection of gel pens, and would write/draw all sorts of great stuff. I remember writing about a boy in my 2nd grade class that I thought was funny, and that President Clinton went on a date with a woman who was not his wife (that's as much of that story as my young brain could understand. . . or that my teacher would tell me), and I drew pictures of my sister being annoying, and of horses, and almost every thing else.

In middle school I wrote all about my boy troubles (soooo fun to read now :) and homework. When I got to high school my sleeping habits really declined, but I still managed to keep a somewhat regular journal ( I think I really enjoyed writing about myself. . . still do actually. . . ), and I would often write in it right before going to sleep. As you can imagine this quite often resulted in me waking up around 2 or 3 with my lamp still on and a lovely pool of drool on the journal page. More often than not I would be writing, and then have to give up because I could no longer form coherent sentences and my handwriting became illegible. Several times you can see exactly where I shut down, because halfway through a sentence the letters get tiny, and then become scribbles, and then just stop.

Now, in the great golden age of blogging, I am still dealing with the same issues. Unfortuately the deteriorating handwriting does not express itself, but oh boy do the sentences become interesting! If I begin my post after midnight there is no hope. I usually end up waking up and editing my post in the morning.

For example: My last post currently ends like this, "So here's to technology, a sport I've never played, and the moon. :) ", but it originally ended something like this, "So here's to technology and a fledgling industry. " . . .

Fledgling industry? I remember struggling with that last sentence. I zoned out several times before deciding it was long enough and I just needed to end it and sleep in my bed instead of at my desk, but I don't even know where I was going with that. . .

So there, behind the scenes of 'Of Strings and Green Things' with Rachel :)

Also, my camera is having a midlife crisis. So pictures may be not as often ( sad, I know). I did manage to get a picture or two of my angelfood cake though!

I would just like to say that cooking on a Fast Sunday* is just difficult.

*First Sunday of every month in which we pray and go without food for two meals in order to grow closer to our Heavenly Father

Good Times

~Highlight of the Day: Attending a baptism - such a good reminder of the covenants I've made ~

I love Sundays :) I sleep in till 11, eat brunch, go to church for 6 hours (including travel time), then come home and talk with friends and family on the phone till it's time for bed.

So I was thinking earlier today how fast time has been flying, and then I was thinking about all the things I did last summer and had to marvel at the fact that it was a whole year ago. So here's what I did last summer, briefly.

Canada! I left the country for the first time. . . even if it was just a few hours north. Now I'm preparing to live across seas for a whole semester!

I went to Forks. And saw everything there possibly was to see in such a small place. Now I get to tell people I've been to Forks, and explain that, 'yes, it's small. there's not much to see.'

I got baby chicks (so cute!) We don't have Jack (the little black guy)

any more. . . he preferred crowing and strutting to laying eggs :)

I was tanner than my siblings. . . pretty sure I still am - they've all been in

Washington where it's been raining, and I've been in Pennsylvania working on my farmer's tan.

We re-carpeted our family room! Little did I know I'd be sleeping there the next summer after having been officially moved out of my old room . . .

I bought a Moro Blood Orange tree for a friend's b-day. I managed to keep it alive through a winter in Utah. . . then I killed it in the spring.

That was all a year ago. How does the time sneak away like that?

To The Ohio. . . and Back Again

Friday night I left with a group of 60-some young single adults on a bus bound for Kirtland, Ohio. About 15 hours of driving, two hotel breakfasts, three slices of pizza, two chapters of 'O Jerusalem', and one testimony meeting later I was right back where I started! Well, maybe a little more sleep deprived and spiritually fed :)

We first went to the Kirtland Temple:

Did you know the walls used to have more of a blue hue
 to them, the roof was red because of whatever they
dipped the shingles in, and the doors were
 an olive green? It's hard to imagine. . .

Yeah. I wore my neon yellow Gravely shirt :)

The Community of Christ did an excellent job of the tour and history of the place. It was interesting hearing the stories without the usual Latter Day Saint lingo.

After visiting the temple we drove the short distance to the LDS Kirtland visitor center, where the saw mill and the N.K. Whitney store are.

 I remembered most of the tour (led by the wonderful sister missionaries :) from a family trip several years ago (especially the sawmill, cause it's so cool!), but this time they told us the story of Orson Hyde, the man the Whitney's employed to watch the merchandise (their upstairs storage was worth something crazy, I forget how much). He had thumbed through the Book of Mormon, read some verses, and declared it a fraud. For the next year or so he preached against it, until one day he felt a 'prick in [his] heart'. So he actually read it, found it to be true, and was baptized.

This is where Orson Hyde slept with the inventory
 on the second level of the N.K. Whitney Store

Here's the cool thing - He was then called on a mission to the city of Jerusalem. His companion gave up and turned back before they even got out of the United States, but he continued on and served for three years as the only missionary (as far as I know) the church has ever had in Jerusalem. There's now a garden there named after him, and when I'm there in the fall, you will see pictures of it :)

My ukulele has now been to the beach.

We wrapped up the day with a little Lake Erie, which was great once we found it (we detoured to a ranger station and a water treatment plant first. . . )


I came away from this trip with a deep sense of gratitude for the immense sacrifice the early saints suffered for their faith. If I were asked to sell all I had, my business and/or home, to help pay off a church debt, would I do it without doubt or hesitation? Would I stay stalwart in the face of immense physical trials? Even when those trials take the lives of my loved ones? I am in awe every time I try to contemplate the strength of will and testimony the early saints must have had. We owe so much of what we have today to their perseverance. So 15 hours of bus time, two sack lunches, two really late nights, and one rainy Sunday morning later I have a greater respect for the faith of those who lived my church's history, and a resolution to try a little harder to be a little better :)