Clean Kitchen

Well, this is cool. I had to jump ship from IE Mobile to make blogger work, but here I am.

So exciting news. Two nights ago I stayed up till midnight and did something special. I completed all the dishes.

This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds. With temper tantrums every time we even tried to do dishes, it was extremely difficult to do them with kids around. By the time they left, most of our dishes were dirty and had to be washed prior to each use. So the sink hadn't been completely clean for easily 3-4 months. And now it is and has remained so for several days! Bonnie Jean was so happy!

In other news, I was hungrily eyeing a spiced potato stuffed bread, but haven't made it yet. We'd have so much food making that along with other stuff I'd want to invite someone else over to share it. But, I don't know how or who to invite. In a family ward everbody has kids and I couldn't fit them all in my kitchen... And as always Bonnie Jean and I integrate into new wards very slowly. But oh well, my stuffed bread needs to await another day anyways.

Korihor

Of the funny guys in the Book of Mormon, Korihor must be one of the top.  "An angel appeared to me an told me to be a materialist agnostic, and I repeated it so many times I believed myself..."

Wow, great internal integrity and mental agility there.  Too bad he never got around to explaining how his angel fit into his materialist cosmology.  That could have been entertaining.

Sleeping

Between teething, a broken musical toy, and other factors, Uriel hasn't been sleeping so well recently. But for two nights in a row now, with the help of a musical glow worm and giraf he is going to sleep without temper tantrums. This is wonderful for us.

In other news, we are replacing the high chair so there will be no more flying baby boys at the dinner table.

Spinning

I've always liked spinning.  I remember going into the gym after church so I could spin, tracing some polygonal pattern on the floor with my feet as I went round.  I remember being made to stop spinning because I was taking up room in a narrow passage way in an airport or someplace like that and someone was trying to get by.  But there's one kind of spinning I don't like: in a car.

I told someone at work today that it was just like backing into a parking spot, except there were cars coming at me at 50 MPH.

So what happened was we were heading up north for Christmas and it was late because we were taking the 80 MPH speed limit road at 40-50 MPH.  One second I'm listening to Artemis Fowl's the Time Paradox and the next my front end doesn't want to stay in front.  I manage to pull straight again 4-5 times in a row before the car got fed up with me and spun around completely out of control, turned backwards and gently but inexorably backed off the side of the highway.  No damage done, no one hurt.  Just like pulling into a parking space except you normally can get back out of parking spots.  The snow was so deep we were stuck.  I couldn't inch forwards or backwards.  We were just getting on the phone to ask my father in law how one got a tow truck when a plow stopped on the side of the road to ask if we had been helped yet.  We answered no and he called out a tow truck to help us.  We paid $50 for the privilege of being driven approximately 10 miles to the next town.

Tow trucks don't have car seat buckles in them.  Fortunately Uriel seemed to think we were having a great adventure and didn't mind sitting in my lap.

So we got into town at 1 AM.  Happy days for us.  I said more than a few thank you prayers that evening that we didn't get hurt.  Apparently I wasn't the only one with trouble with that section of road.  There was a 18 wheeler peeled off the side of the road not more than a few hundred feet away from where we landed.

Perfect day

Today was wonderful.  With fewer demands on our attention, Bonnie Jean and I were able to simply focus on what we needed for ourselves today.  Been like that the last few days, feels really good.  In case it wasn't explained, Ulysses and Becca left a few days ago, leaving us with Uriel to take care of.  But he's still so young its easy to manage his needs.  Today I focused on getting to do the cooking that Bonnie Jean and I were always wanting to do but couldn't because of resident picky eaters.  So in the morning I made almond naan bread.  To do that I had to make clarified butter, which took two tries cause I burned it the first time around.  The naans work better for my taste broiled for 2 minutes instead of 3, but otherwise they were perfect.  Then we went to church, where the music was beautiful.  I've never heard anyone attempt an organ/piano duet before, but it was marvelous.  Then we got home and I made Fenugreek chicken.  This is only the second or third time I made it, but it still turned out marvelously despite being a little burned because my watch timer somehow stopped itself in my pocket so we let it boil too long.  I joked with Bonnie Jean we'll have to keep this recipe handy since fenugreek is known to stimulate lactation.  Then I made eggnog.  I am missing Ulysses some, but in general I'm just glad to be able to have a normal conversation with Bonnie Jean without interruption.  Most of the time I was cooking, Bonnie Jean was reading to me out of the History of the Church, which we also haven't gotten to do together for a really long time.

To top it off, we found out we actually have been certainly assigned home teachers.  Bonnie Jean and I both have so much difficulty networking that home teachers are really valuable for us to have.  Just wish it hadn't taken 3+ months to get them.


Then, Bonnie Jean went to bed early because she's been tired and I've had time to just spend with myself while doing dishes.  I felt like putting on some music, and something made me want to put on an old EFY CD that I haven't touched in so many years it wasn't even imported into my Itunes.  Brings back... memories...  good, and bad.  Life used to be so much harder.  I can still remember when I ferociously read my scriptures and wrote in my journal every night because that's what I needed to reconnect and process everything, and I still probably wouldn't go a few days without seriously considering and planning how to commit suicide.  EFY helped change a lot of things in my life, including helping me form some friendships that helped change how I saw myself and my relationships.  I don't think I would choose to be somewhere else, I just wish I could have chosen a different path to get here.  So many paths... so much pain and so much I didn't know.  Thinking about it reminds me of in "The Never Ending Story" where Bastian complains of not knowing if he chose the right path and is told by the tree lady that every path that gets you back home is the right one.  That probably won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't read the book, but if you haven't read it its very much worth the time.  In any case, life being like a being a rock in a polisher is very real to me sometimes, every nasty scrape and break somehow helping to make me smooth.  Listening to old music I guess helps me air out some old feelings, sort of reintegrate my past.  Just having the time to do this is extremely nice.  Like I said, this has been a perfect day.

Total Slaughter

So Ulysses had been borrowing our CD collection and found a particular CD that started our with an odd little song.  This was a mix that a friend gifted on us, so there's a variety of stuff we really like and stuff that we'd never listen to on them, but for the most part its pretty good.  This particular song I think was included because its absolutely ridiculous and plays an absurd contrast against the other songs on the album.  In any case, the song repeats several times "total slaughter, total slaughter, lets begin by killing time."  Ulysses decided he liked this song and started singing it and writing its rhymes on little drawing's he made of floating ghost police robots, but it was pretty clear he didn't really know what was meant by the phrase.  So as our final bed time story last night I told him about the Jaredites.  It really made an impression.  This morning before going off to school, he taped a piece of paper to my spot at the table that read: "totel sloter is a sad & bad ting."

I hadn't been lecturing him, just thought I'd explain to him what the song meant and why it wasn't necessarily meaning that it was a good thing, but apparently he really wanted to show me he understood what I said.  I was touched.  Bed time stories are fun that way.  Though, I think this is the first night in about a week that I didn't tell him another story about Ammon.  He really likes the one about the arms.

Jacob 5...

Fascinating how much more participation I can get when I ask for people to act out Jacob 5 rather than just expect them to sit there and read it.  It was kind of fun to watch.