The Blizzard of 2010

Tuesday morning, campus was buzzing with talk of the blizzard that was to come.  At lunchtime I got an email from BYU about it with a quote from the National Weather Service that said it would be a blizzard much bigger than anything we have seen for several years.  Later in the day, I got 18 text messages, two phone calls, and one voice mail from BYU warning me about the blizzard and informing me that campus would be closed except for essential services, like the basketball games that evening.  We kept waiting for the blizzard to come.  This is what it looked like the next morning:

Last night we did get some real snow.  We got 5 inches here in Provo, and up in Salt Lake over a foot of snow fell.  We had an exciting, snowy drive to the airport and back late last night, but I was sad this morning when it was cleared up and BYU didn't close down.

Yesterday

I was sustained in my new calling, so now I can tell you what it is.  If you guessed compassionate service committee you were right!

Also yesterday I had an NMS moment.  NMS stands for National Merit Scholar, and it is a joke in my family that those who are smart academically often do dumb things.  If you find yourself lacking common sense and doing stupid things sometimes, do not despair.  It just means you are smart.  Anyway, yesterday I got out the rice cooker to cook some rice to go with our meal.   The sauce to go on the rice was on the stove, and I was trying to keep an eye on it while deciding how much rice to make.  I pulled out all the accessories that we keep inside the rice cooker like the paddle and measuring cup, and I poured in one cup of rice.  I measured out the two cups of water and poured it in, and promptly saw two cups of water with rice bits flowing all over the counter top and down onto the floor.  Without thinking, I had taken out the pan of the rice cooker with the other stuff and therefore poured the rice and water directly into the electric heating part of the cooker.  As a result, water and rice have ended up in all parts of the rice cooker and in all parts of the kitchen in general.  As it has dried, we have been able to shake out a lot of the rice, but there are still places where the little rice grains have jammed themselves in.  When the rice cooker dries completely, we'll plug it in to see if it still works.  At least it wasn't plugged in when I poured water into it.

New calling

At tithing settlement last Sunday, the bishop asked how our callings were going.  I informed him that I did not have a calling.  Monday night the executive secretary called to ask if I could come in for an interview Tuesday.  Guess what calling I was extended?  That was fast work by the bishop.

If you are bored and want to continue your life long learning, check out this website.  Apparently, Independent Study offers free courses (not for credit) on all sorts of topics, from religious to temporal to spelling.  Some of them sound pretty interesting.  I can't decide which one I should do first after I finish my for-credit classes: Growing Vegetables, Fruits, and Nuts; The Citizen's Guide to American Politics; or Bowling.  I plan on eventually doing them all, although I don't know how helpful English as a Second Language--Chinese Speakers will be.

Family Addition

On Fridays I have my evolutionary biology lab.  Yesterday in the lab, we studied sexual selection, using betta fish as examples.  The tests involved putting two male betta fish next to each other, each in his own container, but so they could see each other.  They would see each other, flare up, and act aggressive until one backed down and swam away.  Usually the bigger, brighter fish were the winners.  We also put a female between two males to see which male betta the female preferred.  She would swim over by the one she liked and get all excited.  It was a cool experiment, and the coolest part was that since we are the last section to do that lab, we got to take our betta fish home.  Please welcome Achilles to the family.

Just last week we thought about getting a fish, but we decided not to.  Since I inherited one anyway, I had to go buy the poor fish some food and a little tank.  And I also got him the cool little plant, which he got stuck under last night.

If you were wondering about Achilles's success in the lab tests, he did pretty well, but in the end got beaten out by Silver Thunder and Harold.  Now I have to find a place for Achilles to live other than the kitchen counter.

Anne of Green Gables

Since my birthday, Brian and I have been enjoying the Anne of Green Gables movies (yes, Brian enjoyed them too).  I was playing around on the internet, and I found that a fourth Anne movie has come out!  It is called Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning.  I was really excited until I saw the rating and reviews.  Users rated it 1 star with the following comments:

Kevin Sullivan has created a monster that spits on the grave of LM Montgomery!

Anne Shirley is an ORPHAN.  She does not, as this film suggests, make up the story that she is an orphan (Walter Shirley did not indirectly kill his wife in a wagon accident and become a guilt-ridden absentee father). Anne was imaginative, yes, but she was not a liar.


 Killing off Gilbert? Seriously? Making Marilla into a liar who kept things from Anne? Diana had next to zero part of the storyline?  Even apart from those issues, this movie on its own doesn't hold up. Parts of the plot are never developed or explained. The pace is terribly slow.


If I could have given this a zero stars rating, I would have.


 I bar Kevin Sullivan from ever stepping on another movie set. In fact I think they should banish him to Iceland.


The credits were good. It was such a relief to get to the end (even with fast forwarding it went on too long!)


Ouch.  I guess I won't be buying that one.