Stiiiiiiiill don't get it

We talked about the House of Israel in sunday school today. Not much about that topic has ever made much sense to me. Take for example the following simplified version of a dialogue found in most any Israel discussion:

Teacher: Who are the House of Israel?
Class: We are!
Teacher: Right! And what's a Gentile?
Class: Somebody who's not of the House of Israel!
Teacher: Right! And who are the Gentiles?
Class: We are!
Teacher: Right!

That discussion went about the same way in Sweden as it did in America. I'm curious how it would go in other areas of the world. In the meantime, my patriarchal blessing, indeed the very nature of patriarchal blessings tells me that I'm of Israel. The Book of Mormon tells me I'm a Gentile.

What the heck.

BZZT!

I've got this memory from when I was probably 5 or 6 years old, living in Colorado. I was out in the front yard. Storm. I'd say I was around ten feet away from that tree we had, and what do you know, a bolt of lightning comes down just a few feet away from me. I conclude that it would be best for me to not be there, and I run back into the house as fast as my little feet can get me there.

In recent years, I've looked back on that memory, and at one point was struck by the thought: shouldn't I be dead if that happened? Maybe I'd dreamed the whole thing, or remembered wrong, or just been imaginating. I mean, it was a long time ago. Another memory from around then involves some balloons floating off in one direction, while my sister swears that in reality they flew the opposite direction.

So today after my weather class in which we were discussing lightning, I ran the story by my professor to see what he thought. He said it was entirely possible, albeit very lucky. He seemed to think that the lightning hit the tree instead of the ground, and I remember it hitting the ground, but so what, I still say I got a professional confirmation. And it's really nice to have that somewhat settled.

Major... so close!

I was leaning a lot towards geology. Not decidedly so, but noteworthily so. I sign up for classes accordingly. Then after Environmental Biology the other day, I went up to ask the teacher a question, and then he asked if I'd decided on a major. I admit that I had not, and had meant to talk with him about an EnviroScience major all semester. He says he's got time right then, I say I do to, so we go tour the facilities and talk for a good hour. Now I'm torn again. Do I want to do geology and know what's in the earth, or environment and know what's on the earth? Then there's the factor of them both having relevant emphases, so it's sort of an issue of knowing both, but which should I know better.

The kicker is while they share a number of classes, they both require my taking an introductory class next semester, or find myself here for an extra year, just because of the way the classes are scheduled for certain terms and left out of others. Either way I have to take calculus, so that's four credits. The intro courses are both four credits, so that brings me to 8. If I do enviro, I have to take chemistry right away, and I have to do it for geology eventually, that's another 4 credits, so we're up to twelve before we even get to religion and guitar. If I'm taking three 4-credit classes, I'd like to know I'm taking the right ones, dang it!

And that's the way the cookie is crumbling right now. Updates as the story develops.

Sublime. Not just a band.

Yesterday I went to the clubhouse (that's what they call the central hang-out office gathering place building here) to play the piano. Hadn't played for a few weeks, and I was really in the mood. So I played for a while, got my fingers moving, had a good time. After about half an hour I turned the lights off and kept playing. There's got to be some sort of learning benefit to that, I figure. So I play everything I can play by memory. After a while I hear the door open and a girl comes in and lays down on one of the couches and tells me to keep playing. So I do. I play, we talk a little, I play some more, it was a grand time, ended up being probably 40 minutes, just sitting and playing and talking quietly in the dark. At 7 o'clock more people came and turned on the lights and we had family home evening and went ice-skating.

Later that night I lay in bed, musing on the singularity of the scene. 40 minutes, serenading a girl in the dark, without any idea of who that girl is. I still don't know who it was, or if she knew who I was. Talk about sublime.

He's a what? He's a what? He's a:

Music Man! It's just wrapping up at a theater around here, and I'd been meaning to go see it. Finally did. It was real good.

The funny thing about it is as follows. There's this girl I knew from my Euphony days that lives in this same apartment complex. We ran into each other two wednesdays ago, and decided we needed to go out and have a little fun sometime. Ran into each other the day thereafter, and she asked when I was going to ask her out. I shrugged. Hadn't really planned it out yet, you know? So on Friday she calls and says she's free and so I may ask her out that evening. Well gee, I guess tonight's the night! So we go see Music Man, and it was super swell. As for her, swell girl and I like hangin' out with her, and admittedly I kinda had a thing for her a while back, but that faded away and let's face it, the last thing I need is another Euphony girl episode. Whether or not she's inferring something I can't say for sure, but the point is, that's the second time a girl has made me ask her out, and both times it was a girl I'd been interested in before but wasn't anymore. Dang timing.

On a side note, the scene from the play where Marian kisses Charlie the anvil salesman until the train whisttle blows, you know the one? Well, she kissed him, and she kissed him some more, and she kept kissing him, finally she gave up and said her next line and a second later the train whistle finally blew. I had to laugh at the image of the actor who plays Charlie slipping five bucks to the sound guy to hold off on the whistle.

My day in sales

I was cruising around the internet, minding my own business, when suddenly my trainer's wife mentions that her mom is looking for people to work a flexible schedule for $13/hour. One of my favorite things in the world is making $13/hour, so after some discussion and and pondering and a few days, I make the phone call and sign up.

The deal is this fella Eric Dowdle is an artist, and he's got his art showing at Costco's around Utah this fall, and he needs people to watch and run the display and answer questions and explain why no home is complete without a piece of Dowdle Folk Art in the parlor. I hoped I'd be mostly a theft deterrent, but oh well. My first station was to be Murray (gas was reimbursed) so I drove forever, learned what I was doing, worked for a few hours, drove home. It wasn't super painful for a salesman gig, but it was still a salesman gig, so I was a little down by the time I got home.

It behooveth me at this point that I explain a main motivator in going for the job in the first place. You may but probably don't recall from one of those tags a while back that I listed six or eight things that I wanted/needed or something like that. At the top of the list was DMC-TZ5. It's a camera. It's about $370 at most stores. Ouch, right? So I figure if I take this job I can earn that much money, buy the camera and be no worse off financially than I would have been without the job, and see if I wanted to keep working. I really planned to earn the money and then pay cash for the camera, but after that first evening I needed a morale booster, so I went ahead and searched online and got the camera brand new for $200. Whoo-hoo!

Went back to work the next evening, and really things were going okay. The art was cool, so at least it was a product I believed in, and ya know, I just like being in Costco. I don't know why, but I do. Not too bad a gig all things considered. But then I started considering all the time I was investing. It came out to 13 hours in two days, which two days I really really needed to get a lot of stuff done and couldn't. Basically I thought it would work out great but it wasn't going to and I thought it best to cut my losses and drop out before they got used to me. So I finished out the shift enthusiastically (don't want to get paid for nothing, after all) and then called up and quit when I got to my car. She didn't seem too offended, which was a relief, cause I like her, and she's my trainer's wife's mom, which is to say she's the mother of the wife of my mission 'father', which makes me sort of a step-grandson-in-law, so we're practically family, and I'd hate to have family not like me.

So that was my schpiel as a salesman. Now I just gotta make another $100 on top of my normal income to pay for the rest of that camera. No worries, I will. You know how creative and ambitious we college kids are. But hey. That Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 is sweet.