Deep Thought Fail

 Elannah texted me at work yesterday: "Do you want to make a Costco run just for funsies?"

Absolutely. 

Husband was not interested in taking a long drive into The Big City after an exhausting day of work just to shop at Costco for no particular reason (hello! snagging a carton of Darigold heavy cream is always a reason!), but Joseph wanted to come along, so the three of us hopped into Elannah's car (which has air conditioning; mine doesn't), and I drove us to Costco in the rain (yay! we need rain!). Elannah prefers it when I drive on long trips, and I also prefer to drive on long trips, so that works out pretty well.

While we were there, we found some Kirkland brand baby formula, which my oldest daughter can never get at her Costco, which is in an area of Utah where the babies are exceptionally numerous and hungry. After grabbing two packages of the formula (to her great delight after I called to check with her), we proceeded to add a lot of other items to the cart, not all of which were necessary (the story of a Costco run, amiright?). Well, thirty rolls of toilet paper isn't useless, but a big box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates is a bit unnecessary. But, yum. Ditto the bulgogi-flavored roasted seaweed snacks. And the eggnog (as Joseph assured me, it's never too early in the season for eggnog).

We arrived home a while later, after having waited a very long time for a pepperoni pizza in the Costco cafe, and it wasn't until the dog looked up at me with such a hopeful twinkle in his eye that I remembered we had forgotten to buy dog food. I was done shopping by that point, so Husband did get a chance to make a quick store run after all, bless him, but he only had to go a few blocks.

The Point of the Above Story

If you haven't already noticed, the above is just a little vignette of what happened to me yesterday evening. Nothing stands out about the event except that it was enjoyable because I was with two of my favorite people. There is no moral or lesson there. It's just trivial information. I hadn't really thought it out before I started typing, and the above was the end result. Usually, I would delete it all and start over, though whether I would have made it more meaningful is debatable.

I use this to illustrate what happens to my brain when someone asks me my opinion on deep subjects. No one asks me my opinion on deep subjects anymore, so I'm terribly out of practice with expressing myself when my thoughts on a subject have, until the point of vocal expression, lived in my brain solely as nebulous fragments strung together by visual images that make sense only to me. To cement them into defining words is frustrating and fraught with danger. 

I mentioned in my last post that one of the junior boys visits me daily at the seminary. I've known him since he was a freshman, and he started coming to me for long chats last year. He is a deep thinker, and he is chock full of insightful questions about the gospel, the scriptures, and life in general; and while our conversations are very interesting, they leave me mentally drained because I have to both recall every scripture, book, and talk by prophets and apostles I've ever read and then cement my formerly nebulous thoughts into concrete words. What makes it worse is that he genuinely listens to me and values my insights, which is rare for even the most non-self-absorbed of teenagers. It puts the pressure on.

His habit is to come in right before his seminary class, sneak quietly into my office, and then suddenly say my name so that I yelp in surprise (I never hear him coming. I've begged him to at least cough or something). Then he tosses his backpack on the floor and folds his lanky six-foot frame into one of my office chairs. I say, "Well, hello! How is your day going, and what have you been thinking about?" and he ponders for a minute and then blurts out something both fascinating and tricky, frequently something that I also pondered at length when I was a kid his age. Seeing the danger of getting too involved in a long conversation, I then say, "You've got two minutes, and then I'm kicking you out so you can go to your class," to which he makes a face of disagreement, but starts talking. After two minutes, I say, "Okay, now go to class and come say hi before you leave," but I also have to stand up and pretty much push him out of my office and into his class while he protests, "But I learn so much more when we talk than in class!" to which I say, "But you need to study the scriptures your teacher is talking about today. It's important! The Spirit will teach you something if you go with an open heart," and he finally, reluctantly, goes to class, which is a bit noisy and chaotic for his tastes. He's a classic introvert. 

After school, he shows up again, and this time I have twenty minutes to dedicate to a conversation before it's time to kick all the students out of the building, lock up, and go home to take Gary to work. I've fortified that boundary because, otherwise, he would stay for hours. Even if I know Joseph will take Gary to work, I still claim the need to leave to take Gary to work. I really enjoy our discussions, and I enjoy seeing him gain confidence in his ability to hear the Spirit and the fact the God loves him, but, obviously, there are professional boundaries that need to be maintained. The fact that I won't have much time at work for three months will help maintain that boundary. Today I suggested two other students he should seek out who also like to come talk to me about their thoughts.

The Point of the Above Story(?)

I'm just going to state the obvious: I thought I had a point to make, but it took a left turn somewhere and became just another vignette. At this juncture, I either roll my eyes and delete it all or just go with it. 

I'm just going with it. 

Actually, I think I did make my point that I have a very difficult time cementing my deeper thoughts into words. You'll notice I expressed no clearly delineated deep thoughts, though I'm pretty sure I thought I had some. You, gentle reader, will have to infer what it was I was trying to say (and then let me know).

Math Is Not My Forte

 I made a math mistake. That is not shocking in itself as I am no genius--and certainly not a math genius--but my mistake does have long-term repercussions.

For work, I get a certain number of hours per calendar year, and I cannot go over. For the last two+ years, I haven't had an issue, but yesterday I checked my hours and realized I was in danger of going well over my limit if I didn't do something. Rather than run out of hours and be forced to take off the entire month of December with no pay, I've had to cut down my daily hours to half. With all the no-school days and holidays between now and the end of the year, I should be ok.

I was confused about how I'd managed to get through the last few years with no hours issues when I remembered that for two of those years, Covid played a large part. I was quarantined three times: once because Husband was sick, and twice because I was sick. Quarantines were at least ten days each, and missing those days, plus the fact that I take most of the summer off, got me through the years without going over my hours. This year, I haven't missed a day since summer ended, and for various reasons I won't further bore you with, the craziness of this year has had me working some longer hours. 

The good news is that I get to sleep in starting Monday. Griff decided he would prefer me to be at the building for the last part of the school day rather than first thing in the morning, and I will leave a few minutes before the last bell so I can beat the mad rush from the parking lots. 

The bad news is that I won't have as much time to talk with the students, and I will miss those chats. On the other hand, one of the students, a junior boy, is probably too attached to me, so putting some distance between us will be the best thing for him. He'll be forced to go and seek out some of his peers instead of showing up in my office every day after school and when he has his seminary class. He's a great kid with a lot of brains in his head, and he does just fine socially, so I'm not worried about him. This could be a silver lining for him. 

Meanwhile, my youngest, Gary, ended up with not one but two dates to the other high school's Homecoming dance. 

Gary and Molly, the cutie in the black dress, have been besties since they were seven, and even though Molly has since moved to a nearby town, they still get together frequently to hang out. Molly informed Gary that if she was not asked to her high school's Homecoming dance, he would be taking her. Molly also invited her friend, the girl in the red dress (whom Gary found very attractive); and Molly's older sister, the girl in the back, accompanied them and drove them all to the dance.

Poor Gary with his trousers that aren't quite long enough for his long legs! Those are the suit trousers we bought for him to wear to Sophia's wedding last year, and Gary has grown so much since then that I had to let the hem down as far as it could possibly go, and they were still too short. He's long and lanky, with no fat or muscle on him, poor kid. He is growing so fast that his pants are perpetually too short for him, but he gets longer without getting wider, so finding pants with long enough legs but a narrow enough waist is very difficult.

The next time we buy him a suit, however, it will be much more fashionable.

Gary bought them all dinner (pizza, breadsticks, and hot wings because he has a job but he can't afford four fancy dinners at a restaurant), and they had a good time. I bet he was one of very few boys who showed up with two dates instead of one.

Impossible Dreams

 My brain concocted a brilliant idea in my dream last night: bathroom stalls with digital screens that light up with the name of the person in the stall next to you so you can have a conversation .

Amazing, right? How is using the potty in a public bathroom not the best way to meet new people and make new friends ? 

For some reason, right before I woke up, and as I was walking out of the dream bathroom, I heard Hannibal Lecter say, "Hello, Clarice," and my dream self thought that was hilarious. 

My subconscious is a weird, wild place.

So, it's been a week since I received hormone pellets (mostly testosterone and a little estradiol). I'm trying to be patient, but absolutely nothing has changed. I'm still fatigued and the weight hasn't magically started to drop off. I actually didn't expect the weight to fall off without effort, though it was a lovely little fantasy. What I was really looking forward to was increased energy, and I'm disappointed, to say the least. Obviously, I need to give it time and see what happens as it's only been a week; but if I paid a lot of money for something that didn't work for me (I sound whiny when I say this, but why do these things work for others and never for me?), and if future pellets also bring about no change, I'm going to be so horribly disappointed that I will never, ever see a doctor again. 

Now that I've voiced my little temper tantrum, it's time to go to bed. Good night, dear reader. May your dreams reveal the best and brightest of your hopes and yield the same brilliant bursts of inspiration as mine do.

Mildly Entertaining Stories

Chapter 1

Last week was Homecoming week for the high school. The seminary throws an annual Homecoming BBQ and invites the entire student body and faculty for the event. It takes a lot of planning and it is exhausting to do, but the kids look forward to free lunch outside on the grass with the band playing. 

I visited the grocery store a week in advance to make the order for a thousand hot dogs and buns, bags of chips, and all the other stuff we would need. I spoke to the grocery manager, Ryan, who wrote everything down and promised to get to work on it.

The day before the BBQ, I visited the store again to verify that the order would be filled in case I needed to travel to The Big City to pick up whatever I would be missing. I asked for Ryan, but a manager named Brian arrived to meet me. "Oh, I'm sorry," I said, "I spoke to Ryan last week."

"Ryan is...no longer with us," Brian said, and the way he said it made me a little worried for Ryan. 

"He also didn't leave us any notes about your order," he continued.

Well, crap. Screw Ryan!

Fortunately, Brian was a rockstar and managed to put together our order in under twenty-four hours. The next morning, I drove my big car, The Beast (because it growls when you press the accelerator), and Brian and another kind employee helped me load up thirty-two boxes of hot dogs, ten pallets of buns, seventy bags of chips, cups, condiments, etc. It barely fit into my car, but we Tetrised it all in.

After I delivered the food at the seminary, the guys started cooking hot dogs to be ready when first lunch started. They cooked and cooked and cooked and just couldn't seem to make a dent in the number of hot dogs we had. First lunch came and went and second lunch came and went, and we were urging the students to stuff themselves silly with hot dogs. Take another! Take ten!

After second lunch and cleanup, we stood, exhausted, in the copy room/kitchen and stared at the twenty-eight boxes of hot dogs that we still had. How in the world did we not cook a thousand hot dogs? What were we going to do with the leftovers? Donate them? Freeze them? Where would we store them? 

Then we started doing the math: each box contained thirty-two eight-packs of hot dogs, which meant each box contained two hundred and fifty-six hot dogs. Wait. Given that Brian had given us thirty-two boxes, that meant we had eight thousand hot dogs! Brian had given us a thousand packs of hot dogs, not a thousand hot dogs, but he'd only charged us for a thousand hot dogs! Brian was probably wetting his pants!

I called the store and spoke to Brian. Until we spoke, he hadn't realized his mistake, but when he worked through the math and exclaimed, "I gave you a eight thousand hot dogs!" I heard someone start laughing really hard in the background. He graciously accepted the return of the remaining boxes of hot dogs, which solved our dilemma and his. 

Chapter 2

During the BBQ, one of our students attempted to pull too sharply into a parking spot and scraped up both the side of her car and the bumper of the teacher's minivan next to her (this wasn't the minivan of one of our faculty; we allow high school teachers who work in the portable units next to the seminary to park in the visitors' section of our parking lot). The student was in tears, of course, this being her first accident. The high school's resource officer was called, and he made a police report as the student and the teacher exchanged insurance information.

Today, that teacher was in our building to use the bathroom, and one of our faculty asked her how her minivan repair was coming along. 

Well, she said, the bodyshop had called her husband and told him that they couldn't fix the bumper because of the previous damage to the car. This was mystifying, as the car was only a year old when they bought it from a used car dealer, and Carfax had no record of any insurance claims for accidents for that vehicle. Upon further investigation, the mechanics found that the van had been in a major accident, which had crumpled the floor of the vehicle. Obviously not wanting to report the accident to their insurance, the previous owners had attempted a terrible DIY fix. They'd pounded the floor flat again and then used sealant to reattach it to the frame, not welds! They had also failed to disclose any of this to the dealer who bought the car, and the dealer must not have seen the damage (I'm really hoping the dealer didn't just lie to this teacher). Because of the shoddy fixit job, the frame and the floor were beginning to rust, loosening the already precarious connection, which meant that, in the event of even a minor accident, the teacher's small children could have been in serious danger. 

While finding this out because of a little fender bender might have saved all of them from serious injury or death--which the teacher acknowledged as a very shiny silver lining--they were now facing an $8000 repair bill to get the vehicle safe again. The student only sideswiped the van, so insurance won't pick up the tab beyond the cost of replacing the bumper. The teacher's husband is a lawyer, so he's trying to figure out a way to get the dealer to pay up, maybe. $8000 is still cheap compared to the cost of buying new or even finding another used car, but it's a big chunk of change if you weren't prepared to spend it on a car quite so soon. 

Chapter 3

Husband was asked to do a little acting presentation to the children of the Primary in our stake. The theme was Gathering the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and Husband would play a man from colonial American times who had time-traveled to the present to explain the meaning of a standard, as in "rally round the standard of the cross." He already had a really good colonial costume (I made the knee breeches years ago, just to brag a bit), so I wrapped a blank book in leather to represent his journal, and he wrapped the end of a staff with a leather strap to be a walking stick. He used the walking stick as a prop to act out his story of being in battle, both as a sword and a standard. He also brought along one of his wooden flutes, which he played for the kids.

Husband had to find sport socks that didn't have logos all over them.

To say it was a rousing success is an understatement. He played the part so well and told the story so realistically that many of the children were convinced he had actually time traveled. Husband is an excellent storyteller. I remember many nights when the kids were little when he would tell them bedtime stories that had them laughing so hard they cried. 

Chapter 4

I was able to get an appointment with a gynecologist who specializes in bio-avaialable hormone treatment and thyroid disorders. I'm now the proud owner of two pellets of sub-dermal hormone treatment that will start the process of getting my hormones back in balance.

My blood test showed that in most ways I'm pretty healthy despite the weight gain of recent years. What is very out of whack, however, is my testosterone. That surprised me. I know women produce a small amount of testosterone, but I didn't realize that so many of my symptoms of fatigue and other things common to perimenopause could be caused by low testosterone. My testosterone is around 62 nanoparticles/deciliter when it should be in the high 200s (for men, normal testosterone range is between 800 and 1200 nanoparticles/deciliter). The doctor inserted a 185 mg pellet of testosterone and a smaller pellet of less than 6 mg of estradiol (she didn't want to overdo the estrogen/estradiol until I'm fully menopausal) into the skin of my hindquarters after giving me a little local anesthetic. I should start seeing results in three to five days, with my energy beginning to rise significantly. In six weeks, I will have another blood test to see how it's going, and that will determine what pellets she will use in three to four months. I'm very much looking forward to having energy, not least because it will make losing weight so much easier when I'm not absolutely exhausted all the time.

Having already done a lot of reading up on hormone replacement therapies, I am very enthusiastic about bio-available pellets versus cream or shots or any type of synthetic HRT. Pellets seem to produce the most stable results, and while they are pricey and insurance won't pay for them, it's worth the cost for me. Husband agrees.

Chapter 5

Elannah is on the waiting list for a nail tech class at the local technical college. She asked to do my nails yesterday, and I agreed so she could get some practice. I've never had fake nails before, and I never, ever let my nails grow beyond my fingertips because it interferes with playing the piano or typing. She did a good job, but I'm not loving the length. I might have her shave them down more.

Click, click, click, click.

Labor Day Weekend

The high school Homecoming Queen pageant was clearly run by someone who has never seen a pageant. This is what my daughter, Elannah, told me. Both she and Sophia were asked to be pageant judges, which amused them--both because they are sisters and because their minimal experiences in pageants certainly don't qualify them to judge one--but they didn't pass up the opportunity 

Last night, when Elannah was laughingly telling me the tale of the event, she declared that she would be happy to run next year's pageant because the student body officers who ran it this year had no earthly idea what it took to put a pageant together. Besides the nearly thirty minutes of tech issues, there was just no...pageantry. Sure, if you like minimalist stage decor and uninterested announcers, it was fine; but Elannah did not think it was fine. I told her I'm good friends with one of the vice principals, so she better mean it because I was going to pass her offer along and get her an unpaid job as pageant master. I assumed Elannah would back down, but she didn't. She was really upset by the amateur nature of the whole thing, having been Homecoming Queen herself at the same high school when she was a senior. 

I could not attend the high school's Homecoming Queen pageant, myself, because I was at our first official choir rehearsal for the Christmas season, and I had to play the piano while our real pianist is out until the end of September. Our choir has grown so much that we have had to move from Denise's large basement music room to her larger family room upstairs, a two-story room with lots of hard surfaces that bounce the sound around. It sounded great (those diva sopranos will use any excuse to linger in the reverb), but the electronic piano I was using got lost in the echo, and most of the time I couldn't even hear myself play. The only reason I accepted Denise's request to be the temporary accompanist is because I know that Paula, the other pianist in the group with far superior piano skills to mine, really resents being asked to play when she would rather sing. I'm good at plunking out parts; it's when I have to play accompaniment that I get stressed. Fortunately, I will not be playing accompaniment at our concert.

Denise's former math professor, who is Catholic, put together an interfaith musical concert for our area for September 11 and asked our choir to participate along with choirs from other organizations and religions. We will sing Rutter's "Distant Lands" and Michael Barrett's arrangement of "Mangisondele Nkosi Yam," both of which we just sang for our spring concert. This means I will have to reprise my small solo part in "Mangisondele Nkosi Yam," but I'm not worried as no one can hear me if I don't sing into a microphone, try as I might to project. Dallyn, the young tenor I sing with, has an amazing voice, so everyone will be happy regardless.

Finally, I played with paper and my laminator and made another traveler's notebook. I also made my own paper booklet inserts this time, using both lined and graph paper. I'll add a pen loop today so that I can keep a pen handy for writing. I didn't add any embellishments, but I might put some on the next one I make

I was thinking this would be a fun thing for the young women in my ward to do. Paper is simple.

I cut down some double-sided printed cardstock for the cover and ran it through my laminating machine after scoring the spine so it would bend more easily.

There are only three basic paper inserts at the moment. I'm trying to think of what other types of inserts I would need to use on a regular basis. A monthly calendar booklet would be a good one.

Making this scratched a creative itch. Sometimes I just have to do something creative, whether that is with food, yarn, paper, music, sewing, or words. When I plunk myself down to start a new project, Gary says, "Feeling the need to be creative, huh?" Yep. It's also a good time for us to talk about anything and everything.

Speaking of Gary, he's quick with the puns. The other day, he and his friend were walking to the store together, and his friend kept knocking his head on low-hanging tree branches because he was looking down at the sidewalk. After a while of this, Gary teased him, "Are you treegally blind?" 

Get it? "Treegally" instead of "legally"? 

Anyway, it made me laugh for a very long time.