Choosing gifts

10 November 2012, 3:37 pm by Giggles
Categories: Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.
– Timothy Geithner

Brett enjoying the blanket I made him in 2011

I’ve been planning Christmas gifts for a while now. When you get in the habit of making them that tends to happen. They take time. And part of that time for me is gathering the supplies.

I watch the monthly ads for the different fabric and craft stores. I know when it’s better to use a coupon for one item or when I should wait for a sale on a set of items. For example Jo-Anns will have a 25-40% off sale on knitting needles. But if I wait till they aren’t on sale I can use the 50% off coupon that comes in the mail each month. Which works great for a single item. But I need a whole bunch of a certain notion right now so I’m super excited that Hancock Fabric is having a 50% off sale on all sewing notions this weekend. If I waited until mid-December to start working on presents I’d never be able to get the deals on supplies that I do.

I grew up making Christmas presents. Starting around mid-November you made double sure to knock before entering any closed room because the odds were high the person on the other side was working on a present.

I might buy a few things now, but I still like to include something hand made. It does make choosing what to give more difficult because my crafting abilities do have their limits and time is always an issue (although I’ve gotten better at finishing before Christmas Eve the last several years). But it makes the whole process more fun.

3 Shared thoughts

Choose your ingredients

9 November 2012, 6:35 am by Giggles
Categories: Food

I’d be lying if I said I had confidence in every choice I’ve made, that I have faith in every film I do on every shot.
– Ethan Hawke

I used to think cooking was hard. I thought making good tasting meals was tricky and a talent that took a long time to develop. A bad chicken experience and some utterly inedible meatloaf in college might have contributed to that (haven’t tried meatloaf since, but I do plan to conquer it some day).

But I have apparently figured out the secret that Gusteau was trying to teach in Ratatouille – anyone can cook.

I do follow recipes rather precisely when I’m baking, but cooking is different. If I don’t like a particular ingredient I’ll leave it out or replace it with one I like better.

I used to put carrots in the crock pot whenever I made a roast because my mom always did. I included them in my chicken soup too. But I don’t like the taste of cooked carrots. Eventually I realized I didn’t have to include them. So now I choose not to include them. And I like the chicken soup better and I don’t have to make myself eat the carrots with the roast. I’m an adult. I don’t have to eat cooked carrots.

Our ward made a cookbook this summer and one of the recipes I submitted, one we cook a lot at home, a lemon herb chicken bake that I developed, included this instruction:

Sprinkle generously with oregano, basil, parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, and lemon herb spice mix. Channel the Muppet Sweedish Chef doing this.

I will never be a chef. But I do choose to enjoy my cooking, especially because I like eating.

7 Shared thoughts

To bleed or not to bleed

8 November 2012, 6:05 am by Giggles
Categories: Health

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
– William Faulkner

In my early 20s I developed a severe allergy to all sulfa-based antibiotics. All of them. Which includes two of the three in triple-antibiotic ointments, like Neosporin. If I put it on my skin I develop a rash. We keep a single-antibiotic ointment in our house.

Combine that with my life-long allergy to adhesive bandages, and my penchant for silly injuries doesn’t work that well.

If I put a bandage on for too long I’ll develop a rash that can often be more serious than the wound I was trying to cover. Almost two weeks ago I put a bandage on my lower back before bed so I wouldn’t bleed all over the bed. I took it off first thing in the morning, but you can still see exactly where the bandage was because all the skin it was stuck to is slightly red and lightly flaking off.

I do alright with medical sports tape stuff, so I could tape gauze to me and make it really obvious I’m injured. And areas that aren’t that sensitive, like my fingers or lower legs, generally do okay for a day or so.

Every time I’m bleeding I have to choose what the risk of bleeding all over everything is and if its worth a bandage or not. Sometimes life’s choices are a little weird.

5 Shared thoughts

We all choose ice cream

7 November 2012, 7:49 am by Giggles
Categories: Happy Things

Happiness is a choice. You can choose to be happy. There’s going to be stress in life, but it’s your choice whether you let it affect you or not.
– Valerie Bertinelli

Choosing which flavor of ice cream I’m going to eat is always a tough decision. I have it rarely enough that I don’t want to miss out and I need to decide what I really feel like at that moment.

Chocolate is always a good choice. But what kind of chocolate? Mint chocolate chip? Double fudge? If I’m eating it in a bowl then mint chocolate chip is a good choice because I can add chocolate syrup to it. Brett likes cookies and cream so we usually buy that when we’re buying cartons, and I had chocolate syrup. In a cone I’m more likely to choose double fudge – let’s load up on as much chocolate as I can!

Ice cream in Brasil was a totally different choice. I did have corn ice cream once. It’s like cold popcorn jelly beans. Not bad, but not something I’m going to go out of my way for. Brasil knows how to do fruit ice cream though. Imagine a rich creamy vanilla with amazing fresh fruit mixed in – kiwi or mango or papya. Amazingly yummy stuff. Kiwi was my favorite. Chocolate was hard to come by. And who would pass up fresh fruit ice cream like that? Only a crazy person.

The States doesn’t have anything close to the fruit ice cream I could get in Brasil. Although I’m going to try and start making it at home. We have a good vanilla recipe and then it’s just a matter of the fresh fruit. So if we’re out eating ice cream, I’m pretty much always going to pick some type of chocolate.

6 Shared thoughts

Choose to Vote

6 November 2012, 8:31 am by Giggles
Categories: Politics

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.
– Frantz Fanon

I was substituting in a fourth grade class last week and a girl asked me who I was going to vote for. You have to keep both religion and politics out of the school, so I told her, “That’s a very personal question.”

I did tell her though that I choose to vote. I have voted in every election since I turned 18. I even mailed in a ballot during the 2000 election from Brasil (which I’m pretty sure didn’t arrive in time to be official, and I wasn’t voting in Florida so even if it had I doubt my vote would’ve made a difference).

I’m pretty sure the only way a candidate would ever agree with me on all the issues is if I were that candidate. Which will probably never happen. So I pick the issues that are most important to me and then find a candidate who agrees with me the most on those. Not all issues are equal. So I weight the similarities.

I’m registered to vote, but I’m not registered with either party. Four years ago near the election Brett and I went on a date and I recall sitting at the high tables at Panda Express while he went through a whole list of issues and asked me where I stood on them. There are issues I align with the Democrats on. There are issues I align with the Republicans on. It was actually a fun conversation. And then we went to see Kung Fu Panda.

There was a major election while I was in Brasil. In Brasil, if you are old enough to vote you are required by law to vote. They don’t have problems with voter turn outs. And if your name gets drawn to work the polls, you have to work the polls or go to jail. Since the Brazilian missionaries in our mission couldn’t exactly get home to vote, the mission office had to do a bit of paper work to get them cleared. My companion at the time had been chosen to work the polls back where she was from so we had to do some extra stuff so she wouldn’t get arrested for not showing up. And nobody resents being told to vote either. There are people in this country who would only vote if there was a law saying they either voted or went to jail.

I’m not going to say who I’m voting for here just like I wouldn’t tell that fourth grader. Although if you know me pretty well you’d probably be able to guess on the big issues. But after an appointment this morning we’re headed to the polls and I’ll get my “I Voted” sticker. I’ll say a prayer for the country. And then I’ll watch the results come in tonight.

Choose to vote.

7 Shared thoughts

Choosing a college, choosing change

5 November 2012, 6:19 am by Giggles
Categories: Education, Life, Musings, Politics

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.
– Hugh Mackay

Brett shared an article with me where they were describing different types of undecided voter. This particular article was about the undecided millennial. The article describes a man in his twenties who not only has trouble deciding who to vote for, but also has trouble deciding to grow up (an issue I’ve written about before). This man has never had to choose to grow-up before, to jump into the unknown, to face the uncertainty of change.

He lives with his parents, who pay for everything. He has three part-time jobs, none of which have anything to do with his degree.

even as full-time opportunities arose, Tyler turned away from that path. In a noisy, crowded, competitive life, he discovered a quiet moment between youth and adulthood and decided to linger.

The article specifically states that, “He’s a millennial who doesn’t always know what he believes.” Oddly enough, there’s a popular pop song that says the exact same thing to a very catchy tune:

I’m still not sure what I stand for oh
What do I stand for? What do I stand for?
Most nights, I don’t know anymore…
– “Some Nights” by FUN

Watching the music video for that song paints it as a song from the point of view of a soldier in war. And that’s not an uncommon sentiment for soldiers in war (I could give several literary examples). But people in their mid-twenties living over their parents’ garage and mooching off their parents are not fighting a war.

My dad says when he graduated from high school his parents gave him luggage. It was time to leave. It was time to decide his own path in life and see where it took him. My parents didn’t give me luggage, but it was a very clear expectation that when I graduated high school I would leave home. I could go to any university I wanted as long as I didn’t go to the local one, unless I was super interested in studying what that university specialized in – rocks. I wasn’t that interested.

(Note: moving out of the house is not required to grow up. But making decisions for your life is.)

The choice was wide open for me. At the time my dad was just glad I stayed in the WAC, but that wasn’t a requirement. The young man in this article was told by his parents that he couldn’t go more than a few miles away, which might have something to do with him coming home so soon (and for so long) again.

How did I choose where to go? It was a combination of things. First, I’d always liked BYU. My parents both graduated from there, so there was that, I was familiar with the campus because I’d been there with them and I’d grown up hearing stories of the place. The university wooed me a bit my senior year of high school, inviting me for a weekend to check out the campus. And I felt absolutely at home during that trip. Have you ever had the feeling that you were exactly where you needed to be? That’s how I felt. And they had a real good program for what I wanted to study – elementary education (See! I’d already made a choice at my young age.). So that was how I decided where to go to college, the first time.

The second time I needed something close-by because I had to work it around my job. Which meant I had two choices – Utah State or University of Utah. Again, with prayer, I made a choice. And then I made that choice work.

The third time I felt I was leaving Utah, that I was leaving my job. So that opened up the whole country to me again. I checked out several different programs to see if I could find the focus I wanted to study. And I prayed a lot. And I ended up in southern Arizona.

I am not a millennial, but when I voted eight or twelve years ago, it was not the first big decision I’d made in my adult life.

Still unburdened by the stuff of adulthood, weighing what it means to lead a good life, this might be the first big choice Tyler makes.

Take a chance bud. Make a choice. Choose to change your life. You can’t live a good life if you aren’t actively living.

7 Shared thoughts

Choosing to search

4 November 2012, 4:27 pm by Giggles
Categories: Education, Gospel, Musings

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.
– Pope John Paul II

My last semester at BYU I needed three classes to graduate with my degree – a theater for elementary teachers class, a computer programming class, and another computer science class of my choosing, I chose computer ethics.

But I took seven classes (I never really know when to stop). The extra four I took were Portuguese, Pearl of Great Price, Mormon Folklore, and Writings of Isaiah. Not exactly underwater basket weaving. The latter two ended up being two of the four classes in my higher education career that changed my life.

I took Writings of Isaiah from Sister Ann Madsen, a very fortunate happenstance in my life because of her approach to teaching it, which I’ll get to. The first day of class she asked us each to say why we were taking the class. 3 Nephi 23:1 states “And now, behold, I say unto you, that ye ought to search these things. Yea, a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah.” We’ve been commanded to study Isaiah, I decided I wanted help getting started with that.

So I chose to get some help. And that class made Isaiah my favorite prophet and changed how I viewed my relationship with my Savior.

Today the question of what is the difference between reading scriptures and studying scriptures came up. There were several shared comments about looking for lost items, but those comments assumed you knew what you were looking for in the first place. If you don’t know what you are looking for, can you really search?

A week and a half ago I was substituting in a science classroom and the plans for the day asked the students to read a chapter in the book and answer the questions at the end. I told them they had two strategies. They could read the whole chapter, hope they pay attention to the important parts, and then answer the questions. Or, they could jump to the end of the chapter, check out the questions, and then search through the chapter to find the answer. One student pointed out that either way they were pretty much going to be reading the chapter, which is true. But which of them would be searching? Which of them had a better chance of paying attention to the important parts?

The same is true with the scriptures. If we don’t know what the questions are at the end of the chapter we run the risk of not paying attention to the important parts and missing out on the information there for us. But if we know what the questions are that we are trying to answer as we read we’ll be much more likely to find them.

The reason I enjoyed my Isaiah class so much and got so much out of it wasn’t because we just started at the beginning and read through it. We searched. But the question at the end of the chapter wasn’t “What was Isaiah telling the ancient Israelites?” although that was definitely part of the class. No, the underlying question at the end of the chapter was “What is Isaiah telling me?” We were searching for ourselves in Isaiah, for the conversation he was having with each of us individually.

By having questions laid out before beginning to read the scriptures, you’ll be able to find the answers to them as you read. Every six months for General Conference I choose 3 topics or questions I need answers to. As I listen I search for the answers. Because I am searching General Conference and not just listening, I always come away from Conference edified and uplifted.

I need to choose to search more often. The answers are there.

Seek me diligently and ye shall find
Doctrine & Covenants 88:63
(see also Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9)

2 Shared thoughts