Answering Questions about the Church

I absolutely love this article from the Church about how to answer questions about the gospel.

http://www.lds.org/church/news/answering-questions-about-our-faith?lang=eng

 I especially love the advice to have a two-way conversation instead of lecturing and of tailoring your response to what people want, i.e. don't give them an hour lesson when they just want to know what "stake center" means.   I always tense up at the idea of "missionary work" (because I don't think I'm very good at it)  but I love the idea of focusing on having conversations about the things that are important with people that you care about, because that's how you build good relationships anyway.  Usually I find that if you're respectful and don't try to "pressure or coerce" as the article puts it, conversations about faith-related matters can be a great experience. 

Also, as a person who was once a less active member, I can say that the people who helped me feel ready to return to church activity were those people who actually took the time to know and care about me regardless of whether or not I attended church.  

The Olympics

So I am definitely not an athlete and not even really a sports fan these days, but I always tend to find myself drawn into the Olympics.  I've liked watching gymnastics since I was a kid, and have found an affinity over the last few days for both kinds of women's volleyball and to a small degree women's basketball.   Maybe it's the whole spirit of the Olympics, maybe it's having a built in team to root for, but whatever it is, the Olympics make me smile. 

Oh, it may also be that we have a DVR, which makes watching the Olympics a lot easier and makes it so instead of having to watch three hours every night, you can just watch the hour that interests you.

Garden Update

So along with an almost daily supply of tomatoes (YUM!) tonight we picked our first cucumber, which is also pretty good and a couple of carrots that were small but respectable.  Our little celery plants are growing like mad and we have two green peppers that are slowly getting bigger everyday.  All in all we're feeling pretty happy about our little garden.

I was a little worried about having six tomato plants, but the thing is, we LOVE tomatoes.  For us it's no hardship to eat them everyday.  I'm beginning to wonder if I'm even going to have to worry about preserving any.  Either way, hurray for tomatoes.

The Adventurers Return

Ten Great Things About Our Vacation
1. Road trips always remind me that I married the right guy. (He's that cute one at the end of the beach there)
2. Whidbey Island really is as beautiful and charming as we hoped it would be.  Deception Pass Park (it's North Beach is the picture above) is especially lovely
3. Surprises.   For example, when our second campground was less than exciting we pulled out our brochures and learned about Double Bluff Beach, which turned out to be amazing and lead to...
4.  The single best haul of sea shells in terms of variety ever,  if you want to collect shells, Double Bluff is the place to go.
5. That I got to spend time with my awesome family at my Grandma's 80th birthday party.
6. That I got to visit my friend Becky K., see her great kids, and visit with her for a nice long chunk of hours.
7. Camp fires.  Really, just staring at the flames and talking is the best part of camping.
8. The trees.  Holy cow does that island have amazing trees.
9.  Langley, WA.  It's like the Gilmore Girl's Stars Hollow only in the Pacific Northwest.  Yeah, I pretty much want to live there someday :-)
10. My mom, who, even when she wasn't home, managed to make me smile after a long road trip by leaving me cookies.

Three Things I Learned on Vacation
1.  I like camping and I like long road trips.  I don't necessarily love them in combination.
2. When a campground map shows that your campsite is close to the beach, that means nothing.  Our South Whidbey State Park site looked about 500 ft from the beach, and it was, if you dropped a rock off the edge and it went straight down.  The actually walking distance, however, was about a half a mile hike down the side of the hill.
3. The type of wood you use really does determine how easy it is to start and maintain a fire.  The stuff we bought from the State Park stores was a bit of a challenge, the stuff from their hardware store worked awesome.

Five Things I Love About Home
1. The floor is not made of dirt.
2. Going to the bathroom does not require planning, nor a hike up the hill.
3. PRIVACY
4. Knowing where things are.
5. Coming home to this (see photo below) in the garden.

Favorites A to X - Part Nine "R-X"

Pardon the marathon finish...I'm about to have a delightfully busy, relatively computer-free week.

Alas, no entries for poor lonely "Q" 

R

Movies 
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Have it memorized.  Seriously, I can mouth the words along with the characters.

Return of the King - yeah, it may have six endings, but after nine-plus hours of film making you can get away with it. 

Return to Me - This is my favorite David Duchovny role, and if that seems like a underwhelming thing for me to say see the TV entry under "X"

Roman Holiday - I really do love Audrey Hepburn, but so often I feel like she was kind of poorly matched in terms of co-stars.  This movie is an exception.  I so love watching her and Gregory Peck wander around Rome. 

Books 
Rapunzel's Revenge (Shannon Hale) - Normally, I'm not a fan of graphic novels.  I don't even own a Superman graphic novel, and I own this one.  Really, Rapunzel in a mythical wild west, that's a good idea.

TV
Remington Steele - In junior high my dream car was a white convertible VW Rabbit.  This is not a coincidence.

S

Movies 
Serenity - The reason I watched Firefly, oh and Tracy and I noticed that both Mal and Han Solo both have striped pants and routinely wear a holstered gun and a jacket.  Is this a coincidence?  I don't think so.

Star Wars - Han is my favorite character, Chewie is my second, and the Millennium Falcon is third.

Superman - Of course.

Books 
The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis) - the most spiritually enlightening book I've read that falls outside the LDS canon, and it's funny. 


The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) - Just downloaded this book FOR FREE to my phone.  The world is a beautiful place sometimes.

Seer of Sevenwaters (Juliet Marillier) - This is, partially, a book about a giant shape-shifting sea monster, and yet I related to it on a very personal level.  You have to love an author who can manage that. 

TV
Sherlock - This is somewhere between a television show, a series of hour and a half movies, and a mini-series.  Honestly I'm not sure what the format is, and one of the six episodes, from my moral framework is relatively unwatchable.  However, I still found this BBC update of Sherlock Holmes to have everything the recent movies lacked.  This is definitely a textbook case of "how to update a classic."

Star Trek The Next Generation - In my opinion, quality wise, this is the best of the Trek universe.  Well, at least once Riker grows a beard and Tasha Yar dies (the first may be a coincidence, the second unfortunately, not so much).  And really Captain Picard is so entirely awesome.

Star Trek Voyager - having just said that I think Next Generation is the highest in quality, I have to say that for sheer entertainment value I like Voyager the best.  Maybe because it's the only one of the series in which I had a crush (at the time) on three different characters at any given time.  And don't worry Tracy knows this, and hopefully is confident that he has no competition, fictional or otherwise.

T

Movies 
To Kill a Mockingbird - I love my Dad, but if I could also be adopted by a fictional character, Atticus Finch would be in the running. 

The Two Towers - as I've said before, my favorite Lord of the Rings movie. 

Books 
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (Judy Blume) - this book is about having an annoying but lovable little brother.  I had three :-)  No wonder I loved it. 


To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - the magic of such an deep and layered story told convincingly from a child's point-of-view is brilliance. 


A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute) - Apparently, in looking at this list, I'm a sucker for heartwarming World War II fiction with a romantic bent.  And this book has AUSTRALIA in it, yeah, I kind of think the guy wrote it just for me :-)

Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) - call it a guilty pleasure, a flavor of the month, or just a symptom of my general obsession with the Pacific Northwest, but I couldn't honestly leave it off the list.


W

Books
Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) - An brainy-tough-little girl witch and a brawling, drinking band of tiny Scottish-inspired men?  Yeah, it's awesome. 


Wildwood Dancing (Juliet Marillier) - a lovely version of the "12 Dancing Princesses" fairy-tale in a great Eastern European setting.

Winter Sea (Susanna Kearsley) - It's an interesting thing about time travel-ish novels, I tend to either love them or hate them.  I really enjoy Susanna Kearsley's books and I think Winter Sea is the best of them.


X

Movies 
X-Files Fight the Future - If I hadn't seen the movie, I wouldn't have watched the show.

X-Men - This movie, in part, helped inspire the current series of books I'm writing and introduced me to the awesomeness of Wolverine.

TV
X-Files - It seems appropriate to end with X-Files.  It's the most truly geeky I EVER got over a television show, at least in my adult years.  I even dressed up as Scully for Halloween once.

Favorites A to X - Part Eight "M-P"

Sorry for the delay, an awesome writing conference and a bad cold kept me thoroughly distracted, but I'm back now and ready to resume :-)

M

Movies
Maverick- Beyond the fact that Graham Greene gives one of the single funniest performances ever, and one of, in my opinion, the best portrayals of an American Indian on film.  This movie is just the perfect blend of adventure, romance and western silliness. 

The Mummy - the sequels are extremely inferior, but the initial movie with Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and John Hannah is so much fun.  One of my favorite lines (especially since I was working in a library at the time) is Evie's proud declaration, "I...I am a librarian!"

The Man From Snowy River - this movie probably has a great deal to do with the fact that the second place entry on foreign countries I'd like to visit is Australia.  It's also partly responsible for my desire to play the piano. 

Books
Monstrous Regiment (Terry Pratchett) - My adviser has actually thought about assigning this book in her women and war class.  Plus it's awesomely funny. 

My Antonia (Willa Cather) - I have always kind of thought that Willa Cather is what Little House and the Prairie fans read when they grow up. 

N

Movies
National Treasure - In spite of the fact it stars Nicholas Cage and the fact that the Archivist in me almost has a heart attack every time they touch the Declaration of Independence, I still love this movie.  Plus when I start missing the D.C. area, this movie is a good way to get a fix.

Books
Nation (Terry Pratchett) - On a deeper level, I think this book does lead you to question tradition and religious beliefs, but it does so while giving room for them to still be true and still mean something.  It's another of those books that makes you think long after finishing it.

O

Movies
Ocean's Eleven -Why is a movie about thieves so much fun?  I don't entirely know.  But I do love how clever it is, and how well it juggles so many characters at the same time.

Books 
One in Thine Hand (Gerald Lund) - Before Gerald Lund wrote epic church history books he wrote this great novel that takes place during Israel's Yom Kippur War.  A few years after reading it the first time I took a Middle Eastern History class, and was surprised with how well that novel set me up to start understanding what was going on in modern Israel. 

Outlaws of Sherwood (Robin McKinley) - the first book I read by Robin McKinley and still one of those books I'd put on a list of ten I'd take to a deserted island.

P

Movies
The Princess Bride - Of course, I mean I even dedicated a blog too it once.

Pirates of the Caribbean - The first one is the best. 
 
Books
The Princess Bride (William Goldman) - Uh yeah, it's here twice.  It's one of the few times when the book and the movie version of something are equally good. 

TV
Pride and Prejudice - So is a miniseries a movie or TV?  Not sure.  Anyway, the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth is something I watch at least a couple of times a year.  So much frothy British fun.