New Year's in New York

Times Square, New Year's Eve 2004

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I decided this year that since I was on the East Coast, I might as well go to New York for New Years. I figure it's something that everybody should do once. Besides, Chris and Katie were going up there, and my friend Dave and his wife just moved out there, and my friend Erin and her sister Megan flew out there as well.

Anyway, I got into New York very late on the 30th (well, it was actually the 31st) and slept at Chris & Katie's friend house in Jersey City. The next day I met Erin and Megan at the Pavonia train station, where they dropped off some luggage (Erin needed to get some stuff to DC). We went up to the 86th street station, only we got separated along the way because they got off a station before Lexington and before I could get off, the doors closed. So they had to wait for another train to get to Lexington.

Anyway, at the 86th Street station (the one on the East side of Central Park), I met Dave and eventually Erin and Megan again. Dave was walking his dog, and we followed him to his apartment, where he dropped off his dog with his wife Andrea. It was quite a small apartment. I was expecting bigger for some reason.

Then we went to eat at a Chinese place. It was pretty good. Erin and Megan were feeling pretty sick, though, so they didn't come to the Guggenheim as planned. Dave came with me instead, while we left them shopping at a store that was going out of business.

The Guggenheim was alright. Honestly, I don't see what's so big about it. It' got some interesting architecture, but it sure is small. We got through the exhibits in less than 2 hours. The main exhibit was by James Rosenquist. He did some interesting things, and I guess it was worth seeing, it's just not something I'll always remember.

After that, it was probably about 4:00 or so, and we went to see Central Park. Then we walked by the Met on the way back to his apartment. I like Central Park. Not nearly as big as Hyde Park, but still pretty nice. A pleasant break from the perpetual skyline. (You know what I've realized--I'm too claustrophobic for New York. I need open spaces. I'm becoming a West Coast person).

Anyway, Dave and Andrea and I walked their dog down to the Rockefeller Center (about 30 blocks or so away), and by the time we arrived it was dark, so we got to see the lights. They were nothing compared to Temple Square. Or even the lights at Central Park. Dave and Andrea went back home, and I stayed there.

It was about this time that Erin and Megan called and ditched me for the night. Well, sort of. They just weren't feeling very well at all. Looking back at things, we probably never would have found each other in Times Square anyways, but I was a little disappointed. Chris and Katie weren't going into Times Square either. But I figured I was in New York, it just wouldn't do to celebrate the New Year any other way. So I celebrated it on my own. It wasn't too bad really, I've done London and Vancouver on my own this year, why not New York?

The only thing that felt a little strange was going to the Rock Center cafe on my own. But I was hungry, and I wanted to do things right. Besides, I thought, what if terrorist strike during the celebration and this is my last meal. I know, I know. Stupid logic, but I really wanted the striped bass and some cheesecake, even if it did cost me $40. Amazingly enough, there were three or four other people eating there alone, including a lady in her 30s wearing a black formal dress sitting in the table in front of me. I wonder what her story was. Kind of odd to wear such a formal dress and not have anyone to eat with on New Year's Eve (I was in jeans, myself).

From there, I walked to Times Square. Or at least in the general direction. I thought I would be arriving early (it was about 8:00), but I was wrong. About 48th street, I realized that everybody was walking the other way for a reason, namely that 7th avenue and Broadway were already full up to about 52nd street, and because the police had to search everyone before they could enter the perimeter, the only way in was through 58th street.

So I went to 58ths street, and crossed over to 7th, where the barricade system began. There were about 3 different "floodgates" where they screened you at, and there was a lot of pushing and bad manners in the lines to get through those floodgates. I finally got through the last security check at 9:00, and found my place at about 53rd street, where I would stand all night. It was very cold and my legs were very tired. Standing room only. And once you were in your little barricaded section of the block, the police wouldn't even let you out for a bathroom break. Once you left, you were gone.

Still, it was interesting. Tons of people by themselves, so I didn't feel too left out. Tons of visitors as well. I counted like a dozen languages being spoken. I've never seen so many people, and the amount of security was amazing. Tons of planning must have gone into it to keep the crowd controlled so well. So much humanity. But it wasn't as wild as I'd hope. Pretty mild-mannered actually. The ball, meanwhile, seemed so small. I know we were ten block away, but I was expecting something bigger. In fact, I didn't even realize it was there at first. I kept looking at the antenna on another building, thinking they would be raising it there. Luckily, I had my binoculars.

Anyway, I caught the excitement in video and pictures, so you can see for yourself. It's not something I'd do by myself again. Maybe with some friends, though.

Within 5 minutes of the New Year, people started leaving. In the midst of all this, I made my way to within 2 blocks of Times Square before the police started turning me away. Which was kind of frustrating because I needed to get to the Port Authority for my bus. (I had purchased tickets on a Greyhound for a 3:45 AM bus to D.C.--my flight was leaving Reagan at 3:00 in the afternoon, so I wanted to get home for a few hours to pack). After a few zig-zags, a ton of people, and about an hour, I finally made it to the Port Authority.

I was hoping to sleep on the bus. Not much luck. I got a window seat, but the guy seated next to me smelled of the alcohol he had hidden under his seat, and kept falling over on my shoulder. It was kind of disgusting. And he kept arguing with his girlfriend the next seat over. So it was a long bus ride.

But it gave me some time to think and work on my law school applications. I think I've got something now. Actually, it's inspired by the bus ride. I got to watch the first sunrise of the New Year on the bus, all the way from the first hint of purple, to the bright bulb peering over the Atlantic as we ascended a raised highway in Baltimore. It was a perfect moment for reflection on the New Year and resolutions. I think I'm going to use that moment at the start of my essay. And then I'll talk about the scene in New York; how I was intrigued by the force that held us all in check--that kept us from an inevitable chaos vulnerable to violence in terror. This force wasn't the police. We could have stormed over the barricades at any time had we wanted (and in fact, this happened on the way home). No it was respect for the law. Respect for a social contract. And I'm fascinated by this unseen force. I want to learn more about it.

Anyway, I got back to DC safely, and then caught the metro out to Vienna where a very tired mom picked me up. She had just dropped dad off at the airport--he's coming to Salt Lake to help out with Sharla--and she hadn't slept much. So I packed, caught the flight home, didn't sleep much there, worked a little on the law application, and caught a ride back to my house with Becky and Wayne. If you include my layover in Chicago, I've been in a lot of cities today. It's good to be home again.

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Posted 11:18 PM | Comments (1)

I'm entering this on my PDA via Bluetooth on a T608

Well, I'm finally happy. Okay, that's a stretch of things, but yesterday I cam home to find a new Sony Ericsson T608 bluetooth phone on my desk. After half a year of conspiracy, the phone was released a couple of weeks ago. But you had to call a special number to order them. And they shipped it to Utah instead of Virginia, so even though I technically had it as of Christmas Eve, I finally got to play with it yesterday.

You may remember that the promise of this phone way back in May was the whole reason I broke down and bought a PDA instead of waiting for a PDA phone. It was all part of the Internet anywhere I want it solution-use the phone as a modem for my PDA via bluetooth-but no cords are required. I figured it would be cheaper and more flexible to have two separate pieces instead of being tied down to one expensive piece of equipment with lower specs than a PDA bought for much cheaper. But the phone never came... until now.

The cool thing is, I got the phone for $220, and supposedly there's a $100 rebate. That was way cheaper than I expected. I didn't ask for it activated, because I wanted to test out the reception. It's no good to have a bluetooth phone if I've got no reception. Surprisingly, though, it has better reception than my Sanyo 4900. Now the only big problem is battery life. The phones were sitting in a warehouse for half a year, and because of that, the batteries got all screwed up. Supposedly, it will gradually regain it's former strength. But even if it doesn't I think a new battery's only like $40.

So anyway, I decided today that I would activate it. I'd heard reports that you might lose Sprint's unlimited vision (Internet access) when you swapped your phone, but I didn't. It's a fantastic deal, by the way. $10/month to surf the web as much as I want, with almost as fast as DSL speeds. Theoretically, I could use it as my only connection to the Internet, but it's just a little too slow for me. Plus I need a more permanent connection. So I'll just use this when I'm on the road. Like today. When I had to get my car in to be serviced. I'm connected to the internet, doing business, instead of wasting my time staring off into space.

So yeah, it's awesome. I've already sent all sorts of pictures and stuff to the phone, for picture ID. I want bluetooth in my car now so I can use my console as one giant speakerphone without ever taking the phone out of my pocket. I've already done this with my laptop--I can just click on an icon while my phone is charging on the otherside of the room, and then it connects to my phone via bluetooth, and I can make calls directly from my laptop, using the laptop's mic and speakers. And, of course, now I can connect to the internet on my PDA and check my mail or do some research whenever I want.

I'm sure the novelty will wear off after a while, but I tell you, I'm loving it. This is one of those toys that actually has some very good real-life and productive applications to it.

Posted 01:13 PM | Comments (1)

An Applicable Religion

Here's the text of a talk I delivered today in church. I usually don't post stuff like this on my website, but it seemed to go over pretty well and several people asked me for a copy. Plus I think it really addresses some concerns in a lot of different religions. It's not an exact transcript of what I said--some of it's still in note form, but you can get the general picture:

An Applicable Religion
by Karl Rees, Jan 18, 2004

My talk today was inspired by a friend of mine, who recently approached me and asked, "Karl, why do I have to go to Elder's Quorum?"

This friend is pretty active in the church, and I knew the question was meant partly to antagonize me , so I just looked at him, as if to say you know the answer.

But he continued. "It's always the Same thing: home teaching. And for that matter church. It's always read your scriptures, Say you, players. I already know all that.

Brothers and sisters. I'd like you to think about that question for a second, and how you would respond to it. As for myself, I think I failed miserably in my response. I told h:m to do it because God has asked him to.

I think that it's a correct answer, but I don't think it was sufficient. I don't believe that there are many times in life when God is going to ask us to do something without making it possible for us to find out why, especially in something that we do so often as go to church.

But there have been times in my life when I could sympathize with my friend-times when I would read the scriptures ...or when I would pray... I would daresay many of you have felt the same way.

I'm not going to tackle this problem comprehensively in my talk today-there are many things that cause us not to find meaning in he things God has asked us to do, and many different things to do and perspectives to take that can resupply meaning. Rather, I'm going to look at just one of the chief causes-at least in my life-of this sentiment.

We have a tendency-a very good tendency-to want to grow. We are constantly looking for ways to progress ourselves. And in church, we often equate progress with learning. But in this desire to grow, we become impatient. We start to expect greater and greater knowledge. Every day we go to church, we expect there to be an epiphany of great magnitude. Every time we pray, we expect God to give us a great revelation.

We feel we are entitled constantly to the sudden, life-changing revelations of Paul and Alma and Joseph Smith, and are frustrated when they do not come.

But this is not the way most of us learn. Learning is a gradual process. In fact, it is the rarity of such events is what makes the conversion of Paul and Alma such compelling stories.

C.S Lewis .... "When the most important things in our life happen, we quite often do not know what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, 'Hullo! I'm growing up.' It is often only when he looks back that he realizes what has happened and recognizes it as what people call 'growing up'. You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to remain wide awake."

Brothers and Sisters, I submit to you that every Sunday, every time we read the scriptures, every time we pray, whether or not we see it, we are growing up, spiritually. It is a gradual process. Not every Sunday will we walk out of sacrament meeting thinking, "oh my gosh, every thing is so much clearer." But the point is, and the reason I think we are all here, is that sometimes we will leave Sacrament meeting thinking exactly that. Something someone says will finally click, and you'll make connections you have never made before. Does that mean that all the other Sundays were a waste? Does that mean that we're only coming to church or reading our scriptures or saying our prayers in hope that one of these days we might actually learn something, and that we'd be better off if we could somehow magically predict which days we were going to learn and only come to church then? No. In fact, it is those other Sundays that make the connections that make the epiphanies, possible.

Sunday School Lessons

You
said he who does not remember
history
is doomed.

So I've tried to remember
you gave me candy when I was good,
when I raised my hand.
I've tried to remember
love is the answer to most of your questions,
you should love your neighbor
so your house won't fall.
I'm trying to remember
John 3:16, for God so loved ...
trying to remember
an ark, the number two, unicorns
trying to remember
a story, Samaritans are good people
remembering

you
found a credit card,
we were walking on a class field trip,
we voted you should buy candy with it,
you said
no, honesty is the best

and when I was at the toy store,
saw a dollar in my father's wallet,
needed a dollar for a pack of baseball cards,
when he was not looking,
when I did not buy a pack of baseball cards,
I remembered that
such is the meaning of history.

In this poem, we have a narrator, who apparently learns from the example of his teacher that stealing is bad. But I submit to you, that one event in and of itself did not make the difference in the child's life. Rather, the stories and lessons that child learned from his teacher culminated in this epiphany-made it possible that when the teacher finally set this example, the student was prepared to understand the implications of it, and learn from it. This is the process that is happening in us. It's like an Earthquake-all that tension builds up, slowly, until finally something gives and the Earth moves.

Having said this, let me backtrack a bit and admit that my friend was right, to an extent. A lot of what we are learning is repetitive. This can be frustrating to many of us, especially if, for example, we feel like we already know a topic better than a teacher.

This impatience for growth that we sometimes feel is not just a matter of us not being able to instantly recognize progress in the gospel. It is often times an inexplicable thirst to keep peeling back the layers of the gospel, to dig deeper and deeper for what we like to call the deep secrets of the kingdom. Maybe we're looking for some new, astounding revelation that we can somehow use to prove once and for all that we're the true religion. Maybe we're looking for some complex doctrine that will in some way justify certain aspects of ourselves with which either we or someone else is uncomfortable. Maybe we hope that by getting deeper and deeper into the details of the gospel, we'll be able to understand the mind of God. Or maybe we just want to know something that somebody else doesn't.

But this is the wrong approach to take to the gospel. Growth is not just about new knowledge. Though deep doctrine itself is not an evil, often times our thirst for secrets and hidden knowledge can be a distraction from the truths that matter most; an expression more of doubt in the truth we already know, than of wanting to know more about truth.

C.S. Lewis ... "There have been men...who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. ... You see it in smaller matters. Did you ever know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the most subtle of all the snares."

You see, many of the details that we get so worked up about are unimportant. Think about the poem I just read to you. We laughed because the young narrator of the poem juxtaposed all sorts of details about the stories he learned in primary. But in the end, this didn't matter. He was still was able to understand the point of the stories and apply them to his life-God honestly could care less about whether or not we know exactly when Adam first appeared on the Earth, or exactly where in the America's the Book of Mormon took place. Part of the reason why it is so rare we come out of church thinking, "I learned something new," is that our religion, at least the important parts, is an extraordinarily simple thing. It's not something that takes 100 years of church and firesides and scripture reading to learn. It can be summed up in six one-hour discussions.

In fact, James sums it up in a verse of scripture, James 1:27

(James 1:27)

27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

It is more important that we constantly remind ourselves of our "pure religion" than we get distracted looking deeper and deeper at an infinity that our finite minds will never quite make sense of. Our epiphanies, more often than not, should be of things we already knew, but are just relearning in a way more applicable to our current problems and predicaments.

In fact, that is the keyword to my talk today: applicable. We grow, we "learn" the most in the application of the gospel. When James talks about "faith without works being dead," he is not just saying that our works prove our faith. He is saying that without works, our faith has no application, no relevance to our lives, and therefore will die. We cannot keep growing through knowledge and belief alone. What good is it to know something, and not apply it to our lives? The pure religion James describes is not knowledge of doctrine, but the application of it: "to visit the fatherless and widows in their afflictions, ... to keep ourselves unspotted from the world."

Let's look closer at this statement from James. What does he mean? Is he saying that the only way to truly practice our religion is to visit orphans and widows? No, this is just a metaphor--fatherless means those who have lost their sense of origin--those who have trouble remembering that they are children of a Heavenly Father. By widows Paul means those who have lost their system of support, whether it be monetary, physical, or spiritual. Those who need us to step in and temporarily become their system of support.

There comes a point in our lives when our greatest challenge is no longer learning, but doing. Indeed, what a great challenge this is, for as James says.

(James 4:17)

17 Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.

I think very few of us, can honestly say that our personal religion has moved from knowledge to this level of application. Do you know what this scripture means? If we know of something good and we're not doing it, we are not properly applying the gospel of Jesus Christ. Do we honestly stop to think before we do something if we are doing the greatest good possible? It is a very difficult thing to do.

This transformation from learner to doer is much more significant than we realize. It affects more than just us as individuals. Our hope as a people, for a more perfect world, a Zion, is contingent upon it. What is it about our religion that defines us as a people, as Zion? It's not the stories we tell. It's not our songs, our narratives, our personal histories. These are cultural. These are things you'd find in any religion. It's not even what these stories teach us, because honestly, you're going to find the same underlying principles in most any religion. The difference-the thing that makes us Zion-is how we react to those principles. It's not that we know what to do, it's that we actually do it.

Too often we find ourselves waiting to serve our fellow man, waiting to create this Zion, thinking, well someday I'm going to take all these things I've been told to do and apply them to my life. Maybe not today, but tomorrow or the next day. Maybe when Christ comes and everybody else is doing it. But nothing is going to happen to force us to become better followers of Christ, not even, I would suggest, his second coming. We must make the decision now to be proactive about our religion... to bring Zion to Earth instead of waiting for it to magically happen.

Let me close with a brief discussion of this pure and simple gospel. I'll start with another quote CS Lewis

"When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested' ... concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one ... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between [a man and woman]. ... We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'."

This is indeed a great love. We can learn a lot about what we should do from this love. His love is so great, that, as we read from, Moses 1:39:

39 For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

That is why we come to church. To do God's word, not just to learn it. To serve and be served. To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life not of ourselves, but of mankind. Yes, there's still things to learn once in a while. But that's just something that must happen in order for us to better do God's word. Brother or sister next to you. Do you truly love him or her? Do you know what help he or she needs. Do you mourn with he or she when they mourn? Do you offer comfort in their need of comfort? Do you even know his or her name? What about your neighbors? What about your classmates? Do you love them, and by love I mean not the disinterested love that we're supposed to have for everyone in the world, but the love that requires you to know if they're the metaphorically fatherless, or widowed, or afflicted. Love So great, that you can't help but serve them.

Brothers and sisters, I implore you, if you have not done so already, to not just read you scriptures and go to church, but to use these opportunities to do good to make ours an applicable religion. Pray for the love required to go out and serve your fellow man; but don't only pray, waiting for some miraculous transformation, go out and do. In my calling.... I know that this is what God wants us to do. I know this is what will bring us more joy in life than any other thing.

Posted 08:22 PM | Comments (1)

The Death of a PocketPC

The cracked screen of my deceased PocketPC

Today a sad thing happened. As I got into my car after church, my PocketPC apparently fell out of my pocket. And as I pulled out of the parking lot, my back tire ran over it. Of course, I had no idea I had dropped it, but 5 minutes later Earl pulled into my driveway and delivered the bad news.

The screen is cracked and it no longer recognizes when I touch it with a stylus or finger or anything. So it's unusable. It still works good enough to back it up to my hard drive, so I can easily switch to a new Axim. But now I have to go buy one, and I can no longer get my model (for which I already have tons of peripherals) from Dell.

We'd been through such good times together in the 8 months I had it...London, Germany, Vancouver, camping in Utah, New York, D.C., Austin, California. Sigh. Well, it's sad, but what can you do? Anyone want to buy some spare parts?

Amazingly enough, none of my flash card peripherals or sd cards were destroyed in the process.

Posted 08:32 PM | Comments (1)

Replacing my PocketPC, a new Hard Drive, and Bluetooth

It's sure been a great week for distracting myself with gizmos. On Tuesday, I got a replacement PocketPC. For $199, Dell shipped me a new PocketPC overnight to replace the one whose screen I ran over on Sunday. All I had to do was return the broken one as soon as I got the new one. So yes, I'm out $200, but that's cheaper than my other options (ebay, or new one from Dell's website), and a much quicker resolution thanks to free overnight mail. I got the new PocketPC within 18 hours of calling Dell, and restored all my information to the new PocketPC in less than an hour.

Then on Wednesday, I finally got the replacement hard drive for my laptop (my secondary hard drive crashed over Christmas). I installed DOS6.22, Win98, and Red Hat Linux 9 on it, then I left the other 30 gigs for all the random WinXP programs I might use, as well as space for video editing. Ironically, that took much more time than restoring my PocketPC. I still haven't got a lot of teh drivers working.

Then on Thursday, I got an integrated bluetooth card for my Inspiron 8600. I bought it off of Ebay because I was tired of Dell telling me they didn't have the part. It was a little more expensive ($56 vs. $35, including shiiping), but it sure is nice to have it integrated instead of plugging in an adapter whenever I want to use bluettoth. I can't believe how small of a card it was. It was no bigger than an SD card and it just sort of slid into a slot behind the hard drive. It was a really easy install. I spent a while afterwards reinstalling the bluetooth drivers (the belkin drivers wouldn't work with the Dell card), and also figuring out how to use a slightly nicer application to transfer data and appointments to my cell phone (I'm using Sony Ericsson's XTNDConnect now, which is just a little more flexible than the default Windows app).

And then tonight I went to an STC meeting that I thought was about XML and single-sourcing. That was just the pitch, though. It really was a demo of a new Help Authoring Tool, that actually looks promising. I'll have to try it out after we meet our deadlines. Meanwhile, I get the CEO guy who was doing the demo interested in our ne PDF conversion product.

Anyway, it was a kind of geeky week. Didn't get as much done with law school stuff as I wanted to. On the other hand, I do have a lot of new (or replaced) toys to play around with tomorrow when I go to Cali with the BYU Ultimate team. It'll be so cool when I casually start surfing the web on my laptop on the road to Cali without plugging in anything. I wasn't even going to go, until they called me up about 10:00 tonight (when I was at Becky's eating pizza and meeting this friend Jamie who they want to set me up with). They needed another driver and their backs were against the wall. So now I'm going to be warm all weekend, but I kind of feel guilty about all the work I'm not going to get done, and all the meetings I'll miss on Sunday, and the fact that I'm really in no condition to play a full tournament on Saturday. My physical therapist would kill me if he knew I was going.

And it sure will be fun to go. Good night!

Posted 11:45 PM | Comments (1)

Ultimate Trip - Santa Barbara

The BYU team rests after a tough game

It's been a hectic weekend. Thursday night Neal called me up (after I had already backed out of going) and asked if I could drive some people to the Santa Barbara tournament because they were short on cars. Reluctantly I said yes. Of course, truth is I really wanted to go and socialize and be warm for the weekend, I just couldn't see spending all that time on the road when 1) I'm injured; 2) I need to finish law school applications; 3) I need to get cracking overtime on product documentation for our upcoming product release; and 4) I have a ton of church obligations on Sunday.

Anyway, I packed this morning and then spent the remainder of it way busy just wrapping up odds and ends at work. About 1:30 or 2:00, when I went down to Provo to pick up James, Aaron, Tyler, and Jamie, and we all headed down to Santa Barbara. Amazingly, we stopped a total of one time, in Las Vegas, where we ate and gassed up (we almost ran out of gas). I drove the first leg, and Aaron drove the second, and we watched a number of Newsradio episodes as well as "A Beautiful Mind" on my laptop.

Just a side note here, my Axim started acting up. The screen was acting all funny, as if someone were pressing on it repeatedly. Something's screwy in there, and after a while if you hit it hard enough it stops, but it worries me nonetheless. Still, we were able to use it for GPS, which was the really important thing. Meanwhile, the whole connecting to the Internet on my laptop via bluetooth on my phone worked great. I was online off and on all the way from Vegas to California.

But back to the story. In Santa Barbara, we stayed with these guys Amy and Becca found through the church. They lived really close to campus, and it was Friday night, so when we got there around 1:00, it was impossible to find parking, and we looked really out of place being older and carrying around sleeping bags. The place we stayed in was super crowded, and I had to wedge my sleeping bag between two already sleeping people on the floor. It wasn't extraordinarily comfortable, but I got a little bit of sleep.

Saturday morning, my leg was all tight and so I didn't play at first. We got cremated the first game. It was so bad, I didn't even bother with video. The second game was almost as bad. We just don't have a lot of experience working together as a team. But about then, I started to feel better, so I played a significant amount of offense both the third and fourth games. We won the third game handily (no, I don't think it had anything to do with me playing). The fourth game, though, was tight. Loads of fun. It probably shouldn't have been so tight, but we were still making a lot of errors. We didn't give up, though. It was probably my best game. I threw at least four points. I made one throwing error, I think, but we ended up scoring anyways. My favorite was a break-mark, inside-out throw to Don at the top of the stack. It just opened up the whole other side of the field for a quick score. Anyway, we won. The last point—it was winners take all because of a time cap—was ridiculously long, at least 15 minutes. There were so many errors, but also some great defense. It was entertaining, but that was probably because I was sitting out. Don was an animal covering their handlers—he didn't give them any dumps.

After the tournament, we went to a single adult activity put on by the Santa Barbara single's ward. Most everybody on the team went to a bonfire at the beach after that, but Neal, Jamie, Tyler, and Bethany decided they wanted to go home that night. We figured we weren't getting any sleep anyway, with things being so crowded, so why not sleep in the car. And besides, I wanted to get back to take care of some things at church. The drive was pretty safe, except for the time where we almost ran out of gas near Bakersfield, and except for the freak snow storm at Cedar City. That kept me from getting back in time for interviews with the Stake Presidency, but at least I got back in time for church. Granted, I was pretty scruffy looking because I hadn't shaved all week.

And of course I came home and slept as soon as all the meetings were done (this wasn't until around 7:30).

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Posted 11:44 PM | Comments (1)