What's been going on with me

So, here are the latest developments in my life:

• I will be working at BYU next year as a visiting faculty member.


• I am finishing up my dissertation and handing it into my committee in the next couple of weeks.


• My mom and I are taking a church history tour at the beginning of July.


• Melanee and I have decided to run the Top of Utah Marathon in September, which will be easier to do now that I will be living closer to her.


• I only have 9 cupcake recipes left!

Wow, when I write it all down, it sounds like a lot of stuff. Also, it makes me feel better about being lazy about my blogging lately, and in the future.

Just a typical Monday night...

At FHE the other night, Garrett came up to me and said, "I have some strawberries I need to get rid of, so I'm going to bake a chocolate cake." That is impeccable logic, and one of the reasons Garrett and I are friends. We had a brief conference over whose house to bake it. My apartment kitchen had still not recovered from the 4 batches of cupcakes I made the week before, but Garrett's house is the site of a nightly P90X workout.

For those of you following Challengers of the Unknown, you may be familiar with Charlie, or tonganterror, as he is known in the blogosphere. In addition to bearing a striking resemblance to the Rock, Charlie is in the midst of doing P90X with his buddy Rudy. Another interesting fact about Charlie is that he is Garrett's roommate, and the nightly P90X workout is his.

Imagine, if you will, the juxtaposition of hardcore yoga with cake baking. That was my Monday night.

I did not get any pictures of the yoga part, so you'll just have to trust me that it was going on. Charlie asked that his picture not be taken, and I respected his wishes, as he is in the process of "bringing it" and I did not want to be the reason it was not brought. Rudy, more of an exhibitionist, would have happily allowed me to take pictures, but I chose not to interfere with the integrity of the event.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, we were baking cake.

I brought aprons for everyone to wear. Here's Garrett tying his while he talks on the phone.

Here's a shot of the batter. Isn't it gorgeous?

This cake was odd in that it had a layer of frosting, and then another layer of ganache icing.

Here's a shot of the frosting. It was similar to the stuff inside Oreo cookies.

Here's Stacy cutting up strawberries.

And Stetson. He's an accountant. Tax day was three days later. In this picture, he is melting chocolate for the ganache. And, yes, he is also wearing one of my aprons.

While the cake was baking, we played Scum. Yoga was still going on. In fact, yoga finished at the same time we finally got to start eating the cake.

We were all sinking our forks into the decadence when Rudy and Charlie started "Ohm"-ing in unison. It's a pretty good thing I didn't snort chocolate cake.

Even good chocolate cake is bad when it comes out your nose.

A Quick Trip to Provo

Sometimes I get lucky, and a trip that's meant to be about business ends up being more about pleasure, like Chicago or San Francisco.

Sometimes I try to organize pleasure around a business trip, and it implodes on me. That's what happened last weekend.

I was lucky enough last weekend to be interviewed for a visiting faculty position at BYU, the same BYU that I attended for six years. It was, to date, the scariest thing I have ever done-career-wise.

I arrived in Utah on Friday. My parents drove up from Las Vegas the night before, and I called my mom to find out what the temperature was like. She replied that it was a little chilly, but I could probably get away with a light jacket. Imagine my surprise when, as the plane touched down, it started to snow. Fortunately, the snow did not stick.

I'd had what I believed to be a cold a few weeks earlier, and felt like it was coming back the night before I left Lubbock. With the stress of preparing for a big job interview, I can't say that I slept all that well that week. However, it was decidedly worse on Sunday when I woke up unable to talk. I had made plans to hang out with Anne and Lisa that afternoon, and had to cancel them. I ended up skipping church and passing out on Melanee's couch.

The interview started at 7:30 on Monday morning. I have no pictures of this because I believe that trying to capture the experience with my camera would have undermined my credibility. The most stressful part of my day happened at 10:00, when I had to give my research presentation. Halfway through, I began coughing pretty hard, until one of the faculty members left the room and returned with a cough drop.

The interview finished up on Tuesday morning, and I had lunch with Melanee and the kids before heading to the airport.

I have lived in Lubbock long enough to learn a few things about flying there:

a) There are only four airlines that fly to Lubbock.

b) The best is Southwest. The worst is American.

BYU booked my flight on American Airlines. I didn't complain because I didn't have to pay. However, when my flight was scheduled to take off at 4:45 from Salt Lake to Dallas, and it ended up not leaving until 5:45, I remembered some other information about flying to Lubbock:

c) There aren't that many flights from Dallas to Lubbock in a day.

d) If you miss the last flight to Lubbock, you can get stuck in DFW overnight.

That's exactly what happened. My flight to Dallas arrived 20 minutes after my flight to Lubbock took off, and it was the last flight to Lubbock of the evening. Fortunately, American Airlines put me in a hotel room for free, and gave me meal vouchers. My flight left DFW the next morning at 7:30, and I arrived in Lubbock at 8:20. I went straight to a meeting with my advisor, wearing the clothes I'd had on the day before, having washed my face with hotel soap, and brushed my teeth with one of these fabulous disposable toothbrushes my mom gave me for Christmas called Wisps. I received many dental hygiene products this Christmas, which I think must mean something. I had to change clothing and fix my hair and makeup in my office in between meetings and class because I was supposed to see six clients that afternoon. It was 9:30 before I got home.

The next day, I went to urgent care, where they diagnosed me with strep throat.

And I'm pretty sure that, somewhere in the midst of all that coughing, I broke a rib.

I am never leaving my apartment again.

April Fools!

I didn't make cupcakes for the meeting we had on April 1 because I wasn't feeling great (it turned out to be strep throat, and then, later, a possible rib fracture. Another story).

However, there is a cupcake place across the street from my apartment that I have been dying to try, and, as it happened, they had created some special cupcakes for April Fools' Day. So I bought a few to take to work.

Bagels with lox. I think the bagel was actually a donut. Reminds me of the episode of Seinfeld with the Peterman Reality Tour.

Spaghetti and meatballs. The noodles are buttercream; the meatball is a Ferrero-Rocher chocolate, and the sauce is strawberry jelly. The actual cake was red velvet.

Then, there were the mashed potatoes and gravy. The gravy was caramel, and the butter pat was a lemon Starburst.

This one was supposed to be popcorn. In retrospect, I should have gotten another spaghetti and meatball one. I didn't think this one was as impressive.

But they were all good ideas for next year.

My Kind of Town Chicago is

I spent the good part of my spring break in Chicago. The official reason for this was an interview for a post-doctoral fellowship in medical family therapy. However, that was over on Monday, and I spent three extra days there seeing the city with Kit, who is about to graduate from Purdue Calumet and move from Chicago to Minnesota.

After my interview on Monday, I was too tired to do much else, so we had deep dish pizza at Lou Malnati's, and then went home to bed.

Tuesday started early with lunch at Cosi, and a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I think we spent no less than two hours in the impressionist wing alone.

A word about this picture: I love this picture. I remember learning about the impressionists in fourth grade when Judi Nielson would come into our elementary school class periodically and teach us about art, and I remember this painting in particular because of the enormity of the canvas and because Seurat painted it by individually painting tiny dots of color that the eye blends together when it is viewed. Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte is one of those paintings that is so famous that it has entered popular culture in a different way than most works of art. It is pictured in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

It is the only painting I can think of about which there was a Broadway Musical written. And I think it was the musical that is the reason this picture has had an impact on my life. It's a Stephen Sondheim musical aptly titled Sunday in the Park with George. If you are interested, you can Netflix a performance on DVD starring Mandy Patinkin as Georges Seurat and Bernardette Peters as his mistress, Dot (ha ha). Seurat is portrayed as a workaholic who spends so much time on his painting that he neglects the people who are important to him. This point is illustrated in a song called "Finishing the Hat." The hat in question is the one on the woman in the foreground with the umbrella and the monkey on a string, who, in the play, represents Dot. One of my favorite lines goes:

“And when the woman that you wanted goes,

You can say to yourself, ‘Well, I give what I give.’

But the woman who won't wait for you knows

That, however you live,

There's a part of you always standing by,

Mapping out the sky,

Finishing a hat...

Starting on a hat..

Finishing a hat...

Look, I made a hat...

Where there never was a hat.”

I love this song because, often, in my life, this is what I do. I love this painting because I can appreciate the work that it takes to get something the way that you want it. And I love Chicago for bringing me this close to something I had only previously read about. It wouldn't happen in Lubbock.

I always think it's weird to take pictures of paintings, but this one made me laugh. It was painted by Pablo Picasso, and it is called Crazy Woman With Cats.

We stayed until the museum closed, and then we took a quick trip to Millennium Park. Everytime someone I know goes to Chicago, they post a picture like this:

It's officially called Cloud Gate, but everyone refers to it as "The Bean." I googled "The Bean" and this was the first thing that came up. After that, we headed down Michigan Avenue toward the John Hancock Tower. You may wonder why we selected the Hancock Tower instead of the Sears Tower, which is taller and, one could argue, much more famous. However, the Hancock Tower is in a location that makes it easy to see the rest of Chicago from its observation deck, and it has a tour that is narrated by this man:

This probably won't mean anything to anyone else, but when Kit and I were roommates, we watched many episodes of Friends on TV. Between the two of us, we own 14 seasons on DVD. So it seemed fitting that my Chicago experience should include David Schwimmer, who went to Northwestern and started the Looking Glass Theatre downtown. And when we got home that night, we watched an episode of Friends on DVD.

This is a shot of the city from the observation deck of the tower.

It just so happened that Wednesday was St. Patrick's Day. In Chicago, this is a big deal. The day before I arrived (Saturday) they dyed the river green. Of course, it wasn't still green on St. Patrick's day, but it was still a big deal. Also, most of the parades happened over the weekend, and, seeing as how neither Kit nor I are drinkers, we weren't really sure how to properly celebrate the occasion.

So we went to this place:

And ate this:

And this:

They had signs like these:

And these Port-a-potties:

We spent some time driving around. We saw the Baha'i Temple, which looked like this:

And we spent a little bit of time walking around the Northwestern and University of Chicago campuses.

And, of course, we made cupcakes.

Thursday, we headed to Wrigleyville, which is the area around Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play. After we walked around the outside of Wrigley Field, we decided to stop for lunch at this place:

That's right: we made it to a restaurant visited by Adam Richman on Man vs. Food. It was a very exciting moment. And to top it off, they were playing NCAA tournament games on six different TVs, so we got to see the end of the BYU game. I am ashamed to say that, in my March Madness bracket, I had BYU slated to lose that game, but I was still pretty happy to see the Cougs win a tourney game for a change.

On a completely unrelated note, we saw this on one of the houses in the neighborhood:

How did the Texas Longhorn get all the way up here?

We walked a little bit around the area while I searched for a Blackhawks' t-shirt. A few years ago, I started collecting college t-shirts from places where I'd been, so I picked one up at Northwestern. Then, a year or two later, I started to buy NHL shirts when I was in a city that had a team. The stores in Wrigleyville were selling Blackhawks' shirts, but I had my eye on a specific design:

You see, the Chi-rish, as they refer to themselves, have so much Irish pride that, sometimes, it spills out onto their favorite sports teams. We saw many Irish Cubs' and White Sox t-shirts', but only a few Blackhawks' ones, which is a travesty, particularly considering how many American hockey players of Irish descent there are.

We found this shirt in one of the shops next to Lucky's, but it was way too big. Consciously or not, we made it a quest to find this shirt in my size. We checked Wrigleyville, Navy Pier, and every t-shirt shop along Michigan Avenue along the way.

We finally found it in one of the shops along Michigan Avenue, but the store was about to close and the door was already locked. We stood outside looking sad until the proprietor felt bad and let us come inside to buy the shirt.

With that taken care of, we browsed through some of the nicer shops on Michigan Avenue, and I bought these:

They are supposedly replacing cupcakes as the "it" dessert.

Sadly, I put them in my suitcase, and by the time I got home the next day, they were pretty much dust.

However, considering that was the worst part of my Chicago visit, I couldn't complain too much. It was a great spring break!

27 recipes left!

Just in case you were curious.

A Missionary Package

I have emerged from several weeks of blogging inactivity to write, not about my job search or my dissertation, which I finally proposed yesterday, or my lack of a love life, but about a package I plan to send to my brother, Danny, in Alaska on Monday. Danny has been on his mission now for a little over a year, and he requested a package from all of his family members to celebrate. I thought back to the number of packages he sent me when I was on my mission (zero), and then remembered that a) he was 13 at the time, and b) he's a boy, and I tried to cut him some slack. He requested that no one send him any treats/candy, as he has already gained all the weight a stateside missionary ever needs to gain, and does not need to buy himself any more larger pants. So, after some consideration and a quick trip to the dollar store, this is what is going in the box:

• a Texas Tech ski cap. I hope it fits. He has a big head.
• a yo-yo (he used to be really good with a yo-yo)
• a Goliath (from the Old Testament) figurine. I couldn't find David, sadly.
• a lint brush (I would have loved something like that on my mission in New York. Everyone had a cat or a dog, and they were never outside animals).
• Black dress socks with a subtle pattern. Nothing too crazy, just a little something for variety.
• hand sanitizer spray in a container that looks like a pen. I figure he can even keep it in his shirt pocket if he wants.
• Blistex, because you can never have too many tubes of lip balm that you can't keep track of. Plus, Danny always has notoriously chapped lips. I doubt the winters in Alaska have changed that fact.
• One of those eggs that, when you submerge it, becomes a washcloth. For fun.
• Mylanta for gas relief. It sounds like a gag gift, but it's not. I should throw in some breath mints, also. Wait, it looks like the Mylanta is mint-flavored, so it's like killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.
• a magnet shaped like a TV with my picture in it. I don't know why I got such a kick out of this item. I can't think of any person I know who would be less excited by a framed picture of me.

As a missionary, I remember occasionally getting weird letters or cards from friends or family members and wondering if they had lost it while I was away. I think this may have that effect on my brother.