Stanford and Me

Two weeks ago, I went to Stanford University.

There was a conference on sequential methodologies, which, as it turns out, are not exciting. And yet, somehow, they are. But that's beside the point.

The point is that, for three days, I was consistently the dumbest person in every room I frequented, including my hotel room, where I was the only person in the room. I tried not to even talk to anyone, lest anyone blow the whistle on me.

I am not a statistician. I am not a biologist. I am not even a hardcore researcher. I am a therapist who happens to be employed by a larger system that values research and statistical training. And since that system requires stats training of my students, I believe that it is only fair for me to be likewise trained.

But, I will be really honest, I really went to Palo Alto for this:

And this (which came as a recommendation from my brother, who is an expert in Japanese cuisine):

And to snap pictures like this one:

And this one (because I teach an MFT theories class in the winter and make reference to this place roughly 700 times):

And this one (for Kim):

But this is really what made my trip worthwhile:

One was Meyer Lemon. The other was fleur de sel. Both were divine.

Yes, it has finally come to this.

This post is supposed to be about the time I spent in California with Shane's family.

Unfortunately, to get to why I was in California, I have to confess that I did something I am not proud of:

I went to a mid-singles' conference.

It was not the first I have been to, and I have a feeling it will not be the last. The difference between this one and others, though, is that it attracts people from all over the country--as in, people from other states fly in to attend this conference. I am now officially one of those people.

It started with a desire to visit Stephanie, who is now living in San Diego--well, Coronado to be more precise. She suggested that I come the weekend of the Huntington Beach LDS midsingles conference. I have learned from years of experience that Stephanie can make anything fun, even these kinds of activities, so I said yes.

The highlights:

• The Angels/Braves game on Friday night. The Angels won, and I ran into Rochelle, a former roommate who is now finishing up her law degree at Pepperdine. No pictures of that, sorry, Lisa.
• Fish tacos on the beach.
• Some pretty good workshops on Saturday morning. It turns out, both Stephanie and I are bathing in masculine energy. No, that's not a good thing.
• The beach on Saturday afternoon.
• Speed dating. No, seriously.
• Seeing this man behind us in line for dinner. Not being a Laker fan (in fact, truthfully, being the opposite of a Laker fan) I had no idea who he was, but Stephanie recognized him and texted me discretely to alert me to his presence.
• A pretty decent 80's rock cover band that wore wigs.
• I fell on the floor laughing. Now that I think about it, I can't remember the particulars of that one.

The lowlights:

• Overhearing comments like the following: "I need to know you are willing to give. No, wait. That was my marriage." Huh?
• Dinner at Ruby's on the pier. The food itself was good. What was not good was that, in order to accommodate the entire conference, we had to eat in shifts, and, when we were seated, we were put at a table with six people who were already halfway through their meals, had come together, and were not great at small talk. When I asked the man to my left what he did for a living, he said, "Many things." Maybe I'm a snob, but that didn't seem like something a man in his 40's should be saying.
• A two-hour Sacrament meeting on Sunday morning that dissolved into chaos as people prepared to be fed.

I had a great time because, again, I was there with Stephanie, which meant that, at a given time, I could look over at her face and know that she was thinking the same thing I was. Also, we had a lot of downtime to process through some of the awkward encounters of the day.

Sunday after church, Shane came and picked me up so that I could spend the night at his house. Huntington Beach is about an hour from where they live.

By skipping the closing fireside, I got to have dinner with Shane, Maria, Brooklyn, and Elise, who is now doing this:

That's right--she can crawl. And, when she gets going, she's pretty quick. She has to be because she has to keep up with this person:

Not that Brooklyn spends much time crawling. Most of our time was spent singing, dancing, and playing "Rapunzel," which involved her dangling a gold rope from the back of her head while I pretended to climb up.

The next morning we went to Trader Joe's, where I mostly just looked longingly at frozen food I couldn't take home.

Brooklyn, however got a box of ocean animal crackers which she ate in the car.

For lunch, Maria took me for some really good sushi, which is something I don't have very often, having gone from the plains of West Texas to the landlocked state of Utah.

Here is something else I don't get very often:

Look at those cheeks! Man, I miss those girls. I don't get to see them as often as the two other people whose pictures make it onto this blog, but I sure love them.

My life lately

I officially survived Fall and Winter semesters at BYU!

I am teaching one class during the spring, but it is taking significantly less of my time.

So what have I been up to lately?

Playing at the park...

Making cake pops for Easter...

Visiting the Tulip Festival...

Hanging with two of my favorite kids!

Sammie was showing me her dance costume tonight (I posed her like this),

and I guess Kevin wanted to dress up too.

This is a new swimming suit and shirt he just got.

Then she spent a few minutes showing me her dance routine, while he spent some time showing me how he could climb up three steps and jump to the ground.

Never let it be said that these kids don't appreciate an audience.

Kevin and Sammie

Last weekend marked a milestone: both Kevin and Sammie spent the night at my house.

I had promised them when I moved to Utah that someday they could spend the night at my house. I expected that two things had to happen for "someday" to occur:

a) Kevin would have to be potty trained.

b) I would have to recover from the last time Sammie spend the night at my house.

Their parents dropped them off on Friday afternoon. Our first order of business was to ride their trike and scooter around my parking lot. This lasted approximately three minutes.

We took a trip to the grocery store, where we bought their dinner of choice: Macaroni and Cheese shaped like Spongebob Squarepants.

Following dinner, we decided to go to McDonald's for ice cream.

I'm not sure why the creepy Hamburglar windsock was hanging from the ceiling, but I couldn't take my eyes off it.

I made the mistake of ordering them each their own ice cream cone, while ordering a McFlurry for myself. It turned out they were more interested in playing at the play place than eating ice cream, and when they did decided they wanted ice cream, they were more interested in my McFlurry than they were in their own cones.

After ice cream, we returned to my house, where they got ready for bed.

I mentioned before that Kevin had to be potty-trained to be allowed to sleep over, which he is, at least in the daytime.

At nighttime, however, he still wears a diaper. His parents had run out of the diapers he normally wore to bed. But, being the resourceful woman that she is, Melanee improvised and found a few Disney Princess Pull-ups from when she was potty-training Sammie. At first, Kevin was reluctant to wear them. Then, Melanee did this:

Not only did it keep him dry, but the three of us laughed about it for five minutes.

The next day, I returned the kids to their parents' house, where I ended up spending most of the rest of the weekend. The Frosts were also there. Here is a shot of the kids with Dane, helping to mix some cupcake batter:

I apologize that Dane is not looking at the camera. It's pretty hard to get three children that young to all look at the camera at the same time.

And this one:

Kevin suddenly got very excited about building a tower on the fridge with his letter magnets.

See if you can spot the word he unintentionally spelled. You would have had to spend the weekend with him to know why it was extra funny.

The Festival of Colors

Without really saying my job is stressful (because I don't want to be one of those people who blabs indiscreetly about his/her job and coworkers), I think I have conveyed that point. Recently, it has become evident that I need to spend less time working, thinking about work, and/or talking about work. So, when Lisa invited me to take part in the Hare Krishna Temple's Holi Festival of Colors, I said yes. It has become an annual event for her, as well as for many, many other Utah County residents. It was a first for me.

For those of you who don't live in Utah County, I will try to explain this as best I can:

About 15-20 minutes south of Provo, there is a Hare Krishna temple. I have spent some time on Wikipedia, and feel that I can, with a marginal amount of clarity, explain what Hare Krishna is:

• It is a religious organization whose core beliefs are based on traditional Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad-gita.
• It is a monotheistic religion that aims to bring people to the Supreme God, who is Krishna.
• Its members can often be seen spreading Krishna-consciousness in public areas.
• The festival of Holi symbolizes both the exorcism of the demoness Holika and the love of Krishna and Radha. It is celebrated by the throwing of colors and the burning of the witch.

From these three bullet points, it shares some commonalities with my religio (except for the Bhagavad-gita). I will freely admit that I did not know even this small amount about Hare Krishna prior to attending the Festival of Colors. I will also freely admit that I am confident I was not alone.

So, this is what the festival meant to me, and, in my estimation, 98% of the other people there:

• You get to stand in a field in front of the Hare Krishna Temple and throw handfuls of colored powder at one another while chanting "Hare Krishna," over and over again. Hare, by the by, refers to the "energy of God."

The festival took place all day yesterday. They were expecting something like 15,000 people at this event. I realize that the official capacity of Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin is over 100,000, but we are talking about a pretty small, fairly rural town in Utah. Consequently, we had to park a couple of miles away, and walk to the temple. We never found all of the people we were supposed to be going with.

Our first task once we got inside the temple grounds was to buy the colored powder. The powder, which seemed to be something along the lines of rose-scented cornstarch, was sold in individual bags, bags of three, or bags of six. Entrance into the grounds is free, so the temple makes money from selling the colors. There was no discount for buying bags of three or six. The powder stands were under a pavillion, which was so crowded I never actually saw a line, or the people selling the powder until we managed to press our way to the front.

Once we had our colors, we made our way out to the lawn in front of the temple where probably a couple thousand people were gathered, already throwing colors at one another, despite the fact that there is a designated throwing time and you are sort of discouraged from just throwing colors haphazardly at people.

Meanwhile, a band was playing. They had sort of a Christian rock feel to them, but, after examining their website, I'm not sure they would claim Christianity or any other denomination beyond a general spirituality. Following their set, it was announced that, prior to the 3 p.m. throwing, they would "burn the witch."

I am not making this up. The burning of the witch seems to be important to the festival of Holi, but I cannot get over the bizarreness of standing on a hill with thousands of white people in the throes of some sort of Indian Woodstock chanting "Burn the witch!" "Burn the witch!" Images of Monty Python and The Crucible filled my head.

On the heels of the witch-burning, they had the countdown, and, for a good ten seconds, the air was filled with colored powder.

And that was pretty much it.

I have included some of the dos and don'ts of this activity, which, I think, gives a pretty good snapshot of what this day was like:

Dos

• Going up to strangers and asking, "May I loving[ly] decorate your face & recolor your hair?"-This one became extremely important to me. I have personal space issues in my regular life, and they extended to this festival, so I did not appreciate random strangers on the street (well before I got to the temple, mind you) throwing colored powder on my face or slapping my back with their powdered hands.
• Letting down body surfers gently on their feet. There was an ambulance at the event, which fired up as we were leaving, presumably because someone had failed to heed this rule.

Don'ts

• Throwing colors close, hard, & directly into eyes and mouth.
• Climbing anything except stairs (means roofs, scaffolding, poles, fences, brass elephants, stage).
• Taking off shoes of body surfers & throwing on pavilion roof. (they'll not be taken down til end of the day).
• Vending illegally on the property (undermines temple's ability to improve property & events).
• Throwing colors on the musicians & their equipment.
• Throwing colors on or around the temple building & verandah (it's a color safe zone for those who'd rather observe).

It always worries me when I read a list of rules like this one because it is absolute proof that someone has done these things, and that it doesn't take much for a group of upstanding college/high school students to disintegrate into a group of crazy anarchists.

Here's a shot of Anne, who never broke a single rule during the event, and also kept her sunglasses on during the whole thing, so as to avoid having someone throw powder in her eyes.

At some point in the day, it occurred to me that I am a professional in the community, and it might not be in my best interest to run into one of my students or clients at this event.

I was banking on the fact that they wouldn't recognize me.

What do you think?

*I apologize that these pictures do not do a very good job of depicting things as they actually happened. I have a new phone which is fancy and expensive, and I did not pull it out of its protective bag until after we were safely away from where the colors were being thrown.

Injustice

I have been paying for cable since I moved to Utah. I have discovered that I don't use it as much as I thought I would, though it did enable me to watch five Harry Potter movies last weekend.

HOWEVER, I keep it for such occasions as college football season and March Madness, when BYU is playing in its most important game since I began cheering for their basketball team. Sadly, I am going to miss it because I have to teach class tomorrow night. While I don't feel good about canceling practicum to watch basketball (my students are either uninterested in basketball or not BYU fans), I would feel okay about pausing to watch some of it on the TV in my office. But the game is being broadcast on TBS, which the university doesn't get.

I think that's called irony, but so many people have misused that term that I'm not sure anymore.

The Kid is Legal Again

After faxing my clearance from the Court of South Salt Lake to the DMV (twice) and paying a $30 reinstatement fee, I am pleased to announce that I am, once again, a driver in good standing with the State of Utah.

Whew!