Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
I was reading some forum discussions about game design, and loved this:
Your gems are in the back of the stack: [junk, junk, mostly junk, kinda junk, gem]. Gotta keep popping the stack.
bloomingkales @ Hacker News
It’s programmer humor, but I like what it reminds me about game design. I just have to keep plugging away, designing one after another, until I find a gem.
This picture of our friend Elder Jones sums up life for young missionaries pretty well.
Back in June, when we were new to the area, we bought some cacti at a local show. We set two of them outside in the hot sun, and after a day one of them was practically burned to death. We’d been told (by a cactus expert at the show!) that a lot of sun and heat would be good, but apparently they’d grown up pampered or something. We promptly brought them indoors and attempted to nurture them back to life in a cooler environment, with more water.
Anyway, fast forward to today, when the succulent finally expired and the burned one gave up another lobe (of five original lobes, only one remained). We decided it was time to buy some new cacti.
In the back left is the solo-lobe one that didn’t like the heat. At front right is the other “original” prickly, which seems to be thriving. The other two are new, and we’ll see how they do. We hope to take all of them back to Montana as reminders of our mission in the desert.
Our friend Michelle is a geologist, and she has an amazing rock collection. I’ve always enjoyed rocks and gems, and fancied myself a bit of a collector when I was a kid (although my collection was generally just pretty stones I found on the ground). Today she showed me a sample of iron pyrite, popularly known as “fool’s gold”.
This isn’t an ordinary sample, though. It includes two massive cubic crystals, which is really unusual… and probably won’t really fool anyone into thinking it’s gold. Typical deposits of iron pyrite have thousands of crystals like this, but much much smaller and crowded together, making them at least a little more believable as gold.
So cool!
Our friend Tamra gave us some eggs her hens laid. I think they look pretty awesome!
