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It’s late May. And it’s snowing.

Dirk posted this on Facebook today:

Several friends (who don’t know Dirk or Jen) have seen it and commented that I seem a little under-dressed. I guess that’s kind of par for the course with me.

That was a fun day, being a part of their wedding. Happy anniversary, old friend.

Today was my last day teaching seminary. It’s been four years of getting up at 5:15am every school day and spending an hour with half-asleep high schoolers. Four years of going to bed early, trying to sleep when I wasn’t tired but knowing I’d have to be up in six hours. Four years of spending two hours every day preparing a lesson. Four years of figuring out how to make the lesson engaging and interesting to those half-asleep teenagers. Four years of studying the scriptures in detail, and reading manuals, and researching church history. Four years of wearing a shirt and tie every morning.

And so after returning home from my empty classroom today, I deleted my 5:15am alarm for the last time. That felt good.

When I first received my call to serve as a teacher, my supervisor said, “welcome to the hardest and the greatest calling in the church”. She was right. It was hard… definitely the hardest calling I’ve had in my twenty-five years of service. And it was great… so much fun to be with a roomful of kids every day, so much to learn, and so many blessings from all of it. I’m happy to finish, but sad to see it go.

Found in an old notebook of Kyra’s:

For some reason, I love the juxtaposition of an ionic reaction with copper chloride, and a bunch of little monsters.

I found a snippet of an article from the New York Times sometime in the 1990’s:

As a physicist, I can attest this is true.

Another thing I found in my box of really old stuff (in a manila folder called Miscellaneous, if you can believe it) is this beautiful page from a copier, circa 1992.

That’s Dempsey in the shades on the left, and those are my lips and nostrils on the right. We’d taken a road trip from Rolla to Jefferson City one night (because that’s kind of stuff we did) and broke into the State Capitol building. I think it’s okay for me to admit that now, because surely the statute of limitations has expired. We wandered the marble hallways for a while and found a copier, and decided to put it to use. Hence the “Missouri tax dollars at work” note at the top.

Ahh, college.

I’m going through boxes of old stuff, cleaning house, and stumbled across a page I’d torn out of a magazine.

Luckily Linux isn’t quite that bad these days, but yeah, I do remember days of figuring out arcane hardware configurations and the like. (I’m looking at you, X11.)

Like Alex and Kyra before him, Zaque has decided to serve a mission for the church. After a few months of preparing (mostly waiting for the earliest time he could submit his paperwork), last night he received his mission call.

Unlike past years, missionaries now receive their calls via email. So it’s a little different to stand around Zaque’s computer as he opens the email, rather than sitting on the couch as he tears open an envelope.

He clicked the link in the email and started reading the letter aloud.

It started out just like all the others: “You are hereby called to serve as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…”

And then came the second sentence, the one all prospective missionaries read with a little anxiety (mixed with excitement) in their voice: the one that tells them where they’ll be serving.

“You are assigned to labor in the Oklahoma Oklahoma City Mission.”

Yep, Zaque’s heading to Oklahoma on September 18 for two years. Laralee and I are so proud of him. He’s going to be an amazing missionary.

Laralee always impresses me with her dedication to eating well. She makes all sorts of concoctions that are amazingly healthy, or involve “superfoods”, or are elixirs of immortality, or whatever. Today I was impressed with the drink she created in the blender. Or, more accurately, I was impressed by how thick and purple it was.

I think it includes things like spinach, beets, and grass. Yes, grass. But such is the price of being healthy, I guess…

Today was Zaque’s last day of high school. He seemed pretty happy.

We still have to get through graduation next weekend, but for now he’s just thrilled not to have to worry about homework, quizzes, tests, and projects. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how much he worried about those anyway…