That’s a wrap

Today was the last day of seminary. Just before 6am I opened the door to my classroom and found this:

In teenage-speak, I think that means I’m popular. Or, maybe it means someone has a deep burning hatred for me; I can never remember. I’m not sure who was responsible– no one in my class took credit– but we did end up with a pretty impressive three-foot-wide ball of toilet paper.

As class was ending, I decided to take a picture of the 15 students (of 17) who were here today. What a handsome bunch!

This photo more accurately captures the spirit of the class, though:

I made an attempt at an “Oscar selfie” but failed… too many people…

I have to give a big shout-out to my fellow teachers, who are amazing and have been a huge support to me all year. Thanks, Katie and Jodi!

Here we are showing a little more personality– for some reason I find it hilarious that Jesus looks so serious behind us.

I absolutely love my calling as a seminary teacher, despite the early mornings and long hours preparing. It’s mostly because I have the privilege of spending each morning with 17 amazing kids. I’m looking forward to next fall, when I get to do it for another year. (I’m also looking forward to summer vacation, though!)

Again?

This morning I found a baby rabbit in my window well again. Maybe it was the same one from yesterday, and he still hasn’t figured out gravity. In any case, this time it was Zaque who rescued him.

I told Zaque he should let the little guy go, and he said “in a little while”. I headed out to meet up with a friend, and Laralee and Kyra were both gone, so Zaque worked on some chores around the house. When I came back a little over an hour later, I asked if the rabbit had been set free. It turned out he’d been hiding out in Zaque’s sweatshirt, just tucked away in the corner of a big pocket.

Zaque had tried to feed him strawberries and some water, but the rabbit didn’t seem interested. He was actually pretty content to just sit with Zaque. It was pretty funny to see my teenage boy enjoying some gentle, quiet time with a little animal. Laralee came home and, after hearing the story, commented that maybe we should get Zaque a pet. No thanks.

Eventually he was returned to the wild. I guess I’ll keep an eye on the window well in case he decides to drop in again.

Box o’ spit

Sometimes I stumble across some really odd things in my house. Well, maybe in someone else’s house they would seem odd, and for some reason in ours they seem right at home. Take, for example, this box I just noticed on our kitchen counter:

It is, quite literally, a box of spit. I’m guessing Laralee is sending off a few samples of hers for some testing or something. Who knows.

Trapped

The window well outside my basement office claimed another victim this morning: a baby rabbit. He must’ve fallen in sometime last night, and obviously had no way to climb out. We have a history of animals trapped in the window well: a mouse, another mouse, and even a vole.

After Laralee and Kyra spent a few minutes remarking how cute he was, I went on a rescue mission and climbed into the window well to retrieve him.

He was very docile… maybe from the cold, or maybe from hunger. In any case, Kyra gently put him in a grove of bushes and he hopped away. We’ll probably see him again in a few weeks, munching on the grass in our backyard…

Some things don’t change

On Mother’s Day we had a chance to talk with Alex as he continues his mission in Peru. We connected Google Hangouts to our bigscreen TV and were treated to gems like this:

He’s changed a lot in the last year and a half, but it’s good to know he still has that same goofy streak.

I haven’t written anything political on this blog for a long time, but the recent train wrecks in the Trump administration (or should I say the increased frequency of train wrecks) make me feel like our country is in some kind of surreal situation, with a leader who is basically an arrogant, ignorant, petulant child.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, I read that Trump suffers from something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is “the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence.” He demonstrates this over and over, most recently by revealing classified intelligence he essentially didn’t understand.

The Times article ends with this gem, which sums up much of what I feel about our President:

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies buzzing randomly in a jar.

“We badly want to understand Trump, to grasp him,” David Roberts writes in Vox. “It might give us some sense of control, or at least an ability to predict what he will do next. But what if there’s nothing to understand?

Sigh.

LLAMAS

My seminary kids tell me that sometimes I get off on tangents while we’re studying the scriptures, and I think they may be right. For example, today we were studying the book of Revelation, which includes this verse:

14:3 And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song…

It made me think of a famous song whose words few men know. I did a little bit of research and was fascinated to learn:

* The song was recorded in a single take, and it went terribly. The guitarist missed his cue, the drummer dropped his drumstick halfway through the song, and the lead singer’s voice wasn’t picked up well by the microphone.

* It received a little airplay but didn’t really take off. The band decided to break up.

* A DJ discovered it and played it as “Worst Record of the Week”. Suddenly it became immensely popular, because listeners couldn’t understand the lyrics and thought maybe they were obscene.

* The rumor of obscene lyrics spread, eventually leading to an FBI investigation of the song. After months of work, the FBI concluded the words were “unintelligible at any speed”.

* Not convinced by the FBI, the state of Indiana banned the song.

* Over time, the song has become one of the most covered tunes in music history, with some 1,600 different bands recording versions of it.

* The song has its own web site.

* There’s also an international organization called LLAMAS, made up of people who are fanatic about the song.

* The state of Washington attempted to make it their official state song (but sadly the vote failed).

* It’s played during the seventh-inning stretch at every Seattle Mariners home game.

The song? 1963’s “Louie Louie”, performed by the Kingsmen.

Yeah, pretty amazing stuff. And definitely related to the book of Revelation, right?

Oh, if you were wondering, LLAMAS is the Louie Louie Advocacy and Music Appreciation Society. No, I’m not kidding.

I’m rich! (Well, sort of)

Whenever we use our credit card and rack up “reward points” or whatever they’re called, we cash them in for Amazon gift cards. Every few months I check our balance and realize we can grab a few more cards, so I order them and, a few days later, I have a little guilt-free shopping spree. It’s guilt-free because hey, gift cards don’t count as spending actual money, right?

Last week I realized it had been a long time since I checked our reward-point balance, and I was happy to see that I could order a dozen $25 cards. Woo hoo! Today they arrived in the mail, and I added them to our stash. Now I have around twenty of them.

That’s $500 of whatever random junk I want to buy… expansions for board games! Goofy Halloween costumes! Buckets of Red Vines! Ooh, the mind boggles.