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Today at Walmart, Laralee and I were wandering and bumped into a friend. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then she mentioned that she’d been thinking a lot about the upcoming seminary year. Seminary runs concurrently with the school year– for every day of high school, the kids attend seminary beforehand. Now that we’re a few weeks away from the start of the school year, things are gearing up for seminary as well.

Anyway, she’s been thinking about her daughter, who’s been struggling with a few things of late. She told me that she’s really been hoping her daughter will be in my class. (I don’t have any control over my class– the students are assigned more or less randomly, with some minor adjustments by the people overseeing the seminary program.) Well, the class list had just been released a few days ago, and although it’s not official yet, I knew that her daughter was on my roster. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to tell her, so I did.

She almost broke down. After giving me a huge hug, she explained that she was so grateful for this, and excited that I could teach her daughter. I was completely taken aback, since I don’t think I’m all that great a teacher, and moreover the two other seminary teachers with whom I share a building are both better teachers than me. Still, it was pretty cool for a friend to trust me with her daughter and feel like I could somehow reach her in a way that the other awesome teachers perhaps couldn’t.

Teaching seminary is an amazing privilege, and little unexpected things like this remind me that all those long hours and early mornings are absolutely worth it.

Kyra was working another shift as a Walmart cashier, and it happened that Laralee and I needed to pick up a few things. So we headed over and found her lane.

Here’s a shot of her hard at work:

Notice the woman on the far right– she seemed a little suspicious of Laralee taking a picture of a cashier. She leaned in close to Kyra and whispered, “Do you know them?” Kyra laughed. “They’re my parents.” Because of course that explains the weirdness of taking a picture of a cashier.

Walmart is so much fun!

It’s funny to think that I also worked at Walmart, as did Alex. The question: will Zack carry on the family tradition?

Last week Zack and I headed over to Lyons Pinball, which is a little house up the road in Lyons where a guy has a collection of classic pinball and video games which he lets people play (for 50 cents a game, of course). They’re a lot of fun, and Zack’s been wanting to go for a while.

He found a video game cabinet that had a collection of classic arcade games: things like Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Space Invaders, and so on. For some reason he went straight to Dig Dug. Of course I remember it from my younger days, but I always thought it was kind of lame… you run around digging through the dirt and inflating weird bad guys until they explode. But hey, it’s not like many video games have a deep plot or something.

After a handful of games he proudly entered his initials in the leaderboard. It looks like he needed to do a bit better to hit the high score, though…

Happy birthday to the most beautiful, talented, smart, funny eighteen-year-old girl in my life!

This afternoon I was in the parking lot of Jimmy John’s after grabbing a sandwich, and a guy backed right into the side of my car. I saw him coming, and my window was down, so I shouted “Hey, whoa!” but he didn’t hear me. Luckily the damage was pretty minor:

The rear bumper of his SUV was barely scratched, so he asked two or three times, “Are you sure you didn’t already have damage there?” As if I had a big dent exactly where his bumper hit me or something, and was lying about the damage.

So begins the drudgery of working with his insurance company to get this fixed. Whee!

Zack’s friend Bryce built a “gaming computer” a few weeks ago, and Zack decided he really needed one too. I guess his little iMac laptop isn’t breathtaking for gaming (although it seems to work okay from what I’ve seen) and it’s all the rage to have a custom rig running Windows and Steam. Bryce’s system cost upward of $300, but I sat down with Zack and we worked together to figure out the parts we already have– there are shelves upon shelves of parts in my basement office– and what he really needs for a reasonable gaming computer. We ended up with $165 in parts.

Well, everything arrived yesterday and Zack was excited to get it going. Today we sat down, unpacked all of the boxes, and I showed him how to build a computer.

The one thing he’s missing is an operating system; we don’t have Windows anywhere at home, so I guess he’s going to borrow an installation CD from a friend. Then he’ll be ready to game with the best.

I was just meeting with a lawyer and he had a sweet “happy birthday” cake hat on his shelf. Since today is Dirk’s birthday, I figured I had no choice– I asked the lawyer to take a few pictures of me wearing it.

Yeah, this is the sort of guy I have as a lawyer: the sort of guy who has a hat shaped like a cake.

Astronomers have found another “dwarf” planet deep in the solar system. It’s temporarily been designated 2015RR245, which isn’t a very exciting name, but presumably they’ll give it an official name soon.

Here’s a cool diagram showing the currently-known distant planets:

Everyone knows Pluto, and many years ago when I taught science class, I talked about Sedna, Makemake, Haumea, Quaoar, and Eris. But now I see we’ve added Varuna, Varda, Ixion, and a handful of other yet-to-be-named guys. I’m not sure if someone has yet come up with a song or mnemonic (remember “My very fine mother just served us nine pizzas”?)…

It’s exciting that our local neighborhood is much busier and more complicated than we’ve imagined!

After a multi-year journey, the Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on July 4. NASA just released its first photo of the big guy:

The Not-so-great Red Spot is clearly visible– it continues to shrink, which of course is a source of continuing scientific speculation. To the right are Io, Europa, and Ganymede.

Awesome stuff.

I’m lifting this straight from Mom’s blog, but I thought it was awesome.

For some reason, the “Removable quill pen and book!” part really cracks me up. You just don’t see that kind of thing in Star Wars action figures, for example.