Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The Voyage Westward
The reason for the two-week-plus hiatus in blogging was our Great Adventure in Utah, some of which has already been chronicled on Shelly's blog. It was a big fat family reunion for the posterity of my parents, and we were all there. My brothers and I have produced 10 grandchildren for my parents so far, so you can imagine the fun and chaos that ensued as we were all together.
We went up to Park City for a couple of days, staying in a ski lodge hotel. We spent our time doing things like riding the Alpine Slide (fun but too expensive), the Alpine Coaster (a roller coaster that Shelly was actually pretty terrified of because it didn't give her a sense of security like the big roller coasters at expensive theme parks do), swimming, and hanging out together. Then the party moved back to Provo to my parents' house for a couple of days, which included the hike to Timpanogos Cave (a lot steeper and harder a climb than I remember it from my teenage years, although I admittedly was not carrying a 2-year-old on my back in those days) and a trip northward to see Shelly's brother and my grandma, who got along with the girls famously (Grandma always did like me best).
The second week of the trip, after all my other brothers had left, was Education Week at BYU. My parents watched the girls (and their cousin Loretta, who was abandoned by her parents when they went back to NYC) and Shelly and I spent all day every day on BYU campus going to classes on everything from the legal troubles that put Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail to be martyred, to how to de-stress your life, to the vision of Enoch in Moses Chapter 7, to the brain function of 3- to 5-year olds, to how to write a personal history, to Adam-Ondi-Ahman.
Overall, the experience was very awesome. Individually, the classes were a bit hit-and-miss. There were moments when I felt the Spirit powerfully or where I learned very interesting and helpful new things and left the class committed to be a better person. There were also times where it was all I could do to keep from falling asleep, or from wanting to slap the instructor around. Part of the frustration was nonconformity between what the instructor actually talked about and what the course catalog indicated would be the topic of discussion. Shelly and I have now decided that in the coming days and weeks we're going to have to have a series of sit-down meetings where we go through the notes we took and pull out the specific things we need to be doing to make our lives better. I left the final class of the week saying that all I needed to do was clone myself a couple of times and I'd be able to do all the things I'd learned I should be doing.
Some random but interesting points from Education Week:
* BYU campus is hugely changed from the way it was when I left there less than 8 years ago. It makes me wonder what it will look like when I drop Ellie off there in the fall of 2024.
* There was a class on, um, marital intimacy that we wanted to attend. The somewhat large room they had scheduled for it was filled to capacity and we ended up in one of at least two overflow rooms. Let this be a message to the leadership of the church: this is a topic the members of the church are interested in talking and learning about.
* In the middle of one class, I got a call from the University Police. It seems my dad's car that we had driven that day had rolled and hit another car in the parking lot (despite the fact that I DID have the parking brake on). There was only minimal scraping to both cars, so it ended up with everyone smiling and pretending nothing ever happened, but it was a harrowing few moments before I knew what exactly was going on.
* I found that I enjoyed the practical classes about how to specifically do something, or the history-type classes where they just presented a series of facts, better than the classes where they meant to inspire you or just talk in general about a particular problem people face in life. Education Week being one gigantic self-help session, I was crying out for more specific things I could to do have a better life (not that I didn't leave with a huge list as it was).
* A lot of classes focused on messages such as "Don't spend more than you earn," "De-clutter and simplify your life," and so forth. Then you step out of class and you're assaulted not only by the BYU Bookstore, which was offering signings signings by dozens of authors and artists throughout the week, but also the annual Piano Lab Sale or the official Bookstore Annex - a separate room where they stocked the books recommended for purchase by each Education Week instructor. It was kind of an interesting dynamic between what you were asked to do in class and what you were asked to do out of class. Fortunately, Shelly and I made it through making only minimum purchases (a Mormon novel and a couple of matching BYU hooded sweatshirts for the girls' birthdays).
We went up to Park City for a couple of days, staying in a ski lodge hotel. We spent our time doing things like riding the Alpine Slide (fun but too expensive), the Alpine Coaster (a roller coaster that Shelly was actually pretty terrified of because it didn't give her a sense of security like the big roller coasters at expensive theme parks do), swimming, and hanging out together. Then the party moved back to Provo to my parents' house for a couple of days, which included the hike to Timpanogos Cave (a lot steeper and harder a climb than I remember it from my teenage years, although I admittedly was not carrying a 2-year-old on my back in those days) and a trip northward to see Shelly's brother and my grandma, who got along with the girls famously (Grandma always did like me best).
The second week of the trip, after all my other brothers had left, was Education Week at BYU. My parents watched the girls (and their cousin Loretta, who was abandoned by her parents when they went back to NYC) and Shelly and I spent all day every day on BYU campus going to classes on everything from the legal troubles that put Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail to be martyred, to how to de-stress your life, to the vision of Enoch in Moses Chapter 7, to the brain function of 3- to 5-year olds, to how to write a personal history, to Adam-Ondi-Ahman.
Overall, the experience was very awesome. Individually, the classes were a bit hit-and-miss. There were moments when I felt the Spirit powerfully or where I learned very interesting and helpful new things and left the class committed to be a better person. There were also times where it was all I could do to keep from falling asleep, or from wanting to slap the instructor around. Part of the frustration was nonconformity between what the instructor actually talked about and what the course catalog indicated would be the topic of discussion. Shelly and I have now decided that in the coming days and weeks we're going to have to have a series of sit-down meetings where we go through the notes we took and pull out the specific things we need to be doing to make our lives better. I left the final class of the week saying that all I needed to do was clone myself a couple of times and I'd be able to do all the things I'd learned I should be doing.
Some random but interesting points from Education Week:
* BYU campus is hugely changed from the way it was when I left there less than 8 years ago. It makes me wonder what it will look like when I drop Ellie off there in the fall of 2024.
* There was a class on, um, marital intimacy that we wanted to attend. The somewhat large room they had scheduled for it was filled to capacity and we ended up in one of at least two overflow rooms. Let this be a message to the leadership of the church: this is a topic the members of the church are interested in talking and learning about.
* In the middle of one class, I got a call from the University Police. It seems my dad's car that we had driven that day had rolled and hit another car in the parking lot (despite the fact that I DID have the parking brake on). There was only minimal scraping to both cars, so it ended up with everyone smiling and pretending nothing ever happened, but it was a harrowing few moments before I knew what exactly was going on.
* I found that I enjoyed the practical classes about how to specifically do something, or the history-type classes where they just presented a series of facts, better than the classes where they meant to inspire you or just talk in general about a particular problem people face in life. Education Week being one gigantic self-help session, I was crying out for more specific things I could to do have a better life (not that I didn't leave with a huge list as it was).
* A lot of classes focused on messages such as "Don't spend more than you earn," "De-clutter and simplify your life," and so forth. Then you step out of class and you're assaulted not only by the BYU Bookstore, which was offering signings signings by dozens of authors and artists throughout the week, but also the annual Piano Lab Sale or the official Bookstore Annex - a separate room where they stocked the books recommended for purchase by each Education Week instructor. It was kind of an interesting dynamic between what you were asked to do in class and what you were asked to do out of class. Fortunately, Shelly and I made it through making only minimum purchases (a Mormon novel and a couple of matching BYU hooded sweatshirts for the girls' birthdays).
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