New month, new job, new calling

Ahh, September. What a wonderful month! When I wrote in my journal on September 1, I wrote the date as September 27, and I didn't realize it until the next day. Maybe it's because I'm turning 27 this month.

One of my favorite September traditions is picking grapes from our backyard and making grape juice. We have three kinds of grapes that grow in our backyard. First there are the green grapes, the most abundant, which are good but not as good as store-bought grapes (they're also smaller). Then there are oval purplish grapes. We thought my sister had killed them off years ago, but they grew back. They usually grow very high, but it's worth the effort to get them because they taste better than store-bought grapes. It's amazing that these sweet, tasty morsels come from the water and dirt of our backyard! Then there are the Concord grapes. These grapes are not good for eating; the skins are very thick, and they have seeds, and the inside is very chewy--like the consistency of a gummy worm, but it doesn't dissolve. However, these are the grapes that give grape juice its distinctive color and flavor. Usually we mix green and Concord grapes for juice.

When I was younger, we used to have lots of grapes to make lots of juice, but the deer eat a lot of them now. This year was unusual; usually they aren't ripe until the middle or end of September, but they were plenty ripe here at the beginning of the month.

September 1 marked the end of my time working for Reid Neilson, the Assistant Church Historian and managing director of the Church History Department. I am sad for that. However, there are some loose ends on some of the projects I worked on with him, so I will continue to work on them on my own time and will have my name attached to them.

I'm still working for the CHD, but I'm working on a women's discourses project. There are selections of a few discourses by women from every decade from the 1830s until now. My job is to check the sources, particularly for the annotations and introductory materials. It's not a task I mind; I did a lot of source checking when I interned at BYU Studies. I'm just a little sad because it's not as interesting as what I was doing before. However, I took this position because it's more likely to lead me to a permanent job (I still only have a contract). I do keep wondering, though, if I made the right decision.

Today I was set apart with a new calling at church, assistant membership clerk. This is no new position for me; I was assistant finance clerk during the summer of 2010 in the BYU 61st Ward, then assistant membership clerk from August 2012 to April 2013 and ward clerk from April 2013 to July 2014 in the Provo YSA 18th Ward. I now have three callings, the others being stake family history director and ward family history consultant, so those last two overlap. There are several of us who have multiple callings. It's kind of a weird concept to me, because I remember sitting in bishopric and ward council meetings in Provo, wondering how we were going to make sure there were enough callings to go around. Now we have to double (or triple or quadruple) up.