Hodgepodge

This week's post is a hodgepodge of significant and insignicant things. I hope that you find it funny at least.

I'm in charge of service projects for my ward, and recently we have been assigned to oversee a Monday-night activity every other month. Those of us who are gay in the Church have very complicated feelings, but one of the concepts I love is that of the body of Christ, that we all have diverse and unique gifts we can contribute.

As I go running on the Wild Rose Trail, I am dismayed at all the invasive myrtle spurge that is taking over. So I decided to make it our service activity to remove it. (We originally planned it for April, but we were rained out.) I think that is a unique thing I can contribute: most people would not think to do that. I think we had more than twenty people show up. So we removed the plants, and now all those people know that myrtle spurge is an invasive plant. It can give you a rash, so I told people they had to wear long sleeves and gloves. But if people didn't, I told them they could pull dyer's woad, which is also invasive but doesn't give people a rash. 

We had more than a dozen garbage bags of invasive plants. But I still feel like we barely made a dent. Oh well, it was still a lovely evening.

I like seeing all the people helping. I did this!

Last week, I talked about getting a copy of the CD It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown two months early. This week, I left a comment on a blog that discussed the release. I said, "I ordered the CD directly from MVD, and it arrived yesterday, nearly two months before the official release. And it is glorious." And the blogger replied, "While the enthusiasm expressed by Mark is welcome, it's important to note that he received an early copy of the CD specifically for review purposes. As stated above, the general public will not be able to purchase anything until July 5."

I am so confused. Why would I get an early copy for review purposes!? I'm not a music reviewer! I devoted a paragraph to the new Charlie Brown Thanksgiving CD last November, but I can't imagine anyone would have seen that on this little, insignificant blog. And even if they had, how would they know that I was the one who had written about the Thanksgiving CD when I ordered the new CD ? There surely must have been some mistake. But I will take advantage of the mistake and keep listening to the fantastic music before everyone else gets to. It's funny, because I do actually get candy and books sent me to for review purposes. But not CDs.

At my job with the Utah Historical Society, we get various stickers, and I like to put them on my laptop. 

Of course, all of us employees get the same stickers. And this week we had in-person meetings. My supervisor left early. And when I went to leave, I discovered that she had taken my laptop, since we have similar stickers! So I had to meet up with her outside of work to exchange our laptops. That meant I finally got to see her toddler son in person.

But the next day, it was my turn to do something embarrassing. She lived in Spokane the same time I was there as a missionary. I was reading over a book review, which triggered a memory. So in my email to her about the review, I added this tangential comment: "Back in May 2008, the Spokane North Stake performed an original play written by a member of the stake. It was (predictably) hokey, and I distinctly remember an interpretive dance of pioneer women doing an awkward fist pump to demonstrate their strength. I was just wondering if you might have been there and our paths might have crossed sixteen years ago?"

And then came her reply. "Oh, Mark. Do I know about that play? Yes, the stake president gave [my husband] and me the assignment to direct it and make it less hokey. It could have been much worse. I know nothing about directing plays, but it happened!"

🤦‍♂️

You always need to be careful what you criticize, because you never know who might have been involved. I just didn't expect there to be a connection sixteen years ago in a different state! It actually makes sense that she and her husband would be assigned to direct this play of historical fiction: she's a historian of theater, and her husband is a dancer. She did follow up her email with "And please don't worry that you offended me! That play . . . was one of the hardest, most intense assignments I've had. [We] were purposely assigned to tone things down."

Last month, our dryer quit working, and we had to get a new one. This week, our washer also quit working, so we had to get a new one of those. I remember them being new around the year 2000, and my parents found the washing machine's instuction manual, which was printed in 1999, thereby confirming that my memory was correct. I love how very '90s the manual is.

This weekend was the Living Traditions Festival in Salt Lake City, and I helped man the booth for the Utah Historical Society. We had a wheel that people could spin, and then we would ask them a trivia question. They could have a sticker for answering a question, even if they got it wrong. I haven't interacted with the public like that since I worked at This Is the Place. It was fun—and mentally draining for this introvert. I saw a few people I knew at the festival, including my old boss at BYU Studies from 2012 to 2014. There were lots of enthusiastic people. And a few veritable oddballs. I might have a history as a weird person, but I don't think I was ever that weird. 

I am always amused when musicians release album art that is similar. This week I saw this new art for a single:

 

Which reminded me of this album from last year:

 

And that reminded me of these artworks from 2015 and 2016. 

(If you're wondering why the pictures are different sizes, I just realized that if I use Chrome to paste pictures, it standardizes the picture size, but not in Firefox. So I switched from Firefox to Chrome.)

As you likely know by now, I like to make AI images from my dreams. I am very annoyed by all the AI images I see on Facebook posted by unscrupulous pages that make people believe they're real or that make them think they're worthwhile art. But I think it's funny to make images from dreams, especially since the uncanny nature of AI perfectly matches the uncanny nature of dreams. This picture might be one of the most accurate dream representations I have had. It's rare to have words appear legible! 

Of course I would have a dream like this