Girassol

I have been looking forward to this moment for five years.

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Being able to finally say that I have officially turned a complete draft of my Master's thesis in to my committee chair for editing:  PRICELESS.

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Saturday

Saturday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For is...  "A color."  Only twice in my life before now have I ever stopped to consider gratitude for colors in general.

The first time was when I was in elementary school, and our first color TV went berserk and went to black and white.  We left it like that for a couple of days before Mom and Dad went out and bought a new color TV.  I remember this being a Very Big Deal that involved a trip to an appliance store (!), several behind-closed-doors conversations that we knew were about money because when they closed the doors it was ALWAYS about money, and a Very Serious Lecture instructing us on how to use the new TV and the even cooler feature, the wireless remote control!  With a mute button! 

The second time was when I moved into the little place where I now live, which is the first place I have lived as an adult that I was allowed to put color on the walls.  Prior to this, I've lived in cinder-block dorms and a series of rented apartments and houses which were always painted in a neutral, goes-with-everything white or beige.  (With the exception of the 70's house in Provo that had the red shag carpet and the mirrored wallpaper.  Zoinks!) 

I was thrilled when my landlords said I was welcome to paint the walls whatever color I liked, and THEY WOULD EVEN PAY FOR THE PAINT.  Awesome, awesome people.  So I went wild.  I have no roommates to complain about the colors I choose.  I could get married to some guy who likes beige a lot, and we'll have to compromise the color right out of the house.   Who knows how long I'll live here or where I'll be next, so why not enjoy it while I can?   Therefore, I have a sunflower yellow kitchen, a peapod green dining room, a royal plum living room, and a ladybug red bedroom.  And I am so happy!  It energizes me to wake up and see bright things around me. 

Since purple is the specific color I'm grateful for today, let me share with you why.  The living room in my house is purple, and it's my most favorite room.  The purple color is so unexpected for a living room.  It's a fun, playful color.  It's bright, cheery, and whimsical.  It makes me smile when I walk in the room, and I think that's what your home SHOULD feel like. 

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Friday

Friday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For is...  "An animal."

There is one animal I am particularly enchanted by, and that is the llama.  Majoring in Spanish in college and now teaching it to high school kids, llamas come up in conversation surprisingly often, so they're one of the few animals I know anything remotely interesting about. 

Llamas are pretty friendly animals, although they can spit when they get ticked off, like camels do.  They are built well to serve as pack animals, and their feet are particularly suited for traveling in rough terrain without damaging the soil.  Their wool is very soft and has no lanolin, which makes it a great fiber for spinning and making into textiles.  Plus, they're actually really cute! 

Fun llama facts:

• A llama was featured in the movie, Napoleon Dynamite.  ("Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner!")  This delighted me to no end, as I would love someday to have some land and own some llamas.  Although I would probably feed them something better than leftover casserole.

• There is an annual Llama Fest in Spanish Fork, Utah, which is held at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple.  When I lived out there, I went every year, partly because of the llamas and partly because it was a chance to experience something culturally and religiously diverse in Utah.  (Did you know there was an active Krishna community in the middle of Utah?  Neither did anyone else, until they started hosting Llama Fest.)  The festival features a llama obstacle course and races, Andean textiles and music, and Indian food, and was one of my favorite things to look forward to each summer.  This photo was taken at Llama Fest 2001, and I love how both the llama and I are smiling!  That year there was a freak dust storm out of absolutely nowhere, which explains all the weird spots on the photo.  While everyone was trying to figure out what to do, it started pouring down rain, so we all got completely soaked and went inside the Krishna temple, where it was dry and warm and smelled like incense.  A really kind guy told us all about what they did there on their land and at the temple, and found us a nice plate of curry to eat while we waited out the storm.  Honestly one of the most contented days of my life.

• Llamas can be vital to survival for people, particularly in the Andean regions.  In fact, through Heifer International, you can "adopt" a llama or a share of a llama to be donated to a family or community to whom it will make a big difference.  Heifer "works with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth" by donating livestock.  As the animals breed, they become a perpetuating source of food and often wool or milk to the community, which keeps people fed and gives them a product to sell.

Dogs and cats are fine and all, but how cool is it that llamas can provide so much to a community in addition to being cute and fluffy?
 

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Thursday

Thursday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For is...  "A food."

If there's one thing I find it easy to be grateful for, it is definitely food.  And there's no question what my favorite food is.  It is the food for which I am by far the most thankful.  ICE CREAM!  The only food deserving of the boldface, caps-lock, exclamation point treatment.

Ice cream has been a constant presence throughout my life.  It played a part in many of my fondest childhood memories -- homemade ice cream at family picnics, trips to High's or the Velvet Cafe for a cone to celebrate a good report card, and chanting, "Blink, blink" from the back seat of the car to mimic the sound of a turn signal in the hopes that Mom and Dad would pull into the Dairy Queen.  It has been a staple food on every one of my birthdays.  (In fact, I usually ask for a Baked Alaska or a straight-up ice cream cake -- who cares about the actual cake cake?)  It has consoled me after many a bad date.  It has gotten me through late-night study sessions.  It has cooled me down on hot summer days when the thought of cooking and eating real food was just too much.  Ice cream was even part of one of my favorite college traditions -- at BYU, a first kiss is celebrated by buying ice cream for one's roommates and then sitting around telling the story. 

It is the ultimate comfort food, and one of the few vices I allow myself.  The image you see here is a scan of the inside cover of one of my journals from college, where I kept a sort of collage of thoughts and images that illustrated my life at the time.  Inside that particular journal I glued a little poem I cut out of a magazine.  It reads, "I do not smoke, drink, or swear; Self-discipline is the ticket; But when it comes to my ice-cream habit; I just can't seem to lick it." 

Hee!  Lick it!  Isn't that great?

Even if I could "lick the habit," I honestly wouldn't want to.  Like a faithful pet, ice cream has always been there for me when I needed it, and I pay it back by keeping our connection a quality one.  No generic store brands that come in a bucket and are full of gummy ingredients I can't pronounce.  I'm a total ice cream snob.  Homemade is great because you can make it whatever you want it to be.  But time and resources being as sparse as they usually are, my store-bought choices are the following:

• Häagen-Dazs, which is freaking divine. If you have not tried Mayan Chocolate, Cinnamon Dulce de Leche, or Crème Brulée, you have seriously missed out on three of the finest pleasures in life -- even their sorbet is basically amazing. 
• Ben & Jerry's, because in addition to being delicious, they give back to local communities and work to keep a low impact on the environment.  I particularly recommend Phish Food, Cherry Garcia, Mint Chocolate Cookie, Strawberry Cheesecake, Chubby Hubby, and Oatmeal Cookie Chunk.  I mourn the loss of Rainforest Crunch, Wavy Gravy, and Festivus/Gingerbread Cookie to their flavor graveyard. 
• Breyers, because they stick to the all-natural recipe.  Theirs is the only vanilla ice cream I will consider.  Their coffee ice cream is to die for.  They keep it simple, and that keeps the ice cream delectable.

If I were stuck on a desert island and could only take one food with me, clearly ice cream is the only choice.  There just better be a massive freezer on this island.         

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Wednesday

Wednesday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For is...  "Something I know of but have never seen."

I'm pretty sure the idea here was to get people to focus on something spiritual... like, perhaps, God.  But naturally my mind went in a different direction and the first thing that popped into it was, "Africa!  I know of Africa, but I've never seen it!" 

Honestly, this has been a hard one, because the most grateful thought I have about Africa is that I didn't grow up there.  And that's admittedly not a very nice thought.  I grew up during the 80's.  I sang "We Are The World" with my class at a school assembly in second grade.  I watched the Live Aid concert on TV.  I cleaned my plate, because the starving children in Africa would be glad to have my broccoli.  And then when I was in high school during the 90's, we learned all about the rampant AIDS epidemic all over the continent, the genocide in Rwanda, the civil war in Somalia, and apartheid in South Africa.  Today the TV and papers are full of stories of Lost Boys and other refugees, blood diamonds, and the gang raping and slaughtering of women and children by enemy groups.  The news coming out of Africa has, for the entirety of my life, been a consistent stream of tales of famine, disease, and violence.  It has painted a bleak, desperate picture of a continent engulfed in conflict and misery.

I don't pretend to know what it's really like in Africa, but I have to believe that there's hope there.  Otherwise, how could a place so afflicted still exist?  While it seems that the cards have historically been stacked against the people of this continent, there are still millions of African people waking up each day, having children and loving their families, tending to the land, doing their jobs, getting an education, laughing at jokes, and doing what everyone else in the world does -- living life.  And I'm thankful for that, because I can't imagine doing it.  I've lived a fairly normal American life, and it's been a charmed life in comparison to what someone my age in, say, the Congo has likely lived.

Africa is a place I've always had a desire to visit, despite the negativity and desperation that the media shows there.  I'd like to see this place and meet these people who are strong enough to weather those kinds of storms and survive them.  I wonder if there might be a spirit of intensity and courage there, that many other places in the world have never had a reason to cultivate.

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Tuesday

Tuesday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For (see two posts down for a complete explanation) is...  "Something that gives me trouble."  Yeah, I skipped a couple of weeks between Monday and Tuesday... it was the end of the school year, so everything else was really hectic!

Anyway, the thing that has always given me trouble is math.  Math and I, traditionally, have not been what you'd call friends.  It's never come easily to me.  It was a tough subject for me to grasp in school.  In retrospect, I thought I was worse in math than I actually was -- I was always taking an advanced math course, but I always felt like I caught on slower than everyone else in those classes.  I was not used to struggling in school, and it made me feel like I was a failure at math.

Feeling like I was doing poorly at math made me have very little interest in it.  I coped with my math insecurities by acting like I didn't care, and by not paying attention.  I remember spending a lot of time in 8th and 9th grade math writing notes, giggling with my friends in the back of the room, and braiding one another's hair.  My sophomore year of high school, I took a non-accelerated track for Geometry, and it was the first year that I got straight A's in math.  I had a fantastic teacher who really tried to make math fun and interesting, and it helped that Geometry is more visual and spatial than other kinds of math.  I could see a practical use for Geometry.  With the exception of Geometry, I felt like this about math. 

However, because I did so well at it, my Geometry teacher recommended me for the accelerated trigonometry class the following year.  I argued with him, saying I wanted to stay in the regular track, and he argued back, refusing to sign my course selection form if I took the regular track for trig.  While I appreciated his confidence in me, I knew that trig would be a struggle again.  By my junior year, I had learned that the more activities I was involved in at school, the more math classes I could get out of.  So I scheduled my band lessons, yearbook photo shoots, and everything I could during my math period.  My senior year I had math during 1st period, and I came in to school late often enough that I was rarely in class.

When I went to college, I majored in Spanish, and never had to take a math class, which was exactly what I hoped for!  Until I began working on my teaching certificate, and realized that although there was no university requirement for math, there was a state requirement for teachers to have a certain number of college math credits.  This is how I recently ended up taking College Algebra.  I dreaded the course, and I was terrified that I would do poorly again.  However, one major thing was different -- I was more than a decade out of high school.  I had spent years in college reading the textbook, attending class, studying on my own time, and getting help from professors when it was needed.  I knew that homework and studying were necessary for success.  In short, I was developmentally ready to succeed in math.  Even though it is something that doesn't come naturally to me, I felt confident that I could make up for my lack of ability with hard work.

And work hard I did.  I spent hours on my math homework rather than giving up on it, which was my modus operandi in high school.  I focused during class.  I took notes.  I studied.  For math!  And I got the highest score in my class on the first exam of the semester.  I was ecstatic!  It was exactly what I needed to keep me motivated for the rest of the semester.  When the course was over, and I opened up my grade report and saw that big "A" on the page, I felt like I had just won the lottery.

You don't get a lot of second chances in life.  Even though I was bitter about having to do it at first, I am thankful that I got a second chance with math.  I proved myself to myself, and it was a great experience.  Math is still not second nature for me, but I know that I am capable of the challenge it presents.

I'm even more grateful that there ARE people for whom math comes naturally!  Thanks, math whizzes of the world, for doing my taxes, developing the algorithm that allows me to Google anything I want in less than a second, figuring out the ratio of detergent to water needed to do my laundry, determining how to build furniture, buildings, elevators, cars, and planes that will be strong and safe...  I'm so glad that there are people willing to take on the complex math problems that make life easier so that I don't have to! 

Random Things I'm Grateful For: Monday

Monday's entry in the list of Random Things I'm Grateful For (see my last post for a complete explanation) is...  "Something in my house."

The first thing that came to mind was my bed.  Probably because I didn't get much sleep on Saturday night, so it was at the forefront of my mind.

My bed, like nearly all of my furniture, is a hand-me-down from family members.  A couple years ago, my Nana moved into a smaller place and passed on a ton of furniture.  The bed in question spent the last few years in my sister's condo, but last December when she got married, she passed it on to me -- along with the awesome dresser that goes with it.

I love having a nice piece of furniture that belonged to my grandmother.  If I were purchasing a bed frame, I would never have picked a four-poster for myself -- too traditional, and I'm not a fan of footboards.  But I love the "bubbly" look of this bed.  I think it has a whimsical look that I am rather fond of. 

My favorite thing about my bed is the actual bedding.  Last summer when I moved into this place, I knew I wanted a red bedroom, so I painted it that color, before I even had anything else picked out for the room.  One day I was out shopping with my cousin and we went into a Bed, Bath, & Beyond and I saw this set in their clearance section for next to nothing, and I had to have it.  Purple and red are my favorite colors, and the red was an exact match to the red paint I had chosen for the room (which, as anyone who has ever decorated with red can tell you, is next to miraculous!).  The stripes on the comforter are made of brocades and satins, and the most delicious deep purple velvet.  The cream colored stripes matched the lamp I already had.  I already owned a set of red sheets and a set of purple sheets.  This bedding was MEANT to be mine!

I've always wanted a bed that feels luxurious.  For a single Mormon gal, that is of the utmost importance -- since there's nobody sleeping in the bed but me, I might as well do whatever else I can to make bedtime something to look forward to!

Another great memory of my bed comes from the day I moved into this little place.  I was downstairs unloading the U-Haul and ordering all the helpers around.  It was the 4th of July and hot as Hades.  I was NOT looking forward to cleaning, unpacking, and setting up house all by myself in the sweltering heat after everyone left!  Before taking off, though, my mom called me upstairs.  I dragged my butt up there, and there was Mom standing in my new bedroom, absolutely glowing with pride.  Mom, my grandmother, and my aunt had spent the morning setting up my bed, putting all the bedding on, sweeping, and cleaning the windows and blinds in my new bedroom so I would have a comfortable and clean place to rest at the end of the day.  It looked so pretty, and I was so touched that I totally started bawling. 

I'm grateful for my bed because it is my place of refuge, relaxation, and rejuvenation.  It gives me a connection to family, and is a perfect reflection of me.