Flashback Friday: Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

Last year, I celebrated like this:

This year I'm in San Francisco hoping for a glimpse of this:

So that next year I might wear this legitimately, if ironically:

I just realized...

... that this:

Is all my fault.

I went shopping after the second session of General Conference yesterday and was late getting to girls' night out so I left the bags in my trunk.

I only remembered them when I was in a different car on the way to my parents' house and I maybe said a quick prayer that the aerosol cans wouldn't explode in the heat. (It was 65 degrees after all.)

Well, they didn't explode!

Sorry.

In other news, I now have a testimony of Malachi 3:10. I've always believed it in principle; I just never expected my little prayer to be answered quite so literally...

Top 10 Tuesday: Google is crafty. I am not. Even so...

Search Engine. Analytics. Feed Reader. News. Images. Chat. VoIP. YouTube. Blogger. Is there anything Google doesn't do and doesn't do pretty well?

Sometimes (always) I'm pretty sure Google is (way) smarter than I am. For instance, you know when you accidentally misspell a search term:

How does it know that's what you meant? My old coworker Wes wrote about this phenomenon much more intelligently than I ever could here.

But Google doesn't just stop there. When Riley and I were in Cambridge last year, I was shooting off a quick email for school when Google gave me this error message:

If you can't read it, it says, "You wrote 'I've attached' in your message but there are no files attached. Send anyway?"

I forgot to attach the file and Google knew it. Besides the kind of creepy Big Brother undertones of a search engine reading my mail, how cool is that? I was totally blown away (ask Riley) and I didn't think I'd ever be more surprised by Google.

But I was wrong.

Maybe you've seen those Facebook statuses or blog posts going around saying something like this:

"I promise to send something hand-made to the first five people who leave a comment here. You must in turn post this on your blog and send something that YOU make to the first five people that comment on your blog! The rules are the item has to be HANDMADE by YOU and sent sometime in 2011! How fun it that!"

Well, you only need to look at my sad history of glue-smeared, paint-spattered, ink-stained, over-sized t shirts to know that crafty I am not.

However, Adriane posted one of these challenges, and she always makes the cutest things. So I had, had, had, to sign up. And now I have to pay it forward...

But, before I made the same offer, I decided to do a little research. So in preparation for this behemoth task, I sat down one Saturday morning to look for some crafty ideas. And what better place to look for a lot of ideas in one place than Etsy? So I typed the URL into my browser and this is what I got:

Just kidding.

But I kind of wish I weren't. Wouldn't it be great if Google warned you when you were about to do something crazy? Imagine:

• Google says, "If we send you to this shopping website, you will spend all of your discretionary income for the year in one fell swoop. Send anyway?"
• Google says, "If we send you to Facebook now, you will waste your entire lunch hour stalking your latest 24-hour crush only to find out he has a girlfriend and she's gorgeous. Send anyway?"
• Google says, "If we send you to this YouTube Video you'll end up staying up until 3 a.m. watching literal music videos and you'll wake up exhausted with really sore abs. Send anyway?"

I probably wouldn't listen, but forewarned is forearmed, right?

Anyway, it was in fact my first time ever logging onto Esty (I know, I'm totally nebbish.) And nearly two hours later it was one rabbit hole I'm still not sure I should have gone down...

However, I think I'm ready to get crafty. And I think it's time I go big or go home.

So I'm paying it forward on Top 10 Tuesday. This means that I'll make something for the first ten people who comment and I won't make you turn around and do the same (unless you want to).

So, enter at your own risk.

And incidentally, if you enter, can you please let me know if you have a favorite quote, poem, song, or book? Awesome.

Top 10 Tuesday: Characters That Make My Family Look Like Saints

This week's topic is another post I did for The Blue Bookcase.

The original idea was to list ten fictional characters I'd like to have in my family, but I answered a question about my favorite fictional best friends a few weeks ago and felt like I would be reinventing the wheel. So instead I wrote about some of the worst characters I could think of. I wrote this post sometime between 1 and 2 this morning, and by the end I was so angry it took my about an hour to calm down and get to sleep. During which hour I had an epiphany: We've all heard the warning to not go to bed angry, so if it's ever a family member that's got you resentfully counting sheep (and let's be honest, it almost always is, just mentally compose your own nasty character list. You'll be hugging the annoying right out of your relations in no time.

So here you go: Characters That Make My Family Look Like Saints

Going Native

Having the worst lungs on the planet isn't easy, but I somehow manage to live what feels like half my life with some kind of chest congestion or another. However, earlier this year I had a cough that just would not quit. We're talking weeks and weeks and weeks. Since none of my usual coping methods were working, I finally I decided to go to the doctor. I've had pneumonia no less than five times, bronchitis pretty much every year I can remember, and smoke-induced asthma since the 2003 Control Burn Debacle of Provo Canyon, so I was expecting that it might be something along those lines.

Nope. Diagnosis: Pertussis.

You know, Pertussis? A.k.a. whooping cough. That disease that like consumption and cholera was pretty much eradicated in developed countries by the end of the 19th century? Yep, I had that.

Lucky me.

Luckier me that there's an app for that. Skipping the part about how I was allergic to the first round of medication with disastrous results, I was eventually quickly cured of the worst of it and have lived to see another day.

Friends and family were often shocked and surprised as to how I developed such an archaic illness, so I took to joking that after having spent several months researching 19th century British social history I had simply gone native. My interest in graduate school was history from below, or the history of the common people. I read about their customs and traditions, I guess I just got a little too into their common complaints (: The idea added a bit of humor to a not-so-fun situation.

So fast forward a couple months to my annual physical. I got a call this morning from my doctor to go over the results of my blood work. The pertussis is all gone and everything else looks good except for one thing: I have ridiculously low levels of Vitamin D.

You know, Vitamin D? That thing you get mostly from the sun that makes your bones strong? Yep, I'm lacking that in a big way. Kind of like most of those 19th century British common people I was researching not too long ago. And given my apparent propensity to take things a little too far I think I can see where this is heading.

Rickets.