Utah is attempting a new approach to the social welfare of its residents.

Fall

I went hiking yesterday. Lately, when I’m outside walking, all sorts of thoughts go through my head. The air, the breezes, the coolness and sunlight all make it feel like fall. And fall makes me think of how wonderful it felt to go home after a day at school. It makes me think about being back in a routine, and about walking home, and about family dinners. It makes me think about when I would wait until 8:00 to do homework but I still got it done. It makes me think about the time I got home and my two sisters and my mom and I realized we were all wearing red shirts and jeans that day.

Fall makes me happy. Whenever the seasons change, I think, “This one. This one is my favorite.” But I think I just like the changes.

Tongue

I was at the grocery store at 7:30 this Saturday morning. I was walking around, and found these awful looking things in the meat department.

This is tongue. Cow tongues, lined up next to pigs feet and tripe.

Much of my life relates to the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary that I heard over and over and over again as I was growing up. This morning Ramona came to mind again—the time her and her sister had to make dinner, and had to use tongue because it was inexpensive. The characters narrated how awful a thing tongue was, and always in my mind, tongue was gray and about the size of an adult’s hand. If you can’t tell by my cell phone picture, tongue is slimy and looks like a mid-sized animal curled up in the package. Like a cross between a goldfish and a housecat.

Speaking of tongues, I am taking a class about the phonetics of Spanish. A good part of studying consists of looking at diagrams of how the mouth shapes sounds. (And trying to imitate them—slowly and thoroughly) I am gaining a new appreciation for the versatility of the tongue.

The little white dot left of center in this picture is the author Orson Scott Card—the author of Ender’s Game and a whole bunch of other books. He spoke at the school.

Listening to Orson Scott Card was kind of like reading his books. There are a few things that draw me in, like the book Ender’s Game did, and then other things—like most of his other books—that just don’t really hook me. As I listened to him though, he spoke about some things in a way I had never quite thought about before. Like how we can’t know things, but we can decide what things we will take as truth based what we experience. And that we have to be skeptical, but we decide what we will have faith in. If you are skeptical about everything, then you just have faith in skepticism.

Faith and skepticism aside, I spent the night Latin dancing. After I helped sculpt an ice cream head with the neighbors.

Today was my first day of observation for my education class. We were a group of five, and went to a junior high nearby and watched two Spanish classes. After, I had a bunch of questions for one of the teachers, and I asked them as the rest of the group kind of hung back waiting for me. I’m a geek about languages even among other people studying to be language teachers.

Tonight there was an evening church activity. I went with some people from my apartment complex. Two of them are in this picture. I met one of them a couple of days ago, and he told me his name. Dan. Then I saw him again yesterday, and said, “it’s Dan, right?” It turns out it wasn’t really Dan. It was a whole different person. So anyway, this is a picture of the two of them, plus Dan’s twin brother.

Labor Day

Our family went to Scotts Bluff, Nebraska for Labor Day weekend for my cousin's wedding. My mom is from Nebraska, and we used to go in the summer and for Thanksgiving. But I hadn’t been there for a few years.

I was struck by how different the landscape, the setting is from Utah. More open spaces that aren’t stopped by mountains. Open, yellow plains and bugs that eat you up at night. Scotts Bluff is small and calm. You cross train tracks and talk about going “into town.” And wide, yellow plains.

I had fun at the wedding. I got to spend some time with my cousins, one of whom is radiating in the photo below. My sister and nephew are in the other photos. One at the reception, where I got sent to the group of “single ladies” gathering on the dance floor rather reluctantly (and suspicious of what the DJ was going to make us do). It turned out we were there to catch the bouquet. This surprised me for some reason. It made me feel grown up, or something.

School has started, and I have been so busy I can hardly think. I have thought the same thing at the beginning of each new school year in college: I can't ever get enough done in a day. There is too much to do.