Comings and Goings

Well, I'm clearly slacking off in keeping this updated, though I suppose that it's forgivable at the moment seeing as I don't have any readers yet.

Being in Utah has been strange, though little by little it's starting to feel more normal. For the first couple of weeks everything felt like a dream--already Texas feels too far away to be reality, but here everything is a mix of the unfamiliar and the very familiar and the end result is confusing, to say the least. But routine is good for reality checks and I'm starting to figure things out.

Temperatures have been in the 20s and 30s, which leads me to believe that Utah is trying to kill me.

But, anyway, storytime.

The 19th (two weekends ago) was my Homecoming talk. Well, sort of, I guess we're not supposed to call it that anymore? My certainly-not-a-homecoming-talk, then. Either way, I think I deserve some sort of title for worst returned missionary in regards to inviting people--the only person in the world that I invited was my old Mission President's wife, because she asked me when it was, and I gave her the wrong time. Other than that, at around 11 PM Thursday night I remembered that I even was giving a talk, I didn't even get on a computer on Friday, and I spent most of Saturday yelling unintelligibly at the photograph downloader on Facebook and realized, late that night, that I needed to write a talk. Even later that night I realized that I hadn't invited any of my companions. My mom had sent out some kind of notification around, but the only one who actually received it was my old mission president's wife (who missed the different time on this invitation). I felt pretty awful later when I heard from a few people who had wanted to come but didn't know it was going on, including my trainer. Ouch.

But one of my old companions was able to make it, and my old Mission President and his wife and another of my companions did make it to the house afterwards for sandwiches and Texas-shaped cookies. The talk went alright, I guess, for something thrown together so last minute. I dunno, I've heard a lot of returned missionaries talk (especially because I have a huge family with about 80 cousins, all older than me, so I spent my entire childhood going to missionary farewells and homecomings and wedding receptions for all those cousins) and it seems to me like most of them sound a little more confident up there than I did. (Ironically, I think I got asked to give less talks on my mission than any other missionary I met, and was never asked to give a talk in Spanish. I did teach Gospel Principles many times, even in Spanish, but teaching a class is so much easier than giving a talk for me) But I talked mostly about the missionary purpose--ie inviting people to come closer to Christ--and overcoming our fear of doing that, something that was a pretty big theme of my mission.

Anyway, the weekend went well and it was nice to spend some time with friends and family. The big downer came Monday night as I went back up to Logan. First, as I was driving along through Wellsville, I saw the speed limit sign was at 60 and thought to myself, "Oh, whoops, I'm going a little too fast. Better slow down." Almost immediately I saw the flashing lights behind me; I was pulled over and got my very first speeding ticket. Sigh.
But it gets better! Shortly after that I called my landlady who lives out in Millville to ask if I could get the parking sticker for my car (I hadn't gotten it before because I didn't have the car yet and she prefers not to risk students loosing them) but it was already too late for her that night for me to go by. Thus, when I did get up to Logan I spent a merry hour trying to find some kind of parking lot where I wouldn't get another ticket--a disappointing venture. When you spend four years as a pedestrian, you don't really think about parking lots, so I hadn't ever realized before the complicated system of which cars are allowed to park where and when on a college campus. Finally I parked in the only free legal parking space I could find--in front of a church four blocks away from my apartment--and grabbed what I could carry to get the rest of the way back on foot, grumbling all the way that this is why I never asked my parents to let me use a car at school--they really just make life complicated.

Actually, my car's still there, haven't been able to get the parking sticker yet.
And all the plates and bowls and a set of shelves I brought up are still in there too.

Hm.