lots to catch up on

Personal page: we'll get something up soon. I'm enjoying the great prophet deRaj's commentary one some of the pages. It's making me laugh. It's also good to see what everyone else has up already. Oh, and Jared, about the font on the home page - it's okay that it's one of the basic styles, but could we have something that looks more clean than Times? To me, Times means "write a paper for Dr. Geier." ANYTHING but Times.

Laurel's birds: In keeping with the P theme, and because of it's color, my nomination in the Unofficial Name the Baby Bird competition is Peachy or Peaches. Any more babies yet?

Traditions question: just the word "tradition" makes me think of Christmas. The thing that comes to mind the quickest is caroling - packing everyone into the van, no matter what the person to seatbelt ratio actually is, and singing all the "naughty" Christmas songs while in the van. I remember one year, Eric and I whistled the whole thing of "Sleigh Ride." The other traditions that come to mind is that we frequently went to Silver Creek on July 4th because that was one of Mom's favorite places and our indoor Easter egg hunts with billions of jellybeans and one prize (usually a king-sized candybar) for everyone.

What I plan to continue is all the Christmas stuff. (Mindy, just because you don't have kids to take caroling doesn't mean you can't go with friends. That's what we're going to do.) I also want to make it a regular thing to attend a performance of The Messiah during December. (I'm in hot pursuit of tickets for the Kennedy Center Messiah Sing-along. Doesn't that just sound COOL?!?!) As long as we're in the DC area, we'll go see the temple lights and Live Nativity at the temple, and watch the 4th of July fireworks over the Washington Monument. I liked having ice cream cake on Adam's birthday - that was a bit of ingenuity on Mom's part that could very well continue into a long term thing. We'll see what else comes up - maintaining my own traditions is a new thing. I've never really thought about it before this year, but since getting engaged, I've thought about it a lot. Like Mindy said, ask me in 10 years.

Changing self question: I need to become a much better critical thinker. It's something that has come up at work. Because I'm so accustomed to really really really precise instructions, my bosses here tell me HOW to do what they want. That was fine for the first year when I was still figuring things out, but now it's time to shift gears. They give me an assignment, and I figure out the "how." I have learned VERY quickly that this type of creativity, I'm not so good at.

Our adventures: not much beyond the norm. We enjoyed General Conference. Between the Saturday sessions, we found an AWESOME used bookstore near the church, and got ourselves out of there after only 15 minutes ... and 10 books. We went to the stake center at the temple for Sunday, ate a picnic lunch on the temple grounds between, and watched the last session in the Visitor's Center. It's the screen where they show The Testaments, so we're talking BIG SCREEN for Conference. Today, our friends Jared and Allison in our ward got married, and we babysat Allison's nephews while they were in the temple. The reception was very formal - in a hotel ballroom with a catered sit-down dinner and a string quartet for the music. We both have Monday off for Columbus Day, and Adam says that we can go play tourist. YAY! It's supposed to be really nice weather, so definitely something outside.