Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Branch Manager

I think this had to be one of the best weekends in a long time for me. I had no church responsibilities on Sunday thanks to conference and was off work on Monday. We didn't do anything real exciting this weekend which was nice. We did take advantage of the local case lot sales and finally filled up the shelves dad help me build last fall with food storage. It looks like a mini-supermarket now. I hope we never have to use it for a real emergency, so for now we will try and rotate it so that it does not go bad.

I went to the priesthood session of conference Saturday night and made the mistake of sitting in the middle of a long bench. I ended up completely surrounded on both sides. The guy on my right I recognized from church basketball as one of the jerk players. I must admit that I will, on rare occasions, turn into one of these kind of players. (I think Andrea told me after last season that she won't come and watch me anymore because of how I act) I think they are known as the Jekyll and Hyde player. "He was a mild mannered banker, but when he put on his Reebok's, he turns into the Charles Barkley character in Space Jam." I like to think that I am just being competitive, but I can't help it if someone is being a jerk on the court and I feel the need to treat them how they are treating everyone else. I just get so mad when someone else is treating a stupid game of church basketball like it is the NBA Finals. Part of the problem is that the referees are usually two guys that you played the week before and I might have had a couple of hard fouls on them that didn't get called, so they feel the need to take revenge against me by calling any little hand check or bump a foul. (Wow, where did that come from?) Back to the priesthood session.

I was being a good boy and taking notes in my little notebook. Well, this guy for one, could not sit still. I think that he forgot to take his Ritalin or something. When I would write something down, I could see him looking down at what I was writing! I felt like he was judging me by every word that I wrote down. I kept thinking about what a jerk he was when we played basketball against each other. I could not even concentrate and it was really bugging me because all of the talks were really good. It usually seems like the priesthood session becomes the "Aaronic priesthood" session and I tune out most of the talks. This session was geared towards the adults and it was great.

I must admit that I felt a little down seeing all of the fathers with their sons and coming to the realization that I will never have a son to attend the priesthood session with. I had the thought come to my mind that I can still use that session to benefit my daughters. I must continue to be a good husband to their mother and father to them so that they will marry good young men.

Monday was another adventure. Andrea had a couple of cancellations so she had me and the girls come in for dental appointments. The last dental appointment of Kensie's turned up two small cavities. This time she had 7 cavities. No, that is not a typo, you read correctly, 7. For the daughter of a hygeinist, this is a little embarrassing. I guess it is a good thing that we get free dental care, or we would be broke right now. I think that if we didn't have the benefit of free dental care I would say forget fillings because they are her baby teeth and are going to fall out anyways.

We went to the pumpkin patch over in Paul for FHE. This has turned into a great annual family activity. The weather was in the 70's, so we decided that waiting untill later in the month was taking a chance on crappy weather. Last year was cold and wet, so the warm weather made for a nice outing.

There is a Cadillac commercial on TV that has a song on it that brought back memories. Thanks to the internet I was able to look up the Cadillac commercial on their website and it showed who the group was and the name of the song. The name of the song is "Stars" and the band is called "Hum." I then went to itunes and it listed the album with all of the songs on it. I had bought a compilation CD through some CD club when I was 15 or 16 that had "Stars" on it and onther song by "Hum" called "I hate it too" that I use to listen to all the time. I only had a few CD's and on long basketball trips on the bus, I would listen to all of them more than once. Hearing these forgotten songs, reminded me of basketball games in high school. I don't know what happened to that CD, but I had to download the songs off of itunes. It is funny how you hear, see, or smell something that brings out a forgotten memory. This was one of those moments.