A fine kick-off to Christmas

It's finally here, the Day After Thanksgiving! I love this day, because it is the day I get to stop feeling bad for listening to Christmas carols, get out my decorations, and go to town! I don't mean literally going to town, because the idea of being joining the hustle and bustle (i.e. frenzy) of shopping on this day makes me queasy.
But I love celebrating Christmas!
We started of this year's celebration by raking up all the dead leaves. We'd been waiting until the last leaf was off the trees so as to prevent the counterproductivity that comes with raking while leaves are still falling. While Kevin finished that up, I started putting up the Christmas lights on the house, which hadn't been done for a long time. I'll come back to that.
Now we have a ton of Christmas lights, because every year I either lose the bag of lights and have to buy more, or else I buy up a bunch when they're on sale after Christmas is over. What this means is that this year, since I've already bought some on sale and found all the ones I've lost over the years, we have millions (well, thousands) of Christmas lights. I also got some neat plastic clips that slide onto the shingles or roof drains (shingles in our case).
Our house (as I have mentioned several times before) is a cute little cottage in the middle of a big, open field. It was built in the 1930's, and the same little old lady lived in it up until recently. The neighbors tell us about how she was your typical old cat lady who gave candy to the kids, but they werere still scared to come to the house because it was all old and overgrown.
The house has undergone a major transformation, and now it is a cute little cottage that I new would look stellar decked in Christmas lights.
So I got out the ladder and started clipping lights up. I made Kevin do the highest part on the roof while I held the ladder for him. I carefully outlined the roof on the side, front, and little porch thingie of the house.
Now I've painted our house, including the trim of the roof and the entire porch thingie (although come to think of it, I used a step-stool and never actually looked inside it before). Well, today I looked inside.
There were a bunch of cobwebs covering the remains of an old porch light and a bag of something. It looked like a dead animal of some sort, but I remember poking and prodding it at some point last year and realizing it was a bag of something.
But wait! That was in the basement. I've never looked up here in the porch. And now that I'm looking at THIS bag of something, I'm realizing that it has a face with teeth poking out of its shriveled face and the remains of hair all over it.
I carefully, silently got down the ladder and then RAN over to Kevin yelling, "Glglhghglkkkkk!" and trying to shake imaginary cooties off of me.
"Kevin, there's a dead cat in the roof!"
Kevin got his rake and came to investigate. I made gagging noises again and told him how horrified I was that he was using a rake to get it out.
"How else do you expect me to get it out?"
I ignored him and ran to go get a shovel. This cat may be all dead and shriveled, but he still deserves a proper burial (or at least a hole in the ground). Once I realized the ground was too hard to dig, I ran inside for my camera.
You guys should be lucky I couldn't find it.
So we buried the cat in a pile of leaves in the ditch.
And our house looks beautiful for Christmas.
So merry Christmas, one and all! Maybe you could make a copy of this and send it out with your Christmas letter this year. Or print it out and keep it in your pile of O Henry Christmas stories.
Or just be sure to wear gloves when you put up your Christmas lights this year

Baseball and Perspective

At church this Sunday, our ward organist (who is excellent) gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting (which was excellent). He is a physics professor at BYU, and his talk was about how he reconciles scientific theories with his testimony when they appear to conflict (i.e. the Big Bang theory, evolution, etc).
He started out by making this analogy: Say you got a ticket to a baseball game, but you got a seat where you could only see the pitcher and the batter. You couldn't see the umpire, the catcher, the other fielders, or even the other bases or the scoreboard. This is a really terrible seat!
But as you watch the game, you start to notice patterns. This is like a scientific theory. You figure out that when the hitter hits the ball, he takes off running. You figure out that there must be a catcher, since the ball keeps being thrown back to the pitcher. And after a few games (you got a season pass in this awful seat), you start to figure out more technicalities, like balls and strikes. You start feeling really confident in your theory. Every time the ball is thrown, it fits into your theory of baseball.
But then one time when you're watching the ball, there are three strikes and the runner takes off towards first base. What?! That doesn't fit into your theory at all. So you modify your theory. You add the "third strike drop" rule that accounts for when the catcher drops the ball on a third strike, then the hitter gets to run to the bases. Now your theory works again.
But do you really understand what it is to watch baseball? Do you really understand all the rules? I'm sure you don't. But from your terrible seat and limited perspective, you've done a lot to figure out what's happening.
Scientific laws and theories are actually both theories. Newton's Laws are called laws because that's what HE called them. And they've been proven to be wrong in some situations, but they're still called laws. Then we have Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which has never been proven wrong but is still called a theory, because Einstein called it a theory.
So going back to the religion thing. How can someone believe in the Big Bang theory, the theory of evolution, AND Adam and Eve? Well, it all comes down to perspective. We don't know exactly how anything worked out. The account of the creation in the Bible is very brief and doesn't go into too much detail on HOW things were created. And from our limited standpoint, we've found a lot of evidence that supports the scientific theories. Should we just throw away that evidence because we can't make it fit in what we know to be God's truth? No. But neither should we throw away God's truth just because we found some evidence supporting some theories that seem to contradict it.
We just keep studying and keep learning, realizing that we have a limited perspective and that God knows all. Maybe once we die and get to heaven, we'll get a better seat.

You know that scene from You've Got Mail where Meg Ryan's character has just lost her job, and then she gets sick? I love the part where she gets a knock on the door, so she has to scramble around and get rid of all the tissues she has lying around the house.
So I am working through my second cold in the last month (not November, but the last 30 days). Ugh! The first one lasted like 3 weeks, starting right as I was finishing up my last job. Then this last one started on Sunday. This one's more of just a sniffle that should go away in a couple more days.
But there are so many more things I'd rather be doing than laying around sick! I guess the big question is whether I'd actually be doing them if I wasn't, and the answer is, probably not.
Maybe that's what I'll learn from it this time around: to appreciate the ability I have to do other things besides sitting around.

Yesterday, I got dressed in possibly the most frumpy outfit ever, and this is because most of my cold weather clothes are worn out or frumpy. So even though I was sick, I decided to go out clothes shopping. I didn't find anything I liked (it's hard for me to like anything when I'm sick), but I did buy a sheet. I plan on making a dress out of it. If it turns out well, I'll post a picture of it on here. If not, you may never see it, as most of you didn't see the last dress I tried to make.