11 Future Experiments

As the result of a TED talk, I decided to take on a 30 day challenge this month, and maybe every month.  I've been waking up at 8am every day, and trying to do something meaningful.  Admittedly, sometimes the meaningful something is going back to sleep, but for the most part it's been a month of productive mornings.  Today I went on a 25ish mile bike ride.  Yesterday I got ready for Church.  Saturday I was camping, and I woke up and read in my hammock and gathered a bit of firewood.  I've also been reading Walden by Thoreau, which is a good catalyst for life changes.  Here are some possible future 30 day experiences:

• 30 days w/o facebook 
• 30 days of vegetarianism (Turns out Thoreau talks a bit about not eating meat)
• A Picture a day for 30 days
• No text messaging for 30 days
• Writing in my journal every day for 30 days (or my blog, but my journal would be more meaningful)
• Draw/Paint something every day for 30 days (there was a time when I wanted to be an artist, now I just doodle)
• Learn a new magic trick each day and perform it for someone
• Practice Piano every day
• Spend one month learning a new skill, practicing it each day: Archery? Guitar? Basketball?  Dance?  Sewing?  Fishing?  There are a lot of options for this one
• Learn, and use, a new word a day
• Learn a new language (I think I could make a lot of headway in any of the romance languages in 30 days)

So those are some cool things I could try in the future.  If you have any suggestions, let me know, I might not do them, but then I also might. If nothing else, it would make for some good blog material.   

a list:

A short list of adventures yet to be achieved this summer (some may be combined):

Sleep under the stars
Go mountain biking at sundance
Backpacking
Southern Utah
Do a triathlon
Create a triathlon
Make donuts
Go tubing
Play pool spoons
Hike Timp
Play baseball in the sandlot

I'll keep adding to this list, and crossing things off as I go, feel free to make suggestions.

No rest for the wiki'd

It's June!  Summer is finally here and flying by, it's been a while, and I've had some exciting times.  There's all sorts of stuff on facebook, showing my adventures, but here's what's been going on:

That house rents out their hose for $20.  It's a racket,
but absolutely worth it.  

 I got called as the ward fhe co-chair, so I get to occasionally organize even more expensive expansive activities than before.  For our opening ward fhe we set up a slip-and-slide at Rock Canyon Park, which, as you can see, has a pretty decent hill.  It turns out our tarp wasn't as long as we had hoped. (Happily it's longer than it looks.) The grass at the end really just made it more fun.  I'm back in my ward from last summer, so I've also been going on crazy bike rides with my Bishop, having game nights with the people, and we even took a stab at another pool movie night.  It's wasn't perfect, but it went a lot better than last time.

Thanks to Dan for the action shots

 A few weeks ago I went out to california to do a mud race with Amy, it wasn't quite as muddy as I had expected, which was absolutely fine with me.  It was extremely fun, and I managed to get 18th or so overall, which is not too shabby, considering I only ran about three times in preparation for this.  But it was a blast, definitely not the last time I'm going to do that.  California was great, it was cool to see my Wade nephews, who are pretty awesome.  Katie's right, Tanners 'Aye' really grows on you, especially when he's dressed in pirate garb.  Now I just need an excuse and an inexpensive way to visit the east coast.  I sort of fell in love with california, to be honest.  It's really rather beautiful, and windy winding roads in the dark are exciting.  My friend Dan came out, which made it an adventure.   The summer of one thousand adventures is going well.

Muir Woods, basically Middle Earth. 

 In addition to vacations and adventures, I organized an intramural team, which was one of the best decisions I've ever made.  It turns out captaining a team and getting people together and stuff is actually really rewarding.  We didn't quite win, we had some bad luck and two of our best girls were unable to make it to one of our playoff games.  But I realized that having organized, official matches in soccer is entirely too much fun to avoid, and I'm pretty sure I'll be doing this for the rest of college and after.

There are some other things going on; work, research, my ongoing attempts to figure out the balance between being impossible to please and settling, but there's really nothing of note in that regard, so once something exciting happens in work, research, or dating, I'll try to get around to writing it down.  In the mean time, I'll be living the dream here in Provo.  For all my doubts, this place turned out alright.