Riding And Riding And Riding...

Today you get a random assortment of memories. Enjoy.

One time, in 8th grade, I was in a spelling bee. Now, I'm a really good speller. In 3rd grade, I won the school spelling bee, and went on to the city spelling bee, where I sucked because the woman who was reading out the words had some sort of accent and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what she was saying. ANYWAY, moving on. 8th grade spelling bee: I was given the word "mustache", and having been raised in a household with many, many books, mostly classics, both English and early American, I had only seen it spelled "moustache", so I lost. I think I should have won, since it IS English, after all. That's what I get for being a precocious reader, damn it.

In college, I had a friend/classmate/coworker who was an excellent cook. I paid him $10 a week to bring me homemade lunch every day. He was cooking himself lunch anyway, so he just brought me an extra portion. I think he actually made money off of it, since he made everything from scratch. There was homemade pasta, dumplings, stew, all sorts of things. Always delicious and nutritious, with vegetables (which I sorely needed, since I mostly lived off of vending machine food and breakfast cereal). SCORE!

One time when I was working at Dairy Queen in high school, we all decided to have a superhero day. All of the employees put on aprons backwards and pretended they were capes, and then we all covered up our name tags with tape, on which we wrote our superhero names. I can't remember what mine was, but we got the strangest looks that day...

Once, also in 8th grade, my friend Lori, Kwiddens, and I (this was before she was The Kwiddens...she was just Kristen at that point) went on a bike ride. We lived in Sioux Falls at the time, and there is an amazing trail system next to the river. It's one of the things I miss most about living in South Dakota. Anyway, the three of us were going to ride down to Falls Park, which is about a five mile ride to the left of where we entered the trail system off of 26th Street. I had only made this ride once, and didn't remember if I were supposed to turn right or left, and so I guessed right. WRONG. We ended up riding and riding and riding, and riding and riding and riding, and we were so confused, and didn't know how far we'd gone, so we ended up going something like 15 miles in the wrong direction, ending up in Sertoma Park on the other side of town. Oops. It took hours. Fortunately, I was in wicked good shape, and though it was tiring, it was totally doable. I would give anything to be in shape so I could do that again...

In college, I was the community co-chair of the BYU Chemistry Club. My biggest job was organizing and performing in chemistry magic shows in elementary, middle, and high schools all over the valley. I could rarely find people who had the safety training, understanding of the demonstrations, and time enough to do this, so I did 90% of them myself. It was a BLAST. Being the Lecture Prep supervisor had its advantages, as I had keys to many parts of the Benson building and an unlimited account at the chemistry stockroom. I put on so many magic shows, but I also played pranks here and there...did you know that if you put methylene blue in brownies, they'll make anyone who eats them pee blue? Fun times.