Hero-worship?

Jack was awarded the Distinguished Commissioner Award at the Pacific Harbors Council Awards Dinner tonight. He's done a lot of great work as a commissioner, here and in Alaska, and I'm really proud of him! I know he's worked hard to learn the Scouting program inside and out, and he's helped a lot of people. I'm looking forward to helping someone write a nomination for him a few years down the road for the District Award of Merit and Silver Beaver (although the Silver Beaver may take many more years, I guess).

The speaker for the evening was none other than Robert Birkby, who wrote, among other things, the last three editions of the Boy Scout Handbook! He gave a fantastic speech along with a great slideshow--and he indicated to the computer operator when to change slides by waving a semaphore flag.

After the ceremony, I approached Robert Birkby for an autograph and to ask if I could have my picture taken with him, because I thought my dad might be interested. Since I had nothing else with me for him to sign, I had him sign my program for the evening, then we got a passerby to take my pictures. The following picture shows us with his Troop 77 flag, which is in the Scouting Handbook (check p. 449 of the current version). Troop 77 no longer exists, so Robert was given the flag, which he has taken with him to such places as Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Everest.



A little while later, as I was talking with some other people there about my Wood Badge tickets, he tapped me on the shoulder and said he would like to talk with me for a minute before I left. So I wrapped up the conversation I was in, and he pulled out a big, beautiful, brightly colored Scouting Centennial book called Boy Scouts of America Scout Stuff, by (you guessed it!) Robert Birkby. He said, "You know, signing your program was cute and all, but I thought you ought to have something a little better than that. So tell me your name again." And he signed the book and gave it to me right there! Inside the cover was also a printed list of items in the book that were from his own collection.

After I thanked him again and hugged him and said good-bye, I was talking with Jack and our friend Merrill, and I said, half-jokingly, "Ha ha, I wonder if he could get me a job editing his stuff. On second thought, he'll probably say, 'How dare you! My work needs no editing! Gimme that book back!'"

Jack and Merrill pushed me to ask him anyway, thought, so I bothered Robert Birkby one more time to ask who I would talk to if I were interested in editing. He said, "Me, actually. Give me your contact information and I'll send your name to my editor and see if we can hook you up!"

Job or no, though, I met the guy who wrote the Boy Scout Handbook! And I got his autograph, and my picture with him, and he gave me a book, and yay! Coolest evening ever!

Stuff

Jack has been bugging me to update my blog, so here goes. Now shush, dear. :P

First on the list of things I'm required to write about, we spent so much time playing Wii Bowling that we decided to go normal bowling. Turns out I'm less terrible at it than I was last time I went bowling, which was about three years ago. In the first game, I beat Jack 95 to 88. YAY a win! After that, we were both warmed up, and I broke 100 on the second game with a score of 106 (this is the first time in my life I've broken 100 in a bowling game, so it's very exciting for me). Jack beat me with a score of 125. After that, my wrist was starting to get tired, but we did one more game, which I lost again 86 to 103. I didn't feel bad, though, because I kind of consider bowling to be a game where I mostly just play against myself, and other people happen to be playing too. The reason I view bowling this way is, of course, because I'm so bad at it normally. Apparently playing Wii Bowling has actually slightly improved my irl bowling. (Note for Mom and Dad: "irl" stands for "in real life.")

We also did Pinewood Derby, which was a blast. I got to be the one who set up and released the cars this year! YAY! Because of the way our brackets were set up, there were a couple kids who had to race an equalizer car, which was basically the block of wood with the wheels put on, painted like a school bus. The school bus was supposed to be horrendously slow and lose every race, but it actually beat two or three kids' cars, which made me feel a little bad. The school bus was the only one that I actually tried to turn a little crooked on the track to slow it down. It didn't work, though. Oops!

The kids all had fun anyway, though. Thirty scouts showed up, and after the scouts finished their races, five or six little brothers and sisters ran up with cars that they had made that they wanted to run down the track too.

Also, since springtime is apparently here now, Jack and I have been doing a lot more bicycle riding. In addition, I've started filling the bird feeder, for which I now have about 15 pounds of seed thanks to a Cub Scout project we did a few weeks ago. We saw a bird out there just now that I've seen a couple times before and forgot what it is. We looked it up and it's called a Spotted Towhee. Weird-looking thing with red eyes.

Anyway, other than that, not too much to tell. I still jog periodically. I've ridden my bicycle over 250 miles since September (I have a bike odometer now because I have to go 500 for my Wood Badge ticket). I beat Final Fantasies 7 and 8 and am playing 12 now, which is by far the best FF game I've ever played. Also, I'm studying for my ham radio license and am reading a book called Schwa Was Here, by Neal Shusterman. I'm only about forty pages into it, but I'm really enjoying it!


Okay, the end.

Update!

Last Christmas, we were in the process of moving from Alabama to Washington (state), and I was very sick on Christmas Eve. Consequently, I'm counting this Christmas as my first official Christmas married to Jack.

We got a real tree! A seven-foot Douglas fir. Jack has a buddy from work named Sean, and the day after we bought the tree, Jack and Sean went out to do Christmas shopping, and Sean's wife Samantha and I bought ornaments and lights and stuff and decorated the tree.



On Christmas, after going to church and singing/playing piano for the Christmas presentation thingummybobdoohickeywhatsit, we got down to opening presents. Akela immediately homed in on which one was hers.



We let the dogs open their gift from Grandma Dubby first. Blitzkrieg didn't seem nearly as excited about opening the gifts as Akela, so we let her do it.



We probably shouldn't have, though, because after she opened hers, she started wanting to help us open every other present too.



Especially the chocolate Jack got me.



I got him a Boy Scouts campaign hat, which I know he's been wanting. I don't think I got the size quite right, but they said he could take it in and exchange it if it didn't fit, so it's all good.



After that, Sean and Samantha came over. We ate salmon and shrimp scampi and happle pie and brownies, and then we played Farkle and Funglish and MarioKart Wii and Poker and then more Farkle. It was really fun.

Thanks, everyone who sent gifts! I don't want to list them all on here because I don't want to forget anything and then feel like a jerk, but thankyou thankyou thankyou!

Hallelujah!

Last night we went to a "Handel's 'Messiah' sing-a-long," which is something I had never heard of before. A buddy of ours who went to Wood Badge with us and goes to our church also (Got all that? That's the subject of the rest of this sentence) told me about it. At first I was a little noncommittal--"well, maybe I'll go, maybe I won't, I dunno, I'll talk to Jack..."--but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. After all, I do like classical music, and I like concerts. A sing-a-long, though?

Turns out that while the choir was professional, or at least semi-professional (at least I assume so because they were adults and they were excellent), the orchestra was a youth orchestra. The concert, which they put on every year, apparently, is free, but to buy a score (which is optional), it's ten bucks. So we bought one, and it was the actual full and complete score. All 252 pages of it.

Once we got there, we started looking for our friend, Merrill. We didn't find him, so we went up to one of the four balconies to look there. While we were looking, the usher lady saw the awe-struck look on my face and explained to me that the lowest balcony was called the "loge," then there was the lower mezzanine, the upper mezzanine, and... oh nuts, I forgot what the other one was called. It was at the top, and there were actually two, one on the left and one on the right. Then the people sitting on the ground-floor level were divided into sections: sopranos on the right, altos on the left, tenors mid-right, basses mid-left. They said wherever you sit, though, you can sing along, but the higher up you go, the fewer other people are likely to sing. The people who come just to watch tend to sit on the higher balconies. We wanted to sing, but we also wanted to sit together--plus we only had the one score--so we sat on the loge. Even though we were half an hour early, there were still only two seats left on the loge level. They happened to be together, halfway down a row right in the very front, so that I could stick my feet through the bars and let them dangle over the heads of the people walking below.

They only did an hour and a half of the four and a half hours the whole thing would take. Apparently tonight they're doing all four and a half, but I don't think I could actually sit still that long!

They swapped out conductors every few movements, and the conductors were really funny. My favorite was the guy who was balding on top and let his remaining white hair grow down to his shoulders to make up for it.

Every time the choir stood up to sing, the audience was asked to stand and sing as well. I'm not terribly ashamed to admit that while I did passably well, in several parts of the music, I haven't been so lost in any music since I was a freshman in high school. But it was super fun anyway! Definitely worth the ten bucks we paid. Plus the five it cost us to park in downtown Olympia. The only thing that could have been improved was the French Horn section. Only because there wasn't one. But the trumpet solos were outstanding.

Traffic light

On the way to my horse-feeding job, there's a traffic light that I'm convinced is controlled by a gremlin. If there's only one person stopped at the traffic light, it will turn green and stay green for a more or less standard amount of time. If, on the other hand, there's a line of four or five cars stopped at the light, it turns green just barely long enough for the first person to start moving, and then it turns red again. I'm not joking about this. The light is yellow for longer than it is green sometimes. I once pulled up behind two cars that were stopped at the light, and I watched the light go red-green-yellow-red so fast that the guy second in line had to rush through the yellow, and I had to stop and wait for the light to change again.

I bet the gremlin that works the light thinks that's just the funniest thing in the whole world. I sure do.