on church history

There are a few shocking realizations that begin to sink in during the final weeks before a big move.

"Ricky!" I wailed two weeks ago. "I have to leave the antique mall behind!"

"Ricky!" Last week. "What about autumn?  What about the mountains?"

"Ricky!" This week. "We're going to be so far away from everything!"

And by "everything" I meant "all the cool sites in Virginia and the northeast," of course.  Including the LDS historic sites in upper New York, which Ricky and I have both wanted to see for ages, but it's not exactly like Idaho and South Carolina are right next door.  So before we shoved ourselves all the way in the bottom corner of the United States, we decided to take a road trip!

Luckily, before I married Ricky, I considered the length of time I could spend in a car with him before going crazy.  Even luckier, that time extends well past nine hours, which is the length of time it takes to drive from Buena Vista to Palmyra. (In case anyone is concerned, no amount of time with Ricky would ever drive me crazy.  Duh!)  So on Wednesday, we loaded up the car (mine--Ricky's doesn't have cruise control, and that wasn't about to happen), started up The Three Musketeers on the iPod, and drove to the very edge of the country to a bed and breakfast on the shores of Lake Ontario.  

 

It looks like the edge of the world, doesn't it?  They don't call them the Great Lakes for nothing.

We got to the area just in time for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and I was practically jumping up and down with excitement, so we grabbed some seats and spent some wonderful time talking to the actors roaming the audience.  

It was a long wait.

 (You don't have to tell me that he's the cutest thing you've ever seen.  I already know.)

Once the pageant started, it was awesome!  It was exactly what I was expecting, which is good, because I was expecting a lot.  The pageant covers a condensed version of the story of the Book of Mormon, and it attracts hundreds of people each day of the performance.  We met people from Ohio, Utah, Idaho, Canada...it was great times.

The funny thing about large gatherings of Mormons, however, is that they often attract people who are upset about large gatherings of Mormons.  I don't get it.  These people didn't just disagree with my beliefs--they were yelling hateful things over a megaphone at families walking by with no provocation at all.  It wasn't an attack on the religion, but on the people.

I am blessed with the knowledge of my Savior, Jesus Christ.  I believe He is the Son of God.  I grew up singing a song in church that's become one of my favorites: 

Love one another as Jesus loves you,

Try to show kindness in all that you do,

Be gentle and loving in deed and in thought,

For these are the things Jesus taught.

The man with the megaphone didn't think I knew these things.

"Jesus died for you!" He screamed it like it was a curse. "He died for you, and you don't care!  You're nothing, Mormon!  Nothing!"

What that man failed to realize is no one is nothing to our Savior.

While Ricky and I waited for the crowd to clear before we left, we could hear the man's megaphoned voice become louder and more enraged over time behind us.  It was an interesting contrast to the pageant set in front of us, where somewhere offstage a track of "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" was playing just loudly enough for us to hear it under the screaming. 

Where does someone learn so much hatred?  Learn to lash out at strangers he's never met and doesn't know, not out of welfare for their souls but only to ridicule them?  I don't know, and I'm glad I don't.

I didn't mean to spend so much time on unpleasantries, but it was a thought-provoking incidicent--overall, the pageant was wonderful.  I don't regret a second of it. 

Since it was late by that point, we drove back to our adorable bed and breakfast, admired the antique sheep decorations (I was thrilled) and slept until a home-cooked New England breakfast the next morning...complete with a welcome from the resident cat!  We drove back down to Palmyra to visit the Sacred Grove, the Smith Family Farm, and the Palmyra temple:

 It's a beautiful place.

 The farm!

(The doors of the temple have a depiction of the Sacred Grove in stained glass.)

After our fill of Palmyra sites, we looked at the clock--2:30.  It was a nine-hour drive back to VA. 

"Well," I said to Ricky. "It's a two-hour drive to Niagara Falls from here, and who knows when we'll ever be this close again."

You can guess what we chose to do.

I'll be honest--I was expecting Niagara Falls to be an over-hyped tourist trap.  And it was, indeed, very touristy, but TOTALLY WORTH IT.  Seriously, people, I could not take my eyes off this spectacle.

Canada (as seen behind our heads two pictures ago) has the better view, of course, but since we didn't have our passports we weren't complaining.  I wish I had taken a video of it, because the picture really doesn't do it justice, but whoa.  So cool.

SO COOL.

Deciding we had probably get back to VA in time for work the next morning, we left...at 5:30 in the evening.  Oops!  The GPS didn't know how to handle all the back roads in PA, so we were left with atlas navigating.  A couple wrong turns and gas station slurpees later, we were home at 3:00 a.m.  20 hours of traveling in two days.  Again, I repeat: so worth it.

I'm sorry this is the longest blog post ever, but it had to be done.  At least there are pictures this time, right?  Right?

on the subject of Florida

I've discovered that the only way to motivate myself to blog is to read the most recent entry of every single blog I follow, even if they haven't been updated in a thousand years.  In fact, this is the IDEAL situation, because I begin to think, "Holy jeez, Robin/Elizabeth/Megan Bauer/Sara George-Kreider/various other bloggeritas, why haven't you updated your blog so that I can read about the life you are leading oh-so-far away from mine?" (Robin is the exception to this, because she is close, but I still like to see pictures of video games and bacon and the like, so there.)  Directly after these indignant thoughts stew for a moment, I then realize that my own poor, neglected blog has been lonely for like, six weeks.  Do you realize how long a wait that it in cyberspace?  They should have a Blog Protection Services agency to take blogs away from people like me--the people who promise that they're ready for the commitment and then shirk away from all updating responsibility.  (As a side note, they probably already DO have "the BPS," but it's probably part of the FBI and they hunt down people who use blogspot to plot terrorism, or something.)

In other, less conspiratoral news, Ricky and I made a road trip to Florida last weekend!  As usual, I did not take any pictures, mainly because all we did was look at a quantity of apartments that exceeds the number of X-files episodes ever seen by a certain SGK, and I didn't think anyone wanted to scroll through repetitive panels of off-white walls and beige carpet.  I figured this extensively long (15 hours) road trip would be a great time to start a new hobby, since reading in the car makes me motion-sick. (I still try every time just to see if I've outgrown it.  Next year?)  So, I bought some eggplant-colored yarn, a crochet needle, and set off to become the new starlet of crochet-dom.  To give you some backstory on my yarn-related experiences, I used to knit.  In the 4th grade, to be specific.  My school had a knitting club, but it was run by a teacher whom I loathed to my pre-pubescent core, so I refused to join...but still wanted to knit.  I expressed this to my better-than-the-knitting-club-lady teacher, who then sat me down and helped me knit a blanket.  "I'm a blanket-making prodigy!" thought my 9-year-old brain, who then promptly lost all interest and moved on to Pokemon cards.

So there I was, over a decade later, trying to dredge up some elementary school crafting expertise as I branched out into the exciting world of crocheting.  After a lumpy 4x4 square comprised of all the basic stitches in my "how-to" book and some enthusiastic praise from Ricky (you see why I married him), I went back to eating Cheez-Its and watching Strong Bad emails on my iPod.  My attention span hasn't matured much since age nine.  Maybe one day the post-married crafty gene that seems to be popping up in 90% of people (and blogs) I know will activate and suddenly I'll be whipping up wall hangings and baby shower gifts and maybe even care enough to save up for a sewing machine.  Or, I could just continue to kick everyone's collective rear end at Super Smash Brothers.  Whichever.

What was I blogging about?  Florida.  Right.  Fast forward 14 hours from the crochet episode, and Ricky and I--after passing Disney World (with exchanges of "WE ARE SO CLOSE TO DISNEY WORLD!") and Tampa ("WE ARE SO CLOSE TO THE YANKEES' SPRING TRAINING FIELD!")--are in beautiful, rich, manicured Naples, Florida.  Did I mention I got three nights at our hotel for $140 total (including taxes and booking fees)?  I did.  Bargain hunting should be an Olympic sport.

Seriously, though, Naples is gorgeous.  I mean, the town was (really) named after Naples, Italy, because the people who founded it thought it compared in beauty.  That sounds greats and everything when you're reading it, but being there is entirely different.  It's not often that I'm excited to move someplace--I really looooooathe (I hope your mental voice held out that "o") uprooting--but I'm excited to live in Naples.  We toured Ricky's law school (loved it!), visited the beach at night (a requirement), and even went to the movies (Prince of Persia for $3 each!  The movie wasn't that great, but hey--three bucks!).  There are so many ethnic restaurants in that city that I'm pretty sure we're going to be cardboard box-living broke within a month of moving, especially now that we've discovered this totally authentic, totally delicious Greek place.  There's also a Mexican place called "Mr. Tequila," which is obviously the English-speaking twin of "Don Tequila," and we took that as a good sign.  (We're going to call it "Mr. T's," in honor of good old "Donny.")  It was a struggle to leave, let me tell you.  In-between apartment shopping, we even toured Florida Gulf Coast University--the place where (fingers crossed) I'll be starting my English M.A. program in August!  I say "fingers crossed" because I haven't finished my application yet (I'm taking the GRE this month), but I've got a good feeling about it.  The original application deadline was in February--well before we knew we were moving to Naples--so I thought I was out of luck.  When I called the head of the program to beg for an exception, however, she told me that the deadline had been extended until August!  If I hadn't been trying to pass myself off as a mature, responsible, emotionally stable adult over the phone, I would've cheered.  Instead, I went with, "I'm quite pleased to hear that!" or something around that level of lameness.

Speaking of school: a lot of the apartments we looked at were "income-restricted," meaning you couldn't make over a certain amount if you lived there. (I'm sure you're not surprised when I tell you it's a government thing.)  Cool, fine, whatever--but you can't have both renters going to school full-time, either.  That was what killed the deal for Ricky and me, because he wants me to be able to go back to school if I want to...and, obviously, I do. (Enough to pay out-of-state tuition for a year until I get FL residency, even!  Sigh.)  Therefore, we picked someplace else.  Two bedroom, two bath, carpeted, and even a separate dining area, which is a serious step up from our current apartment.  It's practically a just-under-1000-square-feet palace. The best (or worst) thing about being graduate students is that they allocate living expenses in your student loans, which means that Ricky's student loan amounts are absolutely through the roof, but it gives us the money to pay off our entire lease up-front.  (When I saw the dollar signs, I had to keep telling myself that this is how 95% of everyone pays for law school.  Otherwise, I was going to pass out.)  This is an extra blessing given the fact that jobs in Naples are few and far-between, and I probably won't be able to find anything until we move down there.  Worst case scenario, I take Master's classes and don't worry about being a grown-up with a job ever again!  :D

I promise I'll put pictures up of our new apartment once we're there.  Or, better yet, you could just come visit!  We'll have no friends and a second bedroom, so why not import some already-established friends to Naples?  Eh?

On our way back from Florida, we stopped overnight in Charleston for a blitz visit with some of my long-time gal pals (and guy pals, even).  We attempted to visit Waffle House at 1:00 am once the Sabbath was over, but the federal holiday weekend struck and the place was packed with potheads and some seriously wasted 20-somethings.  Back in the car to IHOP (I definitely wrote that as "iHop" just now)--less crowded, but it took forever to get our food!  FOREVER.  We didn't get back to Alaina and Thomas's townhouse until 5:00 am.  Birds were chirping!  Ricky and I consider this a huge breakthrough for married couples, because we have yet to know anyone personally who has gotten married and stayed out this late.  The lack of sleep did have me making a fool of myself, of course, but what are high school friends for if not for accepting you as an idiot? :)  Special thanks to Lainy and Thomas, who let us crash at their house even though they were (literally) moving in when we got to Chas.  They are, quite possibly, the coolest people to ever exist. 

So there you have it, friends.  Another traveling adventure in the lives of the Jensens.  We also went to a Yankees/Orioles game in April, which I just remembered that I forgot to blog about, but trust me when I say it was good...and cold.  And the Yankees lost.  But Ricky bought me hot chocolate and a pretzel, and we had a great view, and Ricky was happy to be there, and baseball is much more exciting in person, so it was still good.

In later April, we went to Monticello, home of the oh-so-famous Tom Jefferson, whom I don't really like much as a person but have to respect as the author of the Declaration of Independence.  My verdict on the house: definitely cool, but I wouldn't pay the money ($23 each!!) to go again.  I'd just walk around the beautiful grounds.  Ricky and I have a list of historic VA sites to visit before we leave.  Williamsburg is next on the list!

We also booked a bed-and-breakfast in Palmyra to go see the Hill Cumorah pageant in July!  Neither of us have been before, so I bought the room as Ricky's graduation present.  We're stinkin' excited.

As a closing note (and perhaps the best part of this entire post), I got to play Scrabble with Professor Dransfield--and won.  We're having a rematch, of course, but seriously.  It was awesome.