Let the snow fall
When it blizzards
We will stand tall
Face it all together
At snowfall
At snowfall
Snowfall is where we start
A thousand miles and poles apart
Where wards collide and days are dark
You may have my license, you can take my address
But you’ll never have my heart
Let the snow fall
When it blizzards
We will stand tall
Face it all together
At snowfall

It’s comin’ down!

This is gonna be a shorter one, resetting my posting schedule as it were. Yesterday morning I got up early to help clean the chapel. Afterwards I wandered the grounds and amused myself by unblocking a rain gutter, letting about a hundred feet worth of backed up gutter get flushed down in one go.

Also found a little trail through the woods just behind our chapel. The light rain was a perfect touch.

Later that afternoon I helped someone move a few things out of their storage unit and haul it off to the dump. We had carte blanche permission to take whatever we wanted before hauling it away. There were a few computers there, but I didn’t feel like harvesting 1GB sticks of RAM. The big payoff was getting to toss all the stuff out of the back of the truck into the trough at the dump.

Today we had a fantastic lineup for testimony meeting. Nearly everyone who spoke talked about their challenges relating to one form of mental illness or another. I counted:

• Bipolar disorder
• Anxiety, OCD
• Borderline personality disorder
• Depression
• ADHD

Three speakers talked about how their conditions forced them to return home early from their missions, a fourth described flunking out of BYU. (She later returned to graduate in cybersecurity, and now works at Microsoft. Actually gave a great talk the other week, incorporating some fun war stories from cyber-CTFs back in the day.)

Great quote from one of the speakers: Comparison is the thief of joy.

After church we went home teaching. My roommate was recently put as my new companion; both our respective companions had left the ward. When they put us together they gave us three names, and I thought that was our new assignment. But no, neither of us were relieved of our prior assignments. So depending on how you count it, we now home teach ten people. My roommate, being all fired-up recent-convert-style, is having a blast. We’ll see how it all plays out. But we did get to admire our home teachee’s penny-floor.

This evening we had a movie/game night. Which turned into just game night, didn’t have time to watch The Best Two Years before everyone left early, to stay ahead of the snow. I guess it gets really icy here, and they don’t have the infrastructure of a state like Utah to keep the roads clear. We’ll see if I end up going in tomorrow.

Chow now.

I didn’t play soccer as I usually do on Tuesday this week. The real reason was because I was busy helping out with a fast-approaching deadline, but the more entertaining reason is that I didn’t want to make a habit of getting injured on the field. I mentioned last time that I messed up my knee slamming head-first into another player. That was last week on Tuesday. On Friday I had a fellow teammate vigorously stomp on the inside my heel with his cleats. The bruising’s still going down on that one.

But anyways. Saturday afternoon I almost volunteered myself to help valet cars for some guy’s birthday party, a weak second-degree connection through someone I know in a neighboring ward. Figured it’d be a fun way to shoot the breeze with some new people; I was visualizing the scene at Callie’s wedding at the barn.

Then they got down to specifics, and I’d be expected to wear a white shirt, black pants and black tie. Thankfully of the three items I only have a white shirt, and they were strict on the dress code, so I was able to get myself out of it.

So instead I spent some time reading out by our out-of-service pool.

That evening I headed to a Mid-Singles Mocktail Party in Seattle with some friends. Drove over with a cool investigator, met a few people at the chapel, gave my number to a biophysicist PhD student, not hopeful I’ll hear anything back but whatever.

Today I had my roommate and a couple other friends over to Google. I made the mistake a couple weeks ago of having friends over and not reminding them to keep photos off social media. Now I have a queue of people I need to take through at some point. In actuality, the group I had over today was one I would’ve brought over anyways. One of them’s visiting from Germany for a while, the other’s a real good friend I’ve known since soon after moving here.

I’m writing this as I rest in my recliner; my knee’s a bit messed up at the moment. More details on that at the end of this post.

Anyways, last week was a shorter one; on Monday I went on a hike to Wallace Falls. This was the same hike I went on just after I moved here. Very interesting contrast between those pics and these ones.

On Wednesday I had some friends over to visit the office, got the grand tour.

On Friday I went to those same friends’ house to watch About Time, one of their favorite movies.

On Saturday I helped a friend move into a house. We had some fun with the boxes.

On Sunday I had dinner with a coworker, fun meeting his kids, all young budding software engineers.

Yesterday I was playing soccer and I positioned myself really badly, and ended up initiating a head-on collision with another player. If you want to visualize the free-body diagram, we have a high-speed, low-mass object colliding with a stationary higher-mass object. I may have imparted a bit more momentum to him as vice-versa; he was out of the game immediately, I just walked with a limp for a while. However, by the end of the day I was sporting a nice marble-sized bump just below my kneecap. Made getting around a bit difficult, hence this late morning.