Yellow Wallpaper

It's a lot harder to think of creative titles when all my blog entries tend to just be an update about my life and not related to a coherent theme. Expecting myself not to repeat titles after eight years of blogging is probably too much. Oh well. This a post. About stuff.  My last post, and Conference, were both two weeks ago. Things have been going well since then. I will admit that for a few days after Conference I spent a lot of time feeling troubled about a few things that were said and deeply pondering issues that were brought up by some of the speakers. I had quite a few discussions with friends about my feelings, which were decidedly mixed and definitely not peaceful. I didn't feel strongly on one 'side' or another--I just felt agitated and had a lot of big feelings that needed to fit together and make sense. Then, on the Thursday morning after Conference I got up and thought to myself "fear and anxiety don't come from God". I said a prayer, read ...

Another General Conference has come and gone. It seems like the older I get, the shorter the sessions seem to be. Conference weekend used to feel like the longest two days of the month and now it feels like the shortest. I watched all four sessions this time--something I haven't done in a while--though the amount of attention I paid to each varied.  The weekend actually started on Friday evening with a mission reunion. We attended the temple together with my mission president and his wife, then went back to their home for a dinner and a little gathering. Not many people attended this year; I think it wasn't well advertised and people are just getting older and moving on with their lives. I also didn't know most of the people who were there very well. It was still a good, uplifting experience for many reasons. I haven't been to the temple for a while and haven't seen the updated film--that was fun and interesting. It was also good to just get out and socialize, and...

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight This book had some good things about it--the mystery certainly drew me in and I really liked the main character. However, I guessed both of the two major twists in the plot quite early and wasn't surprised by the ending. Some of the dialogue was also fairly clunky and the setting of the story with rich mean-girls in a New York private school was certainly not original. Pumpkin Roll by Josi Kilpack I've ended up reading Kilpack's Sadie Hoffmiller mysteries in backwards order; after picking up the series earlier this year for the Whitney Awards, I've become interested in going back to read the first few that I missed. This one seems to have been a turning point in the series, at least based on so many later references to 'what happened in Boston'. I did enjoy this one quite a lot and thought it was quite tightly plotted and had a good level of tension and real menace. The most recent book I read by Kilpack didn...