Yellow Wallpaper

I've been sitting on this for a while, because I'm not sure I can write anything interesting about billboards. I even debated skipping this day, but I figured I might as well give it a shot.  When I was little, the bank my mom went to was next to Rock Liquor. We would often wait in the car while my mom went into the bank, and I was always fascinated by two large murals on the side of the liquor store. There was a painting of a bunch of people eating lunch in bright, summery dresses, and a poster advertising dancing in French. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that the murals were reproductions of paintings by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and not just liquor ads. The other billboards I remember spending a lot of time pondering were the ones I saw in Spain as a missionary. As missionaries we spent most of our day out on the streets walking around, or riding the metro or buses. We saw a lot of advertisements and billboards, and since I was learning Spanish, ...

Tonight Mr. Fob and I watched a fun, sweet little movie called The Errand of Angels . It's about a sister missionary serving in Austria (we checked it out because we did Austria this week). I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I expected too; the plot is a little sparse but I thought the understatement was certainly better than overstatement could have been. We also laughed quite a bit as we recognized things that were familiar from our mission: falling asleep while saying prayers, 'companionship inventories' that are really passive-aggressive (or aggressive) disagreements, people who enthusiastically invite you in only to kick you out after realizing who you are, tracting an entire apartment building with every door slammed in your face, eating meals in small apartments crowded with stuffed animals and weird knick-knacks, and of course the odd food. Not just the food, but the enthusiastic members who seem to assume that missionaries have massive appetites. There was a brief ...

Today I'm glad that I had the opportunity to serve a mission (sorry for the picture--I don't have a better scanner than this). I'm grateful for the gospel learning and growth that happened during that time. I'm very grateful for the fact that my mission stretched me in so many ways and helped learn how to truly love others. I'm still trying to learn how to do that, but it was a good start. I also love the fact that while on my mission I met the wonderful man who is know my husband. I feel a little funny putting up a picture of us as missionaries. I had no idea at the time that we would come home and fall in love with each other. We served together in the same district for eight months, so about half of my entire time in Spain. I knew many elders who were rude, lazy, mean, vulgar, and various other forms of ugly. Mr. Fob was a caring, compassionate missionary who lead humbly and honestly. I was impressed by his lack of pretension and his willingness and enthusiasm f...

I just set up my new printer/scanner/copy machine. This is the first time I've ever had a scanner, so it's pretty exciting. One of these days I'm going to scan in all my mission photos just so I can write fun posts about them. I'm not sure this file is the highest quality I could get--I need to fiddle around with it some more. But it's still pretty cool. Oh, and that's me and my super cool Spanish companion with the Bolivian family that we taught. The entire family got baptized (I don't know why the dad isn't in the picture) and they are really neat people. I wonder what they're doing now, since I haven't heard from them since I left Madrid. PS--Don't you love my ugly jumper with the stains on it? It's amazing what you'll wear after having no new clothes for nearly a year. The jumper came from our stock of piso clothes--items left behind by departing missionaries that ended up being community property. At least it was comfortable.

This post over at Times and Seasons led me to a whole new way to waste time: watching video of people opening their mission calls on You Tube. It is, of course, inevitable that people would start using this medium for broadcasting their life milestones, and getting your call really is a milestone. Most people probably only put their video up for friends and family, but it's still fun to watch even if you don't know them. My favorite is this one of two guys from Finland. It's probably not as funny if you speak Finnish, but it made me bust a gut watching them. It also made me realize that it's been nearly 8 years since I opened my envelope. I don't remember many specifics of the moment; there wasn't a large crowd there and no one was taping it or anything. I spent most of that night and the next day in shock, because I hadn't considered Spain and I didn't know much about the country. But I'm still glad I went and I will always cherish my mission memor...