Ballet Dancing.

I decided to go out of my comfort zone for this project. I can't have no dancing skills whatsoever you could hardly consider me graceful. So I asked around Hinckley Hall to see if anyone knew how to dance. As it turns out, Stephanie from my hall used to take ballet. She agreed to teach me some of the basics:

Before we began, I thought that ballet had more to do with the position of your feet, but she explained to me that it's not just that, it's the centralization of the body and the straight back. Although I will probably never (NEVER) become a professional dancer, it was nice to have stepped out of my comfort zone and learned a type of passed on knowledge.

the confectionary evolution of a pig

I rather enjoy those getting to know you activities where you list your hobbies because I can feel proud of the eclecticism that is me. I enjoy all my hobbies and  find great satisfaction in my accomplishments; but occasionally, I think I should develop a useful talent in addition fun ones. It remains to be seen if I will succeed in that in the second half of this assignment, but for this first part the difficulty was finding something that I can do that someone else would want to do.
Here follows a list of what I considered, and rejected, as possible topics.
balloon animals, zombie makeovers, hybridizing kitchen appliances, chicken plucking, fossil preparation, calligraphy, and swing lifts.
When I discovered someone in my complex had a birthday, the choice was clear FONDANT CAKE.

Scrubbing Tomatillos

Peeling and Scrubbing the Tomatoes

This Monday I approached a girl who is in my Spanish and my Religion class here at BYU and asked her if she had any skills that she could teach me.  She replied - How about I teach you how to play ukulele? (completely random) And I answered her - Actually I already know how to play it. (even more random)  So she said well how about i teach you to cook salsa verde then.  I LOVE salsa verde so I was pretty excited that she knew how and was willing to teach me because i'm not super great in the kitchen.

Turns out that the salsa making process doesn't start out in the kitchen.  It starts in the grocery store.  So we went to the grocery store to pick out our produce.  It has always been a mystery to me how some people can just look and feel a fruit and know if it's going to taste good or not.  I was taught to pick out tamatillos (green tomatoes) and chili peppers and cilantro and onions and garlic.  Soon we were home and in the kitchen with our ingredients.

This way, please.

At first glance, it’s a pile of rocks. Hardly noticeable. Could have been put there by mistake.

 

At second glance, it might be more.

 

And if you’ve just spent four hours wandering in the direction that you hope is south-south-east, it’s a tremendous comfort.

 

Those piles of rocks are called cairns, and though they are still used today (I can attest to this from my own backpacking experience), they have been used for centuries all over Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I specifically want to talk about the use of cairns in Europe. 

The Idiocy of Measurement Systems

If I asked you to show me how long a inch is, what would you do? How about a yard? I first learned the measurement of a yard from my mom, measuring out rope for a game of tug-of-war. It is the approximate distance from your finger tips to the center of your body and that was how I have measured out approximate lengths since. This is how the majority of measurements came about in our English system today, by standardizing the approximate measurements previously used to enable fair trading (usually by accepting the length of the reigning monarch's foot).

But I want to talk about the Ancient Hebrew system of measuring length instead. In this time, the measurements started out as approximations of the length of certain body parts, and again were standardized to be used by the entire nation. Distances longer than an "reed" (approx. 9 feet) were measured by the number of paces or the days that it took to journey there. Distances did not become standard until the Greek and Roman influence of later centuries. The measurements that were used were rarely taught, just accepted as commonplace and that everyone understood what was meant by them. I mean, really, how could you tell a fishing story without indicating the length of your fish and exclaiming that it is 4 feet long! Idiocy

A cubit is the basic unit of measurement in the Hebrew system, and is the approximate length from fingertips to elbow. In the culture there became two standardized measurements, the common cubit and the long cubit which measured 17.5 inches and 21.5 inches respectively. A handsbreadth was another, measuring the length of the palm across the base of the fingers (approx. 4 inches). In Ezekiel's time (600 BC) the measurements of the future temple were given mainly in "reeds" which was a length of wood cut to the length of six long cubits, or approximately 9 feet.

For me personally, I enjoy the logically metric system. I guess I really am a science nerd. :-)

Deleted Posts

Hey guys -- there has been some comments about deleted posts on the blog (i.e. Alicia and Will).  If this ever happens to you just let me know because it seems that I can see your old post that you may or may not be able to see.  It's saved as a draft in the editing section that I have access to.  So don't stress.  Just give me a call.  Or better yet, write it in word and copy paste it into blogger.

Mike

Becoming a Man

Sorry...! had some frustrating moments when Blogspot deleted my post...

What were you doing at the age of 18 or 19? Surely not preparing to secretly kill as many state owned slaves as you possibly could, right? I was preparing, like many LDS church members, to serve a full time mission to teach the gospel and serve others for the Lord. Instead of preparing to spread the Good News, at that same age ancient Spartan males were preparing to preform the krypteia. Seen through a modern Westerner’s eye this Spartan male right of passage can be seen as a very cruel concept.  This right of passage involves being thrust out into the wild with nothing more than a knife and made to kill as many state owned slaves called helots as he could and return to his training masters without being detected.