Enlisted

I am obsessed with making lists. (Case in point, I have three in progress on the fridge right now, and I'm feeling like I could use a few more.)

Knowing this about me, my sister gave me a book a few years ago called "List Yourself: Listmaking as the Way to Self-Discovery." Basically, each page of the book gives you a different list to make -- everything from "List what gives you goosebumps" to "List everything in the glove compartment of your car right now." It's supposed to help you get to know yourself. It also happens to give me a much-needed something to blog about and, sometimes, a fun trip down memory lane.

In honor of this week's holiday, I thought I'd start with list #279: "List all the beasts, characters, or creatures you were on Halloween."

I've been:
a gypsy
a princess
the bride of Frankenstein
an electrocution victim
a pumpkin
a masked gremlin-like creature
Medusa
a pirate
a super-dorky hero
a stalk of celery
a cat

If you, too, want to discover yourself through lists, I'll throw a few list choices up here from time to time. You may be surprised at what you find. Feel free to post the answers on your blog or in the comments to allow others to enjoy your discoveries.

Try this one, or "List the food that's always left in your refrigerator after everything else is eaten," or "List all the greetings you've used to answer your telephone."

Enjoy!

Musings

I hate to disappoint, but Scouts on Tuesday left me with hardly anything worth mentioning. The boys do love Truman though, and 'Cory' insisted on pushing the stroller on our walk home. I was nervous at first, but he did great even with the many idiosyncrasies of Provo's sidewalks. He really is a sweet kid...

So I have been sick this week, feeling nauseous and achy, unable to eat without wishing I hadn't - you know, a real barrel of laughs. And suddenly I have a huge appreciation (and desperate longing) for 'normal.' Normal may be boring, but it doesn't hurt or make you throw up. Humdrum daily life is sounding really good right about now.

In other news, the weather man said that the moon tonight is going to be not only full, but also the brightest of 2007. It's at its closest point of orbit, approximately 30,000 miles closer to the earth than at its farthest point last April. Just FYI.

This post is getting random and a little silly, but I feel this pressure to have something new on the blog so I'll probably publish it anyway. May the next few days prove more interesting (and thus provide more material worth blogging about).

Then again, I can think of a lot of interesting happenings that wouldn't be at all pleasant, so maybe I'll hope for a few more boring days after all.

Viewpoints

I was flipping through the channels this morning while I was nursing the baby and landed on the TV show "The View." This hour-long show is hosted by women, supposedly for women.

Topic of discussion: toilets.

I guess Whoopi Goldberg has this amazing Japanese-inspired toilet that sprays streams of warm water and finishes off with a hot air dryer. She has several in her house and will 'hold it' until she can get home, just to be able to use her special toilets. I changed the channel.

A little later, I spent an hour on the phone with my older sister, who announced yesterday that she is expecting her sixth baby. We talked about being sick and tired, how she'll manage all the kids and a newborn with an impending move, how to survive on a schoolteacher's budget...how she knows this move is the right thing because of answers to prayers, how she knows she'll be blessed for having another baby because she has been five times before, and how inspired we were at general conference by the talk on motherhood.

It was an hour that left me inspired and encouraged by one woman's view of the road from a little further along - and not once did we talk about her toilet.

Cub Scout Gems, Volume 2

Not the most amazing night for memorable Cub Scout moments, but we did have one semi-interesting (disturbing?) conversation:

Vaueli (my assistant den leader): "We're going to talk about wildlife conservation tonight. What is wildlife? Anyone? Yes, Mitch."
Mitch: "Well, it's like.....life.....you know, that's wild. Wildlife. Life that's wild." ['Friends are good...to have.']
V: "Rrrrrright. Um, has anyone ever been to Yellowstone?"
Cory: "What's Yellowstone? Is it like Cabela's? I've been to Cabela's!" [Cabela's: the antithesis of Yellowstone.]
V: "Uh, no, it's a national park where..."
Jake: "There are buffalo clogging up the roads everywhere!"
C: "Oh yeah, and they have a place there where you can hold baby bears."
V: "I don't think you...hey, I thought you had never been to Yellowstone."
J: "Cory, that's not at Yellowstone! That's at the gunshow! It's near Yellowstone, not at Yellowstone."
C: "Oh yeah."

Did I mention that Jake is going hunting this weekend?

Brain Bender: Tower of Hanoi

This seems like the kind of thing that a Johnson could spend a lot of time on (read: become obsessed with). Not that I would know...

http://www.mazeworks.com/hanoi/index.htm

Cub Scout Gems, Volume 1

As most of you know, I am the Wolf/Bear den leader in our ward right now. I've included the eight-year-old boy antics that I can remember up to this point, and you'll see that Scouts wouldn't be nearly as much fun without one boy in particular. May this be the first of a hopefully-weekly account of my adventures in CubScoutdom. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Brittany: "What does it mean to have a positive attitude?"
Jake: "It's like when your mom asks you to do something and you don't want to do it."
B: "Er....."
Cory: "Yeah, like when you get really really mad and you hit your sister!"

* * * * *

Brittany (standing in front of the group with Truman slung over my forearm on his tummy): "So if you were going to make a model of your room..."

Cory's hand shoots into the air.

"Cory, do you have a question about this activity?"

Cory: "Yes. Well...actually, do you think you should hold your baby a different way?"

* * * * *

Brittany: "Cory, do you remember the big long word we talked about last week?"
Silence.
"Starts with a 'C'?"
Silence.
"Ends in 'ooperation'?"
Cory: "Extinct?"

* * * * *

The Scouts were supposed to be creating menus for themselves for one day; they needed to choose three foods each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cory's menu came back to me with only one food listed for lunch: hot dogs.

Brittany: "Cory, you need to choose three foods for lunch."
Cory: "I'll eat three hot dogs."
Brittany: "Try again, please. You need three different types of foods."

The menu was revised to read "Lunch: hot dog, chicken, foot long." Matt thought this was perfectly acceptable.

It's Official...

I have the weirdest dreams of anyone I know. Here's a sampling from last night:

I was outside jogging with my dad when we passed most of the Johnson clan sitting on a hillside, apparently fishing although there was no water in sight. Dad got a wrong-number call on his cell phone which turned out to be my brother Todd's best friend from high school (who we haven't talked about or heard from in years). We jogged into a cave (a la Fire Swamp) at the end of a long path, which morphed into an old, rundown classroom.

I lost track of my dad at this point because Paul, Jill, Annie, Mark and I were crawling around under desks searching for a pair of dice and $20 that someone had lost there 20 years ago. The teacher said she had a pair of dice we could have as she kept showing us a spiral notebook, and I think it was me who said, "It's not the dice we're really after, it's the principle of the thing!" We starting peeling up carpet and floor boards and eventually found a whole mess of hidden compartments and a big room under the floor - someone said, "We better not tell President Hinckley about this." But no dice, so we left.

As we walked out of the classroom, we entered my parents' house and it was snowing outside. I realized I hadn't seen Matt in a while, so I went outside to the car to look for him. There was a minivan in the driveway with the engine running. I had a hard time getting the door open and somehow broke off the plastic piece that lets you open the back window. Inside was the youngest Johnson sibling (one who doesn't exist in real life), a girl named Holly, 11 or 12 years old, with blond hair and glasses. I asked her, "Have you been in here the whole hour and a half?" "Yes." "With the engine running?" "Yes." Still no Matt, though, so I started looking around and found him sitting in a snow drift writing in his journal. He hadn't been able to get into the car or the house and had been outside for 'the hour and a half' (?).

Enter an out-of-control Dodge Caravan, which came careening down the street and crashed by our neighbor's house. By the time we got over there to investigate, a self-propelled chain saw was cutting through stacks of tin cans like butter. (I don't know where the minivan went - maybe it turned into stacks of tin cans?) A crowd had gathered, and two men were bargaining over one of the cans. It was leaking some kind of ink. Matt reached out and touched the ink, and immediately his finger started to glow with this eerie blue light and he sprouted another finger on top of the first one. Next thing we knew, five or six other people were applying the ink, and the actress Geena Davis kept spreading it on her legs, growing more and more of them, and saying, "You like my legs, don't you?"

I know you think I'm making this up, but it's all true. And this is a pretty run-of-the-mill dream - I've had worse. I'm open to interpretations and probably in need of psychotherapy, if anyone is offering...