Here's Dave Barry's Year In Review. It's really funny.
And here's mine:
January 1. I have finished composing a video from all the footage I took of the Mikkelsens over the Christmas break. When sending the youtube link to them, I type "Brent" my brother-in-law's name, but the computer autofills in "Brent Top," the head of the Church History department at BYU who I had recently emailed. I did not catch the error until a little while later. I hope Brother Top enjoyed the family video.
January 2. Russ Bowers wins Quote of the Year. Again. He has this annoying habit of getting really really good ones during the first week of the year, thereby giving me 51 weeks of "nobody's going to say quote of the year this week," which is annoying. He also did this in 2009. You'll see the quote later.
January 4. Seeing Steve Ward's car towed makes me sad. It survives, but it was still sad.
January 12. My Georgetown Class "Mormonism: A New World Religion," begins. You can read my Juvenile Instructor guest posts about it here.
January 15. In response to what I considered a pretty unfair attack on the LDS church, I post my "Leaving the LDS Cult of False Expectations" on my blog, and ask my friends to share it. In the end, it had about 30k hits. In response I got poetry written about me, two people proposed to me, and I was made fun of on anti-Mormon boards for being a "robo-Mormon" (whatever that means). I think though that in the end the response was positive. Some friends of mine at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference said that they really liked it-that it was just the right response.
February 2. As if the many many hits for the LDS Cult of False Expectations wasn't enough internet notoriety for me this year, George Takei posted my Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart on his facebook wall. George is rated the #1 most influential person on Facebook, so this makes me happy. I don't know if you can "win" at an internet meme, but this is pretty close.
February 2. Earning its own entry in this review, our niece Evelyn Bird is born, making our families eerily symmetrical with 5 nephews and 1 niece on both sides. At least I can say "nieces" now and not have to correct myself.
February 29. This was just an awesome day, all-around. First, it was leap day. Second, there were trailers released for the Avengers and for John Carter. Third, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave an official statement repudiating some rather silly things that a BYU Professor had said a few days earlier in a Washington Post piece. This official statement also put to rest past speculation about the priesthood ban. You can read all about it here.
March 7. John Carter is released. Doesn't fully awaken my inner child, but was a great time otherwise. Sadly, it's box office, while decent, wasn't enough to garner sequels. This makes me sad.
March 15-16. I present a paper at the Mid-Atlantic AAR meeting. The paper was on the philosophical/theological conundrums of God's hiddenness and the problem of evil, and their treatment in geek culture (graphic novels, movies, TV shows, etc.). There's another presentation by my friend Seth, and yet another one on Mormons. Seth and I had both (amusingly) assumed that the other person was doing the presentation on Mormonism. But I was doing geek culture and he was doing death metal band lyrics. Go figure. Also, I get to visit with Stephen and Rachel on my way to and from the conference.
March 23. I visit Southern Virginia University and given them the more or less same lecture, just Mormonized, that I had delivered for the AAR conference.
March 24. Facebook finally drags me kicking and screaming into the timeline mode. That makes writing this easier, but makes my life on facebook more visible, something I'm not happy about.
March 26. My Georgetown class is scheduled to watch a Mormon-themed movie this evening. They've selected Brigham City, and are to bring treats. I'm to bring the funeral potatoes. Unfortunately, I lock myself out of the house and need to hoist up one of my neighbors into my balcony in order not to burn the funeral potatoes. Susan and I make it about 20 minutes late, as memory serves.
April 5. My old MacBook is finally declared dead. We get an iMac, which is like 4x the computer for only $100 more.
May 4. I go to the Father and Son's outing with Devyn, my teen home teachee (who has a single mother).
May 9-ish. I make the final decision to become a force of nature on plagiarism when I decide to fail one of my students at Georgetown on a plagiarized assignment. I caught him because I found his paper on Heber J. Grant very boring. So boring that I said to myself "this sounds like it was written by the correlation committee," which, it turns out, it was. Even though I may very well have ruined this student's life (and I really liked him) I stick to my guns. He ends up with a substantially lower grade than he otherwise would have. Lucky for him I didn't read the instructions in which I was required to turn him in to the Georgetown honor code office. But seriously, when it comes to this, if I wasn't going to let this one kid who I had a great deal of respect for in his senior year at Georgetown get away with it, I'm not going to let anybody else. I hadn't let anybody slide up to this point, but for some reason it was still a possibility in my mind. Now it is not. Future students of mine beware. No matter how the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it. However, I just facebook stalked him, and he got into a really good Law School, so now I don't feel as bad for the outcome. (I didn't feel bad about the failing, just about the future possibilities it might have slammed in his face. I'm allowed to do that.)
May 18-19. Susan and I head down to SVU again for the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference. It's good times with smart Mormons, and has the unintended side effect of making me realize I should quit the bad times with the not-as-smart Mormons, so I drop out of a bunch of facebook groups that I had been inadvertently added to by well-meaning friends.
May 28. I've not cried while laughing for a while. This video made me do so, especially the part at 52:15 with Kramer from Seinfeld as Luke Skywalker, Porky Pig as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Bender from Futurama as the stormtrooper. The look on the guy's face at 52:55 when he realizes what he can do next is priceless, as is the voice actor's next to him a few seconds later when he does it. I almost blacked out from laughing so hard.
June 8-10. Nathan and his family come down from Greensburg for a quick vacation. Good times.
June 11. Susan and I have very few official rules. 3, to be exact. We add a 4th one on this day: Don't be the person that annoys you.
June 17. I get recruited to join the boy scouts on their 50 mile backpacking trip. My home teachee, Devyn, is going with them and they need someone to go with him in case he has to be sent home (having not done the preparation hikes to get his body ready for a backpacking trip).
June 18. We go. Devyn makes it through the first day, but we make the executive decision to send him home anyway because of how slowly he did so. This is no insult to him; I wasn't prepared either, and limp for the next week or so. I still miss backpacking, though.
June 23. I borrow my first library eBook for our Kindle. My life will never be the same again.
June 27. It becomes necessary to store a bunch of my home teachee's groceries in our freezer.
June 29. Because of the derecho storm that hit our area, we need to move everything in our freezer up to my brother and sister-in-laws place in Thurmont. This includes the extra groceries.
July 20-25. Susan and I fly to Utah for our annual Holbrook family reunion.
July 27. Susan and I drive up to PA to help Nathan and his family move across the state to begin his 3rd year at Med School. I've been helping drill Nathan on his viruses, so later this summer when I read an article about an new viral threat at the NIH, I can be all . . .
August 13-16. Susan and I fly to Washington State for our bi-annual Mikkelfest. We get home just in time for . . .
August 19-September 15. Devyn stays at our house for almost a month.
August 31. Our good friends Adam and Heather depart DC. Adam is a former roommate of mine that helped get me into the community college I teach at, and he also D&Ds with me in my evil campaign. They will be sorely missed.
October 6. I try an experiment on twitter to watch conference, and that is apropos considering the game-changing announcement at General Conference about missionary ages. I can't help but think of the effect this will have on my children. They will grow up in a church where 18 and 19 are the normal ages for men and women respectively to serve missions.
October 10. Susan's hair is so epic that it actually kills a bug. That's usually my job.
October 12. Our nephew James is born, thereby messing up the eerie symmetricality of our nieces and nephews on both sides of the family. Was good while it lasted.
October 24. The announcement is made that the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center is shutting down after 20+ years in operation.
October 28. I discover that we have a book in our stake library largely written by one of the two Apostles that were let go form the Quorum of the 12 in 1904 for their refusal to give up polygamy. Our stake library needs some serious revamping.
November 16. Hostess goes out of business. I go buy twinkies as food storage.
November 18-23. All of our Mikkelsen family is in town for Thanksgiving, as are my brother-in-law's parents and my brother Nathan. So the meal is from my biological brother to my brother-in-law's (by marriage) parent's. Ah, we're so Mormon.
November 23. Susan uses glasses as hairbands. On this date she uses my brother Nathan's glasses in her hair as a headband.
December 19-29. Susan and I are in Utah for the Christmas holidays. It's Susan's real white Christmas. (Snow in Maryland doesn't count.) Since she doesn't have to drive in it, she's giddy with its prettiness.
December 29-30. Susan and I stay over in Philly for a day to visit with Stephen and Rachel on our way back into town.
As usual, here is the list of Quotes of the Day from 2012. Russ Bowers wins, but if it hadn't been Firefly's 10th anniversary, and if he hadn't won Quote of the Day 9 days into 2009, I might not have given it to him.
You'll also notice that there are two other Firefly-related quotes in this year's QotD list.
Insightful Quote of the Year comes from someone on Feminist Mormon Housewives:
Here's to hoping I don't have much darkness to hide under a bushel in 2013, but if I do, I'll share it with you so you can all get your Mosiah 18:8-10 on. Or something.
January 1. I have finished composing a video from all the footage I took of the Mikkelsens over the Christmas break. When sending the youtube link to them, I type "Brent" my brother-in-law's name, but the computer autofills in "Brent Top," the head of the Church History department at BYU who I had recently emailed. I did not catch the error until a little while later. I hope Brother Top enjoyed the family video.
January 2. Russ Bowers wins Quote of the Year. Again. He has this annoying habit of getting really really good ones during the first week of the year, thereby giving me 51 weeks of "nobody's going to say quote of the year this week," which is annoying. He also did this in 2009. You'll see the quote later.
January 4. Seeing Steve Ward's car towed makes me sad. It survives, but it was still sad.
January 12. My Georgetown Class "Mormonism: A New World Religion," begins. You can read my Juvenile Instructor guest posts about it here.
January 15. In response to what I considered a pretty unfair attack on the LDS church, I post my "Leaving the LDS Cult of False Expectations" on my blog, and ask my friends to share it. In the end, it had about 30k hits. In response I got poetry written about me, two people proposed to me, and I was made fun of on anti-Mormon boards for being a "robo-Mormon" (whatever that means). I think though that in the end the response was positive. Some friends of mine at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference said that they really liked it-that it was just the right response.
February 2. As if the many many hits for the LDS Cult of False Expectations wasn't enough internet notoriety for me this year, George Takei posted my Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart on his facebook wall. George is rated the #1 most influential person on Facebook, so this makes me happy. I don't know if you can "win" at an internet meme, but this is pretty close.
February 2. Earning its own entry in this review, our niece Evelyn Bird is born, making our families eerily symmetrical with 5 nephews and 1 niece on both sides. At least I can say "nieces" now and not have to correct myself.
February 29. This was just an awesome day, all-around. First, it was leap day. Second, there were trailers released for the Avengers and for John Carter. Third, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave an official statement repudiating some rather silly things that a BYU Professor had said a few days earlier in a Washington Post piece. This official statement also put to rest past speculation about the priesthood ban. You can read all about it here.
March 7. John Carter is released. Doesn't fully awaken my inner child, but was a great time otherwise. Sadly, it's box office, while decent, wasn't enough to garner sequels. This makes me sad.
March 15-16. I present a paper at the Mid-Atlantic AAR meeting. The paper was on the philosophical/theological conundrums of God's hiddenness and the problem of evil, and their treatment in geek culture (graphic novels, movies, TV shows, etc.). There's another presentation by my friend Seth, and yet another one on Mormons. Seth and I had both (amusingly) assumed that the other person was doing the presentation on Mormonism. But I was doing geek culture and he was doing death metal band lyrics. Go figure. Also, I get to visit with Stephen and Rachel on my way to and from the conference.
March 23. I visit Southern Virginia University and given them the more or less same lecture, just Mormonized, that I had delivered for the AAR conference.
March 24. Facebook finally drags me kicking and screaming into the timeline mode. That makes writing this easier, but makes my life on facebook more visible, something I'm not happy about.
March 26. My Georgetown class is scheduled to watch a Mormon-themed movie this evening. They've selected Brigham City, and are to bring treats. I'm to bring the funeral potatoes. Unfortunately, I lock myself out of the house and need to hoist up one of my neighbors into my balcony in order not to burn the funeral potatoes. Susan and I make it about 20 minutes late, as memory serves.
April 5. My old MacBook is finally declared dead. We get an iMac, which is like 4x the computer for only $100 more.
May 4. I go to the Father and Son's outing with Devyn, my teen home teachee (who has a single mother).
May 9-ish. I make the final decision to become a force of nature on plagiarism when I decide to fail one of my students at Georgetown on a plagiarized assignment. I caught him because I found his paper on Heber J. Grant very boring. So boring that I said to myself "this sounds like it was written by the correlation committee," which, it turns out, it was. Even though I may very well have ruined this student's life (and I really liked him) I stick to my guns. He ends up with a substantially lower grade than he otherwise would have. Lucky for him I didn't read the instructions in which I was required to turn him in to the Georgetown honor code office. But seriously, when it comes to this, if I wasn't going to let this one kid who I had a great deal of respect for in his senior year at Georgetown get away with it, I'm not going to let anybody else. I hadn't let anybody slide up to this point, but for some reason it was still a possibility in my mind. Now it is not. Future students of mine beware. No matter how the wind howls, the mountain cannot bow to it. However, I just facebook stalked him, and he got into a really good Law School, so now I don't feel as bad for the outcome. (I didn't feel bad about the failing, just about the future possibilities it might have slammed in his face. I'm allowed to do that.)
May 18-19. Susan and I head down to SVU again for the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference. It's good times with smart Mormons, and has the unintended side effect of making me realize I should quit the bad times with the not-as-smart Mormons, so I drop out of a bunch of facebook groups that I had been inadvertently added to by well-meaning friends.
May 28. I've not cried while laughing for a while. This video made me do so, especially the part at 52:15 with Kramer from Seinfeld as Luke Skywalker, Porky Pig as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Bender from Futurama as the stormtrooper. The look on the guy's face at 52:55 when he realizes what he can do next is priceless, as is the voice actor's next to him a few seconds later when he does it. I almost blacked out from laughing so hard.
June 8-10. Nathan and his family come down from Greensburg for a quick vacation. Good times.
June 11. Susan and I have very few official rules. 3, to be exact. We add a 4th one on this day: Don't be the person that annoys you.
June 17. I get recruited to join the boy scouts on their 50 mile backpacking trip. My home teachee, Devyn, is going with them and they need someone to go with him in case he has to be sent home (having not done the preparation hikes to get his body ready for a backpacking trip).
June 18. We go. Devyn makes it through the first day, but we make the executive decision to send him home anyway because of how slowly he did so. This is no insult to him; I wasn't prepared either, and limp for the next week or so. I still miss backpacking, though.
June 23. I borrow my first library eBook for our Kindle. My life will never be the same again.
June 27. It becomes necessary to store a bunch of my home teachee's groceries in our freezer.
June 29. Because of the derecho storm that hit our area, we need to move everything in our freezer up to my brother and sister-in-laws place in Thurmont. This includes the extra groceries.
July 20-25. Susan and I fly to Utah for our annual Holbrook family reunion.
July 27. Susan and I drive up to PA to help Nathan and his family move across the state to begin his 3rd year at Med School. I've been helping drill Nathan on his viruses, so later this summer when I read an article about an new viral threat at the NIH, I can be all . . .
August 19-September 15. Devyn stays at our house for almost a month.
August 31. Our good friends Adam and Heather depart DC. Adam is a former roommate of mine that helped get me into the community college I teach at, and he also D&Ds with me in my evil campaign. They will be sorely missed.
October 6. I try an experiment on twitter to watch conference, and that is apropos considering the game-changing announcement at General Conference about missionary ages. I can't help but think of the effect this will have on my children. They will grow up in a church where 18 and 19 are the normal ages for men and women respectively to serve missions.
October 10. Susan's hair is so epic that it actually kills a bug. That's usually my job.
October 12. Our nephew James is born, thereby messing up the eerie symmetricality of our nieces and nephews on both sides of the family. Was good while it lasted.
October 24. The announcement is made that the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center is shutting down after 20+ years in operation.
October 28. I discover that we have a book in our stake library largely written by one of the two Apostles that were let go form the Quorum of the 12 in 1904 for their refusal to give up polygamy. Our stake library needs some serious revamping.
November 16. Hostess goes out of business. I go buy twinkies as food storage.
November 18-23. All of our Mikkelsen family is in town for Thanksgiving, as are my brother-in-law's parents and my brother Nathan. So the meal is from my biological brother to my brother-in-law's (by marriage) parent's. Ah, we're so Mormon.
November 23. Susan uses glasses as hairbands. On this date she uses my brother Nathan's glasses in her hair as a headband.
December 19-29. Susan and I are in Utah for the Christmas holidays. It's Susan's real white Christmas. (Snow in Maryland doesn't count.) Since she doesn't have to drive in it, she's giddy with its prettiness.
December 29-30. Susan and I stay over in Philly for a day to visit with Stephen and Rachel on our way back into town.
As usual, here is the list of Quotes of the Day from 2012. Russ Bowers wins, but if it hadn't been Firefly's 10th anniversary, and if he hadn't won Quote of the Day 9 days into 2009, I might not have given it to him.
"Carl I'm calling to apologize for falling asleep when you tried to introduce me to Firefly a few years ago, and to let you know that I have been converted."
You'll also notice that there are two other Firefly-related quotes in this year's QotD list.
Insightful Quote of the Year comes from someone on Feminist Mormon Housewives:
"Don't hide your darkness under a bushel, either."
Here's to hoping I don't have much darkness to hide under a bushel in 2013, but if I do, I'll share it with you so you can all get your Mosiah 18:8-10 on. Or something.
2 comments:
On October 6 didn't they change the age for young men to 18? Score one for the non-mormon nuclear engineer over the mormon theology major. :-)
Can I add the birth of Evelyn? She is just so cute I think she ought to make the list:)
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