Night and today difference between yesterday and today. 🥳
I should probably start with last night, since I posted before the night was over. The carry-on saga in Denver actually went a lot better than it did at XNA. 🥳
In Denver, I decided to take even more articles of clothing out of my pack and stuff every pocket that I had.
I looked absolutely ridiculous. 😆
But the result was that I managed to get my pack superficially deformed to such a degree, that after situating the pack such that I could have one of the anchor points on one end of the pack and the straps on the other cinched down, if I squoze really really hard, I could compress the pack down to the size of a double decker birthday cake.
Being as small as it was, they didn’t even ask me to measure it. I just got to walk right on through. 😎🥳
Of course, walking down the little ramp thingy to the plane itself, once I got to the line people are waiting in to actually board the plane itself, I started pulling everything out of my pockets and stuffing them back into the pack, probably tripling the size that it had been while squeezing it into its former shape. 🙃
I also pulled the internal back support and frame rods out from there tucked away places and, once I got to my seat, stuck the frame rods in the seat back pouch with all the magazines, and put the back support between my back and the seat.
Gratefully, the plane wasn’t full, so our little three person row on the passenger side of the plane only had two of us in it, so I was able to not only stick my pack under the seat ish next to me, but I was able to have all the space under the seat for my own legs.
🥳
Gratefully, I think I managed to doze off for maybe 20 or 30 minutes? of the flight home.
The flight was relatively uneventful, and after walking the 34,000 mi of tunnels from my terminal to the front, I was super happy to see Cory.
Things started getting a little brighter for me with all of self-entertaining efforts to meet the requirements for classifying my luggage as a personal item and not a carry-on, and they got even brighter once I was there in salt Lake with Cory.
He’s one of the best.
Instead of taking me all the way down to Highland to grab my Civic in the middle of the night, he set up a little bed inside his Suburban for me, complete with a little space heater, and I crashed for the night there, getting a relatively good night’s sleep.
The space heater proved to be invaluable, as it was pretty cold, and so I turned it on a few times in the middle of the night to warm up a little bit.
Cory’s church building is right across the street, so after waking up, I mozied on over for sacrament meeting.
Honestly, I wasn’t very good at paying attention. For some reason I got a bee in my bonnet to try and memorize the sermon on the Mount all in one day, and I think I got through about the first 15 or 16 verses (which I was already quite familiar with, so it wasn’t like memorizing 15 or 16 unfamiliar verses) before other priorities took shape after church.
Cory and I had a great little conversation about expectations as he drove me down to my brother’s place in Highland.
Once in Highland, I had a great little talk with Jared, and among other things, it makes me happy that my brother wants to see me enough that he’s willing to volunteer his driveway to keep my extremely eye-sorely car in it if it increases the likelihood of more frequent visits. He said he actually doesn’t really even care but the car looks like, but I do. 😅
I likely will visit a lot more now that I’m working so much less with cars. 🥳 Plane ticket prices between XNA and SLC are stupid cheap on Frontier… if you cram everything you’re taking into several layers of clothing. 😆
Actually, it was only more awkward this time because my car that I leave here is decked out for summer visits, but not winter visits. So I have clothing and all sorts of stuff ready to go in the car, but I was not prepared for the change in seasons. That all changes this time around because I will be leaving winter clothing with the vehicle as well, which will make flights back and forth even simpler in the future. In the future, I’ll just have a little tiny backpack, if even that.
But this time, it’s definitely been a little bit more of an adventure.
After hanging out and chatting with Jared for a bit, I started in on my plan to spend the rest of my birthday today and Christmas just sort of on my own doing my own thing by myself– because of any lingering depression, but just because that’s what I want this year.
I hadn’t made any plans with anyone anywhere, and I don’t want to be an added stress for anyone in any way shape or form, and I just like the idea of just sort of having a little personal retreat.
I did something very similar for my birthday and Christmas back in 2015. The morning of my birthday, I just drove away from salt Lake and headed on i-80 East until I got to Wyoming, then I drove north through the middle of nowhere, ending up all the way back at Bear Lake, I think, and then driving south… I ended up staying at a hotel for Christmas Eve night and all day Christmas. I had a lot on my mind and a lot to process through then, and I think it’s similar now, although this year’s little personal retreat is unique in its own way.
After leaving my brother’s house, I drove over to a park but I’ve spent a lot of time at over the years because of the memories that I have attached to that park. It’s sort of a place that I go sometimes to think when I’m in Utah.
While I was there, it popped into my brain to visit an old professor of mine from my UVU days way back in, gosh, 2003 maybe? Yeah, I think maybe fall of 2003. Dr Alex stecker. He lives just probably a mile away from that park in pleasant Grove. So I swung over to visit him. He didn’t remember me this time. The last time I’d visited him was probably 10 years ago or so. But I don’t think he recognized me or remembered me at all this time. He’s 86, but he’s still as brilliant as ever, I think. He had recently broken his back, so It seemed as though, even though he was moved I think by my visit, he wasn’t inviting me in, and I think he was in pain standing at the door and wanted to go back and rest his poor body.
I guess for some reason even opiates don’t work for him as a pain reducer, so he just has to deal with it. 😬
Anyway, it was good to see him, even if you didn’t remember me. He lives alone, though he does have family that he’ll be visiting for A Christmas Eve got together.
It was also cool because he’s a scholar of Hebrew, among other things, and though he doesn’t publish anymore like he used to, he still does a lot of writing, and he was excited because during one of his reads through the doctrine and covenants (modern scripture to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ latter-day saints) I guess he ran across some sections of the doctrine and covenants that to him were basically Hebrew poetry.
His was probably one of the hardest classes I ever took in all of my university experience. He packed so much information into his lectures that I actually bought an mp3 recorder, sat in the front row of his class, and recorded every one of his lectures, going back and listening to them all, and creating extensive notes from which I studied for his extremely difficult exams.
Anyway, I would have loved to have talked to him more about what he felt he had found, and what it meant to him and everything, but he just looked like he wasn’t up for it, and since he didn’t invite me in like he did the last time I visited him, I didn’t want to press anything.
After that, I drove up the canyon. I’ve been a bit dehydrated, and being Sunday and not wanting to Go shopping because that’s… Just something that I try not to do on Sundays… I drove up Provo canyon, walked up the tunnel that I built my shower at back in 2010, and happily, there was water running, though not over my shower anymore. It was just trickling down, but I hacked up the little trickling creek far enough to where I could fill up my life straw water bottle from the water that was flowing over the icicles in the frozen creek.
It was a fun little picture, and a beautiful time of day to see the sun starting to set, the colors starting to change, and just the beauty of the mountains.
I still love this place.
(sigh)
After getting my water to rehydrate myself a bit, and after taking a bunch of pictures and sending them to one of my sisters, and after taking advantage of the bathroom at one of the Provo canyon Parks, I drove back to that little park in pleasant Grove and spent a bit more time there, chatting for about an hour with my dad and stepmom who had called me to wish me a happy birthday.
And now I’m just hanging out at one of my little default sleeping spots–my Orem hospital home. It’s supposed to get down to 16° tonight, so I guess we’ll see how well I’m prepared for the cold. 😅
I remember back in 2010 when I spent 9 months living in my car, some of the winter nights got pretty darn cold. I’d wake up and turn the car on to heat up the car and then go back to sleep after it had heated up enough to be comfortable.
I might end up doing that tonight. 🙃
Anyway, I started working a little bit on non-profit stuff today– Just a tiny little bit. I had thought that I would do a lot more, but I find myself easily distracted because I’m already overwhelmed at how much work it’s going to take to get all of this going, and how much mental energy I’m going to need to expect to decide how I want to proceed forward. So it’s easy to procrastinate, even though it’s where I want to be in what I want to do, there are so many different things within that realm, that I can’t do them all, and so I have a lot of hard work to do to figure out which of those things I’m going to focus on.
There’s a lot more to all that, but My bedtime has arrived, and it’s time to crash.
I’m grateful for today. It’s been a good day. 😊
Thank you, to all of you who wished me a happy birthday. I don’t know if there’s any special significance to this particular birthday, as in a name. My golden birthday was nearly 20 years ago, but is there a reverse golden birthday? 42 on the 24th? 🙃
I’ve been reminded the last couple days of a song… and with the song of someone who made a big impact on my life when I was a severely struggling teenager. The first time I can remember hearing the song was with him playing it, I believe. It was an important song to him, I think.
He died not too long ago. I guess time flies… but I think within the last few years now.
Wherever you are, thanks Nick, for helping me get past a really hard and dark time.
I’m going to post it here in honor of you.
I don’t know what the future brings for me or for others whom I love. But I know that nobody can take away our ability to dream and love.
So I’ll keep dreaming, and I’ll keep striving to love, and maybe, just maybe, we can change the world, just like brother Denver sings, and just like Nick did for me. 😊
I’m grateful for good people who spend their lives trying to lift others.
I’m grateful for God’s patience with me, and as was shared with me in a song by another friend of mine, God’s reckless love. 😊
As these days go by, remembering who he is, and I’m remembering that I can trust him. It’s so easy to forget what I’ve once known. It’s so easy for experiences to just vanish into the ether as though they’d never occurred. I find myself amazed, sometimes years later, when the memory of an amazingly powerful experience comes to my mind, and I find myself bewildered at how on earth I could have forgotten that experience, and yet… I have.
Such is my current experience now, I think. As I reconnect with God, as I remember who he is and the experiences that I’ve had with Him.
How could I forget?
Fear… that’s what it is for me. Fear is so potent… “what if…😬”
But I’m remembering… and He’s got me. He won’t lead me astray if I’ll just follow Him. Sure, He’ll lead me through the hardest roads I’ll ever have to walk down, but there’s the kicker… He’ll lead me.
“I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left hand…”
And so I return to that terrifying phrase…
Bring it on.
Love to all. 🥰
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 
Happy birthday. 🙂
Thanks 😊