Family Races and Thoughts on Worship

Today's favorite moments included . . .

. . . cooking a solar dinner on a partly cloudy day. It's nice to feel I'm finally getting the hang of this solar oven. It's still trial and error, but at least I have more successes than failures these days.

. . . racing to read the scriptures, like Sylvia Allred did when the missionaries were teaching her family. After we talked about Sylvia and her sister rushing home from school to get the first turn reading the Book of Mormon, we raced across our family room a few times to see who could reach our big Book of Mormon first. Whoever won got to choose a picture in it to talk about.

. . . after the races were over, Joy chose our activity. As usual, she opted to go to Menchie's for frozen yogurt. None of us minded that we were eating frozen treats on a chilly evening when we were all bundled up in jackets.

And another thing . . .

. . . food for thought, from a commencement speech delivered by David Foster Wallace in 2005: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . . Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."