Music for your Midweek: Joseph Arthur and Miley Cyrus

I DON'T CARE. I LAAAHV IT.

I've been sharing this cover with everyone and their dog. It's great:

A Poem for Saturday: Naomi Shihab Nye "Kindness"

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like a salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will star out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and send you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friends.

Music for your Midweek: The National

I'm beating myself up about not going to see The National when they were here with the Twilight Concert series. I was just in such a funk, I wouldn't have enjoyed it. So instead, I'm listening to this track on repeat:

A Poem for Saturday: Larua Kasischke "Look"

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds no. It's pearls, public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every f------ magazine for free. They tell us that most of the billions of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. But logic tells us there must be operas, there have to be car accidents cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on earth and pulled out of that darkness another god. She--

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just--

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on, she turned it off.

A blog post for work: In which I intentionally embed links that DO NOT work

HAHAHAHAHAH

So I STRUGGLE when it comes time to do a blog post for work. I was determined that this time would be different. This time, I prepped in advance, and planned on getting my post done early about how this year is the 20th anniversary of AmeriCorps. And then this happened:

I'm fine.
I am still a VISTA. I  can continue my work, receive my stipend and my living allowance, etc. But that's not a case for many of the other VISTAs out there. Anyway, when I went to ready my post, it was a little difficult because all the website I was going to get my information from looked like this:

OOOOPPPSSSS.

Anyway. Here's the post. I included the links anyway because they'll work eventually, right? RIGHT?

Oh. And just a little rant while I have your attention. There's been a lot of joking about the government shutdown, which is fine and I actually love a lot of it. But I hope all y'all remember that a lot of us (not me, but several of my friends) have not been able to go to work. Or their businesses have been affected. Or they're working, but not sure if they'll get a paycheck anytime soon.

Just something to keep in mind.

Music for your Midweek: Laura Mvula is all you need

Ok ok.

Listen to all of it.

Just love it.

1. Green Garden


2. Father, Father


3. That's Alright


4. She


5. Sing to the Moon
Listen to a cool performance here:


Watch a clip of that performance here:

Recap Attack: Family fun, and anyone wanna buy a car?

Some stuff from the past couple weeks:

This cool tapestry hangs in the Episcopal Church in Provo. I come here once a month to sing with a Sacred Harp group. One of the highlights of my month :)

Teams preparing to read and do math activities with kids at the United Way Day of Caring. They did a great job!

George and Lindsey through a smashing party for Kimberlee's birthday. Here we have all the fixins for s'mores. We played Gilmore Girls trivia, sang while George and julia played guitar, and almost set ourselves on fire. 

THEY MADE STARS OUT OF DIET COKE AND DIET DR. PEPPER CANS.
Can it get any better? I submit, it cannot.

Jeremy played a show with his band Chalk, the same night as the Holy War. Rookie mistake. There was a decent crowd though. We all had a jolly good time. I'll talk about it more later. 

My mom let me steal this old shoe rack so I could hang my scarves on it. Isn't that clever? Now I can actually see them so I can actually USE them. 

I feel like I spent half my life trying to get my car in working order so that it could pass emissions. I drove over 300 mile (I have a faulty "check engine" sensor, so I needed to drive it 50 miles after every time I took it in to see if the sensor would go off again...), waited countless hours, and paid hundred of dollars... and it FINALLY PASSED. I noticed this smiley face while I was leaving the mechanics for the last time. Oh yeah, anyone looking to buy a car? For reals.

We had a wedding this weekend! My cousin Emilie married Ross and became a Cairns. It was great. He's a Scot, so all the groomsmen were in kilts, and we had great music and dancing. This bagpiper played all. night. long.

Jeremy and Mumsy.

Family

The Happy Couple

I went hiking up to Stewart Fall with Caitlin and Sarah

It's been pretty cold and rainy the past few days, there was actually snow in the mountains!
First snowman of the season