Sock Monkeys

All right, Marisa, fine. Here's a blog post for you! I'm sorry it's been a while, but it's rather difficult to blog from home due to the dial-up 28.8k internet connection (bleh!). But now I'm back in Provo (for two days), so there's no excuse.

So I survived Christmas. It was extremely hectic because of how late finals went. I was on campus until 5:30pm on the Friday before because I still needed to finish my History of Rhetoric paper, but the paper turned out really well. The highlight of my research was finding this quote in a Mormon public-speaking book written in 1898:

[When we are in sacrament meeting,] one of three things happens: we sleep—blessed escape!—we wander, or we are mentally tortured. (N. L. Nelson, Preaching and Public Speaking, p. 6)

All the research for this paper was extremely interesting. It seems little has changed with regards to Mormon rhetoric. :D Doing this research has merely firmed up my belief in preparing beforehand to speak in church. We need to arrange our words so that they "offer the least resistance to [the Spirit’s] guidance" (Nelson, p. 435-436), so that our audience gets something besides warm fuzzies out of our 15-20 ramblings. As Nelson points out, if all I can say about your talk is that you expounded upon the gospel, I derive no more benefit than if I just stayed at home and read my scriptures. It is a testimony to the dedication of the LDS people that we continue to go to sacrament meeting despite its innanity.

(I guess it could be worse. I read some of Brigham Young's talks in the Journal of Discourses--hour-long talks with no focus! They just range from topic to topic with no apparent connection. Which is great, I guess, except if you are trying to do research on his opinions on public speaking and you have to look up 20 different talks, each with only one paragraph on speaking!)

But the research finally got done, and I drove home to SLC. By the time I got there, it was too late to go shopping, so I officially had one day to finish all of my Christmas shopping. Yay! Luckily, I purchased two CDs in the Black Friday madness that I could give to my parents, and I had already bought the yarn for the sock monkey hats for two of my brothers, so I only really had to look for 3 presents.

Speaking of those sock monkey hats, I hadn't actually started them. I had hoped to get time to make them during finals week, but it just didn't happen. (Cursed roommates wanting to do fun things!) When I wasn't out shopping, I was inside watching movies and frantically knitting away. I finally finished at 1 am on Christmas morning and dropped onto my bed exhausted (well, onto the couch, actually, since I don't have a room at home anymore *sniff*). But it was all worth it because my brothers absolutely loved the hats! I love them too--they are totally adorable (the hats, not my brothers . . . though they are pretty cute as well). Anyway, here you can see the finished products, as modeled by my youngest two brothers, Josh and Mike. I need to sew on some nostrils so that the brim will stop falling down, but other than that they are totally done.

I actually kinda want one myself. Would you people think I was odd to wear one on campus? They are 100% wool and very warm!