School Conferences

Both Ruth and Jared had good conferences this week. Ruth is a great reader and Jared loves math. Kaitlin and I also met with a counselor to plan out her high school. High School!!!! Yes, Kaitlin enters 9th grade next year, but here, 9th grade is still at the middle school. She won't actually go the high school until her sophomore year.


Chuck's new Bike

Chuck bought a motorcycle on Monday. He's been researching and looking at the want-ads for several months now. We look forward to weekly short get-aways - him on his bullet bike, me on my little scooter. What a pair we'll make! And yes, Mom, we both have helmets and will always wear them.


Guitar Lessons

A couple of weeks ago I sang and played guitar at my church at a dinner, and afterward I had three different women come up and ask if I taught lessons. I told them that I was self taught and wouldn't feel comfortable teaching others when I feel like there is already so much I don't know. But as I thought about it, I thought what a great opportunity I had living in this area with so many children (literally 50+ children per block). So I did some research and I was able to arrange lessons with a woman who has put out a couple of folk albums and had done several songs on EFY albums named Nancy Hanson. I start lessons next week. My goal is to start teaching beginning students in the fall.


I Bought a URL

Those few of you that have followed this blog know that I write fanfiction as a hobby. In the past year I've published around 100,000 words. About a year ago I wrote a fanfiction story about a character found in the Book of Mormon. My site accepted Bible fanfiction so I thought it wouldn't be a problem. But when I went to submit it, I was rejected. After several emails back and forth they gave me their final word that they would not allow publications relating to the Book of Mormon. I thought it was crazy that a site that has thousands of stories about all sorts of atrocities and perversions would have a problem with a story that happened to be set in a book from my religion. (I wondered if they would accept stories written about Buddah, the Maccabees, or Mohamed or if it was just Mormons that they don't like.) Ever since then I've thought about how people of my faith have no place to post and read stories that have Mormon themes or elements in them.

After a lot of research I finally discovered an archiving database program that allows you to run fanfiction on your website. So I bought my own URL and I've been working all weekend on getting a Mormon fiction site up and running. It's still under construction but you can find the site at www.ldsfiction.net .

If any of you great people are good at PHP or designing web banners I sure could use your help! So far it's been as much sink as swim as I've never had to deal with raw programing before. But I'm learning a lot and hope to have it up and running in a few weeks.