My blog

On November 29, 1839 Joseph Smith went to the White House to meet with President Martin Van Buren. It had been a terrible stretch of years for the members of the new church in Missouri. They had been denied the right to vote, beaten in the streets, dragged out of their homes and killed despite surrendering. Certainly mobs were a problem, but even more egregious were abuses from the state militia, and from the police, because those were the people who should have protected the saints. Joseph Smith and several other church leaders had been wrongfully imprisoned for months on end. He met with the president with hope for relief but was sent home empty-handed. The saints tried to get justice through the court system and were denied. Joseph appealed to Van Buren a second time who rebuffed him with the words, "Your cause is just, but I cannot help you." ( historyisnow ) Five years later Joseph Smith was dead, murdered in police custody. As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of La...

The Draft Handsome Bryce and I love basketball and football. We especially love BYU basketball and football. We read a lot of sports articles, and have been pretty dissatisfied with the vast majority of them. How often do you read an article about an athlete and come away thinking "What the heck? Has this guy ever even watched sports?" Sports articles are so full of disconnected thoughts, general inaccurate criticisms and cliches that we started to wonder if there are real humans writing them at all. It really seems like a robot could do just as good of a job. So we set to work and created just that! Behold the Sports Writer of the future! This robot writes articles for the NBA draft (tonight!!!) so it only uses male pronouns. You can select whether you would like the to generate a positive review, or negative review. Try it out, I think you will see it compares in quality to most articles you might come across online!

The Game Probably most of you know about BYU's game last Saturday. We lost the football game, but Bryce and I won our own personal game that we play. It is called: "Outwit the Orange Shirts". The Orange Shirts, also known as the Events Staff, are humorless, radio carrying, people. They do not watch the game, they only watch you. BYU can make the greatest play of ALL TIME and their faces register no joy, only the steely glare of enforcement. Their favorite thing to do is to confiscate things, especially food and beach balls. So we have undertaken a vendetta against them, to foil their food stealing ways at every turn. With each game our smuggling will be more extravagant. This week we smuggled in: Homemade beef jerky. (I made this in my smoker for the first time, it was tasty, but there are some things I would do differently next time.) And giant ginger cookies. (I would not do anything different on these next time!) The Orange Shirts inspect your bag surprisingly thoroug...

The New Bed! Handsome Bryce McEwen and I have been doing some projects around the house. We decided it would be nice to have a new duvet cover, and set out looking at different deals on the internet. We found some pretty cheap ones, but we weren't sure about the quality. Then one day it hit us like a stack of bricks, we could make our own! Seriously, it's two large squares sewn together! How hard could that be? Turns out, not very hard at all. We got our white fabric for cheap in the fabric district in LA. Thanks to Haley and Clairice for helping us hunt it down! I wanted black satin pillow cases, because I was afraid black cotton would look dusty all the time. It turns out it was tricky to find decent quality black satin pillow cases, and impossible to find them for a decent price. (Seriously people who make bedding, everything you sell is essentially two squares sewn together! Who are you kidding???) So I made my own of those too. The only thing it is missing now is this FANT...

Jamie Densley Fieber Changed My Life! Ok, apparently I was born yesterday, because I just barely found out about this, but my friend Jamie told me that you can make popcorn in an ordinary paper bag in the microwave! I know, I was totally skeptical too, but today I tried it and IT'S TRUE YOU GUYS! You can actually put pop corn kernels and nothing else into a plain lunch bag, fold the top three times and stick it in the microwave, two minutes later the bag is full of real fluffy pop corn. It's like some kind of magic trick! Anyone can do it! You don't even need a license or anything! All this time I have been thinking there was some secret trick to popcorn and you either had to make it on the stove, in a special popper, or with the magical bags from the store. Man, I feel like a sucker, but a reformed one, reborn as a non-sucker! Hooray!

Rachel-2, The Man-0 Or, Rachel Beats a Traffic Ticket Some of you may have heard about my school zone speeding ticket, (26 in a 20 zone!!!). I was pretty annoyed about it so I fought it in court today. My argument was that the lights that alert drivers of a school zone were obscured by a tree. This is a courtroom artist's rendition of my hearing: (Just kidding it is a picture I drew after the trial, note my cute "going to court pants".) I was a little nervous because the police man had a lawyer, and I didn't. The two of them seemed to be friends and I heard one of them scoff, "Oh, this should be hard " as they were going over the case together. I had three secret weapons though: 1. Over 14 hours of "Perry Mason" viewing 2. Mock-trial experience in 8th grade 3. Photo evidence Observe: Exhibit A Exhibit B: Turns out that the first two weapons are really only useful for murder cases, which I have not been convicted of lately, so I mostly relied on my ...

Rachel 1 the Man 0 Two months ago Bryce finally got a cell phone! My contract was up, so it was time for me to upgrade too. This is the phone I got: It is cu te, N’est pas? It is small and shiny and white and fancier than my old phone. We were getting along smashingly, until tragedy struck. One day I took the phone out of my purse and the joystick was cracked!!! I hadn't even beat any muggers over the head with that purse either! As the day went on, piece by tiny piece, the joystick plastic flaked away until all I had left was a stick, and no joy. The components still worked, it was just hard to move because the stick was short. So I called AT&T and told them my sad story (3 times before they sent me to the warranty people) and the warranty guy, not paying particular attention to what I said, told me to take the back of my phone off. I thought this was weird because obviously the problem is on the front of the phone. He asked me what color a lit...