Baby!

Ha ha! Fooled you. No, the baby hasn't come yet, but Rachel and I made this cute clay animation movie to pass the time until he does.

We made a blacklight neon version, too!

We do have some news about the baby: Rachel is dilated to 5 cm and 70% effaced as of this morning's checkup. She hasn't been having frequent contractions, though, so there's no telling when Baby Stay might decide to make his appearance. I'll keep you up to date as more news comes. Until then, enjoy our movies!

Theory Predicts My Own Timely Discoveries

Ever since I first read it, I've liked C.S. Lewis's definition of joy: "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1955). He connected it with the feelings of the Holy Ghost, and that rings true to me.

A few months ago, I skimmed a book called Animals Make Us Human by Dr. Temple Grandin (a scientist with autism who has written a lot about how autism can help us understand animals), and found an interesting connection to this idea of joy. At the start of the book, she quotes another researcher's work on several fundamental emotions that all animals seem to share, not only in their behavior, but also in their brain's anatomy. This is a quote from that section:

SEEKING [an almost universal drive among animals] is always about something you don't have yet, whether it's food and shelter or Christmas presents.... SEEKING is a very pleasurable emotion. If you implant electrodes into the SEEKING system of an animal's brain, it will press a lever to turn the current on. Animals like to self-stimulate the SEEKING system so much that for a long time researchers thought the SEEKING system was the brain's "pleasure center," and some people still talk about it that way. But the pleasure people feel when their SEEKING system is stimulated is the pleasure of looking forward to something good, not the pleasure of having something good.
Animals Make Us Human p. 6-7

This sounds just like how C.S. Lewis described joy: the anticipation is better than the fulfillment, like waiting for Christmas morning. Later in the book, Grandin refers to other researchers' idea "that novelty and unpredictability are attractive to animals and people." In a more mundane sense, I think these two desires are what makes for a good story, whether it be a romance or an epic adventure or a fairy tale: we know how the story should end (we anticipate it), but part of the fun of new stories is being surprised by how the storyteller gets us to the end we know is coming. Finishing a good book is almost never as good as reading it!

Incidentally, following these same feelings led to me writing this post: I read books that looked interesting (including the scriptures) because I anticipated finding something cool in them, and then I was surprised by connections I didn't expect to make.

Joyfully,
Steve Stay

Teenaged Piquing Masks Other Tender Desires

Part of the fun of working with middle schoolers is watching them move from "eew, cooties!" to flirting. The way they make fun of each other, they must think irritation is the sincerest form of flattery!

Drolly,
Steve Stay

Things we do in the summertime!

I thought about writing this as an official TPMOTD, but I think I'll just make it a regular ol' "here's what we've been up to" blog post.

I graduated!


Mom and Dad and Grandpa Holt came, and Doug joined us earlier in the day for a very nice picnic, courtesy of Mom.


I had a little trouble figuring out the hood at first...


Mom and Dad and Grandpa gave me very generous graduation presents, which I used to buy a new bike! Believe me: it was time.



I made the mudguard for the front wheel out of an orange-juice jug. Oh, and see the paper chain hanging by the wall? That's the number of days left until the baby's due date: 18 today!

With no school, no internship, and no work for either of us, and most of our preparations finished for the coming Baby Stay, we've had lots of time to do some things we've been meaning to do for a long time. I've been practicing the guitar using a book my sister-in-law, Jessica, gave me for Christmas.


Not to be outdone, Rachel picked up her violin again.


We've both been doing a lot of reading and eating.


And Rachel has been perfecting the Roman miniscule, modern 2 calligraphic font.


We also give each other lessons in our foreign languages, she to me in Spanish, and I to her in Arabic. Those of you with Rachel's phone number should call and ask her to do the Arabic alphabet for you!

We've also been enjoying the sights that Columbus has to offer before we move. We went on lots of walks, and to the art museum, the movies, and the zoo. I was jealous of the primates' ability to swing around, but they were my favorites.
The slumbering bear reminded me of Rachel's ever-more-frequent naps. Baking that bun in the oven takes a lot out of you!


And very big news: we got our house loan!


So this has been a very nice summer, and with the baby on the way and our move a month later, it's only going to get more interesting from here!

Two of my favorite quotes

A lot of people have the impression that Latter-day Saint (Mormon) beliefs about who goes to heaven are some of the most strict and exclusive of any religion. But these quotes from Joseph Smith, Jr., the first modern Prophet, reveal just how merciful and inclusive God will be at judgment day:

“… While one portion of the human race is judging and condemning the other without mercy, the Great Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of men, causes ‘His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ [Matthew 5:45.] He holds the reins of judgment in His hands; He is a wise Lawgiver, and will judge all men, not according to the narrow, contracted notions of men, but, ‘according to the deeds done in the body whether they be good or evil,’ or whether these deeds were done in England, America, Spain, Turkey, or India. He will judge them, ‘not according to what they have not, but according to what they have’; those who have lived without law, will be judged without law, and those who have a law, will be judged by that law. We need not doubt the wisdom and intelligence of the Great Jehovah; He will award judgment or mercy to all nations according to their several deserts, their means of obtaining intelligence, the laws by which they are governed, the facilities afforded them of obtaining correct information, and His inscrutable designs in relation to the human family; and when the designs of God shall be made manifest, and the curtain of futurity be withdrawn, we shall all of us eventually have to confess that the Judge of all the earth has done right [see Genesis 18:25].”6

“God judges men according to the use they make of the light which He gives them.”7

So anyone who never hears the gospel preached--or more accurately, anyone who never feels the spirit testify the truth of it to their hearts--who would have accepted it had they felt it will be saved. Doctrine and Covenants 137:7-10, a revelation to Joseph Smith the Prophet, says the same thing:

7 Thus came the ^avoice of the Lord unto me, saying: All who have died ^bwithout a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be ^cheirs of the celestial kingdom of God;

8 Also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who ^awould have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom;

9 For I, the Lord, will ^ajudge all men according to their ^bworks, according to the ^cdesire of their hearts.

10 And I also beheld that all ^achildren who die before they arrive at the ^byears of accountability are ^csaved in the celestial kingdom of heaven.

I know that God is perfectly loving, merciful, and just, even if none of his followers can claim the same about themselves. That knowledge is what gives me the peace and calm that I feel every day.

Tongue-Pricking Meal Offends Taste. Darn!

Is there such thing as an antispice? I put too many pickled jalapeños in a zesty shrimp pasta that I made on Tuesday, so it would have been great to have some canister of powder on my spice rack to sprinkle into the dish and bring its hotness down. Diluting spiciness is one way to combat it, I know (e.g., with sour cream), but that often changes the dish too much. There ought to be some food-safe chemical compound that neutralizes capsaicin's burn. I'm sure there would be a huge market for such a product! Wouldn't you buy it? Dave, let's get on this.

Piquantly,
Steve Stay

Trip Planned, Made. Outcome: Tiny Dwelling!

We traveled to Carthage this weekend to go house hunting. We got up at 4 AM Saturday to catch our 6 AM flight out of Columbus, and we were at Rachel's parents' house by 10:30. They fed us lunch and loaned us their car (thanks, Mom and Dad Hall!) so that we could go meet our realtor, Dan Barger, two hours away in Joplin. We visited 8 houses we had picked out from online listings.

The first was built in 1880, and it looked okay from the outside, but it had been repossessed and locked up by the bank, so we couldn't get in. Fortunately, we saw enough through the living room window to convince us it would require too much work to get it into livable condition.

Several other homes were cute, but run-down beyond what we felt capable of restoring, especially with a new baby, and two were in parts of town that we didn't like as much as the one we finally chose. We had narrowed it down to two by Saturday evening when we went to have dinner with one of the junior high's science teachers who had offered to treat us. We enjoyed wonderful food and company as we ate dinner with her family, and we felt very welcome. We got home around 10.

Sunday we went to church and rested with Rachel's family, who are always delightful to spend time with. It was great to have the whole family there at once.

Then Monday morning Rachel's parents came with us to help inspect and choose between our top two homes. They also bought us lunch (thanks again, Mom and Dad Hall!). After some serious thought and deliberation, we settled on this one:



There's a small front and back yard, and room for a garden as well as flowerbeds. It has two bedrooms and one bath, plus a kitchen and large(ish) living room. No basement.

The previous occupant was an old widower whose grandkids operate a building company, so they fixed it up nicely after he passed on. We were fortunate enough to find them there cleaning up the debris of the home's new roofing job on Monday, so we got a lot of questions answered that we might not have otherwise. The home will still need some work (a garage floor, some attic insulation, a new water heater, gutters, fence repairs), but we think it's a good first home, and it just felt nice. We visited with two neighbors, too, and they vouched for the neighborhood. One of our neighbors informed me that, each year in August, 70,000 Vietnamese Catholics converge on a shrine one block down the street for a four-day mass. That's 5 times the population of the city! So we may be renting out camping spaces on our lawn soon after moving in this summer.

It was a long, tiring, whirlwind weekend, but we're grateful to our generous family and friends who are helping us make this move, and everything is falling into place.

Satisfactorily,
Steve Stay

Taking Pea-brained Mistakes Optimistically Terminates Displeasure

This past Sunday I somehow managed to get strawberry jam in my armpit while scraping the jar with a spatula for a pre-bedtime snack. My wife's response of laughing and rolling her eyes reminded me of a post I read a few weeks ago at Apron Stage. Such exchanges are not uncharacteristic of our relationship, so I'm glad she views my unusual habits as delightful idiosyncrasies and not intolerable faults. Everyone should be so lucky.

Stickily,

Steve Stay