Magic Momma

This is my Momma.

She's pretty cool.

 

 This summer, I got really sick and had to go home to recover from mono. I had been planning on staying at school, and so while my plans had to change quite a bit, I got to spend a whole lot more time with my mom.

We went on hikes

 Saw waterfalls

Visited 1000 year old settlements

 Saw less successful 1000 year old settlements

 Went to a brand new temple

 Saw old churches

 Played Yard Games

 Took Selfies

 Saw Piñatas

 Ate delicious food

 Went to a pharmacy

(And got drinks there)

 Saw elephants and a lot of other animals

(We were really excited for the Tapir)

 Attended the temple (but not this one, unfortunately)

 Ate more yummy food

 Picked and ate lots of berries

 

And a whole lot more! We went to Rebel Donuts, Voodoo donuts, whale watching, went to a concert, a hilarious opera, a number of tours, saw trucks, played board games, listened to music, did puzzles, watched movies, played putt-putt, and all kinds of fun things. (I don't have a lot of pictures of those, especially because the camera on her phone is easier to use).

Mom is really cool. She's such a great example to me and I'm really glad that I got sick with mono, because it gave me the chance to spend time with my mom. She has been a really fun adventure buddy this summer, and I'm really grateful for this time we've had to hang out, get to know each other better, and I'm especially grateful for the good friend she is to me.

So far, she's been Popo to her grandkids, but I don't want to call her that since I speak Spanish and I also love her. Towards the end of the summer, we were talking, and mom mentioned the name "Magic Momma". I think it's the perfect name to describe my wonderful mom.

I dreamed a dream

Last night I dreamed a dream. In my dream, we were in Oregon, and mom and Dad had just decided to adopt three muggle children. That’s right. Muggles. Because we were all wizards and witches from Harry Potter!

We were somehow related to the Weasleys, and were good family friends with the Potters. I think mom and dad were curious about the effects of close proximity to magic in muggle children (which is partly why they adopted them, but they also know them from church).

Within the LDS community, there was no secrecy about magic, and all the wizards and muggles lived together and everybody knew who could do magic and who was a muggle. I’m guessing that most home teaching companionships had at least one wizard so that the difficult home repairs could be done with magic. Chris was the only one of us who wasn’t working a wizard job, he was working for a muggle company. All of us thought it was weird at first, until he showed us that he used magic to get all his work done, and was already a senior manager after less than a couple months at the company. He expected to be CEO within a year!

Meanwhile, I was attending BYU Hogwarts. It was mostly for magical LDS students, but nonmembers and muggles attended too. I think I was majoring in Chemistry, but, of course, that meant a lot of potions classes. At the same time, I was the star of the Squidditch team. Squidditch was a broom sport like quidditch, but in the same ways that quidditch is similar to basketball, squidditch was similar to football (and was therefore a contact sport). I was really good and got an offer to play professionally, but somehow that translated into me getting drafted into the (muggle) airforce to play normal football.

When I got there, I was excited to see that my friend Brooks was also on the team. He and I were standing together on the first day of practice, and the coach started going on and on and on and on about balanced meals and healthy diet, and we both kind of zoned out, but then the coach called us all to attention to have a competition to see who could find the healthiest breakfast in 45 minutes. Brooks immediately wanted to be partners, partly because we were friends, but also because he knew I was a wizard. We decided to divide and conquer, and while he worked on cooking up some eggs, I went to Walmart to find protein muffin mix.

It was tricky though, because I looked all through that store and with each walkthrough, the Christmas display got larger and larger. Eventually it overgrew the whole store, and I couldn’t find anything but Christmas trees and ornaments. I went and complained to the manager, especially since it was only September in my dream, which I thought was ridiculous since there wasn’t even any Halloween stuff!

Well, while I was complaining, my friend Bailey from my freshman ward overheard me. She told me she was going to the secret upstairs of Walmart. She told me when she couldn’t find something she needed she would go up there. I got excited and figured that’s where I’d find the mix I needed. We walked and walked and walked and finally made it up to the sixth floor which was a dead end. I asked her what she was planning and where the things were she was looking for. She looked at me an said “Didn’t I tell you what I was looking for? Peace and quiet. When I can’t find it, I come up here.”

“But what about products? I thought it was going to be something you could buy!”

“Robert, you can’t just pull everything off a shelf.”

Desperate to not be late, I hopped on my broom and flew down through the stair case, weaving in and out of each flight of stairs, and rushed back to the building, with just 5 minutes before we needed to report for practice. Brooks got frustrated with me for coming without the muffin mix, and when I explained I couldn’t find it, he said “Can’t you just accio muffin mix or something?? You have magic don’t you?”

I guess this is what I get for rereading all of the Harry Potter books this year!

Restoration Project

For my religion class I had to do a project that had something to do with the restoration. That was all the topical guidance we had, so it was extremely open ended. He showed us examples from previous classes and there was everything from paintings to computer games to essays to songs that people had created. I had no idea what to do, but Alicia had the great idea of making a house with all of the building analogies. And thus my project, the "Mansion of Christ" was born.
I researched a bunch of analogies in the scriptures and in various conference talks and CES devotionals. I tried to find a blueprint for a model house, but couldn't find anything so I drafted one myself with a ruler and compass and started making the house from foam core board.
I got most of the drafting and cutting pieces done in one weekend, and finished that up and started assembling the house while listening to General Conference the next weekend.

The finished project came out pretty well in the end! I was pretty happy with it. I'd originally planned to put a fence around the house so that I could have the "Gate of Baptism" but I still had the Keystone, Capstone, Door of the temple, Four Cornerstones (including the Chief Cornerstone), a foundation, Windows of Revelation, and a few other elements in it. It was a really great learning experience for me-- for example, I had no idea what a capstone was before doing this project. 

I was really impressed though by several of the other projects. The last day of class we all brought our projects in and it was so cool to see what some of my class mates had been working on! Somebody found a piece of sandstone and literally carved the sunstone (I really wish I'd gotten a picture of it). Others painted, wrote and arranged music, and did so many other great projects.

(Below, the one of the classic first vision painting is a mosaic made from pictures of temples!)

Salt Lake Aquarium

After we had completed almost all the coursework in my amazing animal class, my professor took us on a field trip to the Salt Lake aquarium!! It's a really great aquarium, and it has a surprising number of non aquatic animals, including a binturong, clouded leopards, snakes, scorpions, and Asian pheasants.
I put in my snap story from that day, so even though it's kind of a funny format, it should give a good scope of what I saw.

As you can see, there were Amniotes, Amphibians, Fish, Molluscs, Arthropods, Cnidarians (Jellyfish, corals, etc), Porifera (sponges), and several other phyla that we talked about in my class! It was a really fun activity, and especially to go with a group where we had all been through the same animal class and were all biology majors, was a lot of fun.

I of course liked this fish with really creepy teeth. He swam really fast so it was hard to get a good picture but he had three giant teeth that he'd come and show at the glass right in front of my face and then swim off over and over.

Chemistry Mystery

For my chemistry lab class, we had both a written and a practical exam. For the practical exam, we were given a salt which we then had to dissolve in a few different solvent and perform experiments to identify the anion and the cation in the salt we had been given. Mine dissolved in all of the solvents (ammonia, hydrochloric acid, water, and bleach), indicating that I might have potassium as my cation, as potassium is an alkali metal and dissolves in most anything. I then performed a flame test, burning some of my salt, and had a brilliant violet flame, confirming potassium!
After that, I went through a number of experiments to try to figure out the anion. I was able to rule out a number of things since it had dissolved in everything but not bubbled out at the beginning-- for example carbonate bubbles out just like soda carbonation when placed in acid. After adding a number of different chemicals, I identified the anion as sulfate, and got a beautiful dandelion yellow solution at the end. It was such a fun lab! It made me feel like a mad scientist as I combined lots of different solutions to look for specific orders of color changes.

Hesperophylax occidentalis

For my animal diversity class, you may recall that I needed to get an invertebrate from the Provo River. The reason I needed to do that was for an assignment to identify an invertebrate down to the species. I got a caddis fly, a remarkable insect that in its larval stage constructs a shell for itself out of the materials at the bottom of rivers (sand, plant matter, etc)

The only thing we were allowed to assume was that the specimen was an animal (multicellular motile heterotroph). After that we needed to use scholarly dichotomous keys to identify it further. (I did it out of order though, since I assumed it was from the subclass Insecta and started there). Even though I knew it was from the caddisfly order (Trichoptera), I started there to get used to using dichotomous keys. Getting down to caddisfly, wasn't too hard, but to find the family it belonged to, we needed a microscope.

Entomologists use special microscopes that are really cool! you can zoom in on the image itself, once it's focused, which means you never have to change the lens on the microscope or refocus it. The instruments are special for looking at things about this size, and so they were perfect for examining the caddisfly.

It was actually really difficult to narrow it down to the family of caddisfly. There was lots of specific vocabulary to describe the different types, and I needed to learn a lot of terms (mesanotum, setae, etc). It took me almost 3 hours to find the family! It was from Lemniphilidae.

After that, I found the genus to be Hesperophylax. Surprisingly, finding the genus was much easier and faster than the family, and the synapomorphies were much more clearly visible. The species I had to guess on between two options since there's no way to distinguish them in their larval state, but based on population sizes in Utah, I can pretty confidently say it was most likely occidentalis. So overall the classification of the caddisfly was:
Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda, Class Hexapoda, Subclass Insecta, Order Trichoptera, Family Lemniphilidae, Genus Hesperophylax, Species occidentalis
The assignment was difficult and time consuming but it was rewarding to eventually find the species, and to know why it was that, as well as to have the joy of discovery as I went along. I was really ready to be done with fly larvae afterwards though!

Animal Diversity

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is Animal Diversity. Not surprisingly, I LOVE this class! It's so fascinating! One of the coolest parts about it has been how much attention we've given to invertebrates. When I started the class, I realized we would spend the majority of the class studying invertebrates, and to be honest, I was a little disappointed. But it's actually so interesting! It's really helped me feel a lot more wonder about all the animals in the world, from sponges to jellyfish, from blue whales to flatworms. Animals that seemed so simple before have been surprisingly complex, like earthworms-- I always used to think of earthworms as being "barely" animals, but they actually have complex organs, a brain, eyes, jaws, and make themselves burrows which they return to daily. 

It's also been really fun to do dissections every week. My lab partner and I have gotten to be really good friends, and we have had fun getting more used to using the instruments and learning a ton about each animal phylum that we've studied. We started with the most basic, Sponges (Porifera), which lack true tissues, symmetry, or any ability to move, and have slowly moved up through the phyla, advancing in complexity through Cnidarians (Jellyfish, sea anemones, corals), Platyhelminthes (Flatworms, tape worms and flukes), Annelids (Earthworms, sea worms, sand worms), Nematoda (Roundworms -- the ones Alicia did lots of work on), Molluscs (Clams, snails, squids, octopi) and now we're working on Arthropods (Spiders, insects, millipedes). Some fun facts I've learned about these animals:

Nematodes are the most abundant type of animal on earth. Of all individual animals (not species, individuals), 80% are nematodes.

Platyhelminthes have extremely complex life cycles-- usually three or more hosts (they're almost all parasitic), and as many as eight different forms and life stages.

All Cnidarians are stinging-- the reason sea anemones feel kinda sticky when you touch them is because they've shot off hundreds of microscopic "harpoons" that are all sticking on the outside of your skin with "strings" still attached to the organism (they're not strong enough to get through human skin and actually hurt you)

Spiders lost their sensory organs (antennae), but many of them use the front pair of their legs as antennae most of the time and walk on only six legs.

The largest arthropod that ever lived was some 13 ft long (It was a giant swimming scorpion)

Our closest relatives as chordates are sea urchins and starfish.

Arthropods are the most species diverse group-- about a quarter of all known animal species are beetles.

There's a wasp that's about the same size as a single celled paramecium-- and it's not even the smallest insect in the world.

Live the Riv

Going back to school was exciting, but it was sad to end my 8 month hiatus. Surprisingly, the plane was mostly empty, and I had all the room I could want.

I am living at the Riviera Apartments now! I love my little home, but I'm also excited to be moving to the Brittany apartments in May. One of the best parts of the Riviera is being next door to Swig, a gourmet soda place. 

Dental days

While I was in Albuquerque, I got to shadow a number of dentists. It's been fun as I've expanded the number of practices I've visited to see how the atmospheres differ, and how each dentist interacts with their patients and their staff.
I spent a couple of days in a general dentist's office, and really liked what I saw. General dentistry does look like a lot of fun since there's such a wide variety of different things you can do, and you get to build patient relationships a little more than you might in a specialist setting.
I also went to an endodontist's office. Endodontists are specialists in root canals and apicos (a procedure that tries to repair a failed root canal) primarily, though they also perform some procedures that deal with tooth development and regeneration. Since the only procedure they do, for the most part, is root canals, with the occasional apico, I thought it would be really boring. But I actually really enjoyed it! It was fun watching the doctor work, especially because everything is on such a minute scale (clearing out nerve channels on teeth is really precise work!). There were cool microscopes and cameras that the doctor looked through as they worked, which was quite different from, say, oral surgery, which is what I have the most exposure with.
And, best of all, I got to meet the zoo dentist! I went to his office, and he was really friendly and gave me a lot of advice about dental school, getting ready for applications, and choosing where to apply. He was also an older dentist, and it was good to get his perspective on dentistry since most of the dentists I've met have been relatively young. He told me that he's been volunteering as the zoo dentist for decades. His first animal patient was an otter. He took me to a back room where he had pictures up of him doing root canals on a polar bear, a jaguar and giving a filling to a mountain lion, and he had a hand print in paint from a gorilla he'd done some work on as well. It was so cool!

Ice Castles

On New Year's Eve we went to the Ice Castles in Midway! They were super fun, and it felt like I was walking through Frozen or something from the Chronicles of Narnia. 

We had watched some music videos filmed at the ice castles in previous years, and the videos actually made it look much smaller than it really was. There was plenty of space and a variety of fun areas in the castle.

There were lights that changed color constantly giving an otherworldly glow to the ice. The fountains were cool since steam would billow up out of the center of them, while all around was caked in ice.

Arches

On our way up to Utah for Christmas, we went to Arches. It was really fun, especially because we seemed to be the only ones there. It started snowing which gave the place a very different feel than usual. We had fun driving around and seeing some of the rocks. 

The best was all the extra cairns people had made.

I really liked seeing the park without so many people; it made it much easier to get the pictures we wanted.

Overall Experience

I loved my time in Spain. Absolutely loved it. It really was the time of my life, and while it was different than I expected, it certainly lived up to what I had hoped for out of the experience.

I fell in love with the country and culture, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to go on this study abroad. I went to just about every major sight in Madrid, and attended the vast majority of the museums at least once (Reina Sofia, Tapestry factory, Naval Museum, etc.).

Some of my favorite experiences were from going to tapa bars and experiencing modern Spain. I loved going bar hopping, especially in Granada, where I had easily the most successful experience of it. The history in Spain was breathtaking. I loved learning about the history and getting familiar with the culture. My host abuelita made the experience that much better, and I enjoyed befriending her and her husband. My favorite cities we went to were probably Seville and Barcelona, and, of course, I absolutely loved Madrid. All of the trip was so great though, and I really liked seeing how much diversity there is within Spain.

In retrospect, I would’ve gotten the Rick Steve’s guide as an eBook. It would’ve been really helpful to have it around and be able to pull it out more easily and frequently in cathedrals and museums where I wanted to know more than just what was on the signs. I would’ve taken a good rain jacket; I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I decided not to bring one. I also would have started going out for tapas on my own much earlier, and I would’ve tried to talk to younger people. Most of my interviews were with people who were at least fifty years old, and I think I would have liked to learn more about today’s Spain from people who don’t remember the years of the regime. I also would have spent more time walking around and window shopping, rather than focusing almost my entire attention on the large attractions of Madrid. 

One of my biggest regrets was not tasting the famous jamón sooner, and let me tell you, there really is a difference between the usual jamón serrano, jamón iberico, and the jamón de bellota, pata negra. Anyone who goes should definitely try them all, because they really are quite great. The best is definitely the bellota, and I definitely recommend it to everyone!

The experience was so fun, and I would so recommend to everybody that they travel and experience other cultures. The biggest highlights were:

Tapa Hoppin'

(Foods-- the jamón, the paella, the gazpacho and the tapas are the way to go)

The Royal Palace

The "Golden Triangle of Art" in Madrid

The Sagrada Familia

Attending a Real Madrid soccer game

The cathedrals of Burgos, Seville and Toledo

Flamenco

Meeting a completely new people with their own widely diverse culture, learning about the history and people of Spain, and gaining a greater appreciation for all people everywhere.

Last days in Madrid

The last two days in Madrid, Laura and I went through all of the biggest sites-- The Prado, the Reina Sofia, The Royal Tapestry Factory, the Royal Palace, the Parque de Retiro, the Egyptian Temple of Debod, the museum of style and fashion, and so many other things!

It was really fun, and while we had a disappointing experience Tapa Hoppin', we ended the whole trip with the best Flamenco show I've been to, accompanied by the best paella and probably the best meal of my time in Spain.