Table for Eight

  1. Add real plants to our home. (Not sure succulents grow in Utah indoors, but I am gonna look into it.) Usually each New Year I create written goals for myself ... b ut for some reason this year I didn't feel like writing them in sentence-format-- at all . It's not that I didn't want to set goals; I just didn't want to write them as a list of To Dos. I thought maybe I would be more inspired by posting pictures (from Pinterest, etc.) that show the things/ideas I'm working toward achieving in 2015. And so that's what I did. I came up with some images that reflect the goals I'm working on. Some are trivial, some are more involved ... but I think it's a good starting place for me. 2. Add some funky sterling silver to my wardrobe. 3. Add color to my life. (In all forms.)  4. Finish our kids' rooms and make them comfortable places to spend their time. 5. Add a meditation room to a corner of our house. 6. Foc...

About once a month our local congregation (ward in LDS lingo) hosts an activity for the women. Just the women.  Last night was our activity and it was sooooo fun, I wanted to share. If you have a large group of women that meet regularly (Relief Society, Book Club, etc.), it's a great way for people to get to know one another better. It's basically a play on the concept of "speed dating"--where a big group of people sit at long tables across from one another with different topics of conversation placed all over the table (we had strips of paper).  Then every 1-2 minutes one side of the table moves to their left and speaks with a new person. During the 1-2 minutes women talk, share answers to questions ... and typically begin new conversations based on wherever the discussion leads them. And after 30-60 minutes, every person has been able to visit with every person there (or at least in theory--our conversations sometimes went longer, so I am not sure we wer...

For. The. Love. This is the story of my life: I can't remember all of the passwords I've created over the last 20+ years! Now, before you tell me that there are programs to store your passwords--save your breath! Dave is totally on board with that and has set them up for me in the past. But for some reason after 6 kids, 2 games of Survivor, and 4+ new computers or tablets, I haven't maintained those programs. At all. In other words, every time I sit down to log in to a website I find myself playing, the At-Home Edition of "This Is Your Memory, Dawn Meehan!" Case in point: Today I received an email from GoDaddy, the company that hosts this blog/website. They were writing to let me know that my 5 year package is due for renewal. But in order to renew, I need to log in to my account. And guess what? After running through every possible password/username combo in the history of my life, I can't login. Nope. No way. No how. I can't re...

Speaking to one of my advanced writing classes last week, something hit me: One of the most important skills we try to teach our students at BYU is how to be a critical reader/consumer of the information and ideas they encounter as researchers/scholars/people. And with the explosion of online content and materials available to us in modern society, this is a task we are asked to do sometimes 10s of 100s of times an hour. We are constantly "filtering" content. --We decide which emails to open and in what order. --We determine if a text message really means what we interpret it to mean ("Did they sound sarcastic in that text? Or am I just misreading it?"). --We compare products, multimedia, social media posts ... and hundreds of other messages to determine if they are "good to read" or "not worth our time." We have so many choices to make each day. And I think that constant decision-making or filtering has made us somewhat prone to ...