Another day, another trip, more new unexpected friends

I go on adventures every day. Some days my adventures are a little bit different than other days. Friday's adventure was such an experience. I decided the other week to travel home and surprise my brothers and sisters with my graceful presence. The plan was to arrive home right before the kids got home from school. I enlisted Erma my cousin, a gal in the ward named Heather whom I love, and another gal named Nicole whom I didn't know until that morning but now I have a huge place in my heart for her. The last two both served their missions in Mesa. So at approximately 6:16 and 24 seconds am MST on Friday morning we left on our merry way. We had a beautiful drive making great time all day, timing was working out great and I was very much looking forward to our surprise. As we approached Flagstaff I was a little nervous because of our last experience coming in Flagstaff but we reached our regular gas fill-up stop without sign of trouble. We got onto the road again and had been about a minute when the battery light came on (we just bought a new battery a week ago) then the car over-heated and the power steering went out. Luckily we were able to get off the interstate pretty quickly and pulled of into a Conoco station. I sure realized that I would be a lot buffer in the arms if we didn't have such a thing as power steering. Heather had to help me pull the wheel a couple times. I feel like I have truly come to know cars a lot better lately, at least I've come to know mine, inside and out. I called my dad and told him we were having trouble and I'd keep him posted, looked under the hood at everything. It all looked mostly normal to me except that the belt looked kind of loose and there was fluid of some sort pouring out of some hose...I called Carie's dad...who has been more than generous with helping me through my pathetic knowledge of cars, and as I started to talk to him, some man stuck his head under our hood and said "well this is your problem" and pulled the hose right out...well almost right out, it was still connected. Carie's dad said that that sounded like it was the problem and to get that worked out...so our friend Alvin told us to go to Jiffy Lube...well we inched our way there and met some more friends...who's names I don't know...oh wait, one really nice guy who called people for us, his name was Larson Spencer... who told us that that wasn't the real problem, we had a broken idler...whatever that is....and that is why the belt came off. Hm, so we call a tow truck and have an appointment at Randy's garage. So then we sat in the car for an hour waiting for the tow truck man to come. An hour passes, and then some, and we finally see him coming, we were rather excited. Our tow truck man, we decided to call him Frank, said that we could ride in our car on top of the tow truck!!! It was super fun, kind of like riding on a ride at Disneyland...or six flags. He tilted the bed of his truck, hooked some hooks onto the bottom of our car, and then it pulled us up on top of the bed. It was rather exciting. We got to Randy's and found out that Frank's name was really John...but people around there called him Juan, so we did too. I'm sure we brought light and happiness in Juan's, Randy's, and Curt's (who was the guy who actually fixed the car and offered the borken part to us as a memory of our adventure...we declined offering it to him as a souvenir...he declined too...so it got thrown away) lives yesterday. Sure enough they found this thing that was supposed to hold the belt on totally broken and no longer holding the belt on, they replaced it, and just over three hours after breaking down we were back on our way car fixed and all. I don't know that I'll ever drive through Flagstaff without getting scared that my car will break down now. So...yep, there you have it. Great fun with my new friends. While they were fixing our car we took ourselves a little walk up and down the street in Flagstaff, it was a grand walk...and that was good too...thus ended another adventure fourteen hours after it started. Oh my happy life...we're super blessed that it broke down when it did and that we could meet Alvin, Larson, John, Randy, and Curt...timing and everything was perfect... :)

ah life :)

This, again, has been quite a month. It's time to update the few readers of this here blog on the happenings in the sweet life of Mel. Last I wrote I was thinking that it was time to head east....so to help readers understand my thought processi through this whole decision experience:
Choice A: Stay in Provo, do my internship at Heritage Schools working with amazing kids and doing what I really want to do and what will help me a lot in the future with what I want to accomplish in the way of helping youth get out of their issues and live productive happy lives.
Choice B: Sun Valley Adaptive Sports. Not only is this in Idaho, but it is where I spent seven happy months. I LOVE it there. What attracted me to this opportunity besides the location was that I would have the opportunity to get a little different experience than I have in the past with therapeutic recreation. I would have the opportunity to work with mentally and physically disabled wonderful individuals. I actually really, really, really, really enjoy talking and working with disabilities, so this was an exciting thought of an adventure.
Choice C: Children's village, New York. When I interviewed with these people I realized that I didn't really want this one very much. It sounded incredibly fun and exciting, but my role wouldn't have been so much a recreation therapist as it would have been a play pal...which I love doing, but for my internship I really wanted to get a little more clinically involved and see what that is like.
So, by virtue of the interview alone, choice C was vetoed and got rid of itself. Choice B and A both offered me a position... Choice B was a no go, even though it was to be amazing...and so here I be. So for all those that shuddered at the thought of losing my presence from this happy valley, shudder no more. Now just to decide what to do in August....I think I'm feeling I'll be here....
Now that I have that decision out of the way, it relieved some stressfulness that I was feeling...I think it did anyway. School has been crazy busy. I think it is time to introduce the world to my friend, Sniffy the virtual rat. I spent an evening with Sniffy the other day. He was trouble if there ever was any. This was last week in the midst of decisions, and waiting for phone calls, four tests, a quiz or two, a late night of reading the wrong week's class material, and oh so much other stuff. And then I had Sniffy. He is a program for my learning behaviors class and we have been classically conditioning him to...oh boy, I don't even remember what we've been classically conditioning him to do, but this last week we switched to operant conditioning. My task was to condition my friend Sniffy to press the bar (that you can see right over him) above the hopper (where the food lands) in his little cage so that he could get a food pellet. You'd think that he would quickly oblidge since he was getting a good deal out of it, 'twas not the case. The manual that we have is supposed to teach us how to train Sniffy, it usually gives great directions. This busy night it was not so. I actually had to do two experiments with him. The first trained him that the hopper delivered food. I had that one out of the way in no time. I'm a great food-comes-from-hopper-trainer for Sniffy. The next task was to train him that every time he went up on his hind legs, the hopper delivered food, then that proximity to the hopper brought a higher possibility of food, then pressing the bar. I had a really hard time getting to that last one. It took an hour and a half, he kept untraining himself because he wouldn't go up on his hind legs next to the hopper, so he wouldn't get a pellet, so he quit going up on his hind legs. I was really grumpy at the virtual rat. However, after much suffering and frustratedness, he did what I wanted him to, and all was well. I can't imagine what others around me thought as I sat in the library with a rat on my screen just pressing my space bar for an hour and a half...hopefully no one noticed.
So that's my life...decisions, Sniffy, and...nope that's pretty much it. It's a pretty happy life.