This Weekend

For those who might not know, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gather together twice a year to listen to our General Authorities speak to the entire Church as a whole. The Conference is broadcast in 92 languages to who knows how many different countries. Living in Provo gives us the opportunity to go to Salt Lake and attend a session or two in person. Like my last post stated, the BYU auditioned choirs sang in the Saturday Afternoon Session, one of the five sessions of General Conference. This year I was blessed to be able to attend three of the five sessions in Salt Lake, two of which were in the Conference Center.

I always forget how big the Conference Center is! It's huge!! I got to see it from two different views during this General Conference: once from the choir loft (behind the pulpit), and one from the balcony. Both views make you feel like you're really looking at a picture, or a big IMAX screen, but certainly not a huge open building. This room seats over 21,000 people! Incredible.

I didn't really have a chance to rest this weekend like I wanted to. In order to sing at the Saturday Afternoon Session you have to be inside the Conference Center before the previous session ends (and the sessions are spaced 2 hours apart). We wanted to see as much of the Morning Session as possible - therefore, we left Provo a little after 7 o'clock in the morning to be able to park and watch the Saturday Morning Session in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It worked and we were able to see almost the entire session.

This morning, once again, we were gone a bit after 7 AM in order to park and be at the Conference Center to attend the Sunday Morning Session in the Conference Center. What made today more difficult was the fact that we had to bring our food with us instead of buying it in Salt Lake, since members of the Church do not shop on Sundays (since that requires other people to work on the Sabbath). But it worked out great! The Morning Session was beautiful - although I did have an impromptu singing competition with a guy sitting next to me (don't worry, I won) - and we had a picnic in the car in between sessions. And it was a good picnic, too. We ended up driving back during the Afternoon Session while listening to it on the radio and finishing it at the apartment. Not too shabby.

I also received all of my welcome information from the WINS Internship Program yesterday, the Native American program that arranged my internship for this summer...that I have not yet turned down. Now that my summer is beginning to look more concrete with the grant for Crittenden, I'm going to need to write both the WINS program and my internship sponsor and let them know that I won't be able to attend this summer.


...However, this is one of those things that you know you have to do but do not want to have to do it. You know? I made a commitment before, but now things have changed enough that this internship will not do much good for me either for music or for law. Grrr. I'm just going to have to put my nose to the grindstone and get it done.

Anyway, that's about it. Nothing too exciting, but it's still an update with my life. Well, at least my weekend.