Onion Antics

Although I love to cook, there are a few things I hate about it. One is spending all that money. One is having to clean up the mess afterward. And one of my very least favorite cooking tasks is chopping onions. I have never been a big onion fan to begin with. When I was little (okay, maybe not so little, but I won't say just how many years ago that was), I always used to pick out every speck of onion I could find in my food. As I've grown older, I've gotten more accustomed to cooked onions, but I still have a difficult time with the flavor and aroma of raw onions. So, when my roomate asked me to chop the onions for our dinner today, I cringed and half-heartedly accepted my assignment. Sure enough, I had barely gotten a couple of chops in when the acrid odor reached my nostrils and I felt my eyes start to burn.
I'm not a quitter, so I bravely continued attacking the onions until I made it all the way through the first one. At that point, fearing the onions were in danger of a salt-bath from my teary eyes, I set them down and scrubbed my hands, in a vain attempt to eradicate the smell. I should have known better. The offensive odor continued to assault my senses until I was ready to surrender in disgust. It was at this point that I had an epiphany. I suddenly remembered, although I couldn't remember where I had learned it (probably from Mom and Janel's infinite store of cooking wisdom), that I had heard that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth while chopping onions, you won't cry. Although I had known this for a long time, I had never bothered trying it out (probably because I usually avoid the whole sticky situation by just dumping in minced onions instead). This seemed like an excellent time to test my theory. I left my onions and eagerly stuffed a half-piece of bread into my mouth.
The result was amazing! Withing seconds the smell was no longer bothering me! I could breathe again! A few minutes later, I shared my tip with my roomate, Megan, and it worked for her too!
Our dinner turned out great, and as for cooking, it will never be the same for me. Chopping onions will never bring me horror again. I may even volunteer to help with onions again . . .
as long as I have bread on hand!

I Love Spring!

Spring. Who doesn't love it? After slogging through months of freezing temperatures, muddy slush, and disgustingly bulky winter coats, I think everyone is ready for spring to be here. There's nothing like leaving your heavy coat inside and stepping out into the warm sunshine. It's such a refreshing change from the gray, listless days of November, December, January, etc. Unfortunately we don't have any spring flowers yet and the high today was only barely forty, but I figured I needed a good way to celebrate spring. So, I pulled out one of my favorite spring T-shirts (green, of course, in honor of St. Patrick's day), and I got a haircut!

There's nothing like a nice haircut to make you feel light and springy. Especially in the middle of the end-of-semester-slumps. Hence the new me. I have a feeling school is going to be better this week already!

(P.S. Sorry the pictures aren't the highest quality ever. You can only do so much with a self-timer.)

What can I say? Aren't haircuts the best? :)

Goals

I used to hate the word goals. I think my antipathy for goals began at the tender age of twelve, when I was introduced to the Young Women's Personal Progress Program. Personal progress always seemed so tedious to me. I would put off my goals until the last week or two before New Beginnings (the recognition night for the acheivement of said goals). Mom would always discover that I hadn't started on the goals and would force me to sit down and immediately make plans to finish them in time. This always seemed like such a tedious process to me. Did I really care what the definition of integrity was? Did I really need to write in my journal examples of times I had shown faith in my life? Without exception, I would end up picking the shortest and easiest goals to complete--ones like telling your mom you love her or doing an anonymous good deed for someone (I could always find someone's bed to make and have that completed in five seconds.) As far as I was concerned, goals were just another checklist to mark off as fast as possible so Mom would stop nagging me. I remember thinking with great relish "I can't wait until I'm out of Young Women and I never have to set another goal again!"

Obviously I realized the fallacies of this logic fairly quickly. Even after Young Women I found that there were times I still needed to set goals. When I started college, Mom helped me set goals to be more social and talk to people in my classes and at church. Dad "encouraged" me to set goals to earn enough money to pay for my year at the dorms myself, and later to pay for my mission myself (an encouragement I admittedly didn't appreciate at the time, but afterward was grateful for it). Begrudgingly, I had to admit that goal-setting didn't end with the presentation of my Young Women Medallion.

In spite of my continued efforts to set goals, my true conversion to goal-setting didn't happen until I became a missionary. As part of the missionary rules, missionary companionships were required to set goals we wanted to acheive for the transfer, the week, and the day. In addition, we were encouraged to work on personal goals individually. At first I found this annoying, tedious, and time-consuming, but as I began setting and acheiving personal goals, I was surprised to find that I actually liked it.

In the missionary guide, Preach My Gospel, in the section under goal-setting, it says:
"Goals reflect the desires of our hearts and our vision of what we can accomplish. . ."
"The ultimate measure of success is not in acheiving goals alone, but in the service you render and the progress of others." Reading this gave me a fresh perspective on the purpose of goals. Contrary to my twelve-year-old impressions, goals are not a torture-device created by parents to make their teenage daughters miserable. Goals actually make me happier. I love the satisfaction of knowing that I have set a goal and actually made it. It gives me hope and makes me want to try better. As Preach My Gospel says, "through goals, our hopes are transformed into action."

Lately I have been feeling a little bit down-- just not as happy as I'd like to be. It seems like life has become a boring trudge down the same barren paths-- school, work, school, work, etc. So, after some reflection I decided that maybe what I need is some new goals to brighten my perspective and give me fresh hope. With that in mind I came up with 3 new goals for myself:

1. Go to bed by 11pm every night. (This one will be the hardest, but I really want to do it. As motivation, I've promised to reward myself with a new haircut if I can stick with it for a week.)
2. Read scriptures before nighttime. (I always read them right before bed, and I'm always too sleepy to get much out of them. Time for a change.)
3. Write in my journal every day.

Already I'm more excited just thinking about these goals (and not just because of the prospect of a cute new haircut). It will be fun to see how my live improves from these few simple steps. At any rate, I'm off to a good start-- I already acheived two of them (scripture study and journal writing) for today. Now if I can just make it into bed on time-- I can picture the new haircut already!