The Conference and the Concert

At the end of February, I had a busy Saturday between attending a stake women's conference and going up to Salt Lake with Marinda and Paul for a concert. The day didn't get off to a great start when I found myself running late to the conference in the morning. Unfortunately, this meant I was speeding, and because it was the end of the month, the cops were on the prowl. Add those factors up and you can deduce that I got a ticket. So that was no good. On the bright side, the cop was very nice and only ticketed me for 5 miles over though I was actually clocked doing 10.

Or course, this little bump in the road made me significantly more late than I would have been if I'd gone the speed limit. Still, I heard afterward that I didn't miss anything too exciting. The conference was quite nice, with a chapel session as well as 2 workshops and a luncheon. I went to one session in which Sister McDonald, the wife of my first councilor spoke. She talked about how to nurture our inner beauty. It was nice to get to hear from her, because though we see Bro. McDonald all the time, we don't get as much opportunity to know his family. One of the things she shared was this video from Hilary Weeks about negative thinking vs. positive thinking. She did an experiment on tracking her negative thoughts with a clicker. If you are interested in how it went, you can watch the video.

After the conference was over, I went straight down to pick up Marinda and Paul. They had some errands to run in Salt Lake, so we went and did those few things before heading downtown. I always like to go to the temple when I'm up in SLC, but the errands did take a bit longer than expected, so we were pushing it a bit by the time we got parked. I knew that we would have time to complete a session as long as we got right in, but Marinda and Paul didn't want to risk it, especially since we'd have to dress quickly to make it. I had a bunch of baptisms to do, so I suggested we check into doing that. After I got my cards cut. we asked for directions to get down to the baptistery. This ended up being a lot more complicated than it seems like it should have been. We talked to various temple workers and got different stories from each of them. This led to a lot of wandering around for awhile. Eventually, we made it down, though we had to go through our separate dressing rooms. This meant that somehow Paul ended up getting his clothing and dressing even though we still needed to check and see what the time-frame was down there. While he was doing that, I talked to a temple worker down there and discovered that the baptisms would probably take even longer than a session would due to the number of people already there. This meant another change in plans, but we had to try to round up Paul again first. We sent a couple young men in looking for him in the dressing room without a lot of success, but eventually, he came out and we were able to consult.

We determined that our only recourse after all the wandering around and complications would be to do some initiatories. So Marinda and I went to get started while Paul got redressed and went to do his own. Sadly, I didn't have any family names ready for initiatory, so we were stuck with doing temple names. I do like doing initiatories periodically, so it worked out well enough to do them on that occasion. It was a little unfortunate, however, in the sense that part of the appeal was that Marinda and Paul had never been to the Salt Lake Temple and there's nothing especially noteworthy to see in the initiatory booth. I guess at least they got to see a bit in the wanderings, though that was mostly fairly normal hallways. We could see a bit of the nice doorways and such down in the baptistery, at any rate, and for all I know, Paul may have gotten a glimpse of the font itself. I had to go to the bathroom, so Marinda ended up going into the initiatory booth before me. Since none of us had phones on in the temple, we decided to simply meet in the foyer after finishing. When I got up to the foyer, no one was there. I waited about 7 minutes and there was still no one. I tried calling Marinda several times, but wasn't at all confident that she had remembered to turn on her phone. Also, my phone was running low on battery, so I was worried that it would die and then we'd really be up a creek. There was also the fact that I'd forgotten to bring the tickets for the concert in my temple bag. I knew I would have to run and grab those at some point, and that we would probably be cutting it semi-close, at least, on time, especially as Paul was apparently eager to have some dinner. I figured Marinda and Paul must have met up and then went to find some food together, but since I wasn't sure, I decided that I would just run back to the car and back to the foyer to save time. As I was running to and from the car, I could see that a lot of people were clearly arriving for/heading to the concert. It was still over an hour before it would begin, but I knew that the doors would open before too long, and if we didn't get in reasonably close to the beginning, we'd end up in the back of our section. Still I figured it was worth the delay, since I gathered that Paul was very hungry. The next day was Fast Sunday, so I knew that if we were getting food, it would be much better to do it earlier in the day if possible.

When I got back to the foyer, Marinda was there. Paul showed up shortly thereafter. Marinda had only gotten there a minute or two before I showed up the second time, so I'm not so sure how I managed to get done so much faster when she got started first. I immediately suggested that we book it over to get some food quickly so we could get back and find seats. We were about a third of the way there when Paul and Marinda decided they didn't want to get food. I wasn't planning to eat myself, so it didn't really matter to me. We quickly made our way back to the Conference Center and were early enough to get pretty good seats.   The concert really was fabulous. I'm quite fond of Santino Fontana, who was one of the guest singers. He was the voice of Hans in Frozen. His nice, clear tone appeals to me, so it was fun to get to hear him sing more songs of wider selection. Sylvia McNair was the other soloist. I figured she was going to be an operatic type of singer, which I'm OK with, but I can only take operatic sopranos in small doses. Fortunately, she ended up being more along the lines of a Broadway singer, so I enjoyed hearing from her as well. It turns out that a lot of the numbers they did came directly from last years Pioneer Day concert, so essentially it was an opportunity to enjoy a concert that is always sold out on a different occasion. I'm going to include a couple of the songs performed at our concert that are online thanks to having been in the Pioneer Day concert.

This song was just really fun. It wasn't my favorite of the night, but it definitely did have an infectious power to put a smile on every face. Speaking of songs that make you involuntarily smile, this organ piece was quite possibly my favorite of the night. It was a really fun piece. It is quite wonderful to hear that amazing organ in it's full glory. Plus, Richard Elliot is very much an undervalued treasure, so it's fun to see him have the chance to cut loose and receive the appreciation he deserves. On the night we were there, the crowd also went nuts after this song finished.



The whole concert was fabulous. They did a number of songs that I really love, like "The Dying Soldier" and others. I was very glad that Mom arranged to get and send the tickets. Of course, getting out of downtown after the concert finished was quite a nightmare. Paul and Marinda still wanted food, so we ended up making a pit stop at a McDonald's that was still open.

I had to get up at 6:30 the next morning in order to be ready for ward council, so after doing my best to make good time without getting picked up again by the cops, I got Marinda and Paul back then made the trek home in time to dash into bed around 1.

Though it was a little rough getting up the next morning, I was very glad to have a chance to be involved with a number of good things that day. Honestly, I think these are the kinds of days that I like best, when I'm able to participate in a variety of uplifting experiences of different kinds while building connections with the people in my life. It really was a great day all around, despite the rough start!