Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

This morning I woke up at around 5:15 am. This was because my upstairs neighbors were noisy, but mostly it's because of stress. We Hedengrens get insomnia from the other direction. None of this stress is that big--it's not like "how am I going to feed my babies?" stress or anything, but there's a lot and of different kinds. Some of my stress is "good stuff happening" stress: visiting my brother, getting a visit from a friend, throwing an awesome Halloween party, getting invited to many good activities, planning a huge trip to Morocco. Some of my stress is stress I've brought on myself, chickens coming home to roost, and are also pretty good: my novel's finishing up, I got a revise and resubmit on an article and an "accept with revisions" on a short story (I know, right?), and I'm applying to academic jobs as a "practice run." On top of this, I have all of these goals I set for myself, the number of hours of service I...

So in light of the great talk in General Conference by Elder Nelson on bodies, I'd like to give a little shout out to my own body, which is pretty remarkable. I love the doctrine that body and spirit are soul and that our use of our bodies can determine our destinies. I like my body. Here are some specifics. These are my legs. I'm very proud of them lately because when I went for a bike ride Saturday night, I fell trying to maneuver around a small child in the road. and do you know what my legs did? They got up. Nay, they sprang up and got on the bike again almost instantly. You may notice the bandaid on my left knee. I scraped a bit there and there's a bruise on my other leg and I didn't even notice until well into my ride. This, incidentally, is not the first time my remarkable legs have sprung up after a fall; just a couple of weeks ago, the exact same thing happened after I tripped on a root while running. Well done, legs, well done. This is my rig...