Harry Potter is real!

Today I got an email that St. Mungo's is looking for a new Research Manager:

My first thought was, St. Mungo's??? Isn't that the hospital in Harry Potter? It's real????

My next thought was, I need more exposure to British culture than what Harry Potter gave me. Sheesh!

Bath Bed

This dog cracks me up.

Baths are the bane of her existence. She hates them with a passion. If you carry her to the tub, she starts squirming and trying to escape (and a lot of the time she succeeds. Bath time is a work out!)

On rare occasions when she is thirsty, she will intentionally jump in the bath tub to ask for more water. That's where she thinks it comes from, I guess. But she doesn't stay in there long--too much risk!

So out of the blue this last week... Molly has started taking naps in the tub!  A couple of times she disappeared, only for us to find her relaxing inside the empty bathtub. What the heck? Maybe it's a cool place to go to beat the summer heat?

Ask vs Guess Culture

I'm a bit behind the curve, but today I learned about something called "Ask vs. Guess Culture" that explains so many interactions I've had in my life. Here's one of my favorite pages about it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vs3kzjLhbdKsndnBy/ask-and-guess

The basic idea is that there are 2 kinds of people:

• Ask culture people (Askers) who believe it never hurts to ask a question. They aren't afraid to ask anything and everything ("My car is in the shop, can I borrow yours?") because they expect people to say "No" if necessary. They ask with an expectation that sometimes they will be told no, and they fully expect people to say no if they don't want to do something.

• Guess culture people (Guessers) are much more subtle. They don't like to ask a question unless there's a good chance the answer will be yes. They put out feelers to see if the other person might be amenable to their request, and they only proceed if that seems to be the case. Sometimes even if the other person says yes, they keep putting out feelers to determine whether it's a sincere yes, or if they are just saying yes to be polite. To Guessers, questions come with a pressure to say yes. Saying "No" feels rude or dismissive, so sometimes even if they want to say no, they will say yes to something to avoid feeling rude. But they hate being put into that position. From their perspective, some things are not appropriate to ask for in the first place.

Neither of these communication styles are bad. Askers are direct and straightforward, and they expect you to be the same. They aren't offended if you say no. Guessers are more enigmatic, but they are also sensitive to people's emotions and much less likely to ask for something you're not willing to give.

The problem comes when you put askers and guessers together. Guessers are sometimes offended by what Askers ask, because by Guesser standards, the question was inappropriate. Why would you ask them when it was so clear the answer would be no? This throws Askers for a loop, because what is wrong with just asking? You can always say no. Askers sometimes view Guessers as passive aggressive or as game players.

I am a guesser, in case you can't tell by the mound of writing about guessers, my people. I try to be sensitive to other people's feelings and responsibilities and stress levels when I ask them something. If I suspect they will need to say no, I don't ask. I don't want to put any pressure on them to say yes if they don't want to.

If someone asks me something and my answer is no, it can be quite agonizing for me to turn them down, and I try to soften it as much as possible.

Over the years, I've had many interactions with askers where I could tell we were coming from different perspectives, but I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Now I get it so much more clearly.

I admit that sometimes I've been annoyed by questions posed by askers. Why would they ask me that? Couldn't they see it was too much to ask? Couldn't they see I was stressed out of my mind already and I couldn't take on one more thing? Understanding their side-that it's fine for me to say no-helps a bit.

At the same time, I admit it can be easier to pose a question to an Asker. I've noticed over the years that some people will say yes, but I'm not sure they mean it, so I continue to put out feelers, not wanting them to feel pressured to say yes. Other people say yes and I can just tell that 100% they mean it. Is that the difference between an Asker and a Guesser?

There is some internet debate about which is better. I found a few articles by Askers arguing that everyone should be an Asker because it's a better way to communicate. I would argue against that. This is a difference in communication style. One is not necessarily better than the other. Can't we all just get along? Understanding that this difference exists is one important step.

Anyway, that's my psychological insight for today. I really love learning about this kind of thing.

The Secret to Fast Cleaning

I did a dumb thing. I downloaded one of those free guides from a commercialized mommy blog... the kind that means I'll be getting spam email for a while. (I realized this was a risk, so I didn't use my personal email, just the one I use for spam!).

The ad for it looked so promising... The secret to Spring Cleaning faster. It had a little preview of the document with some kind of list on a spreadsheet. I thought, awesome! This is a list of things you should do during spring cleaning. Being new to this homeowner thing, I hoped the list would be fairly comprehensive and include those random little tasks I probably haven't thought of yet. I was especially hopeful that this would be an actual schedule--do these 3 things on day 1, and these 4 on day 2, and so on for 10 days and then you are done. Something awesome like that.

Nope. Not even close!

Page 1 shares the amazing secret to cleaning faster.... which is... drumroll please.... to CLEAN FASTER. I am not kidding. That's what it advises. It says this right at the top of the page. Unfortunately in my initial skimming, I didn't notice this. I did see that I was supposed to list my top 10 most common chores. Then, she says, the next time you do those chores, time yourself. See how long it takes. Then, the next time you do the chores, try to be faster! If you are making a conscious effort to be faster, you will be!

This was not an impressive beginning, but okay. I kept scrolling on to page 2.... which ended up being a mostly blank spreadsheet with columns for your chores, how long it took to do them the first time, and how fast you were able to go the second time.

End document. 😂 I feel duped. No more free guides for me!

Rediscovering My Love of Reading

Reading has always been one of my favorite pastimes. When I was a kid, each time my mom took me to the library I'd check out a good 20 books or so, and I'd always read them before they came due 3 weeks later.

As an adult, sometimes it's not so easy to find the time to read. In grad school, I had to cut back a bit. Since I've gotten married, I've cut back a lot. My husband and I are admittedly pretty tied at the hip. When work is done, we are almost always together doing some shared activity--often something related to housework, or our callings, or whatever, but also fun things like board games and movies and just talking. Something that requires our focus on each other and whatever task is at hand--not prime time for reading.

But I've been feeling an itch to get back into my writing, to finally take my stab at the great American novel. And it's been said many times that you can't write if you're not actively reading.

So I've set a goal to make time for reading every day. I first set the goal about 2 weeks back, and so far it's gone well! I went on my library's CyberShelf page and found something readily available that I'd been meaning to read for a while--Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. That was a quick read done in just a couple days. I went back to see what else was easily at hand, and stumbled across a thriller novel (that sucked me in with a child psychology beginning) called The Girl With All the Gifts. So far I'm halfway through. This is just like old times. It feels good!

Now to see if I can beat down my perfectionism beast enough to delve into creative writing again...

Timing is Everything

At General Conference, Elder Brook D. Hales of the Seventy gave an awesome talk on answers to prayer. He said that "Sometimes our most earnest and worthy desires are not answered in the way we hope, but we find that God has greater blessings in store."

That really hit me. Sometimes when our prayers aren't answered right away, it's because God has a better plan for us than we are hoping for ourselves.

Lately I've been pondering the timing of Trevor and I finding each other. I'd expected to get married a lot younger than 30. I went to BYU anxiously hoping to be a "BYU success story" and find my eternal companion. (Also, to get my education!! Despite the common assumption about girls in my major, I was not there just to find a husband, but I did hope that it might happen along the way.) Four years went by... No husband. I remember spending my graduation ceremony with a friend of mine who experienced life the way I'd hoped I would--she had a crush on a cute boy during her freshman year, she wrote him faithfully during his mission, and when he got back, he finally asked her out. Soon they were married and tackling college life together. I remember at the end of our graduation, my friend and I went in search of our families. Her husband ran up to her to congratulate her, and she flung herself into his arms. There it was--my dream, playing out for someone else. Meanwhile I had yet to find a serious boyfriend.

But what I didn't know then, what I couldn't know, is that my dream guy was four and a half years younger than me. A month or so after I graduated from BYU, Trevor graduated from high school. We couldn't be together yet then. God knew that, and so He tried to counsel me to be patient and wait for the right guy and the right time.

I didn't understand. I was so impatient. Over and over I prayed to know what I could do to find my husband. I promised that I would do anything. Most of the time the answer I got back was, "Really? Anything?" "YES! Anything!" "Then... keep waiting!" AHHHH! I hated that answer so much.

All along though, God had a plan for me. He knows the end from the beginning. He knew that Trevor and I would meet one day and have our happily ever after, but it wasn't the right time just yet. Trevor had a mission to serve, and then a couple of degrees to finish. Trevor's aerospace program was pretty grueling. He didn't have much time to date while he was studying.

Within a week of him graduating, we were dating. The time was finally right. And he was worth every second of anxious waiting. I love him so much, and I'm so grateful that we are together.

I know there are many more challenges in life ahead. I'm hoping that I can remember this lesson--trust God's timing over my own. His plans are greater than ours, and He wants what is best for us. We have to trust that His vision is greater than our own.

Lost at Sea

Crazy dream last night.

Trevor and I lived on an island in a chain of islands. I was on a Relief Society committee (Relief Society is the women's organization in our church). There were 9 of us, including a couple women I know from my real life. We wanted to go visit the sisters in our congregation, but they lived on multiple islands in our chain, so the only way to go was by boat.

Our boat was small--basically just a big canoe, although we didn't use paddles to move it (motorized?). I have a terrible fear of drowning so I didn't really like traveling in the boat, but I did it. We made our visits. Finally, towards the end of our journey, I got off on an island to run an errand or something. The other sisters continued without me. And... that was the last time anyone ever saw them. On their way to their next destination, they were captured and kidnapped by pirates. A ransom note was sent, but that was it.

Then the dream fast forwarded, and it was 2 or 3 months after the kidnapping. There was still no sign of the women, and no one knew what had happened to them. Were they still alive? Where were they? I plagued by survivor's guilt. I desperately wanted to find them and I thought about them all the time, but there was nothing I could do. I kept talking to Trevor about how scary it was that I was almost taken too, that it was a 100% certainty that I would have been kidnapped if I hadn't decided to get off when I did.  I couldn't believe that I'd come so close, and I was relieved I was safe, but also feeling guilty that I was safe and the rest were lost.

My dreams can be so random sometimes! I wonder what triggered this one?