Italy Rome Mission Reunion

Very very nice to see familiar faces. I feel like i am dreaming. The reunion was at the Pacini's and it was good to see people like Garfield, Barrington, Rains and others. I love it.

University of Utah, Temple Square and Red Lobster

I walked around the U of U today after i caught a ride wtih Amy, Kate's cute little sister. The LDS kids at the U are so lucky, they have a huge, new building just for Institute with a gazillion classrooms and a cultural hall and other stuff like a deli (?). I attended one of the many Institute classes on during the day about World religions and the LDS faith.

I took the trax to downtown SLC and walked across the trax tracks then remembered that sign that read "Please do not jay walk over the trax lines. Fine is up to $200". Oh well.

Temple square was really nice on a beautiful day like today. I took a tour with the sister missionaries and watched "the testaments" again. That film always makes me cry.

The Parker's and I went to dinner in the evening at a place called Red Lobster which serves, hmm...Lobster i think. It was nice talking with the Parkers, they are a great family. Kate's dad is Australian, so it was fun playing the "who do you know?" thing. I love the Parker's.

Tomorrow I will see Careen who i haven't seen in 5 years. I spoke to her voice to voice for the first time today which was good hehe. I am sure we will both fall to the ground like we both joked we would back in the day.

A Small Bite of the Big Apple

I spent Wednesday to Saturday of last week in New York, only 4 days which wasn't really enough time to take a look at things, but i saw most of the things i wanted to see mainly this:



The temple is situated smack bang in the middle of everything and i had no trouble finding it after getting off the subway at 66th street. I did a session and later got the chance to look around upstairs. One thing i loved about it was the ticking of the wall clock in the peace and silence. The interiors are furnished in an art nouveau style reflective of the early style in NYC. There was noone around as i was allowed to take a look at the sealing rooms, I felt like i was Charlie in the choclate factory.

Ground Zero was very moving, Pentagram did an very successful and emotive design for the site. But what got me was the cross that sits on the site. Many people think that it is a deliberate symbols placed there as a delberate gesture of hope. It was not deliberate. A few rescue workers had found two cross beams, welded together in the form of a crucifix, sitting upright in the ground. Not only that, there was fire and flames billowing from below the cross. A silverish, paper looking piece of metal sits on one of the arms welded there. The funny thing is, is that chemically, steel and this metal do not weld, but in this case it had.






Allan, Greg, Marilyn and I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday and I was completely floored by their collection, it is the best museum i've ever been to. I also did the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art which were also both very good.

I guess i've already said it but, the best thing though is being in with the people, and in their world. Everyone has some story to tell, and some life to live. It really humbles me to see that on the other side of the world, another person here and there are doing the best with what they have and dreaming up dreams they can only dream.




Last night i flew into Salt Lake City. It was midnight and i looked out the window and could see the Salt Lake Temple shining out from the darkness. The little boy next to me watched cartoons for 5 hours straight, i was very much amazed. Jetblue is a great airline to fly with- lots of legroom, friendly service, and your own personal LCD screen. Big cities are great, but i love the wide open spaces of a place like Utah. It's cold here, the east coast was warm, so i guess i'll get to use all those warmer clothes i brought.

I have changed some words in my vocabulary, just so i can be understood: restroom, sweater, napkin, and some others that i can't remember because i think i am tired.

For the next couple of days i am visiting Kate Parker. Tomorrow, i am going to get the trax from the University of Utah to Temple square.

PS. This one is for Ria

Beacon Street

I walked down Beacon street today admiring the locals and surroundings. Turns out i have some sort of flu virus, north american style, that can override an Australian flu vaccination. It made me have to sleep upright last night so i could breathe.

I love the brownstones here, i feel like i am walking down Sesame street, with the red fire hydrrants and kids with pigtails, walking bouncy puppy dogs. Maybe Big Bird will invite me to come play some hopscotch.

At Coolidge Corner, an intersection of shops, I met a little old man named Nat Kempsey, i thought he had said "Campsie", with a long elongated a, but it was just his accent. He had stopped me to ask for directions and we began to chat. He's not from here, he's from New Jersey, staying at the Jewish nursing home around the corner. He told me of how his wife passed away although he still wore the hat he had from his wife's family reunion, it was a German name. I love it how everyone, in every place has a story to tell.

I turned down Boston university way and on the way back, i found this little dusty bookstore and found a bunch of antique books, one of them being a book called 'Boston Boys of 1775' written by James Otis, an American colonial political leader, the book is 100 years old and i bought it for $5. Thought it might be a great thing for inspiration for futire design projects, i really like the colour and texture of the front cover.

Well, it is my last day here in Boston, it's been really enjoyable and my friends have been really kind and generous. The Bostonians are "all set" as they like to say, with the beautiful city they live in.
Tomorrow morning i fly out to visit New York City, i hope my hostel room doesn't make me run the other direction.

Many thanks to Amber and Cindy for helping me have a wonderful stay.

Boston Public Library and Clam Chowder

Last night Cindy came home, and we stayed up till 5am and woke up at 10:30am today. So i guess i didn't have much time to jump around. She got called in to work, so i let Boylston street take wherever. We had clam chowder at 'Legal Seafood' which was really good.

One of my most favourite things to do is to visit a library, just for the fun of it, and just because there is so much in reading. So today i went to the Boston Public Library, America's very first public library( arguably). Joshua Bates, a banker, gave funds to create a 'free for all' oppurtunity for everyone other than the higher classes to gain access to information. It was the 'internet' of it's day and age.

I found some stuff on Josiah Quincy, Boston's mayor in the late 1700s - early 1800s. After spending some time with the Bostonian saints i was humbled by the blessings that the Lord would pour out upon them. I remembered how i felt last Sunday as i read what Josiah Quincy had written in his quest for building the city he presided over before the time of the restoration:

"I have always encouraged myself to believe that all men are at times, if not always subject to invisible influences, suggesting thoughts and communicating impulses which give direction to the whole course of their lives. True or false, this belief is consaltory and useful." (Dec. 1794)

Some pics:

I'm leavin' on a jetplane...i think this is the manly pittwater area


Boston Temple


Cambridge Chapel, cnr Brattle st. near Harvard


Rumoured to be Old mother Goose's grave...


BPL's reading room in the McKim building


This was great, some guy falling asleep in a chair on a downtown street with 'BOSTON' emblazoned on his shirt. I should've taken a closer shot!


Capricciosa at Pizzeria Regina at the North End and some strange girl.

Sunday Sue, an Evening with Judge Griffiths and Hero's Kerby

I ran into Crismon at church today. Funny thing was, when i signed the roll i noticed no other name but hers as i quickly turned the pages. I read 'Crismon', remembered where i knew it from, and thought "as if". Why not? I didn't know where she was from, but low and behold there was a familiar face in front of me, giving a synopsis of the book of Amos.

A very fine Sunday in Boston and i feel refreshed by some familiar voice that sounds very much like Hero's. US District Court Judge Griffiths spoke at a fireside tonight and left that same this tune in my heart, that i still feel now.

Kerby is 14 and loves basketball and excels in mathematics. He has the best of the best in a mentor and friend, genorous with a gracious, constant smile. One day the "culmination of all that is good" will find him at Hero's house, with the world at his feet, because he chose to be watched over by one Hero.

Harvard and other stuff

I am at Amber's house, my friend natalie's friend. We met through the 'mormon mafia'and now i am her house while cindy is away. It's great and heaps of fun being aroung a member to do churchie stuff for the weekend esp sunday. We went to harvard today and checked out the Fogg museum, it was awesome- picasso, manet, monet, miro, mondrian, rembrandt...all different artists from different periods and works i have only seen in books. great stuff.
Went around Boston city and did the Freedom Trail and then decided to wander of a bit where i ran into a crowd of people watching some break dancing, it was amazing to see what they can do without helmets even!
Tonight Amber and i went to a party for the people coming up from around the new england area for the BYU football game today, we left early though hehe.
I love the mundance stuff, we went to the supermarket and boy does everything have sugar in it! We saw these humungous peaches and a hand full of orange cheese.
Well, i've decide this city is great. The people talk really loud and i keep having deja vus.

Boston, Massachusetts...and every other American city

Well, at least that's what it felt like today. I made it here! I feel like i have accomplished one great feat in my life, sitting in a cramped space, 'sleeping', eating and chit chating with the person next to me each time i stopped for such a long period of time. I took 4 planes, one after the other over the period of 22 hours today. Tiring, but fun.

I've always wanted to come and visit the states ever since i was a little kid and now that i am here i feel like i am in Australia, only everyone around me speaks with and American accent.

It is 3:30am Boston time and i am wide awake. I should probably go to bed so i'm not zombie tomorrow. Hey, there was this girl on my Philadelphia-Boston flight who i could've sworn was Punky Brewster. She even had a little dog (I don't think Punky had a little dog though).

Cheers to the friends i made today- Helen, Penny, Katie/Punky Brewster and her puppy Toby, the indian guy who almost missed his flight because he was walking too slow on the moving escalator, Kelly from Brisbane and her son Stevie who likes soccer and daughter Olivia who is going to be a "Junior Bridesmaid not a flower girl", Edna from Melbourne and my good friend Laurel Brooks (she was on the same flight as me to San fran, which was very nice!)...and drumroll for the last person, Johnson my taxi driver with the characteristic Haitian accent who reckons taxi drivers just drive and don't need to know directions, what a classic. Then Hero starts singing "...everything's gonna be alright..." with the song he has on the radio.

I should have two 14th Septembers more often!

Graduation Day

The day I met Hero changed my world forever. Back then, to me he was some aquaintance, foreign and awkward, who wore too much grey marle all at once, and bike pants, but only occasionally rode a bike. As good friends who are meant to be friends always find each other on some path in their lives, I crossed paths with one Hero whose warm embrace made me drop everything in my life at that time, work full-time for a couple of years, move to Italy, come home for another couple of years and pick up my life again. Only now with a new perspective.

That life was that of a 20-something year old whose dream it was to reach for the sky and land amoung the stars in some world called the creative industry. Little did I know, I found much more than that.

Today marked something much more than the sleepless nights, stress, disappointments and endless footsteps up the Surry Hills backstreets every Monday morning. It marked something like a Bachelor degree in design majoring in ‘Sarah’.

The most important thing I learnt in my finishing years for this program was not the year Saarinen designed the Tulip chair or if a design idea ‘works’. It was that when Hero and I get up and tell 100 design students and a handful of critical design academics who some American guy from the early 1800s is, they listen, and I’m still alive. I learnt moreso how to have a friend like Hero, in a world like Sarah’s.

"Outstanding Hero!"

This is where i was tonight. A lovely rainy Monday night in Sydney...



...I stumbled across this...



...and this! I have a famous friend.

Jodie

Jodie never liked to put colour in her drawings, ever. She would shake her head and hide underneath the table every time I encouraged her to add a bit of colour. All of the other kids would be diligently colouring away, and here was Jodie colouring with a lead pencil. One day, she had colour on her drawing, she brightly exclaimed to me “ I got new colouring pencils!”. Ah ha! Why didn’t she have colour on her drawings? She did not have anything to colour them with. Despite the fact that she could have borrowed colouring pencils from one of her peers, she was always a little embarrassed and apprehensive about it.

Today after class Jodie and I were chatting, I was commenting on how the extra work she puts in on study will give her so much more the step ahead when she reaches high school, that maybe even to the point of the “best and the brightest!”. She stopped me and said, “No not me! You know who the best and the brightest is?” I waited for her response and she confidently exclaimed, “John Howard!”.

Spring clean

I cleaned my incredibly messy room the other day. One wise friend said that you just have to be ruthless and chuck the ‘junk’ out. I hope I was ruthless enough. Perhaps the extra couple of centimetres one has to move their feet around can attest to that? Maybe. I’m not usually a messy person, I just hoard things. I just can’t stand throwing things away, I tend to think that someday ‘it might come in handy’.

After I returned home from Italy, I put up all these photos of memories I had made during that time, its nice to remember those things, you know? Well, four years later it is still up there and I figured I should probably take some stuff down now. When something has been up for too long you tend not to notice it anymore, like advertising. Nonetheless, the memory of it will always remain. Here is a part of the wall of photos that adorned my room for some time:



The empty spaces are where some photos fell off due to moisture and old, hardened blutack. Or maybe those fallen photos were some symbolic gesture of absence of that individual/s in my life. Let’s not get too deep now.

There were some other things that I stuck up on my wall, like quotations and scripture references that needed to come down too, it just made me feel better to take the scrappy bits of paper off, no matter how encouraging the thoughts written on them were. But I’d like to pay tribute to one of my all-time favourite quotes for the perpetual student, from Elder Jeffery R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve, given at a BYU devotional address (sorry I forget which one):

“With the background of our religious convictions, there is no encouragement that would matter more… than for you to take your academic work seriously and to study hard.”

I had that quotation greet me each day sitting patiently on the back of my door. It would run through my head in anticipation for some finishing moment. Perhaps a moment as finishing as good spring clean.

A note

Here are some people standing around at FHE. Tonight we had a nice lesson on the gathering of Israel. Hero kept jumping up onto the couch, punching the air telling everyone they should go to the temple. I wanted to join him so bad but i felt a little reserved in the quietness of the room. Hero is such an apt name for one so courageous.

Today I got my flight tickets! Hurrah! I am leaving next week how funny does that sound? I really feel i need to get out of here a bit so i can 'put the glass of water down and pick it up again and not get tired'. I hope that glass of water analogy sounds familiar.

Well, my dad has been sleeping in this little office down here, and i am just about to get kicked out of his temporary 'bedroom' so, goodnight all.

“It’s so cool you know.”

Yesterday at school, all the kids had their Tamagochis around their necks on lanyards. They kept on playing with them and not concentrating on their work, so I said to them that the next person who plays with their Tamagochi, everyone loses their Tamagochis and they get them back at the end of class. Little S started to explain to me exactly what Tamagochis are, how they’re virtual pets that sleep, eat and play, and how “there are boy ones and girl ones and you can join them together and they have babies.” Lovely. As I listened to little S explain to me wide-eyed with enthusiasm about this much loved toy, I couldn’t help but smile as she concluded with a hesitation and a very sincere, “It’s so cool you know.”

After class I got to eat too much at my cousin’s house for my nephew’s birthday celebration, then work it all off jumping on the trampoline with all the other kids (after all I am a big kid). At one point I had a bunch of 3 and 5 year-olds doing a pile up on me, I could’ve sworn I heard some little voice cry out “PILE UP!” after I had gone down.

The next hoo-ha for the day was what’s called a ‘Soireé’ for the third quarter Relief Society enrichment program. We had a pretty good turn out, having about 25 attend when we expected only 10 or so. Post-Script: don’t buy skirts with snap buttons.

Today is Father’s day and I heard a lot about bacon and eggs. We have Fast Sunday next week so all the dads could have a nice breakfast this morning, very nice. My dad seemed to have enjoyed his day. We got him a book he wanted. I regret not being able to make a trip to the cemetery to visit my grandfather’s grave, he and my grandmother been pretty present in my mind lately although I have never met them.

So today was my last day (for the time being) serving in Relief Society, I had to go to RS class for 2mins then leave, as I left I turned to look back and 8 month old Phebe was standing in the doorway watching me walk down the hallway. I thought how interesting that was. I don’t know why. My new calling is Young Women’s President, which should be interesting since I have never in my life participated in Young Womens. There is always something that heightens my sense of awareness when it comes to kids though, and i get Hero’s elbow jabbing into my side to tell me that of course there is something! ... Did I not listen? "It's so cool, you know."

(Note for M and A: passed on big fat love to the fam for y’all).

7 Socks

Holding seven socks in one hand while picking off pegs is much easier than doing it one at a time. I blink my eyes and all of a sudden Spring is here and i'm wearing boardshorts. I love that smell in the air, that Springtime pollen, flowery sorta smell. It says to me "Sarah, i've got more to come". Something like, sun on my back, a "a table for 20", touch football on the beach at 12am, jumping on a trampoline with 3 and 5 year olds in my cousin's backyard, sandals and festivals of all sorts in Sydney...

Well it's nice to know that things like this are around, i think i am not grateful enough at times.

For some reason, some wiki got me all wiki and i ended up reading some stuff on Al Capone, the notorious Italian-American gangster. His father Gabriele was a barber from a town called Castellamare di Stabia, which is not far from a city i where I lived in Southern Italy. I thought "Hmm, there is a possiblity he could've been telling the truth" as I remembered how good ole nostaccio man with the walnut hat who we'd always talk to, once told me he was Al Capone's cousin. I could have said at that point "So am I". Everyone is related to everytone in the bel paese. I remember each time we talked to him the young boys on their motorinos would whistle the tune to "The Godfather".

Perhaps one day we might know, but for now i am happy with picking seven socks off at once, and visiting over at Hero's house.