April General Conference

In the midst of watching conference sessions, I'm going to recall the past April conferences of my life. (Last fall I made a post of the October conferences I have experienced.) Some of these years are lifted from my Easter memories.

2012. Saturday was a really warm March day. I remember looking outside and seeing people running and wondering why they weren't watching conference, since most young people in Provo go to BYU. I was eating Easter Dots and grapes to stay awake. For the afternoon session, my roommate Cameron Eaton and his girlfriend came and watched; she had made cookies but they didn't offer any to me (which was fine by me because I didn't want to share my stuff, and the cookies weren't in season anyway). During the last song, she said, "That's David Archuleta!" And indeed it was. There were lots of Facebook statuses about him. I changed into a blue shirt and put on my Snoopy Easter tie and walked over early to the church on 900 East. There was a backyard adjoining the church parking lot; a guy with no shirt asked me if the Priesthood Session was being broadcast at the building. I was early, but the building was later filled to capacity and I wasn't alone on my bench for long. During the session, I doodled in the empty spaces in the calendar in the back of my planner to stay awake.

Sunday was April Fool's Day, so there were plenty of fake engagements and baby announcements on Facebook. One person even said something about a crime at Yellowstone, but that was fake too. I was amused by Google's jokes, like all the YouTube videos on DVD and the Google Maps video game theme. That night I wrote a blog post.

2011. My roommate Derek slept through all of the first session. And then he slept through all of the second session. I walked up to the Marriott Center for the Priesthood session, and when I walked home, I stopped in at South End Market to buy some grapes. The cashier told me she liked my Snoopy tie. I think I looked at the display of Easter candy, but I didn't get any.

On Sunday it had suddenly become snowy. I was quite amused by the guy at the end turning around and smiling; Lynsey Mitchell made a status about it.
It appears that I actually wrote in my journal that night: "Today was the second day of conference. Derek (Elder Warren) slept in for all of the first session. At least he didn't sleep through both of them like he did yesterday. One of the main themes of conference was dating and marriage. This week I went with Lori McKee to the play Persuasion. I'm glad that happened before conference.

"I didn't leave the apartment at all today. When Tristram came home about 7:00, the door was still locked. I had fun looking at  the Corpus of LDS General Conference Talks, and playing Easter songs on my keyboard.

"I am nervous for tomorrow because I have to take a test and finish a CHum 250 project for Tuesday, and I don't know if I'll be able to figure out the project. I will be glad when the semester is over." 

2010.  In the morning on Saturday I saw my Easter basket that had my new shirts and blue plaid shorts in it. I was kind of disappointed that those were my only gifts, since I had got those the day before--there were no surprises. I think we did some grocery shopping and I got a haircut in the morning before the first session. And I think after the first session we had our Easter festivities. Allie didn't want to stay with us because of general conference; Matt said that she had been telling them all about it. We watched Here Comes Peter Cottontail before the second session, and I think that morning our home teacher Christian Ulmer brought us donuts. I think my dad and I went to the Eagleridge building for the Priesthood session.

On Sunday, my parents were going out of town since it was my mom's spring break. My mom wanted me to eat a quarter of the last donut, a glazed one. I didn't want to, since it didn't have any Easter frosting or sprinkles, but she insisted. I told her that I would have to do ten pushups for it. She told me I was a slave driver (against myself) and said that she wouldn't have made me eat it if she knew I would have to do pushups for it. I told her it was OK. They left, and I watched the afternoon session of conference. Elder Nelson spoke and showed pictures of his grandkids. I thought about how my parents wouldn't see those pictures, since they were listening on the car radio. Then I was texting my cousin Jesse about how I would be coming to their house. It took me a long time to get ready to go back to Provo, and before I left I played "That Easter Morn" on the piano. In the car I was listening to Messiah as performed by the MoTab. I think Jesse texted me while I was driving, asking when I'd be there. I got to the Thompsons' house and they had a banner across their door that said "Welcome Home Elder Mark" that they had taken when I came home. I had been home for four months at this point, and I had actually seen the banner on the floor in their house on a previous visit in December. When I told them this they seemed disappointed. When I went inside I was standing, waiting for them to invite me to sit down (as I had become accustomed to doing on my mission), but I could tell they weren't going to invite me, so I sat down anyway. They told me that Joey had objected to putting the banner across the door because it would make them look like white trash. He didn't mind it being in the window, but he didn't like it across the door. I said that I didn't know how having it across the door was worse than having it in the window, and Sue agreed with me. Sue talked about watching conference, and mentioned the speaker who showed pictures of his family. I said, "Wasn't that Elder Nelson?" They were watching a sports game of some sort. After some small talk, Jesse asked me if I wanted to play Nintendo. I told him that I preferred not to play video games or watch TV on Sunday. I didn't think about the fact that they were watching TV. I didn't mean for them to turn off the TV, but they started to. Sue told me she agreed with me. But Peter insisted on keeping the TV on. I remember Jesse eating his Easter candy and I was a little sad that I had eaten all of mine. Jesse and Peter talked about how they wanted to get a pet penguin, and I started talking about how puffins are better than penguins because they can swim and fly. Sue said, "Penguins can fly." Peter and Jesse said, "No they can't!" and Sue realized her folly. They talked about how they wanted to buy an island for exotic pets, and how our uncle Paul could probably finance such a purchase. We talked about an individual we don't care for. We talked about the mysterious, creepy phone calls my aunt Debbie had received many years previously. Sue said that Wayne had put someone up to it, but she wouldn't say who the caller was because it was someone Peter and Jesse liked. After some coaxing, Sue told them who the caller was, and they assured her they didn't like that person. Throughout all our conversations Joey was in and out of the room. He would say the initial of a swear word, forbearing saying the word itself. He said he hated his dad and anyone associated with him. Sue told him he couldn't hate his dad. After he had left, Jesse was talking about how people believed Obama was a Muslim and that Joey probably believed that too. Sue said that Jesse and Peter believed dumb things too, "like evolution." Jesse retorted about evolution being fact-based. I could have spoken up with my views on evolution, but I figured it wouldn't have done much good, and I didn't want to open a can of worms. Eventually I left. I parked in my parking lot by the storage sheds. Lots of people had Facebook links to the Church's YouTube clip adapted from Elder Holland's talk the previous year. I made a status that said "Handel's Messiah is awesome," but no one commented on it.

2009. We went to our church building to watch. I think after the second session we went to the Days', which was where the elders in the Hayden 3rd Ward lived, and there was a press conference with the newly called Elder Andersen. Then I think it was Elder Stafford and Elder Johnson who drove us back to the church for the Priesthood Session. I was reading funny Bible verses, and I was reading some from Proverbs 23 about how dumb alcohol is. I was reading it, and Elder Johnson was talking to Elder Stafford, and then Elder Stafford told him that he wasn't listening to him because he was listening to me. Before the session started, they showed clips of the Tabernacle Choir, and Elder Stafford made some crude comment about how women shouldn't be at the meeting.

On Sunday we went to the church building again. Elder Nixon had gotten a ride from a member in their area down to the church building. That member had brought food and shared it with us. Then Elder Nixon, in his typical overbearing fashion, insisted that he go help us blitz our area. I wasn't too keen on the idea, since it came out of the blue and because it was a burden on the member, but Elder Kitchen also went along with it. Elder Kitchen went with Elder Duncan and I went with Elder Nixon. We went to see a potential investigator and ended up talking with an old man in the yard. The potential wasn't interested. Then I think we went and saw a member to ask about her neighbors. Elder Nixon seemed annoyed that we weren't tracting, but I told him that tracting was one of the least effective things to do, so it only made sense that we do something more productive, especially since Elder Kitchen and Elder Duncan were tracting. Then we went back to the church for the last session. That evening we visited a less-active woman who rarely went to church, and she told us that that day she had actually gone to church with her son, only to discover that there was no church (because of conference; she must have arrived before conference started). Here is my journal entry for the day: "So I don't know how I didn't write yesterday. In between conference sessions Elder Nixon insisted on blitzing our area. That was all right. Then we saw some people, including Kristine Hart, a less-active. It was good to be back on the bikes after the week-long hiatus from the rain and Elder Kitchen's sickness."

2008. We left our house in the morning. It was a rule for a missionary to guide another missionary when he was backing up, but since we were just in our driveway (and we were backing up so that we could drive forwards out of the driveway), we didn't think it necessary. Elder Condie backed into a cement wall and scraped the back bumper. I worried I would get in trouble since it was my job to back him up, but he diabolically never told anyone. On one of the days, Sister Shinn offered us some of her jelly beans; we declined. Elder Condie later complained that she coughed the whole time, but I had not noticed. They sustained President Monson as the new prophet. There was a solemn assembly, and they had everyone stand up according to the organization they belonged to. I remember feeling a little weird standing up as part of an elders quorum, since missionaries function differently from most elders. After the first session Elder Condie wanted to watch the World Report; I was impressed by the counsel to share the gospel on the internet. During the Priesthood Session, President Monson wiggled his ears in a talk, and our zone leader, Elder Gammon, thought that was ridiculous. Then we had dinner with a couple who had a baby and a little girl. It was fun, and they told us that we should come to their house some P-day to play board games. But it was late, and they needed to get their kids to bed. This is my journal entry for the day: "I thought I'd add some color by adding some blue ink to this journal.

"Nevó esta mañana antés de la Conferencia. They had a solemn assembly where we all stood to sustain the prophet and apostles. It's been a good conference.

"It snowed today but it all melted. That was disappointing. Elder Condie backed into a cement wall and scraped a bit of paint off."

The next day (I think) I filmed our drive to the stake center and narrated about the day's happenings. We ate lunch with the sisters in the church building. While we were eating, our investigator Duane called us. I answered the phone and stepped out into a little courtyard-like area off from where we were eating. Duane and Vickie had driven to our church building, but no one was there. We had told them about conference, but we apparently hadn't explained it well enough. While I was on the phone, Elder Condie yelled at me to come in from the snow. Before the afternoon session, they were playing footage of The Restoration and playing "Joseph Smith's First Prayer." Elder Condie was annoyed because he thought the song and the clip were overplayed. Sister Shaw told him they played it because the event was so important. The Stumms from the Greenbluff Ward showed up with our investigators Heather and Matt. Here is my journal entry for the day: "We sat around the sisters again today at conference. Then we ate lunch at the church building. Heather and Matt showed up for the second session. I really liked the sessions, especially when Elder Bednar said missionaries are full-time teachers and members are full-time finders.

"We came home early because we were out of gas. The Welshes made us brownies." (Ah, the dark days of my mission.) 

2007. We left early Saturday morning on our drive to Tennessee. My parents hoped we would be able to get conference on the radio, but we couldn't. My parents wanted to listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later that evening I watched Bewitched on my portable DVD player. I watched the fourth-season episodes with the canine aliens and the Japanese client who was worried about losing face. We stopped at a hotel that night.

The next day my mom looked for conference again. We heard some religious choir on a station, so my mom stopped there. But then she changed the station when a narrator said, "Friends in Christ." I wondered why that was so bad--certainly not LDS parlance, but not something bad. So we listened to weird CDs. We listened to this one called Songs for a Mormon Child; I wondered why my mom liked it so much (even she commented about the girl who tried too hard), especially since there were no kids in the car. Then we listened to all five discs of the Children's Songbook CDs, which I thought were awful. (I actually grew to like them on my mission, but now I think they're terrible again.) Then we stopped at my cousin Tammy's in Iowa. I think we had missed all of conference. They told us about how they had set up a blanket fort tabernacle for the kids to watch conference in. When they began putting the kids to bed, I remember Tammy telling her oldest son, Adam, that two-year-old Ben, when saying prayers, had repeated "Uncle Ricky" as "Uncle Ribby." That night we talked with Tammy. We talked about the synesthesia blog post I had made before leaving. She talked about how she wanted to line me up with a girl from her ward who wanted to be an editor, "this girl Candice." I told Tammy I had actually met her. She said, surprised, "Candice Bellows?" I told her that I had met her at Y-Weekend the previous fall. She told me how she had called her mom, distraught, that she was at a play at BYU that seemed to laugh about a girl being pregnant and not married. I said I was a little surprised at some of the content in the play.

2006. I remember that my two-year-old niece Allie was playing with my mom's friend's niece Austin (what a weird name for a girl!), who was a little older. We were trying to concentrate on conference, but the girls were playing. Allie was getting annoyed with Austin, and Austin kept saying, "She's yelling at me!"

2005. I remember watching Allie during conference, and therefore I didn't get to focus much. I remember her pulling a toy paint set out of her mom's dresser. During the Priesthood Session, President Hinckley spoke about gambling. I wanted to use that as ammunition that my family shouldn't go to Vegas. We told my mom about what he said, and she said that she wouldn't gamble five dollars after all on our trip.

2004. I was with my mom and Nan and Allie out doing errands. I think we stopped at A&W for lunch; we had previously bought Starburst jellybeans from a store. We stopped at my mom's friend Jackie's. I wanted to listen to conference in the car, since I had a diabolical seminary teacher who made us do massive conference reports; my mom told Jackie's son Jake about how I had to do a report. When we got home, I put the jellybeans in the various plastic eggs all over the house. During the Priesthood session, they had an Aaronic Priesthood choir, and we were annoyed with the closeup they did on the one black kid, as if they were trying to prove that we're not racist. I didn't like the choir because of all the young boy voices. David said he liked boys choirs, but that he didn't like the song "True to the Faith," which they sang. He was astounded by the figures President Hinckley described about the revenue of the porn industry.

2002. We were at the Fillmore sand dunes, even though Easter was over. We had brought our trailer, but we couldn't use the water without a battery. We would have tried to listen to conference on the radio. On Sunday we were at my grandparents' house; my dad and grandpa slept for much of it. My aunt Michelle talked for a lot of it, even during the prayers. I remember my mom and Michelle being amused by one of the apostles singing "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof. 

2001. On Saturday my mom and I were out in West Jordan and were at a grocery store. They had those permanent small mylar balloons, and one bunny balloon was identical to the one my cousins had got me a week or so earlier when I had seizures. Then we stopped at my cousins' house. Sue wasn't there, but Wayne was, and I was surprised he was out gardening, since most Mormon adults were watching conference.

The next day we were watching conference and I said to my mom, "There's a spider on you!" My dad actually seemed more surprised, maybe because he was sleeping. Then I told them, "April Fool's!"

2000. I remember using the Health Rider during one of the Saturday sessions. My brother told me it wasn't good to do a cardio workout during conference, but my mom reproved him and told him it was impressive that I was watching Saturday sessions. I think it was that day I put plastic Easter eggs on pieces of yarn and draped them around the rearview mirrors of all three of our cars.

The next day my brother's girlfriend Andrea was at our house. My brother was amused that she and my mom were crocheting or something and I was corking a rug. We went to my grandparents' house. My mom and brother were talking about how some of the Apostles had radio voices; I remember Sue talking about how her boys also had low voices. I remember saying, "I thought these were semi-annual conferences, not annual." Sue said, "They are." I said, "But they just said, 'This is the 170th--" Sue cut me off: "Yeah, 170th Semi-Annual General Conference," but my grandparents and I told her that it had in fact said "Annual" and not "Semi-Annual." (Now I know that the April conference is called annual and the October conference is semi-annual.) I think my mom drove David back to Provo from there and I went home with my dad.

1999. My cousin April was with us that morning for our Easter festivities. My mom had bought her a travel reading lamp. I got a VHS of It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown. I went down and watched it. As the Easter morning scene started, April said that that was one of her favorite Beethoven pieces. She laughed when Woodstock laid on the egg he got. My brother said something about the line "Never trust a man with a blanket." I remember saying, "I didn't know that girl [Marcie] was dumb," and he told me she was actually smart. Then we drove down to Fillmore; we probably listened to conference in the car. I was wearing a pink Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, but I covered up the picture with a green sweater vest. I cared about the pink (for Easter), not the picture. While everyone must have been watching conference, I went in one of the side rooms and saw that Here Comes Peter Cottontail was on the Fox Family Channel. I remember getting annoyed with all the commercial breaks and thinking that they couldn't keep doing that, because they couldn't take much out. (Which was false; they actually could take a lot out.) The promos for the special had the scene where Peter skates the shape of a heart into the ice and makes it light up. That night I was playing the Game Boy and my grandparents' friends came over and my grandma said to her friend, "They sure love those games, don't they."

The next day uncle (or maybe my grandma) had thrown jelly beans all over the living room for my small cousins. They told me there were some hidden especially for me. They gave me a hint--it had to do with a piano. I kept looking around the piano. There was a shoe lying haphazardly on the floor near the piano, and there was a jelly bean behind it. I asked if it was the one behind the shoe, and my grandma said, "I'm not telling." Eventually I looked up and looked at the painting on the wall of a woman playing a piano. The jelly beans were stuck in the decorative holes on the frame. I pulled them out and ate them. My Christensen relatives came over. I remember that the kids had these weird candies that looked like colored Rice Krispies that I had received the previous year in my third grade class. Rachae and I were in the kitchen watching Here Comes Peter Cottontail on TV. At one point the adults asked us to turn it down. Later Michelle came in and said, "You must be deaf," and turned the TV down. Rachae said to me, "I can't hear it," and I couldn't hear it either. Then we went to my other grandparents' house. I remember talking with Jesse about a Peeps commercial. He liked it, but I wasn't sure what to make of it.

1998. I suspect this was the year Tammy had come to our house for conference. On Saturday night I went to Deseret Book with my mom. During one of the sessions, one of the people giving the prayers had a thick accent; Tammy admitted that she had opened her eyes to see who it was.

1996. My original Easter post has us going to church on Easter, but I just looked up the date of Easter in 1996, and I see that it was on conference weekend, therefore the original is in error. Having reconsidered what actually happened at Easter, I can remember being at the sand dunes and listening to conference on our little yellow radio.