Vol 2 Issue 7

Pic of the week 

Went camping with some friends this weekend.  We were imitating the trees just down the hill.  What you can't see here?  The incredible view: 

The older I get, the more I appreciate getting away into nature for a while.  I need to make an effort to do that more.

What's going on?

Here's what's going on.  If you ever find yourself in the market for a new job, try to get one on the campus of Dreamworks Animation.  They feed you free lunch.  Every.  Day.  I was there for a Story Pirates event this week.  We do a thing called "Story Love" where we give personalized, handwritten feedback to every story we receive.  We expect to get tens of thousands of stories this year, so we recruit volunteers to help us with that, and NBC/Universal and Dreamworks brought us in as part of a big volunteer thing they've been doing over the past couple of weeks.  It's a lot of fun and people really enjoy seeing what these kids write.  Anyway, we were on the Dreamworks campus for a few hours and they fed us lunch in their giant employee cafeteria where you just go in and get whatever food you want and however much food you want and it's all free.  It's crazy.  Our contact there told us there's a thing called the "Dreamworks 15" which is completely understandable to me.

I also helped with similar events at the NBC studios.  We got free lunch there too, though that's not typical.  Lots of free lunch this week.

And - fun fact - I found out this week that I've done over 120 Story Pirate shows since I started 6 years ago.  Crazy!

I also made an effort to be extra social this week.  It's pretty easy for me to stay in my apartment at the end of the day and curl up to a movie or a book or a donut, and I wanted to not do that this week, so I went to 2 different birthday parties, dinner with a friend, a play, and a movie night at another friend's.  One of the birthday parties was full of strangers - which is a bit of a waking nightmare for me.  I hate going into a room full of people I don't know - especially when they all already know each other.  Luckily it wasn't too bad, but I think I've done my quota of stranger parties for the year.

What I'm listening to

There's a podcast called "Leading Saints" that is targeted toward local church leaders and how to be a more effective leader.  I listened to an episode this week called "Maintaining Relationships When Loved Ones Leave the Church" that I thought was pretty insightful.

Science Vs. podcast. Very entertaining, fact-based, and super interesting!  I particularly liked the episodes on vaccines, dieting, and abortions.

What I'm puzzling

As far as puzzles go, this one is actually pretty low-quality - the pieces are very thin, and they don't really snap together so much as slide together, but it's a fun picture and I'm enjoying it nonetheless.