Graveyards, nature fights, and other Christmas miracles

Greetings from New Jersey! This entry comes to you from the Stones' house, where we are spending the Christmas holiday. Here are some snapshots of our vacation so far...


The Stone "children" can't contain themselves as we get ready to run down the stairs on Christmas morning. (It's posed...we promise...seriously...)


Mom and Dad look pretty well rested, now that no one's presents require assembly.

The Christmas carnage. Jemima is keeping watch alertly.

The day after Christmas we took a trip to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to visit the birthplace and grave of H.D. Alison is writing her master's thesis on H.D., so this counts as "research."

It's a tradition to leave seashells on her grave stone, but we forgot them (and didn't want to drive back to New Jersey for them!).

Brandon caught this cool shot of a hawk at the cemetery.

In Bethlehem, we visited the Central Moravian Church and saw their putz. The putz (pronounced like the word "puts") is a Moravian Christmas tradition --they make a big model of all the parts of the Christmas story using real moss and rocks, and they tell the Christmas story with lights shining on each of the parts. (Another Moravian tradition: many-pointed Christmas stars). Most of the figures are wooden carvings from Germany, but as we looked up close, we saw that the kids from the church had put in a few of their own decorations--there was a little plastic lion among the sheep, for one thing!

The angels from the putz--they were pretty cute!

We gave Eric a shirt for Christmas that matches one Brandon already had. The shirt has a picture of a frog fighting a turtle and has this text: "NATURE FIGHT! Turtle vs. Frog!, Caiman vs. Croc!, Rock vs. Wood!, Worm vs. Worm! Time: Right Now, Where: Outside, Directions: Go Outside". Everybody got a pretty big kick out of it; here are Brandon and Eric acting out the nature fight.

Last night, Brandon, Neil, and Alison took a trip down to New Brunswick to visit the historic Rutgers University Grease Trucks. Brandon and Neil had Fat Darrells, a sandwich that includes french fries, chicken strips, mozzarella sticks, and marinara sauce. The sandwich was voted #1 sandwich in America. Among our testing group, reviews were mixed, but we enjoyed sampling New Jersey culture at its "finest."

Thanksgiving 2008

We spent Thanksgiving with the Robergs at their Cedar City house. Here's a picture of the group.
Carl took us on a hike in Zion. It was beautiful but a little longer than we had expected (about 6 miles total).
Carl and Kendall constructed a potato gun. After lots of engineering and several false starts, they got some pretty good shots fired off.

We also got to see Aunt Candy, who lives in Cedar. One of her chihuahuas had puppies, and we got to hold them. Brandon helped give them their first shots. Here is Alison holding one of the puppies--we can't wait until we live somewhere where we can have a pet!

Here is a lovely outtake from the family picture taking session.
For more pictures from the vacation, check out Kendall's website.

Safe Statues

It's time again for one of our favorite yearly rituals on BYU campus: the wrapping of the statues. This Saturday is the big BYU-Utah rivalry game (a.k.a. the Holy War). To prevent possible vandalism, the BYU grounds crew wraps all of the statues on campus in plastic wrap for the week leading up to the game. Brandon took pictures of some of the "makeovers" around campus:
Karl G. Maeser in front of his namesake building.

Massasoit, by the library. He's a little closer to being fully clothed now.

The family, with a joke added by a student (click to enlarge).

Grandpa Brigham.

Go Cougars!

Historic days

Tuesday, November 4th was a very important day for our family: Brandon turned 27 and Barack Obama was elected President. When Brandon got home from school, he found the apartment decorated with some birthday and election-related greetings from some famous faces...

Below are some of the celebrity well-wishers. Marvel at Alison's amazing literary skill in writing the captions. (Sorry the photo is sideways...we can't figure out how to rotate it on the blog!)


For Brandon's birthday celebration, we watched the election results come in. We were pretty sure who would win...(Brandon's truck displays our prediction with homemade signs which we colored by hand because we don't have a color printer. Now that's dedication!) (Not pictured: Alison's car with a similar sign, two windows of our apartment with signs, Alison's backpack with Obama sticker [not homemade; given out by BYU Democrats on campus])In other news, Dad (Scott) had a crazy adventure last week. He was sitting at his desk at work when a car suddenly drove through the wall right behind him. The car slightly bumped his chair, but he escaped injury. Thank goodness!
At almost the exact same time this was happening in New Jersey, I (Alison) was taking advantage of the early voting opportunity at the county building in downtown Provo. Embarrassingly, I somehow drove my car into an "authorized vehicles only" section of the parking garage, went to vote, and then realized when I got back that the car was behind a chainlink fence with a locked gate. Apparently you can get into the restricted section but not out of it??? Luckily, within half an hour, an authorized person went in so I was able to slip through the gate behind him and retrieve my car. This was the worst part: when my car was stuck, I went looking for an employee to unlock the gate. I was wearing my "I Voted" sticker, but I felt like an idiot for managing to vote but not to park my car correctly, so I took off the sticker. I stuck it to the book I was carrying with me and wasn't able to get it off later in one piece. So I got to wear my "I Voted" sticker for a total of about 10 minutes. Bummer; I had been excited to wear it around town all day!

A Great Day for Football

The Robergs came up to Provo again this week. We took a little walk around campus and saw some lovely fall colors.
Then we all went to the football game. We are usually happy watching the games on the couch at home, but we had a really good time at the stadium today!


Carl took this great picture of a baby BYU fan and his dad.
By chance, we ran into Fahu Tahi at the game. He and Brandon were in the same mission in Florida from 2001-2003. After that, Tahi played running back for the Cougars from 2003-2005. He now plays for the Minnesota Vikings--they have a bye this week so he came up to Provo to see the game.
Who's this guy?Another cool thing about the game is that one of Alison's English 150 students is on the team. He had quite a bit of playing time and did really well. We predict that he'll have a great career at BYU, and that Alison will try to claim some credit for his success...

Tagged!

This is the first time we have been tagged.  Thanks, Meredith!  (OK, technically just Alison was tagged but Brandon is so interesting, he had to join in.)  Read on for some amazing facts...

Four Jobs I Have Had

(Alison)

1. Page at the Sioux City Public Library

2. Bookseller at Waldenbooks

3. Administrative assistant for an environmental engineer

4. English 150 instructor at BYU

(Brandon)

1. LA City Lifeguard

2. Cashier at OSH

3. Monkey catcher at research lab

4. Evolutionary psychology instructor at BYU

Four Movies I Have Watched More Than Once:

(Alison)

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

2. Sliding Doors

3. Donnie Darko

4. No Country for Old Men

(Brandon)

1. A Simple Plan

2. Playing God

3. Amadeus

4. Flight of the Navigator

Four Places I Have Lived

(Alison)

1. Tacoma, Washington

2. Sioux City, Iowa

3. Bridgewater, New Jersey

4. Provo, Utah

(Brandon)

1. La Crescenta, California

2. Saint Augustine, Florida

3. Lake Butler, Florida

4. Provo, Utah

TV Shows I Watch

(Alison)

1. America's Next Top Model

2. The Soup

3. Jon & Kate Plus 8

4. Seinfeld 

(Brandon)

1. The Simpsons

2. 60 Minutes

3. South Park

4. The O'Reilly Factor

Four Places I Have Been

(Alison)

1. Scotland

2. England

3. Tijuana

4. Zion

(Brandon)

1. Almost to the top of Mt. Whitney

2. Tijuana

3. Hawaii

4. Big Sur

Four Celebrities You Have Met

(Alison)

1. Mohammed Ali

2. Denis Leary

3. Bart Oates

4. Brian Doyle (not really a celebrity, but he is awesome!)

(Brandon)

1. Casey Kasem

2. Brenda Villa (on the silver-medal winning US Women's Water Polo team)

3. Michael Phelps (before he was famous)

4. Tommy Lasorda

Four of My Favorite Foods

(Alison)

1. Cheese, cheese, and anything with cheese

2. Penne vodka

3. Fresh peaches

4. Curry of many varieties

(Brandon)

1. Chicken aloo

2. Angelhair pasta with alfredo sauce and chicken

3. Taco salad

4. Avocado cheeseburger (no bacon)

Four Places I Would Like to Visit

(Alison)

1. Paris

2. Israel

3. Japan

4. Prague

(Brandon)

1. Rome

2. The Galapagos Islands

3. Kenya

4. Tibet

Four Things I Am Looking Forward to in the Coming Year

(Alison)

1. (Starting and) Finishing my thesis

2. Christmas in New Jersey

3. Moving somewhere new

4. Trying out for Jeopardy (again)

(Brandon)

1. Being accepted to a PhD program

2. Publishing my thesis

3. Earning my MS degree

4. Thanksgiving in Cedar City

Four Friends I Am Tagging 

Uh...who even reads our blog?

1. Eric S. (BTW, he has a new blog--link on the list to the right)

2. Meghan M. 

3. Jacque B.

4. Rebecca F.

Peach Pie

I made a pie on Sunday. It was a peach pie. We had about 5 pounds of peaches left out of the original 25 pounds we bought a couple of weeks ago, and they were nearing the point of no return, ripeness-wise. So I decided to attempt The Big One: a deep dish, two-crust peach pie, all from scratch.


Yummmmmmm, peaches. Mixed with lots of sugar.
She has a knife! (For cutting decorative and functional vents in the top, of course!)
The finished product! Not beautiful, but it tasted dang good.
My parents were visiting for the weekend! They went to the BYU Homecoming game against New Mexico and spent the rest of the time hanging out with us. We're glad we got to see them, even if just for a couple of days!

Objective Illusion

On a hike, Alison and I came upon this rock that we both perceived as a man’s face.

However, it soon became clear that while we both saw a face, we each saw a different face.

Alison's face:

Brandon's face:

This reminded me of the famous picture of the old or young woman. You can manipulate what face people will see (old or young) by having people read a biased description of what they should see (a description of a young woman or a description of an old woman).

It is a safe statement to say that most of us think that reality is objective in that it is something we perceive with one of our senses, the eye for example. However, an individual’s perception of the world is not simply an objective truth experienced through the senses; rather, humans and other animals use a combination of (1) sensory information, (2) psychological mechanisms, and (3) past sensory information to construct a conscience view of a world that can then be called reality. These constructed perceptions of the world can be different for different individuals and all can be considered “reality.”

Perhaps you are wondering what a psychological mechanism is. To understand this we must turn to evolutionary psychology. You have probably had an experience in which your leg brushes up against something (perhaps a blade of grass or a stray thread on a couch) and you instantly pull your leg away and simultaneously swat at the area to kill the “perceived insect”. In this example the (1) sensory information is the blade of grass, (2) the psychological mechanism is thinking it must be an insect (perhaps a spider) and (3) based on past experience, perhaps the grass felt more like an insect crawling on you than a blade of grass. The difference between 2 and 3 is that 2 requires no prior experience. Rather the experience of your ancestors (who by your existence) proved that when it comes to feeling insects on your leg, it is more adaptive to be wrong in your perception (to slap your leg to kill a perceived spider that happens to be a blade of grass) than to be right and take no action (thinking the itchy sensation is grass when it is really a black widow).

Hopefully you are not more confused about psychological mechanisms. It would be useful to know that they are analogous to physical reflexes, have a physiological counterpart and can be considered instinctual. As to the development of psychological mechanisms it is important to know that neurons that fire together wire together. It would also be useful to have a knowledge of natural selection and selection pressures. Also, if you are interested in the psychological mechanism of facial recognition (since that’s what happened when we looked at the rock), this mechanism’s physiological counterpart is in the fusiform face area (FFA) and you may be interested to read about prosopagnosia.

In other news...Alison made peach cobbler! It was delicious if she does say so herself. (She also says: Many thanks to Cindy for sharing part of your peach purchase!)