The Ward Clerk

So today Scott was put in as the ward clerk, which means here I am sitting here writing more blog posts.  I may meet my goal of more blogging after all.  So there's that!

The experience of getting called as ward clerk has been funny to me because
A. I've joked before that my general skill sets could be best utilized at church in this particular calling despite the fact that I will never be called to it, and
B. This whole thing started to remind me of in The Giver when Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory because the calling is slightly mysterious.  I guess the clerk is in charge of the finances and membership and history of the community ward, and it sounds like he's not going to be able to talk about most of it...  And while others are enjoying their Sunday lives, the clerk seems to be weighed down with important things in his office...  And everyone chants your name when you're called in Sacrament Meeting... Suspicious parallels, you guys.  Anyway if I start having dreams about sunburns or sledding or Taylor Swift with brown hair, I might become concerned.

The Allowance

Scott and I are trying out a new little thing in our budget this year called an allowance.  We each get twenty bucks each month to spend on whatever we want.  I know, right?  Doesn't it seem like I just won Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

See kids, if you work hard and graduate from college and get a job, you might get the same allowance you had when you were 12.*  That is the lesson to be learned here.

Ahem, so this leads me into all sorts of exciting google searches about what I might spend the allowance on this month.  OR.  Do I wait and spend $40 next month?  This is not a use-it-or-lose-it thing, ya know.  OR.  Do I wait until the end of the year and then I have $240 to spend?  This is like getting double grandma money!

Scott already spent his allotment on lunch with a friend.  You see this is where we go from Who Wants to be a Millionaire to...the exit scenes of the Bachelor.  "Unexpected" things tend to happen, and then suddenly your dream boyfriend allowance is gone and you're driving away in a limo.  Ok I'm going to stop this analogy right now.

So back to finances.  This morning I went to the farmer's market and guess what?  I got vanilla beans for one cent each.  I am not even kidding.  Do you know how many vanilla beans I could buy with my twenty dollars?  I do, it's 2,000!  Luckily I kept my cool and only got 17.  This 17 cents is most likely part of the grocery budget and not my allowance, but the point is, now I have this totally crazy expectation that I need to utilize this $20 to get something greater than 2,000 vanilla beans.  How is this even going to be possible?  It isn't.

*Let it be known that I never got an allowance, but it seemed like other kids did...No real data is referenced in this post.  Except the vanilla bean calculations.

The New Toy

I finally got my new camera. :)  I pretty much took all my EA exams for this purpose, so this purchase has been about 6 months in the making.

I really wasn't sure how much my pictures would improve with a new camera since so much of photography is the photographer (still me, so...), but I have been pleasantly surprised at the instant improvements!

For example...over on my recipe blog I took this picture back in August...Doesn't this look appetizing?  Ha.

And then last Saturday we had taco soup for lunch so I decided I'd try some replacement photos.

I'm just not sure if this is that much better.  Hardy har har.  Clearly this camera is amazing and I am so happy to have it.  Now I just have to figure out how to use it...which feels like taking on a second job.  So maybe when I'm retired I'll have this figured out.