Sunstone not Treadstone

This past weekend I went to a Sunstone symposium in Seattle with Ellie, Ginger and Seth. Last March Ellie and I went to the symposium in San Francisco and that was my first one. The Seattle one was much smaller and was held at some rowing club a few miles outside of downtown Seattle and the heater was not working well because we were frigid the entire day. I am normally one that likes things on the cool side, but my feet and legs from the knees down were frozen until well into the afternoon and by afternoon I was beginning to get sick from our lunch. I ended up hoarking in a Chevron bathroom in Tacoma on the way back to Ellie’s parents’ house that evening.

Needless to say, the cold and the beef brisket declaring war on my stomach made it hard to concentrate at times. Also making it hard to concentrate was the presentation on the settlement of Arizona by early Mormon pioneers. Not interesting.

It definitely wasn’t all bad though. Margaret Young, mentioned in this post and this post, did a presentation on Mormon Literature. Margaret teaches creative writing at BYU and is the current president of the Association for Mormon Letters. She is a fantastic story teller and shared a couple of amazing stories from her own life. She also talked about Mormon literature and how there’s a lot of not so great stuff out there and how it’s currently very Utah-centric and how she’d like to encourage more literature from outside of the Mormon belt. We are a world wide church with a vast and diverse membership, but you’d never know it by what you see at Deseret Book (including art work, not just literature). Anyway, I obviously always love hearing from her.

Back to lunch though. I was sad that it made me sick because it was delicious. The four of us wandered up the street to this BBQ place called RoRo’s. I got a beef brisket sandwich and sweet potato fries and was way happy. Also contributing to my happiness was the fact that RoRo’s was not an icebox. Maybe that’s why the food tasted so good to me.

We had a server there who was hard to figure out. She had very manly facial features, but heavy dark red lipstick. Her eyebrows and lips, as Ginger so accurately described them, were overwhelming. She had eyebrows thicker than mine (not that I have big unruly bushes for eyebrows, but if I didn’t trim and pluck, they’d definitely be unsightly). This lady though, looked like she colored her eyebrows or filled them in with a pen to make them very thick and black. She also wasn’t wearing a bra and I think she was very cold standing at the cash register by the door. They kind of assaulted us when we walked in. It was the first thing everyone noticed, except for Ginger, who couldn’t get past her overwhelming lips and eyebrows.

Also fun was the ferry ride to Seattle early in the morning where I made Ginger take the picture below of a nice old man sleeping on a bench. Precious.

PS, did anyone notice that there are fish to feed at the bottom of my blog? Click to feed.

I posted this and then noticed that two of the presenters at Sunstone posted what they presented at By Common Consent and wanted to include links. Check this and this out.