I blog again because I feel I must, but I can't think of the right angle for any of my stories at present. perhaps this time I begin it will be to my liking.last week I went to San Diego to visit a friend from BYU. it was an interesting experience from the beginning because I chose to take a Greyhound out there. a normal drive from Phoenix is about 6 hours, but with the bus it took 8. and I slept a lot of the way which is always a good thing because I sleep better than I do anything else in cars or buses or airplanes. But what else made it interesting even before I really started out was the fact that I had worked with this girl for one semester and had never met any of her family. I was basically going to stay with complete strangers in another state for a week. and my mom didn't even look into it at all. oh the joys of growing up and gaining responsibility for yourself.

while I was there, we did a lot of stuff that I had never done before and I got to meet a lot of awesome people. I went hiking,

visited a lighthouse, explored and got lost in down town, cut the roof off a car, played with foam swords in a park, WENT TO DISNEYLAND(!!!), and just kinda hung out on the beach. ok, so I've hung out on the beach before, but I'd never really done any of the other stuff, and definitely not with marvelous people like I did last week. it reminded me why I love BYU and mormons in general so much. we are able to have so much fun doing the simple things and we don't feel the need to impair our senses in some way to heighten the experience. I compare it to how I saw co-workers act and party all summer. They would have parties where they got good and drunk, and they thought it was so mu

ch fun. I went to some of those parties for a time, but I didn't drink because I didn't feel the need to, and I also didn't see how getting drunk could be considered fun. It was great to have a week doing a bunch of random, crazy stuff, and yet doing itall sober and in good company.

I don't mind living in Phoenix. In fact, for the most part I like it a lot. I love the people in my singles ward and the people I get to work with every summer (even though recently it's changed every summer). But sometimes seeing what it would be like to have a larger, closer group of friends with the same standards makes me wish I had had something like that growing up, or that my children could have something like that while they grow up. I don't mean to say I'm going to stay in Utah when I'm starting a family. I don't know if I could really stand it there for years upon years, but I want to find some strong mormon community somewhere that has a few kids around my children's ages, and they can raise all the ruckus they want doing crazy, interesting, out-of-the-box things that won't get them into too much trouble.