A former “student” of mine from when I taught Sunday school to 14- and 15-year-olds bumped into me at Blockbuster this evening. (She’s married now, with an toddler). She was carrying a Blockbuster form of some sort, and I asked if she was applying for work.

“No, I already HAVE a job” she laughed. “This is an application for membership.”

Okay, it’s kind of weird for someone who has lived in the area for pretty much her whole life to not already have one of these. So I asked “You’re just now getting one?”

“Well, my parents had one, but after they got divorced–” (at this point my brain tuned out everything else she said while I sorted through that casual revelation. Had I heard correctly?”)

A moment’s silence, while I steeled myself to ask an embarrasing question.

“When did your parents get divorced?”

I won’t go into details, because I didn’t get many. It was this year, though, and to be honest, I had NO IDEA. I wondered why I hadn’t seen her father at Church much, but that’s about it.

And I guess that’s the whole point. Her father used to be quite the fixture in Church. I’d recieved several blessings under his hands, and he was what you might call a “pillar of the community,” or at least of the neighborhood. I’m anxious to know what happened, because I really, really, REALLY don’t want anything like that happening to me and Sandra.

I know, I know. Divorce doesn’t “happen.” It’s something you decide to do. It’s a destination on a path you choose, or at the very least it’s a waystation. But how do you know you’re on that path?

In other, sort-of-related news, it turns out the husband of the famously-missing Salt Lake woman, Lori Hacking, was even less honest and upstanding than we believed him to be. Apparently during the time when he’d said he was in school, he was loitering at the local convenience store satisfying a tobacco addiction. This may not seem like THAT big a deal, except that Mormons with tobacco addictions sort of stand out… he went to quite a bit of trouble to hide his behavior, and it seems he successfully hid it from his wife.

I said “sort-of-related” news. I guess it’s related in that when you choose a particular path, you also choose the destination. Whether or not he did violence to his wife, the discovery of his lies and his subsequent incarceration at a mental institution certainly qualify as all-but-inevitable waystations on the path he chose.

–Howard

They checked my grandmother out of the hospital today… TWICE.

Apparently the EMTs got her home, and then checked her pulse and stuff and thought “Geez, we gotta get this lady back to the hospital!” So they did.

Her doctor checked the same stuff, and said “no, that’s pretty much normal for her.”

So back home she went.

I think she’s like a zombie or something, but she’s pretty cheerful to be Undead.

Okay, I just finished a journal entry, and my forearms hurt. Both of them. The pain is along the outside edge about halfway between hand and elbow. And I just realized that they’ve been hurting all day, pretty much whenever I type.

Is this carpal tunnel? I’m gonna be SO pissed off…

And now, from my list of placeholders, I’d like to take a moment to talk about hamburger.

In order to properly cook hamburger patties, you need to account for three things:

1) The size of the average human jaw, and the size of the SPECIFIC human jaws that will be eating the sandwich your patty ends up in.
2) The tendency of hamburger patties to bunch up in the middle when they cook.
3) The potentially cancerous effect of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).

We’ll start with #3. The research is inconclusive at best, especially when it comes to determining how much PAH you need before you’ve got a measurable cancer risk. The best solution: turn the burger 3 times, rather than allowing it to sit long enough to cook all the way through on a single turning. You’ll get a more evenly cooked burger, less PAH (my favorite carcinogen, by a long shot), and those cool grid-patterns on the burger patty (provided you rotate it 90 degrees with the 2nd flip.)

Now, back to #1. Costco provides these “pre-shaped” fresh burger patties that are pretty close to 2/3 of a pound each. THESE ARE TOO BIG. Unless you’ve got the ability to unhinge your jaw, or can flatten them out to the size of a dinner plate, they’re just useless for sandwiches. Cut ’em in half and reshape them.

#2: When you shape them, make them into concave lens shapes. The rim should be fatter than the middle, and the whole thing should be at least an inch larger than your bun. When they’re done cooking they’ll have flattened out and shrunk inward, and they’ll be just the right size.

I got #3 right when we barbecued last night. I made exactly ONE patty the right way for #1 and #2, though, because I was in a hurry, and I only needed one “small” burger for the kids. The result? My cousin Steve ate his with a fork, Aly, Sandra, and I didn’t finish ours, and Tayler plowed through his with the marvelous mastication only afforded by God Almighty to 1% of the population.

Other than that, the barbecue went well.