Author: Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Fall at the Pumpkin Patch

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Last Friday we drove an hour up into the hills to pick fall apples. We filled three buckets with Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Empire, and Rome apples, enough to grandly fulfill Grammy’s dehydrator ambitions, eat all the sweet, crunchy apples we could want, and have apple crisp with vanilla ice cream for family home evening treat tonight.

On the way home, we decided to stop by the pumpkin patch.

We only intended to stay an hour or two, but Murray Family Farms is no ordinary pumpkin patch. It’s a 360-acre autumn extravaganza. After eating our picnic lunch on a shady table outside, we let the children play in a sandbox thing full of field corn.… Read more

Rough Stone Rolling, Mother Teresa, and Misquoting Jesus

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I will probably never catch up with reviewing books now that I have a virtually unlimited supply of them, but I like to share at least my favorites with you.

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone RollingJoseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard L. Bushman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really cannot overstate how fascinating I found this book. Although as a Mormon I was fairly familiar with the general outlines of Joseph Smith’s life, this was the first real biography of him that I’d ever read. Self-categorized as a “cultural biography,” it paints a picture of the Prophet against the backdrop of other religious and philosophical thinkers and innovators of his day.… Read more

On the Eve of the Nobel Peace Prize

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I was thrilled to hear last week that Lina Ben Mhenni, a Tunisian blogger who was at the forefront of human rights cyber activism ahead of the revolution, is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, to be awarded tomorrow. If chosen, she would most likely share the prize with one or more Egyptian bloggers.

Along with other activist bloggers in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Ben Mhenni wrote on issues such as press freedom and women’s rights. But unlike many bloggers, who hid their identities to avoid harassment and detention by government officials, Ben Mhenni defied the press ban, blogging under her own name.… Read more

One in a Million

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Back when I was an entrepreneur, I had a hero named Steve Jobs. He founded and ran an amazingly successful company. He produced new markets out of thin air. But he was more than just a savvy businessman. He was an artist. A creator. I used to read a lot of books about management and business, and my favorites were the ones about Apple, and the way Jobs turned his unerring aesthetic sense into an empire, a worldwide phenomenon, and a whole new way of living with technology. He had an instinctive understanding of the importance of design, which he honed to sophisticated perfection.… Read more

Conquering Trojans, Thorns, Aliens, Orsinia, and Sleeping Beauty

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

One of the things I told you I was looking forward to in the U.S. was unlimited books in English. I spent the first couple of weeks reading books off the shelves at my in-laws’ house. But my voracious (and long-suppressed) literary appetite soon called for more drastic measures; i.e. the public library. The first time we went, I made sure to bring my two pieces of mail with my address on them, but forgot my driver’s license, and was thus unable to get a library card. Fortunately, Grammy had brought hers, and lent it to us. Between the three of us (Axa, Raj, and I), we were with difficulty able to limit ourselves to the thirty books allowed at a time.… Read more

Conference Weekend

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

It’s been rather startling during the past couple of weeks to have so many people I hadn’t seen in years tell me face to face that they’ve been avidly following my blog (not to mention chide me for not posting much lately). Sometimes I forget that this blog is a fairly public personal journal. Also, sometimes when I tell a funny story as I’m catching up with old friends, I realize I’ve told it before, just not in person. Ah, well.

We had a lovely Conference Weekend. One of the nice things about being back in the States is that we can watch Conference in real-time and it’s not the middle of the night.… Read more

Fun News for Today

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

My piece on the Mormon political candidate conundrum was republished over at Times and Seasons today, so if you’ve forgotten what I said (or are just dying to see it again) you can go ahead and pop over there to read it.

Note for non-Mormons (and Mormons too, I suppose): Times and Seasons is not an official Church website. It’s more of an informal virtual drawing room set aside by a group of individual members for doctrinal speculation, cultural commentary, and other vaguely intellectual Mormon-related pursuits. I think of it as a sort of Mormon equivalent to the Medieval Christian debates about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.… Read more

Apocalypse Over

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Jet-lag has been vanquished, but I’m still making those last lingering adjustments to post-expat re-entry. (you know, finishing up the spontaneous incineration of the ablative heat shield, also known as “trailing clouds of glory . . .”) So far, I’ve been to Trader Joe’s, the Library, Macaroni Grill, and even (gasp!) Wal-Mart. But I didn’t actually buy anything at Wal-Mart. So does that make it O.K.?

I still don’t have a good short answer (or even a good long answer) for the ubiquitous question, “where are you from?”

I’m not sure what to do about that. Lately I wish I had something prosaic to say, like Wisconsin or Palo Alto.… Read more

Travel Update #3: Not with a bang but a whimper

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

You know what? I don’t think I have 22 hours worth of memories from our last 22 hours of traveling. I know I wasn’t sleeping for most of it (sadly), so I must just have selective amnesia. Or maybe nothing really happened.

Here’s the little I remember:  We ate guacamole in the Chicago airport. It was as good as I remembered it. (Also, I made a bowl of guacamole yesterday at my mother-in-law’s house, and ate the whole thing myself. I might do that again today.)

Airport security is as paranoid as ever in the U.S.A. At least we were only flying the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and not the actual day.… Read more

Travel Update #2: The Best Laid Plans . . .

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

In what we all now recognize as my hopelessly unrealistic fantasy-land of trip planning, our overnight layover in Rome went like this: Arrive at 7:00 p.m., hotel shuttle picks us up, we check in, and then go out for pizza and gelato. We retire early, wake up to a nice breakfast, and then get shuttled back to the airport for our noon flight.

Enter reality.

As you know from yesterday, contrary to the intelligence given us beforehand, general strikes in Italy actually do affect international flights. Considerably. Ours finally left Tunis at 10:00 p.m., a mere 5.5 hours late, and arrived in Rome just after midnight.… Read more