Mitt is Legit

Today was a great day! Yesterday afternoon I found out that Mitt Romney was going to be coming to Springfield (the Illinois primary is tomorrow). I had heard that he was down by St. Louis and was going to be up in Chicago, but then they announced at the last minute that he was going to be at Charlie Parker's Diner here in Springfield for breakfast today at 7:00 a.m. Unfortunately Greg had some work obligations this morning, so he wasn't able to go along, but I woke up really early and got to Charlie Parker's at 6:00 a.m. When I got there the parking lot was full, and I didn't have high hopes for actually getting to see Mitt up close, but I found a little parking spot for my little car, and tagged along at the end of the line that was filing into the restaurant. (Charlie Parker's is a cool little diner in a Quonset hut, but it is not very big.) Next thing I knew, I was inside! I was one of the very last people they let into the restaurant! They said that they were limiting it to 70 people, and I later found out that people had started lining up at 4:00 this morning, so I was pretty lucky. When I got inside, I looked around and saw an empty seat at a table in the front of the room. I asked if anyone was sitting there, and the three other ladies at the table said no. So, I sat down, and then they brought out the breakfast menus.

I ordered the blueberry stuffed French toast. It was DELICIOUS!! It worked out well because we had over an hour before Mitt was to show up, so we got to just eat breakfast and get to know each other there at our little table. At about 6:45, some secret service guys came and asked us to scoot our table over next to another one because Governor Romney was going to be standing RIGHT NEXT to our table!!! I was so excited!!! Then the head secret service guy gave us some rules: no standing up during Mitt's speech, no sudden movements, no reaching into our purses or pockets, no waiting in line at the bathroom, and no acting crazy.

Then at 7:20 a.m., Mitt arrived!! It was so exciting to see him in person. I've loved him ever since he saved the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.








Right behind Mitt was Congressman Aaron Schock. Greg and I like this picture because Schock looks shocked! He's a cool guy. He's only 30 years old, so he's the youngest member of Congress right now.







And of course Ann Romney was there too! Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to meet her today, but she seems like such a cool lady. You never really hear about her battles with MS and breast cancer, but she has overcome a lot of challenges in her life. She spoke to the crowd about raising five boys and about how her husband can make America a place to be proud of again.



Then Mitt spoke for about 15 minutes. He mostly talked about the economy and his plans for sending things in the right direction. He had a couple of funny quotes. He said, "The pancakes here are almost as big as my margin of victory last night in Puerto Rico!" Haha. And then my favorite was: "Remember, tomorrow you need to vote early and VOTE OFTEN--we are in Illinois after all!" Ha, Mitt knows how things roll in this state :) I was so lucky to be right by where he was speaking!

After his speech he went around the restaurant meeting everyone and taking pictures with pancakes. I like this picture of him with the Rout 66 sign.

And then I got to shake his hand TWICE! When he first started walking around he came and shook my hand and signed a baseball for me (Greg and I figured a baseball would be appropriate since his name is MITT, and we like to collect people's signatures on baseballs)! I didn't have a chance to get a picture with him that time, but then when he came back around, I got to have my picture taken with him. As one lady was taking the picture, another lady at my table yelled out, "She's from Utah!" Mitt said, "Oh! Utah?" I said, "Yes, thank you for saving the Olympics." He said, "Yeah, that was exciting." This picture cracks me up because the secret service guy on the right does NOT look happy. He was just taking his job seriously, which is good. I was also interviewed by some media people, but I don't know who/what media outlet they were with. We just briefly talked about why I like Mitt, the Olympics, being a Mormon, and stuff like that. I enjoyed sending Mom and Greg pictures and text messages during the entire event, and Mom was able to follow along with everything that was happening using the Illinois State Journal Register webpage live updates. In fact, she is the one who told me what time people started getting there this morning!

Speaking of the media, this was the picture they had on the homepage of the State Journal Register after Mitt's visit! If you look to the left of Mitt, there I am looking (luckily) very attentive. My proximity to Mitt turned out to pay off because this afternoon Dad saw me on the local news in Utah, and one of my friends said they saw me on CNN! Greg and I watched the local news here at 9:00, and I showed up several times :)

So it was certainly an exciting day! After visiting with the crowd, Mitt was interviewed by the media for a while, then he took off to head north. I believe he went to Peoria and then on to Chicago for tomorrow's primary. I am so excited to vote tomorrow! This will probably be the only time that my vote in Illinois actually counts for something (since the Democrats always win here). So I'll enjoy it while I can! Go Mitt!!

Randomness

It has certainly been a strange winter here! The other day it snowed, and this was the most snow we've had on the ground since our one-and-only blizzard back in January on the day I flew home to Utah. After our Snowpocalypse last winter, I certainly am not complaining about the lack of snow this year! The view out of our bedroom window on Monday morning was very pretty though. But with the temperatures already warming up, and with the horrible storms in the midwest and south last week, I'm afraid it is going to be a very long tornado season.

Last night at our church Young Men/Young Women activity for dessert the Bishop dumped a few gallons of ice cream into a giant tub, and then the kids dumped every imaginable topping into the tub. Then they all got giant serving spoons, and dug in! It looked kind of gross, but it was so funny. There had to be at least five billion calories in that tub :) I did not partake of the ice cream madness, but the kids loved it. Hopefully they don't all end up with mono or something like that.

Next month is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic! As many of you know, I became obsessed with the Titanic when I was younger after watching the movie "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." I read and watched every imaginable Titanic-related movie or book, and I looked forward to the day when I would be able to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster. Well the time is almost here, and so I have already started planning my Titanic party. This is the front of the invitation I created.

And this is the inside of the invitation (although I decided it would be best to erase our contact info. in this picture--who knows who reads my blog!) :) I found this stuff at Hobby Lobby the other day called Distress Ink that you can use to make paper look old. Isn't it cool? Greg and I ordered a Titanic cookbook, so we're going to try our hand at making some fancy dishes for the party. We're also going to watch the 1953 "Titanic" movie and tell Titanic stories. It should be a good time. Too bad it's over a month away! But it will be fun to look forward to.

Someone I've been doing some research about lately is a woman mentioned in Elder Cook's talk at the October 2011 General Conference. Her name was Irene Colvin Corbett, and she is the only person from Utah and the only Mormon to die on the Titanic. Her story is really interesting and sad. She was a nurse from Provo who was married and had three little kids. She went to London for six months to study midwifery and booked passage back to America on the Titanic because she had heard that six Mormon missionaries would also be traveling home on the Titanic. However, the missionaries were delayed and had to book passage on a different ship. She was one of only 14 second class women to die on the Titanic--most of the women in first and second class were able to get onto the lifeboats. Many people assume that Irene purposely stayed onboard the ship to help people until the very end. More about the Titanic to come in the future . . .

Honest Babe

Today I was able to have a Lincoln adventure with our fun friends, the Atkins. Laura is the Young Women president at church, and I am her first counselor. I am so glad that Greg and I have gotten to know their cute family! The other day their son Connor took an Abraham Lincoln test at school, and when asked what Lincoln's nickname was, he responded, "Honest Babe." :) After learning about Lincoln, Connor wanted to go see some of the Lincoln sites, so our first stop today was at Honest Babe's house. My friend John gave us a great tour of the home, and the kids earned a Junior Ranger badge by being so good during the tour.

We then went to see where Honest Babe is buried. Connor and Emma thought it was especially fun to rub the Lincoln statue's nose for good luck!




Here we are in the lobby of the Lincoln Tomb. Connor did a good job making sure that everyone was quiet while we walked through the burial chamber. And Emma and I matched in our pink coats! We had so much fun today, and I am really glad to be friends with the Atkins.

And here are a couple of random things: the other night I was up late working on the computer, and when I looked over at Greg's chair, Lily was sound asleep with her paw over her eyes. She looked so cute!















And at work last Wednesday I got to help put an original General John A. Logan Civil War frock coat out on display! It's always cool to touch something with that much historical significance. General Logan was from Murphysboro, IL, and was one of the Union generals during the Civil War. He was made the military governor of Vicksburg after the city was captured by the Union Army, and he later commanded the entire Army of the Tennessee during the Battle of Atlanta. So he was a pretty important figure, and the museum is lucky to own a bunch of stuff that belonged to him. His wife donated a lot of his personal belongings to the state of Illinois back in the early 1900s. The jacket looks a little wrinkly, but it had been in a box for a long time . . . and we can't iron it :)

Adventures in Alton

This has been a FUN long President's Day weekend! Because of my work schedule, I usually never even get two days off in a row (including weekends), but thanks to the President's Day holiday, I got a three-day weekend. Yesterday I had a very fun day visiting Tuscola, Illinois with my good friend Laura Atkins. We had lunch at the best restaurant in the whole world: Flesor's Candy Kitchen. And we of course ate the most delicious thing on their menu: the Reuben! It was as tasty as ever. Then we had a fun afternoon visiting the outlet mall. It was a great day!

Today Greg had to attend a class in Alton, Illinois (close to St. Louis), so I decided to tag along and go exploring. I have always wanted to visit Alton and see the Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument at the Alton Cemetery, so that was my first stop after dropping Greg off. Mom, Dad, and I first learned about Elijah Lovejoy when we were visiting St. Charles, Missouri in 2004. Lovejoy's wife's family lived in St. Charles, and we saw a plaque about him when we were walking downtown one day. He was an abolitionist newspaper editor who was killed by an angry mob in Alton in 1837--just seven years before Joseph Smith was killed by an angry mob in Carthage (Illinois was a rough place if you had ideas that went against society's norm!).

I wrote a paper about Elijah Lovejoy in college and was interested to find many similarities between his and Joseph Smith's families. (I realized that a lot of my cool college paper ideas came from things I first learned about on trips with Mom and Dad--Elijah Lovejoy, Sterling Price, etc.) Lovejoy's murder inspired people like John Brown and Abraham Lincoln to stand up against slavery. Lincoln even went so far as to say, "Lovejoy's tragic death for freedom in every sense marked his sad ending as the most important single event that ever happened in the new world." So it was really cool to visit the Lovejoy monument today!

Elijah Lovejoy is buried at the Alton Cemetery, but when I realized that his grave was not at the monument, I wasn't sure how I would find it. But after driving around the cemetery for a few minutes, I only saw one plot with a fence around it--and sure enough, it was his. When I got back into the car after visiting his grave, I typed my next destination into the GPS, but then the GPS just turned off for no reason. This happened several times, and I thought it must be Elijah Lovejoy trying to contact me from beyond the grave . . . until it happened again later in the day :)

My next stop was the Lincoln-Douglas Debate site. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had seven debates throughout Illinois when they were both campaigning for the senate in 1858, and today there is a statue on the site of the debate in Alton. The Stephen Douglas statue looks super mean and scary!

Stop #3 was the site of a Confederate prison during the Civil War. Unfortunately there is only a small portion of the prison left, and it stands in the middle of a parking lot across the street from a grainery, but at least there's a remnant of the prison. 11,764 Confederate soldiers were imprisoned here during the war, and 1,534 of them died from sickness and exposure to weather--yikes!

Next I visited the National Great Rivers Museum, located next to this lock, the Melvin Price Lock and Dam, on the Mississippi River. I arrived at the museum just in time to join a tour of the lock. It was SO COOL!


We went up to the top of the lock, and it was REALLY windy. Being up so high, we had a nice view of Alton and the very wide Mississippi River.






We got to watch a barge come through the lock, which was really neat to see. Here is the barge first entering the lock. It took about 20 minutes for the barge to get completely inside, and then it took about 10 minutes for them to fill the lock with water.





This was the point at which the water inside the lock reached the same depth as the water level outside the lock, so they could lower the gate . . .








. . . and the barge could be on its way. It was really cool to see the entire process! I remember that one time in Clarksville, Missouri, Mom, Dad, and I watched a boat go through a lock, so it was neat to see it up close again today. I am totally fascinated by the Mississippi River!





The museum was also really cool. My favorite part was their fish tank full of different types of fish that live in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. This guy with the long nose was really funny. He was very intrigued by my camera and kept wanting me to take pictures of him (at least I think that's what he wanted). After three hours of non-stop adventures, it was time to go pick Greg up. What a fun day I had exploring Alton!

Silly Lily

Lily has been doing some funny stuff lately, and luckily I've had my phone with me so I can capture her silliness.


She is very intrigued by the fact that during the winter I work out in the living room using the Nintendo Wii. Here she is watching "me" on the TV. She seriously sat there watching the TV for about five minutes :)






And here she is in her "window seat."









The other day I bought a little roll of curly ribbon, and it took her about five minutes to find where I had hidden it! We don't buy her cat toys anymore because her favorite things to play with are shoelaces, ribbon, boxes, and crumpled up paper. She is such a silly kitty!