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Fluffy and I recently spent two days in Venice. (That’s Venice, Italy, and not Venice, California.) Venice is not a city that lends itself to people who are in wheelchairs or scooters, because there is a bridge with steps at every corner. There used to be lifts at every corner to get people in wheelchairs or scooters onto the bridges, but apparently they were too much trouble to maintain.

Because I couldn’t “walk” around the city, Fluffy took a walking tour on my behalf. The following day, both of us toured Venice by boat. We had a grand old time, if the number of pictures we took is any indication.

The terracotta roofs of Venice, as we sailed into port on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

We had the cutest little tour guide. I mean “cute” as in personality, because I never saw what she looked like. She, like most of the other people on the tour, was in the cabin of the boat, looking through dirty windows at the sights of the city. Fluffy and I were the lone passengers who took seats on the prow, where we had an unobstructed view of Venice in all its finery.

One of Venice’s many churches, on a sunny Sunday morning.

Venice is every bit as beautiful as everyone says it is, but I have heard its aroma is not quite as lovely as the scenery. In fact, I’ve heard many reports that the canals of Venice stink like open sewers. Our tour guide explained it to us this way:

Venice was build before indoor plumbing. To this day, our toilets, they empty into the canals. But ees hokay! The tide, he comes twice a day and takes it all out to sea!”

She went on to explain that up to forty times a year, Venice floods to the point that “water” (and I put quotes around “water” because we’re not just talking about seawater here) is knee deep on the streets and even in people’s homes. Yes, friends and neighbors – up to forty times per year, the people of Venice are walking around in their own poop!

Don’t drink the water! Don’t even put your hand in the water!

Fortunately, Fluffy and I visited Venice when the tides were right and the canals had been “cleaned” for our visit. Thank you, Mister Tide! But our experience in Venice was eye-opening, to say the least. I know that Americans are infamous for being squeamish about bodily odors and functions, but I was floored that Venice’s 280,000+ inhabitants don’t think twice about dumping their sewage into the canals – especially considering that those canals flood their streets and their homes an average of once every 9.13 days.

Of course, some things are best not thought about.

Lest you think I’m hurling stones at the people of Venice, the thing that struck me was how human their attitude is. Quite often we drop litter on the ground or leave dishes in the sink without knowing (or caring) that somebody else is going to have to pick up behind us. Quite often we say a careless word, never stopping to think that we could be damaging someone else in the process. Sometimes we demand special concessions for ourselves, never stopping to consider that if we get something extra, everyone else is going to be doing with a little bit less.

We can even find ourselves getting careless about sin. I’ve heard of young people who plan ahead of time to sleep with their boyfriends or girlfriends and then confess and repent so they can get married in the temple. After all, the Atonement will take care of everything!

It’s one thing to commit transgressions and then understand the enormity of your actions and repent. After all, that’s what the Atonement is for! But it’s another thing entirely to plan ahead of time to play now and repent later. 2 Nephi 28:8 says this about being careless about sin:

And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God.”

The rest of the chapter goes on to remind us that if we succumb to this mindset, we’re going to be in big spiritual trouble.

Although the thought of floating down canals of raw sewage may not be appetizing, the spiritual sewage we can bring into our lives is much, much more dangerous. Whenever I think of the Venice canals, I hope they remind me to think of what things I am overlooking, assuming that the problems I create will be fixed by somebody else.

None of us can be perfect, but it’s our responsibility to do the best we can to make the world around us just a little better than the way we found it. I’m not going to pretend I do that all the time, but I hope our trip to Venice will remind me to be a little more diligent in caring for the world I’m leaving to others.

When Fluffy and I were just finishing high school, one of the big summer movies was a comedy called, If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium. The plot centered around a nine-day European bus tour where the hapless travelers visited eighteen countries so quickly that the only way they knew where they were was to consult a calendar.

Fluffy and I thought the movie was funny. Little did we realize that we were going to have a similar experience – not once in our lives, but twice. One can argue that it’s a lot more fun to watch the movie than to live the experience up close and personal, but I’m not ready to go that far. Some things are remembered for their beauty; other things are remembered for their craziness. Fluffy and I have lived through some crazy times, and I’m not sorry about that.

Our first whirlwind trip happened shortly after Fluffy and I were married. We lived in Salt Lake City at the time, and Salt Lake City was within spitting distance of Yellowstone National Park (if you were a champeen spitter, that is). Possibly the only thing on my father’s bucket list was to visit Yellowstone, so he packed up my sisters in the family station wagon and picked up Fluffy and me in Utah so he could fulfill his lifelong dream.

Let’s just say that visiting Yellowstone was on Daddy’s bucket list. He had no interest in actually seeing it, as we learned when we got to the park. The maximum speed in Yellowstone is 45 miles per hour, with the speed limits being considerably lower near the main park attractions. Daddy didn’t know how to back out of a driveway at only 45 miles per hour, so our trip around the park was a hair-raising adventure.

One of the big attractions in Yellowstone is Mammoth Hot Springs, a gargantuan complex of thermal hot springs. After all these years I can’t remember how big it is, but it was considerably larger than a football field, and as tall as a short skyscraper. Steam spews forth from cracks, giving the whole thing a surreal impression. To say that Mammoth is impressive is an understatement.

We were driving around the park counter-clockwise, at breakneck speed, when we passed Mammoth. “I don’t see anything special about this,” Daddy said with a humph.

Fluffy and I yelled, “It’s on your right! It’s on your right! You’re looking left!”

By then, of course, we had passed the hot springs. Daddy never did see them, and he was royally disgusted that something he’d read about all his life wasn’t even impressive enough to see from the side of the road. Pity he was looking in the wrong direction.

If Daddy had bothered looking to the right, this is what he would have seen.

We have laughed about that Yellowstone trip over the years, assuming it was our only “If it’s Tuesday” experience. A week or so ago, however, we had a rerun. This time we were in Rome, and all I can say is that Daddy must have been resurrected to play the role of the Italian bus driver.

The name of the tour was “Panoramic Rome.” It was pretty much the only tour I could take, because this was the tour that accommodated scooters. “Accommodated” may not be the appropriate word. There was a lift onto the bus, and the driver put the scooter (with Kathy on top of the scooter) on the lift and then raised us precariously to the level of the bus floor. I got off the scooter on the bus, and the scooter was then lowered and put in the storage compartment until it was time for us to disembark.

The lift was way in the back of the bus, giving me two seats to myself. The whole back row of seats was set aside for Fluffy. Theoretically this meant that Fluffy could only see scenery that was on the left, because there was a non-functional bathroom obscuring his vision on the right. But the driver cooperatively did everything twice, going in each direction so everyone could see everything through the closest window.

You can make concessions like that when you are traveling at the speed of light.

The operative word for the trip was, “Zoom!” I’m sure we saw everything in Rome at least twice, but we did it so fast that I was almost never certain what we were seeing. After a short while I realized my neck hurt. It took me several minutes to realize I had a minor case of whiplash. This is what happens when you see Rome panorama-style.

The fact that we were on a bus did not stop Fluffy or me from taking pictures. We took more than 250 pictures apiece, and although a goodly number of them consisted of trees we passed after the things we wanted to capture with our cameras, when you take that many pictures there are bound to be some winners in the group. In fact, if you looked at the pictures we haven’t deleted, you might be fooled into thinking we actually saw a whole lot in Rome. This would be a huge exaggeration.  Fortunately, our cameras saw more than we did.

If you take enough pictures, some of them are bound to turn out all right (even if taken through the window of a speeding bus).

In our six-hour tour, almost everyone got off the bus twice. The first stop was a potty break, but as everyone else was getting off the bus, the tour guide told me I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of getting off the bus for just a bathroom stop.

This is a woman who apparently did not know me. I have visited so many public restrooms that our parents used to say my sister Sandee and I could write a book called Bathrooms I Have Visited. But when she told me it would “only” be another hour and a half or so before our other bathroom stop, and that the bathroom at our next location would be completely handicapped-accessible, she talked me into staying on the bus. I had a half hour of quality time to myself, taking pictures of the McDonald’s across the highway and a field of corn that was inexplicably planted in the median between the opposing lanes, sucking up the exhaust fumes from passing vehicles.

While her traveling companions discovered Roman restrooms, Kathy wondered if corn that grows next to a freeway is fit for human consumption.

Needless to say, I was ready for that second stop when it finally occurred. We were let off in the heart of Rome and were given forty-five minutes in (get this) a Catholic souvenir shop. I mean everything in that souvenir shop was geared toward Catholics. If you didn’t need a rosary or a St. Christopher medal or a picture of the Pope, you were out of luck.

This “fully-accessible” shop had a couple of six-inch steps between me and the interior, which meant that Fluffy had to disassemble the scooter and carry it, piece by piece, into the store to assemble it again. Then we learned that the bathroom was down three stairs with no handrails, but Fluffy was determined I was going to use that bathroom and my bladder was glad he insisted.

Most of the tourists spent forty-five happy minutes buying crucifixes and religious statues and other Catholic memorabilia. The tour guide told Fluffy and me, however, that all we had to do was to cross the street and we’d be in Vatican City. We wanted to visit a new country (two for the price of one!), so off we went. I was stopped from getting very far by a lot of stone stairs, but Fluffy parked me and went off to take pictures for both of us.

If you happen to be in Rome and are looking for Catholic memorabilia, do we have a store for you!

This may not seem like a stellar day, but Fluffy and I had a great time. Travel is never perfect, and you quickly learn to look at the glitches as enjoyable parts of the day. If nothing else, the crazy things enhance the memories.

That’s the way life is. You can plan your life down to the smallest moment, but it’s never going to turn out the way you planned. When things go wrong, you can dwell on them until your life is ruined or you can make memories out of them. Fluffy and I prefer the memories. You get much better stories out of weird things that happen to you than you ever do if you have a picture-perfect day.

People who get around on actual legs often look longingly at the handicapped parking stalls that are used by people like me. If they only knew the joys of life in a wheelchair or a scooter, they wouldn’t be nearly so envious.

Of course, they are missing out on lots of opportunities for entertainment that are only experienced by people who are in my shoes.

Last week we had another exciting adventure, as we whizzed from one flight to another in London’s Heathrow Airport. Heathrow used to be a cute little airport, until the new and improved behemoth sprang into existence a few years ago. Today, you only want to go to Heathrow for the amusement factor – and that’s only if you are easily amused.

There was an employee waiting for me with a wheelchair when we got off the plane. Of course, the wheelchair he had was built for a six-year-old. My left ear would not have fit in that wheelchair. So there we sat, waiting for an American-sized wheelchair to arrive. The one that finally showed up was a perfect fit – my own wheelchair, which had mysteriously appeared from the bowels of the plane. But we kept the airport employee to push it, because we had no idea where we were going.

If we hadn’t kept the airport employee, we would still be lost somewhere in London.

Jetways are not built for wheelchairs. This is not just true of Heathrow. By their very design, jetways have tiny ramps on them that have ridges where wheelchairs get stuck. It is not uncommon to have to get out of the wheelchair so the person pushing the wheelchair can get over the ridge. This somewhat negates the advantages of having a wheelchair in the first place, but I digress.

One of the joys of the newly-“improved” Heathrow is that even passengers who get off a plane at one terminal and then immediately get on another plane in the same terminal have to go through security again. I’m not clear on the concept here. If I’d had a nuclear device with me, it would have been detected in the Barcelona airport. But that’s the way Heathrow does things, and arguing about it doesn’t get you anywhere.  (I didn’t try, mind you.  I’m not an arguing kind of person.)

Going through security meant we had to go up one floor (complicated by the fact that we needed to use the “lift,” which was in Naples, Italy), get in the long line of frustrated passengers who, like us, were puzzled about why they had to go through security when they hadn’t been anywhere, and then take the lift down to the same floor we had just left in order to find our connecting gate.

All this would have taken the breath out of me if I had been the one doing the running. But because I was gloriously seated, it was the tiny Cypriot wheelchair pusher who got out of breath on my behalf. Fluffy trotted along behind us, glad that someone else was doing the pushing and he was only responsible for moving himself.

We found the gate (just before it closed), only to learn that there was no plane at the other end. No, that would have been too predictable. Instead, the passengers took an escalator down from the gate (in our case, we took another “lift”), left the airport, and were loaded into buses that would take them to the plane. Because of the wheelchair, we were held aside for “special” treatment (oh goody!). That meant we had our own special bus, which wasn’t a bus at all but a panel truck without windows. It was all very James Bondish, and I hope Fluffy appreciated my taking him along for the ride.

Of course, even though the panel truck was designed for wheelchair patrons, that didn’t mean that people in wheelchairs could actually use it. My pusher had to find a way to get me off the four-inch curb, which was no small feat. Then he tried rolling me up the ramp into the truck, which had a ridge that made rolling a person up the ramp in the wheelchair pretty much impossible. I had to get out of the wheelchair, prop myself up against the truck until the wheelchair was up the ramp, and then follow the wheelchair up the long and steep ramp on foot.

I guess I should be glad it’s only my heart and lungs that don’t work. If I had actual leg problems, I would have been out of luck.

Once we got on the truck, the trip to the plane was not a short one. I suspect the plane was located somewhere south of Paris, but because the panel truck didn’t have windows I didn’t even get to see the Eiffel Tower. Bummer.

Eventually we arrived at our destination. The lift on the panel truck took us up to an emergency door in the plane, which would have been really handy for us to use if it had only been open. One of the wheelchair wranglers beat on the door for a good five minutes before the emergency door was finally opened from inside. Of course, there was a six-inch difference between the floor of the lift and the entrance to the plane. That meant I said goodbye to the wheelchair and to the nice man who pushed me and climbed upon the plane under my own steam.

By now, of course, all the other passengers were either on the plane and blocking the aisles or boarding the plane and blocking the aisles. Heathrow has apparently not heard of the concept of having passengers who need a little extra help boarding first. But after some time, we were able to get to our seats and enjoy the eight-hour flight back to our home airport.

Isn’t plane travel fun!

There’s an old saying that a camel is a horse that was designed by committee. Fluffy says that the people who weren’t smart enough to get on the horse committee were assigned to design Heathrow Airport. I tend to agree with him.

But despite the frustrations, I consider myself fortunate to be able to travel. God has made us a glorious world, and I want to see as much of it as I can before I’m planted in a place that is even less portable than a wheelchair.

We planned our vacation for months, but we didn’t plan it well enough. You see, we arrived home in time to celebrate Mother’s Day. If we had only scheduled it better, we would have missed the day altogether.

I can’t speak for Mormons in other countries, but American Mormons enjoy (or endure) roughly the same routine on Mother’s Day. Two or three speakers talk about their sainted mothers, making sure to stress in these politically correct times that even women who have never borne children are mothers in the nurturing sense of the word.

The Primary children toddle to the front of the chapel, usually singing, “Mother, I Love You,” although this year our Primary children sang something that focused on “blossoms of blue.” As I sat there, I wondered if anyone had bothered to explain to the kidlets that blossoms are flowers. More than likely, they had no idea what they were singing about. I wasn’t clear myself how a walk among the blue flowers had anything to do with motherhood. Of course, I was more focused on watching the kiddies than I was on the lyrics.

After church, mothers and other women are presented some token of admiration. Usually it’s a cut flower or a soon-to-be-dead plant, although the men in our ward bake and plate a dozen cookies for each woman in the ward. The women in our ward return the favor by giving each man a pie on Father’s Day.

This year we struck pay dirt, cookiewise. Fluffy picked out our cookies at my request, arriving with a plate that had, by actual count, 36 cookies in the “dozen.” If quantity counts, Fluffy slew the mammoth in our ward on Sunday. We will be eating chocolate chip cookies for a week.

Needless to say, Mormons do not have a corner on Mother’s Day. When I was a teenager, my sisters and I attended the Mandeville (Louisiana) Union Protestant Church. Now that church knew how to do Mother’s Day. On the fateful Sunday, the church’s deacons stood on the front steps to greet the worshippers.

Mormons are used to deacons being fresh-faced 12-year-old boys. This was definitely not the case at the Union Protestant Church, where deacons were grizzled, middle-aged men who were more at home smoking cigarettes on the front steps of the church than they were sitting inside listening to the sermon.

As far as I know, the deacons only had one responsibility throughout the year – taking care of the Mother’s Day commemoration. With their cigarettes firmly planted between their teeth, the deacons kept their hands free for plastic roses, which they pinned on the chest of every man, woman, or child who entered the building.

There was a method to their pinning. As you walked up the stairs, a deacon would ask, “Alive or dead?” What they wanted to know was whether your mother was on the grassy side of the turf or the rooty side. If your mother was alive, you got a red plastic rose. If your mother was no longer alive, you got a white one. Anyone in the congregation could tell the status of the mother of anyone else in the congregation with only a casual glance.

Our mother died in 1970. The next Mother’s Day, as my sisters and I walked up the steps to the church, one of the deacons said, “We’ve got some dead ones here.” Sure enough, the deacons pinned the unenviable white plastic roses on our chests as they blew cigarette smoke in our faces.

It was a touching moment.

All these years later, we still remember the indignity of the white plastic roses. On Sunday night, my sister Susie sent me this quick email:

Howdy!

We went to church this morning and I got a red flower. I was telling the family how when we were kids we had to get the white ones because Momma was dead. How tacky was that?”

Altogether, I’d rather get three dozen chocolate chip cookies, or the strawberries that Fluffy dipped in chocolate to give to the gluten-intolerant mothers in our congregation. There are a lot of good things about being a Mormon, and although chocolate chip cookies may not be at the top of the list, they beat a plastic flower any day.

Happy Mother’s Day Week to you mothers out there. And to those of you who aren’t mothers, go out there and earn your cookies by nurturing your hearts out. We can all use a little extra love, and you might as well be one of the people who give it.  It makes you feel just as warm and fuzzy to give as to receive.

We have all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. If the laws of economics apply to this expression, pictures should be going down in value because so many more of them are being taken. There are so many pictures being snapped every second by cameras, cell phones, electronic tablets and other picture-ready devices that if the principle of inflation applies to pictures, any picture taken today is probably only worth about 200 words.

I was thinking about this recently, when Fluffy was talking about an article he had read in about 6BK (six years before Kathy). When he was in college, he had a minor in photography, and even considered doing it professionally until he found computers even more fascinating. At that time he owned lots of camera equipment and regularly joined with other photo enthusiasts to go on field trips for the pure fun of just finding pictures.

Fluffy often quoted that article when he told me that what turned an amateur photographer into a good one was the act of taking a thousand pictures.

The article said that a photographer’s talent will grow with each picture, and he will be a much better photographer after the experience of shooting those first 1,000 pictures, even though that process may take months or even years. But as the budding photographer takes his 1,001st picture, he should start seeing differences between the professionalism of his current works, compared with the very amateurish attempts captured on those first few rolls of film.

This article made perfect sense when Fluffy read it, because it reflected his own experience. In college he worked as a lab assistant for photography classes, where students learned to take and process their own pictures.

The first week the students were asked to go out and shoot what they considered to be a group of “really good” pictures. This assignment always produced the same results – the statue of the first college president just outside the photo lab, the family dog with his nose right up against the camera lens, the pictures of friends and spouses smiling and looking directly into the camera from 50 feet away (usually with telephone poles sticking out of their heads), and Fluffy’s personal favorites – the surprise photo of another family member captured in a partial state of undress or during a personal bathroom moment. Yes, these students were destined to give old Ansel Adams a real run for his money.

But for those who really were interested in mastering an art (and not just getting an easy credit) their skills would improve during the class, until their first efforts were replaced by decent landscapes, good portraits, sports and action photos, and even impressive results with more difficult subjects such as nature photography and night exposures.

With a little experience, the students learned to use such variables as film speed, lens aperture and shutter speed to affect the final result, just as an artist uses different paint types and brush textures to set the mood of the final work. They also learned the physics of photography – the process of getting focused light onto film, and how they could use their understanding of that process to capture usual things in unusual ways.

Why have I been thinking about Fluffy and his ancient photography career? We just returned from a Mediterranean vacation where we took two digital cameras and came back with more than 3,000 pictures between us.

Fluffy took this on his walking tour of Venice.

Prior to digital photography, nobody would have taken that many pictures on just one trip, no matter how beautiful the scenery. Even with 36-exposure rolls of film (one of the larger film sizes that used to be available), the poor tourist would have to pack 84 rolls of film. Add that to the cost of buying and processing the film, and the cost of taking 3,000 pictures would have gone through the roof.

The good side to having to pay for every snapshot was that it made you a little more careful about taking pictures of that beautiful sunset. Instead of shooting off a dozen digital shots in a westerly direction, you would have to think about what you wanted in the picture before blindly snapping the shutter. Of course, then you wouldn’t know for sure whether you had succeeded until you got the pictures back from the processing plant, which was far too late for a do-over.

Like the punch line to that old joke, “I don’t know how I liked my vacation until I get the pictures back!”

I took this in Budva, Montenegro. In the old days of paying for film and processing, I never would have considered wasting money on a picture of a window.

As far as vacation pictures are concerned, Fluffy and I are firmly planted in the digital age. Once we got our first digital cameras, we never went back to our very expensive and much-beloved film cameras. The advantages of digital photography are just too great.

It used to be that our big bulky cameras were just brought out for vacations or special occasions. Now, thanks to my little blue point-and-shoot digital camera, we can make photo memories whenever we feel the urge. We don’t have to go to the trouble or the expense to send them out to be developed, either.

But we worry that something of the old art of photography may be going away. Do new photographers have the discipline to learn an art that can bring others to tears with their beautiful images? Or are we destined to be swallowed in a sea of fuzzy self-portraits and cheesy beach-week pictures?

If the true art of photography could keep up with the advances in photo technology, we should be seeing images that defy the imagination and inspire the soul. We’re hoping that the next great photo artist is out there now using his new digital camera to take those first 1,000 pictures.

True masters of the camera (like Edward Weston, who shot this cabbage leaf) expose the beauty and complexity of ordinary things.

After two weeks away from Planet Kathy, Madame K is back home on her own planet again. I regret not being around to respond to comments these past two weeks, but I didn’t have internet access when I was back on Earth. Now that Planet Kathy is back in its proper orbit, I am here for whatever fun and excitement I can handle. Life is sweet.

Less than twenty-four hours before we were scheduled to fly across the Atlantic for this year’s vacation, Fluffy decided to book next year’s cruise. He saw a sweet deal next winter that cruises from San Diego to San Diego, with Hawaii being the ports of call in between.

The way cruise companies get by with paying ridiculously low wages to their employees is that even cruises that only go to the United States have to stop in some foreign port. Thus this cruise from the mainland to Hawaii and back to the mainland again, also has a stop in Ensenada, Mexico. That part of the trip has me salivating already.

You see, we have been to Ensenada. There isn’t a whole lot to do there, although there is a public restroom in a centrally-located McDonald’s. Best of all, you don’t have to buy any food there to use the facilities. The people of Ensenada, however, have an entirely different take on their little town. You see, Ensenada is home to La Bufadora, which our tour guide breathlessly informed us is one of about six blowholes, or marine geysers, in the whole entire world.

Ensenada, Mexico's, claim to fame.

The tour guide was so proud of his blowhole being one of such an elite group that he told us where the other five blowholes were located. There was only one problem. Only a few months before, we had seen a blowhole in Australia when Fluffy went there for a business trip. Our guide there told us there was at least one other blowhole in Australia. Neither one was on the Ensenada guide’s exclusive list.

We have since seen a blowhole in Aruba. There’s one in Barbados.  We’ve seen one in Bar Harbor, too.  But it wasn’t enough for our guide to show us a really neat geological feature. No, La Bufadora had to be one of a handful on the planet.

As it turns out, our guide could have been worse. Disney cruises says there are only three marine geysers in the world where people can actually take a look at the water spouts. Of course, it was the Disney people who were responsible for the movie Pinocchio, so perhaps they’re accustomed to seeing their noses grow.

I don’t understand the whole concept of exclusivity. I don’t want to be known for having the fanciest car or the prettiest wardrobe or the most-stamped passport. When life is a contest, it just isn’t any fun.

Even so, there are a whole lot of very poor people whose livelihoods depend on La Bufadora being such a big tourist attraction. You can’t blame people for wanting to feed their families. You can’t blame them for wanting to feel as though they are part of something important, too.

So when the tour guide told us what an exclusive attraction we were visiting, Fluffy and I didn’t raise our hands to dispute anything he said. We oohed and aahed like everybody else. And you know what? It was fun to see La Bufadora. It was fun to see the pride in the guide’s face, because he was obviously telling us what somebody had told him – something he believed, and that he wanted to believe because it made him happy.

We live in a cynical world. As far as I’m concerned, our planet needs as many Santas and Easter Bunnies and Tooth Fairies and La Bufadoras as it can get.

Next time somebody brags about something to you, don’t burst his bubble. Yes, you can show off how much smarter you are and ruin his day. But what’s the point? Being smart may give you a momentary rush, but being kind lasts forever.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll stop by La Bufadora again when we find ourselves in Ensenada next winter. It might be worth seeing.  After all, I’ve heard it’s one of only a handful of blowholes in the whole entire world.  You don’t want to miss an opportunity to see something like that.

We human beings are creatures of habit. If you don’t think that’s true, it’s probably because you just haven’t been paying attention.

For example, when you put on your shoes one at a time, you probably always put on the same shoe first. It’s certainly not a rule that you have to put on the right shoe before the left one (or vice-versa, depending on your habit), but that’s just the way you do it.

When you drive to work or to church or to the supermarket, you more than likely take the same route every time. This is unless you’re married to Fluffy, of course. Fluffy is constitutionally incapable of taking the same route twice. He is likely to go to the supermarket (which is located in Dulles, Virginia) by way of Zimbabwe. But Fluffy is not like the rest of us. Most of us have our favorite routes, and we stick to them.

When we go to restaurants, we sometimes get in the habit of ordering the same thing. We tend to stick to the same brands when we purchase toothpaste or toilet paper. We find something that works for us, and then we stick with it until it doesn’t work anymore.

I was about to say that’s part of being human, but even animals have their habits. If your dog tends to circle before he lies down, he will generally circle in the same direction. And a cat may come running at the sound of an electric can opener, even if nine times out of ten, the can that is being opened does not contain any food she would want to eat.

Most of the time, our habits don’t make a bit of difference. Nobody cares, for example, whether you put on your makeup before or after you brush your hair. Sometimes, however, our habits stop working for us. When that time comes, it’s time to crawl out of the rut.

For years, I used to read my scriptures every night before going to sleep. I did it like clockwork – one chapter per night, day in and day out. There was one problem with that. By the time I crawled in bed, reading scriptures was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to relax for a few minutes with something fun, and then I wanted to fall asleep.

What I wanted did not mesh with what I had to do. I doggedly kept reading that one chapter of scriptures per night, year in and year out. Actually, it was my eyes that did the reading. As often as not, my brain was entirely disconnected. After all, they tell you to read scriptures every day. They don’t tell you to absorb what you’re reading.

Once I established the habit of reading my scriptures before I popped out of bed in the morning, I decided this was going to be a lifelong thing. Surprise! Not two months later, Fluffy got a new job that allows him to work at home. All of a sudden, we were getting up later than we used to. Suddenly the people who were waiting until 9 a.m. to call me because I would be off the treadmill by then were calling me in the middle of my exercise period. The thing that I thought was going to be a lifelong solution no longer worked.

These days I have a new lifelong habit. I’ve been getting up, exercising, and then sitting at the computer to have the computer read my scriptures to me. You don’t have to be a Mormon to go to the Mormon scripture website, choose your scripture from the list on the left (Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, or Pearl of Great Price), click on your favorite, load a chapter, and click the “listen” button. Sweet!

We told some friends about my discovery, and they were horrified that I play solitaire while I’m listening to scriptures. Hey – I don’t play any games where you have to think. I can still play Klondike on the computer and recite random passages along with the disembodied voice: “And thus they did encamp for the night.” It’s the closest I ever come to being a multi-processor.

If you need help changing your habit of not making the bed in the morning or hanging your clothes up when you take them off at night, you’ll have to look elsewhere for your words of wisdom. What can I say? I’m a creature of habit, just as you are. But if you’re stuck in a rut in your scripture reading because you keep falling asleep over the Isaiah chapters, I’ve got you covered. It’s just another free service from Planet Kathy.

I’m always amazed at the amount of advertising dollars that are wasted. Corporations spend millions of dollars to hold focus groups and target their message, and yet they still find ways to mess it up.

I wonder how the costs of products we buy would decrease if companies could just advertise to those who want the product, rather than to blanket the market with their message, and then have most recipients ignore them. Some companies think they have a successful advertising campaign if they get a 4% response, meaning that 96% of the recipients ignore the message.

I was reminded by this again today when we received a letter addressed to Fluffy’s father. Not only does his father not live with us, and has never lived with us, but he has been dead for almost six years! His father died in 2006, and then his mother died in 2008. After she died, we had their mail forwarded to us, so that Fluffy could settle their estate.

The amount of mail addressed to his parents has decreased steadily since then, because Fluffy has closed accounts and otherwise contacted companies to let them know that sending anything to either of his parents was just the waste of a stamp.

Yet here it is four years later, and a steady trickle of junk mail still continues. Many of these are charities that his parents supported when they were still alive. They remind them that it’s time to renew the annual pledge, and the happiness of millions of men, women, and children depends upon their generosity.

“Because it’s only through the contributions of generous folks such as you, Mr. and Mrs. Kidd, that we can lick chapped lips, cure cancer, and eradicate yeast infections among left-handled Albanian women with halitosis.”

Now you would think if someone moved 2,000 miles away and had not responded to a fundraising letter for four years, perhaps those people would no longer be in your top tier of charitable givers, and perhaps they should be removed from your mailing list. When Fluffy was a child his family did that with their Christmas card list. It was an annual ritual to update the list based on who had sent a card that year. If they hadn’t received a return card for three years they figured you were either dead, had amnesia, had entered witness protection or were no longer interested in being friends – then off the list you went!

If a family can do it with Christmas cards, then why can’t these big corporations with hundreds of employees and lot of expensive computers do it with their customer lists?

But the charities are only part of the problem. There are other companies who compile and sell mailing lists based upon the demographics of the recipients. You want a list of retired people who have high blood pressure and attend the opera? Boy, do we have a mailing list for you! Then, before you know it, your mailbox is full of advertisements for retirement communities with opera houses and free blood-pressure pills at every performance.

The letter we got today was from “Bristol-Myers Squibb/Sanofi Pharmaceuticals Partnership.” If that name had been any longer, it would have cost them an extra stamp. I guess one night while we were asleep, all of the major drug companies merged into one giant conglomerate that now controls the market.

According to the name on the envelope, Fluffy’s father (who used to be known as Lloyd) has now changed his name to “Llody.” Also, we were shocked to read that the envelope contained, “The offer you requested and the card that can help you take advantage of it.” At this point we were quite alarmed and almost tempted to call the authorities. “Someone has faked my father’s death and has taken him away, changed his name, and given him a phone that only allows him to call pharmaceutical companies and request free literature!”

At the risk of breaking federal law, we steamed open the envelope to determine what vital information it contained. Well it turns out that the pharmaceutical conglomerate owns the patent to a brand name prescription drug that is about to have some competition from a lower-cost generic substitute. The company wanted to assure Llody that he didn’t have to settle for the cheap knock-off drug, and he could get on a special program that would allow him to maintain his prescription for the “real thing” for the phenomenal price of only $37 per month.

It even came with its own official “club card” that could be detached from the letter and put into the consumer’s wallet or purse. (At one point in a former life I used to write fundraising letters, and I know these things are called “involvement devices.”) Even though neither of us takes this particular prescription, we’re hoping we can both get on the program because it sounds so grand, it’s such a great bargain and the little plastic cards look so official.

Fluffy’s father was a good guy, and we always just assumed that he would go to a good place when he passed to the great beyond. But now our expectations are changing. Apparently at Llody’s final destination, people still have health problems, or perhaps they are just so bored playing harps and floating on clouds that they pass the time requesting product literature and reading junk mail that contains drug warnings written in 1-point type (“This product should not be used by women who are pregnant, women who are thinking about becoming pregnant, men who daydream about getting supermodels pregnant, or those who don’t know the definition of the word pregnant but like to operate heavy machinery”).

Meanwhile, if Llody starts getting junk mail for sports cars or dating services, we have decided we will stop opening the mail.

I was glancing at Facebook this morning, and I saw this update from a friend:

I’d like to erase the last ten years and do them over again. Some days my life just sucks because of my stupid choices.”

The person who wrote this had lived an exemplary life, but about ten years ago she had one really bad day. She made a couple of bad decisions during the course of this really bad day, but because she was a good person she awoke the next morning and asked herself, “What have I done?”

She immediately went to the bishop and told him everything. She went through the repentance process, found a terrific husband, and had a passel of kids. They are as poor as the proverbial churchmice, but everything else in their lives is pretty much normal. (And when you’re young and in love with a passel of kids, even being as poor as churchmice is pretty much normal!)

Nevertheless, she has apparently never forgiven herself for the one really bad day, to the point that she would like to relive her life again, just to have escaped making those bad decisions. When I read her comment, I had to ask myself if she had thought this through.

As we were preparing to go out of town for our vacation, I got a priesthood blessing. One line of it said, “Your experiences, both the bad ones and the good ones, have made you the person you are.” That line was intriguing, but it was hardly something that was exclusive to me. Everyone is the sum of his or her experiences – the humiliatingly bad ones as well as the ones where we did everything right.

I have done some icky things and made some terrible mistakes in my life, but right now my life is pretty terrific. If I had not taken some of those bad forks in the road (and repented of them later, and changed my ways), would I be happily married to Fluffy and living in this house, with my friends, and my life? I don’t know. Frankly, that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.

The same is true for “Sharon.” If she had never had her really bad day, would she have met her husband? She would probably have a husband, but would she have this husband? Would she have this passel of kids? Is erasing her mistake from her memory worth risking that loss?

The bottom line is that she doesn’t understand the Atonement. Yes, she made the mistakes. Yes, she remembers them. But God doesn’t, and He’s the one who matters.

Jeremiah 31:34 says this about repentance:

I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Doctrne and Covenants 58:42 says the same thing:

Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more.”

Those reassurances are good enough for me.

Are there things about myself I don’t like? Sure – there are tons of them. Are there things about me that other people don’t like? I’m absolutely certain of that. Have I made mistakes and had challenges in my life that were unpleasant, and that I wish I hadn’t had to endure? I’ve got a big list of those!

But would I change that has happened to me, and risk losing the knowledge I’ve gained and the blessings I have now? There’s not a chance I would do that.

If you want a do-over, that’s fine with me. But even if I had a get out of jail free card, I wouldn’t use it. Life is too good to risk losing even one of the joys I savor every day.

On the same Facebook wall where I read Sharon’s lament, another person posted a picture about her own experience with mistakes. Here it is:

This is something we all need to remember. Our mistakes aren’t who we are, but at the same time, we are who we are in part because of those mistakes. If we learn from our errors, we are stronger. Once we put those mistakes behind us, we can help others who are in danger of losing their way.