National YSA Conference 2011: Saturday Morning "What heresy is this?"

( without pictures for time being as blogger doesn't want to play nice :-)

My first thought on Saturday morning as my alarm blared into life was pretty much the same thought I had every Saturday morning of every conference I have been too.

“ I’m paying to get up this early? What the heck was I thinking”

Of course my mood hadn’t been helped by the fact I had been woken up three times by the darn fridge suddenly getting louder. I think I finally had enough around 3am and unplugged the darn thing! Because at that time of the morning even the novelty of having a cold drink in your room tends to pall when compared to interrupted sleep!

And of course let’s not forget the awful cramp pains that shot up my leg the moment I woke up and tried to move! It just goes to show that as you get older your ability to brush off pain seems diminished. One of my nieces falls out and cuts her head open on the side of the fridge leading to a whole lotta blood pretty much everywhere ( or at least that’s the impression you get when you speak to her sister who is more than happy to tell you in great detail everything that happened) and she’s up and running about in a short while. Me I spend ages hobbling around trying to loosen my leg up enough so I can actually put weight on it!

Anyway at least I had a good old fashioned English breakfast to look forward too. At least I thought I did. Because as it turned out the fact that there were girls and boys in the same hall! was not the only downright bizarre thing to happen. Yes they were serving breakfast without bacon. They were serving a cooked breakfast without bacon! Seriously what heresy was this? Where was the bacon?

All right I know not having bacon for breakfast is not the most earth shattering thing that could have happened, but what can I say , I’m old. I’m getting set in my ways : - )

Well we kind of got an answer to where the bacon might have gone later but of course more on that one later as well.

Anyway one breakfast and one rather botched first attempt at using the shower ( not at the same time of course)which involved a rather panicked moment when I thought the water wasn’t draining away, I headed over to the conference centre to see what was going on. All of this of course still well before the time I usually get up on a Saturday morning.

The first thing I found was a stall from the LDS Bookshop.

So I decided to have a look to see if there was any interesting reading material, as I hoped for something light and interesting. Unfortunately there was only one book which fell into the category of light reading and that was Dude don’t be a lemuel. The other books were on “light and fun” topics as the dangers of addiction, recovering from addiction, encouraging heterosexual relationships, understanding isiah, the danger of porn, the dangers of internet porn, how to avoid internet porn, how to repair relationships after addiction and so on and so on and on.

Still at least he had bought a good selection of “mormon” films and as he could take cards for once I decided to invest in a couple. (important later, hope your still keeping notes).

Most conferences had Saturday starting with activities, activities and more activities. However a change to the usual schedule, we were going to start with the service projects rather than leave them till the Monday. Because lets face it most people were half asleep but that time anyway. As there was a choice of workshops I decided to take the one on indexing first . ( hey it was history and computers do you really think I was going to go for the knitting workshop?) Plus although the cemetery cleaning workshop sounded “different” ( but strangely enough not creepy, I had a feeling staying on site as it were was more of the right choice.

So onto the indexing, where I made my first new friend of the day as we were shown how to start indexing genealogical records before they actually let us try some! I ended up indexing a set of WWII draft cards from the Hawaii, which was a bit strange as I’m sure the doctor who originally wrote them up imagined that 60 plus years later some guy in England would be copying them into a something called a laptop.
Anyhow that workshop ended really quickly as there were only a few laptops but a lot of people. As most of the workshops were in full swing at this point, I decided to wonder around the different workshops to see what was going on and just generally soak up the atmosphere for want of a better term and see who I could run into as it was a little late to jump into the knitting workshop as lets face it my knowledge of knitting is mainly limited to the fact it uses wool, needles, and you knit one then pearl one.

Still I did find a surprising number of the guys doing the knitting workshop and actually concentrating really hard. Whether or not that’s because they were enthralled with the opportunity to serve or they were just trying to figure out what the heck was going on, I’ll leave that one as a point of discussion.
Mind you this was in a contrast do some of the guys who were helping with the blanket making workshop who seemed to decide that rather then making blankets then wanted to see what they would look like as mummy. In a quite fetching shade of pink too.

Finally there was the workshop making baby bibs. Some YSA’s creativeness ran away with them shall we say so some of these babies are going to have the coolest looking bibs ever.

Still time moved on rather fast and all too soon it was time for lunch. Which as I’ve learned can be quite a double edged sword, as for every year they’ve got it so right, there’s been a year where it’s been gotten so wrong ( remember the crayfish and rocket debacle.... shudder). And based on the lack of bacon ( yes I’m still going on about it) at breakfast I didn’t think signs were good.

But I was surprised to find lunch was excellent. Not only did I manage to bag myself a rather nice Tuna sandwich, I also got a kitkat too ( yes I can be that easy to please). There was also cheese and onion crisps as well, which as it turned out were the only crisps they ever gave out in the lunches. I dunno maybe they got a job lot on cheese and onion crisps, or maybe it’s just a Nottingham thing?

Mental note, must ask phoenix.

Anyway lunch gave us all the opportunity to sit outside and soak up some sunshine ( yes I was actually outside and no, no photographic proof before you ask ) . I’ll admit it was only a disappointing lunch in the fact that I didn’t have a nice companion to share it with, but it could have been a lot worse.

I headed back to the hall for a quick rest. Having no idea what was about to happen.....