The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food, America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.' Corn stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, 'We Shall Overcome.'

Rev. Jeremiah Wright then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ants food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

Moral of the story: Apparently, EVERYONE deserves some of what YOU'VE worked hard for.
(watch out who you vote for in 2010)

...I'm reading.

Clarke signs up for everything at church. In all honesty, its equally endearing and annoying. There is the sign up to clean the church. Annoying, but someone has to do it, right? So long as I'm not assigned toilet duty, I'm okay. Pushing around the behemoth vacuum cleaner counts as a workout, right?

There is a sign up for feeding the missionaries. Endearing.
With my little brother serving a mission, I hope that he encounters lots of amazing meals in the home of super cool members (like Clarke and me!). Of course there was that time Clarke signed up to feed the Spanish speaking missionaries. We don't speak Spanish. At all. Talk about awkward!

Then there is the sign up to work a shift at the cannery. Endearing until you've actually worked there and then annoying doesn't even begin to describe what waits for you behind those doors.

Today we worked at the cannery.
Its pear season at the cannery. I was relieved we would not be working with raw meat. Or vegetables. Pears are great, after all. I woke up this morning thinking I liked pears. Of course, when I wake up, I also like the thought of exercise. Until I roll out of bed.

We were ushered into the "plant" where the temperature was about 30 degrees below freezing and assigned to work wearing attractive hair nets and blue latex gloves. Duties were doled out on a first come basis and just as we were being ushered to the assembly line, the "duty doling" man pulled Clarke aside, undoubtedly impressed by Clarke's remarkable physique (hot....sizzle...), and rewarded Clarke with a special job. Not just any job doled to your average drone. He would be mastering the coring and peeling machine. Lucky.

I was a drone. Pointed to the assembly line and armed with a hand peeler. Oh goody.

Flanked on either side by elderly men, I set to work. Watching those peeled, cored, and chopped pears rumble from the machines and tumble out onto the conveyor belt in front of us. THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of pears. The pears were freezing cold! Maybe that's why the gloves are blue....so you wouldn't see your fingers turning a dead shade of pale during the process?

It was my job to watch each pear as it moved on by. If it had any seeds, I had to peel them out. If their was any remaining peel, I peeled it off. Exciting times.

The first hour was mind-numbing. And finger numbing. In my strained effort to be creative, I discovered a method of peeling that made each pear half look like a giant tooth. Char See, master fruit peeler.

The second hour was excruciating. I had no further feeling in my fingers. But they magically continued to peel those pears. Go fingers! And my frantic search for a wall clock proved fruitless in a room surrounded by fruit. Go figure.

The third hour was comatose. Somehow my mind continued to tick, though. First I ticked through this week's grocery list. Then next week's grocery list. I ticked through my imaginary travel itinerary...someplace warm where they don't grow pears. Then I mentally decorated for Halloween, fantasized about cake, daydreamed what it would be like be Mary Poppins, and finally gave up on "ticking" altogether. Ticking is way overrated when your imagination is competing with truckloads of pears.

The fourth hour. FINALLY. Just call me the energizer bunny. The frozen, hair net-wearing, and completely deaf version of the energizer bunny. Four hours of hearing those monsterous machines clanking and banging and crashing and smashing had rendered me hard of hearing. Four hours elbow deep in pear land had left me with frozen appendages. Four hours of complete, 100% monotony made me question whether or not I really liked pears much after all. Perhaps we should have done vegetables instead. No love lost there.

BUT...

In spite of my experience, here is why you should sign your name on that volunteer sheet that routinely floats its way around priesthood and relief society.

Because all the pears produced by the church are canned at the cannery in Garden City. That means, the tooth shaped pears I helped peel today, for four hours, will be packaged in cans and sent all over the world to help feed hungry children. A definite plus when I step back and consider that I have a child who eats on a regular basis, and several times in between each meal, at that.

And, well, thats the only good reason I could think of. But its a humdinger of a reason!

AND...

Here are a few handy dandy tips for your shift at the cannery.

#1 Wear jeans. Canning is a messy, sticky, and wet business!
#2 Wear sneakers! Again, canning is a messy, sticky and wet business!
#3 Memorize epic poems to recite back to yourself when your eyes begin to glaze over.
#4 Wear long sleeves for protection against freezing to death and stickiness.
#5 Your cannery shift is a bad hair day waiting to happen. Embrace that hair net!
#6 Wear ear plugs. You might be able to hear yourself think afterwards
(my ears are still ringing!)
#7 Memorize full symphonies to hum to yourself when you think you begin to fall asleep on the job.
#8 Wear a waterproof watch. There are no clocks! I looked.
#9 Try to get a cool job. Bribe if necessary. Conveyor belt drone is not the way to go.
#10 Make an appointment with your chiropracter for afterward. Your back will thank you.

...with this fantastically catchy tune guaranteed to make you sing and dance your way through the dulldrums of another Monday. Think this little gem could replace our national anthem??

Our grandparents had Pearl Harbor.
A terrifying event that we could not understand or comprehend.
Until September 11th, 2001.
We all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news, and how the gravity of the situation settled upon us; fear, disbelief, and confusion.
It was such a surreal experience.
But then the sun rose on September 12th, 2001. And we were a different country. A better country. We found reason for hope, reason for faith.
So put your politics and conspiracies aside and remember the people of 9/11.

This is fantastic:

Our niece, Becca, told her parents that what she wanted for her 10th birthday was to spend a week....with another family.

Our family.

We were tickled to think that we were 'exciting' enough to elicit the interest of a 10-year old girl...and for an entire week at that! The arrangements were made and we spent last week galavanting around Boise with our niece; Brock adored every second with his cousin.

One Saturday afternoon was spent on the Payette River, the beach at Banks. The four of us, plus two dogs crowded into Clarke's little pick-up and rattled on up highway 55 for an afternoon in the water, and under the sun.

Don't be decieved by this precious little face! He was luring in the fish with Smarties.

The water just sparkled and was very calm (where we were).

Becca was really good with Brock and they pal'd around all the time.