June 8th

I haven’t known much about professional storytelling until I met Sharon. Sharon is one of my coworker friends from Nu Skin, and she won’t be there for that much longer because she is too talented for her own good and will be going to coding school in July. But in the meantime, she has educated me thoroughly on weird Southern phrases, kept me out of trouble by dispelling boredom and entertained me with missionary lesson stories (she also works at the MTC as an investigator). Sharon came out to Utah from Tennessee largely because of the Timpanogos StoryTelling festival, where she got a job telling stories. I didn’t realize there is so much that goes into telling a story, and how to make it memorable and entertaining, so it has been fun to hear of different techniques from her. On Monday she invited me to the Orem library, where she is teaching a storytelling camp for kids. So I took an early lunch and was able to see her share three stories. She told one of those repetitive stories, so it was so fun to hear the kids’ reactions as they predicted what would come next!

This is Sharon sharing Jack's First Job. My favorite is the faces of the girls in front of me-totally into it :)

It reminded me of teaching the Large Group Meetings at the MTC, and how I learned to love being up in front of people and getting them into the subject for that day. I am loving learning more about storytelling, and have been researching it a bit in my freetime. I’m dead set on going to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival this year on September 5th, so I hope little baby Wasden cooperates!

Tangent: Oh, by the way, we are taking a break with the name Marian for now. We both still like it, but there are other names on the horizon that are coming more into favor. We’ve decided there is no way we are going to be able to decide on a name before she is born-there are so many good ones, it will just be a matter of matching her personality/looks.

Back to the day: Later that day, about half an hour before I left work, Chris informed me via a very excited text that he had just submitted the Telltale previs he had made to apply for the job. This was a complete surprise, because he had told me just that morning that he was planning on cleaning a few things up before sending it all in. Turns out that Chris’ connection to the company, Andi, had found out that the position would be closing soon, and told Chris to get it in pronto! So when I picked him up we were full of jittery, high spirits and decided to celebrate before running over to FHE. We had a quick dinner and ran over to Rita’s (a local Italian Ice place we discovered recently and fell in love with) before heading out to the golf course to meet up with two of the FHE groups. By the end of the meeting, we were both completely sick! The rest of the night we lethargically laid around the house until we felt better. I don’t know if it was because we ate quickly, or the Ritas was just too much, but the conclusion was that in celebration of Chris’ exciting application news, we made ourselves sick :) Irony at its finest.

The next day Chris was sitting in the lab, doin’ his thing, when his phone rang. He looked at the unknown number-the area code was 707. California. Which just so happens to be the same place Telltale is. He barely kept himself from hyperventilating as he answered the phone…

And it ended up being State Farm! True to their motto-State Farm is there. Apparently even when you are on pins and needles waiting for a job interview. :) It took him a few hours to fully recover from that traumatic experience.