8/12 YSA conference: Day 1

I am bushed. It's been a rather long day from when I got up and got ready to go to the YSA conference. As you can see, I wrote a quickee letter to Jacob to complete his birthweeks of letters that I planned to write to him. Most of them won't be quickee, hopefully; hopefully they will be long and with information. I got up and went and was some of the very first people to be there, even though I got there like 15 minutes after it was suppose to start. Sister and Brother Mason were in the first aid room, along with many more adults when they arrived to take their place. I went several times to visit with them and they were extremely bored. My guess is they had a first aid booth because they thought they'd have more injuries due to games that were more physical, but in the end, I guess the physical games were scrapped, or at least saved til the very end of the day. Bishop had brought a first aid kit that would cover any injury, and had enough tools to actually perform a "lobotomy." Most of the adults were planning on taking off for Doug Williams and Ariel Bray's wedding reception, which happened today. So after dinner, I think most of them took off.

They had us sit in a huge circle of probably like 100 or maybe even more. I met a brother and sister combo named David and Sandra from Corona. They were Hispanic. They both work at DI, so I'll have to look for them the next time that I go, however, I should for sure see Sandra because she works books, mens, shoes, and display case. The game they had us play was if we had done one of the things that the MC had said, then we move one chair to the left, having us sit on the lap of someone who hadn't moved. It was quite funny. By the end, one had 4 people sitting on one lap.

Then they had the workshops. The one that interested me the most out of the four workshops we could go to was the one on Personal Finances. Brother McKell works as a CPA and has had experience helping the older crowd with finances. He gave us an article he wrote called 10 Principles for Financial Peace. The articles is in this link to his blog
https://www.markmckell.com/2017/03/02/10-principles-for-financial-peace/
He also gave us his personal website:
https://www.mckellpartners.com/

The next two were good. The brother that taught us about building relation-SHIPS, as Nephi did when he was asked to build a ship was good. The brother told us a story about how his wife had a christmas baby. How she went into labor Christmas Eve and had the baby 10 minutes later when after they had gone to the hospital.

The last workshop I went to was about using social media and the etiquette thereof. She told us about having a video of her husband and young baby go viral on Youtube and how even amongst the comments, there were trolls, even though it was unwarranted. She shared a clip of Elder Bednar talking about social media, when he was at Education week a couple of years ago. She challenged us to use social media wisely. I'll include the whole talk Elder Bednar gave, because I love it so much.

During the workshops, they had set up two service projects table. One was designing cards to send to kids in hospitals. The other was making hygiene kits for people off the streets. I did the latter.

Then we had tacos for dinner, which was so good. Then we played two games. Would You Rather, where the gym was divided in two, and you had to pick from two options, or choose neither or either or, like In n Out and Five Guys, Angels and Dodgers, Book of Mormon or New Testament, Thomas S Monson or Joseph Smith, Apple or Android, etc and so on. Then Cassidy Hadden had us play a version of Never Have I Ever, where the one in the middle would say something they haven't done and the seated crowd would move if they had done that thing, like skydiving, or gone out of the country, or to the east, or mine when I got up there was been older than 28. Both games were fun. The last was taxing because you had to run in order to get a seat. It was kinda nervousness anxiety inducing.

Fortunately for me, there was a fireside where Bishop Trask's dad, President Trask from the Phillipine mission spoke, for an hour. So I got to calm down and recover from the taxing work of the previous games.

Then we had a dance. I only stayed for about an hour because I'm not a big dance goer, especially when I don't have someone to dance with me. So after an hour, and some feeling of anxiousness, I left.

Got home safely, and talked for a while with Sarah.