It may surprise some to know that I HATE cooking.  Maybe hate is a strong word…I just like eating better and especially if I didn’t have to cook it. (I guess cooking isn’t that bad when I know what I’m going to cook and I have ALL of the ingredients)   My mom cooked a delicious meal everyday while I lived at home.  Sundays were HUGE feast with my extended family and friends over to enjoy time together.  So, really I didn’t ever need to cook until I got married.  Yes, I do know how to follow a recipe and my family is not starving…I just don’t love to think of new meals and try to be creative in cooking something with the ingredients around our home.

So, this past week for Enrichment _{(a meeting with women from our church that meets once a month to once a quarter…depending on the needs of the women)} was focused on WHEAT!  I was out of my league and comfort zone, but ready to learn. We were challenged to use wheat in baking and cooking something.  I tried some “hamburger” patties that were made from wheat (no meat) and a really yummy tamale pie.  I met with the instructor the next day and she gave me a bag of whole wheat and let me use her hand grinder to get some cracked wheat…and her recipe book (she is going to be one of my good friends here whether she likes it or not!)  So, today I made that “Mock Tamale Pie” and it turned out pretty good.  It wasn’t exactly the same as the instructor’s pie…I still have some things to work out.  But, I am getting excited about cooking with wheat.  Next month I will learn about GLUTEN

Maybe one of these days I will enjoy cooking.  But lets be realistic…there are so many people that enjoy cooking and so many restaurants to try.  I don’t think that I need to LOVE cooking when there are restaurants and I have family/friends like YOU!

I debated on posting this, but decided to go ahead and let others discover what I just discovered last night.  I recently got a blackberry phone and also recently joined a gym here.  I get so bored at the gym while I work out since I usually don’t  have anything to listen to, so I decided to try download things to my phone to help out with my boredom.  I knew that I could download General Conference talks (talks from our church leaders who speak to memebers worldwide twice a year) so I went to our church website.  And that is where I made my discovery.  Not only can I download General Conference talks  but also all of the scriptures, Sunday lessons, and our church magazines here.  Matt and I paid to own the audio scriptures a few years ago, but now anyone can get them FREE and even in a couple of other languages.  I just think this is fantastic.  Now I can feel like I am learning while I exercise or hang out at the park.

And for anyone who comes across this blog and isn’t a MORMON…you can still check out the website and take advantage of the things you can download.  This is information from our official church website…the things that I believe, the reason why I served a mission to El Salvador for 18 months, why I am happy and makes me…ME!  And if you don’t feel like you know ME, then explore farleyfamily.net which is filled with videos, photos and blogs.  You will soon know more than you care to know about Tia Farley!

So, I had a FUN night last night.  Some women in the ward/church here got together and went to the movie theater to watch “Momma Mia” featuring Meryl Streep.  There was about 25 of us together with most of the women around my mom’s age or older…so I was one of the young ones!  We only had to pay 2.75 GBP since we were a big group and one of the managers of the movie theater was in our group.  I had never seen the movie before, but it was a musical and I LOVE musicals.  We attended the Momma Mia sing-a-long so the words were on the screen for all to sing.  It was a lot of fun singing to ABBA music…and when the song “Dancing Queen” was played we all got up and danced!  I know that my sisters would have had a great time there with me.

As far as the movie went…it was okay.  In Scotland it was rated as PG.  However in the states it is PG-13 which is more apporpriate.  The language was clean, but there were a couple of quick scene shots that I didn’t care for and they could have done away with one whole song “Does your mother know.”  Then it would have passed the “Tia Standard.”  (remember I live in my little bubble that I created for Kalani and I where we are not exposed to many things)  So, I am NOT going to recommend you go out and watch this movie…especially if you live in a similar bubble that I live in.  However I am planning on buying the soundtrack _{(at least some of the songs}) and I know that many of my siblings would LOVE to watch this movie, learn the songs and the dance steps.

During the second half of 2007 I was called to be the Young Men’s Secretary in the Tomball Ward (of the LDS Church) in the Cypress Stake near Houston, Texas. Given the large number of young men we had at the time, record keeping was a bit of a hassle. Various leaders had disparate versions of excel spreadsheetings containing rosters, Duty to God, etc.

Having a background in web applications development, I immediately saw an opportunity to leverage a web-based system to better manage our records. Over the course of the 2007 Christmas break YouthMaster.org was born. Its original scope only consisted of Young Men / Duty to God (no Young Women, no Scouting, etc) for the Tomball Ward. Since then I have gone back and refactored the system to easily support multiple wards and incorporate Scouting and Young Women as optional modules.

YouthMaster.org is free for all, and I hope to keep it that way. I have no plans to move to a yearly/monthly fee as some similar sites have done.

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Find out more at www.YouthMaster.org

People in Scotland would mention MIDGES, but we didn’t really know what they were talking about until this past weekend.  These small little buggers are annoying and they bite.  At least they don’t itch (edit: they *do* itch, it just takes a day or two for the skin reaction), but you can’t hear them like mosquitoes, so you don’t know they are around until you see them.  Poor Matt got bit the most since he would go outside to take photos while Kalani and I stayed in the car with the windows up!