MaeLyn's Musings

I was at work and didn't see the text. It wasn't until I arrived home and noticed Steven's car parked on the street outside our house that I had any idea of what had happened. Thursday, February 13, 2025 Journal entry:   Yesterday... Steven was laid off from his job at Krayden. It wasn't a huge surprise - I just didn't know whether he would quit from frustration, but this way he got a nice severance package and can collect unemployment. ... Recollections: Steven said he was working on a project at his desk when he was asked to talk with some people in a conference room. He was told that the company had been struggling and so some people needed to be laid off, including him. They allowed him to grab his coat before they marched him out of the building. It was a few days before he was given the rest of his belongings - including his plants. 

Note: 2025 was an interesting year. It was a hard one with a lot of challenges, but also a lot of blessings. I neglected my blog last year, but I do want to record some of the major events that happened so I have a public record of them. (And blogs are more searchable than my journals at the moment...) Friday, February 7, 2025, 8:25am. Incoming call/Mobile/1 min 2 secs. from Peter  Friday, February 7, 2025, 8:58am. Video recorded: S aturday February 8, 2025 Journal entry: Yesterday morning Peter left for work in the morning but shortly after he called me to say he had gotten in a car accident. Driving east on 97th there had been a glare on the windshield and he couldn't see and ended up hitting a car parked on the right side of the road and then the van fell on its side. I walked over to where a fire truck and police car were blocking traffic while they took pictures and measured and waited for tow trucks to come get the vehicles. Peter was okay physically. he had been wearing a se...

Like the morning sun Gently rising, gaining strength: AI overlords! An AI generated image of itself influencing the world It seems like every time I go online or use my cellphone these days, there are invitations to use AI to help me in my tasks. If I do a search on Google, I get an AI overview of whatever topic I looked up. When I open my email, I get summaries of my emails, reminders to pay bills, estimates of package delivery times,  spam emails helpfully filtered out,  even  offers to write my emails for me, all compliments of AI.  Realizing that it has been way too long since my last blog post, I tried an experiment. I asked ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of MaeLyn's Musings on the influence that AI has on our lives today. Here is what it came up with: The Quiet Role AI Plays in Everyday Life Artificial intelligence sounds like a big, complicated idea, but most days it shows up in very small ways. It’s there when a reminder pops up at just the right t...

  My dad passed away a couple weeks ago. He was diagnosed with cancer a while ago. He took medicines and chemotherapy and he was in remission for a while, and then one day he went to the doctor for a checkup and learned that it was back, and throughout his body. He started taking the medicines again, but they made him feel tired and awful and weakened his immune system. In March, my dad got sick with the flu, which turned into pneumonia. The doctors at the hospital didn't know if he was going to survive, and so I and most of my siblings travelled to see him to give him a final hug. Meanwhile, my dad decided that if he was going to die, he wanted to do it in comfort, at home.  He stopped taking the cancer meds that were making him miserable and went home on hospice to sleep in his own bed, where people weren't poking at him and waking him up at all hours of the night. When I arrived and first saw him, he was sitting up in a rocking chair, looking tired, but alive. In the next c...

This is a talk I gave today, based on a talk given by President Henry B Eyring in the October 2024 General Conference.  Many, many years ago, there was a man named Alma who started out as a high priest to a wicked king. He heard and believed the words of a brave prophet named Abinadi, and, because he tried to defend that prophet, he was exiled and hunted. He and his followers were conquered, enslaved, and later miraculously saved and led to a land with others who believed in God. He was called to organize the Lord’s church in this land. Somewhere along the way, Alma had a son, who he loved dearly and named after himself. As his son grew up, however, he was led astray. He may have been influenced by his friends (who were the sons of the king and should have known better). He became rebellious, wicked and idolatrous. Eventually, not only did he leave the church himself, but Alma the younger went about seeking to destroy the church of God. Can you imagine the sorrow that his father mu...

I love family dinners. Every night we try to sit down together to eat dinner. As my children have gotten older it has gotten a little more challenging as one child needs to leave to get to an event before another gets home from work. Now two of my children have gotten married and moved out so we have their company even less frequently. (It was almost three years ago that Hannah last sat down to dinner with us at home, but she is coming back to the States next month!!!!) In spite of all this, those of us who are at home try to sit down together to eat dinner whenever possible. These dinners together are a chance for us to share what we did that day, discuss and coordinate schedules, and sometimes just talk about whatever comes to mind, which is when things get fun. My kids were drama kids and there is an improv game where someone gives a group of actors a first line and a last line and they have to improvise a skit that incorporates those lines. Occasionally at one of our family din...