There are only two things I hate...

...heights and jumping from them. Does anyone know what from movie that line is from*? I decided that I wholeheartedly agree with that line. One of the stupidest I ever did on my mission was give in the peer pressure of the Elders. My zone was all doing service together at an unfinished home. I can't remember what we were doing exactly, but I do remember that outside the door of the house there was a huge pile of gravel rocks. Some of the Elders were jumping from the roof of the house into the pile of rocks and they were trying to get the whole zone to participate. I think (sadly) that I caved before my companion and climbed to the roof (which in my defense actually was a fairly short one-story roof) and jumped off into the pile of rocks. The disastrous consequences were that I landed wrong and somehow gave myself whiplash. I could not move my head for the next three days and it was pretty painful.

This semester, I have been taking a swimming class. (A side kind of funny story is at the beginning of the year the teacher was calling roll and after he called my name, one of the other students said to me, "Neeley? Are you related to a statistics professor Neeley?" I responded, "I am a statistics professor." To which she replied, "Oh, I'm in your statistics class. You look different in your bathing suit." Awkward.) A few weeks ago our teacher "made" us jump of the 15 foot platform. I'm sure if I would have just plain refused, it would have been fine, but as we know from the previous story, I don't resist peer pressure well. So I took the leap, and it was again with painful results. It's not as easy as you might think to keep your body straight and so I hit the water at a rather painful angle. Furthermore, water rushed into my sinuses and my ears hurt very badly for the next several hours, so badly that I thought I might have broken my ear drums. I swear it took me 2 days to fully recover. The lesson that I've come away with is I do not like jumping from heights.

*The line is from the movie "The Muppet Christmas Carol" and it is said by Rizzo the Rat.