Big changes

First and foremost,

wow.

Big changes this year, and we’re only 2 days into it.

President Monson just died.

He was an apostle literally longer than I’ve been alive, and has been the leader of our church for the last 9 years. Here’s the lds.newsroom.org link, but in case the site crashes again* – here’s his wiki.

He was a great leader and he will be missed.

I actually feel less like mourning, though, and more like celebrating.

“Congratulations, Pres Monson! You did it! I’m so happy for you! You lived a wonderful life and you touched a lot of people and you did a great job serving the Lord and I’m grateful for your teachings and your example… and, hey, while you’re over there could you give Gramsie a hug for me?”

It feels weird to be happy about it, but it is what it is. It’s probably related to having a friend recently pass away suddenly in her 50s. Also, a close friend lost her mother-in-law in a car accident last summer. Both of those were hard, unexpected, tragic-feeling losses. Dying of old age surrounded by family… that doesn’t have the same trauma around it at all.

I’m sure I’ll have time at some point to be sad about this, but for right now I’m in party mode, full of gratitude and peace about this change for the world.

2018 is going to be a great year.

So,

Hooray for the God’s plan of happiness! Hooray for a life well lived! Hooray for living apostles and prophets and the guidance they give us! Hooray for the next president of the church, and hooray for the revelation that will bring 2 new apostles by the next General Conference in April!

(Another vacancy in the Quorum of the 12 Apostles was created when Elder Hales died in October.)

*As a side-note here,

I just kinda wanna do a little journaling about Mr Smith’s backstory.

Since he prefers I not vent about that on fb, I’ma vent it here, mwahahaa. #itsmyblogandicanwritewhatiwantto

He worked for the lds church doing techy stuff from 2007-2011. I don’t know how many times I heard him explain what he did, but “techy stuff” is pretty much all I retained. Something about working on the back end of things to make sure users gets a streamlined experience when navigating between different sites?Because lds.org and mormon.org and mormonnewsroom.org are all actually quite different on their backsides.

Anyhow. Not too long after he started working there, a member of the 1st presidency of the church (James E Faust) died, and newsroom.lds.org totally crashed in the excess traffic. Pres Monson was, at the time, the other counselor in the 1st presidency. He was NOT happy about the techy fail there.

So at some point after that, Mr Smith was put on a special task force, whose mission was to make sure newsroom didn’t crash like that again. Doesn’t that just sound cool? Special task force. I love it. At the time, there was a lot of instability between lds.org and some of its sister sites.

Those were the days of having on-call rotations and holding your breath during General Conference, because yeah. He was one of those background guys who had to fix it when things broke… and who, eventually, got things stable enough that they didn’t break very often. It even handled the huge influx after Pres Hinckley’s death in Jan 2008.

YAY Mr Smith!

It was a pretty fun job in its own right, getting to see some of that behind-the-scenes stuff. He did a lot of good great things for the lds church’s techy world. We’ve joked around, as the years have gone by and things have changed (not always for the better), that things just haven’t been the same since he left.

There probably is some truth to that, actually. It’s sadly ironic that it was Pres Monson who wasn’t happy about newsroom crashing after Pres Faust’s death — and then it hard core crashes after his.

As of 11pm here, it looks like it’s working again — hopefully it stay up tomorrow when the rest of the world wakes up again.

Looks like it might be time for another special task force.
If you want Mr Smith’s help again, he and his super powers of awesomeness are available as a consultant between April-Sept.
(Totally not joking.)