The feeling of "General Conference" is in the air

I love General Conference. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assembles two weekends a year, in April and October, to listen to church leaders and get a full dose of Spirit for the next six months. I look forward to conference weekend for several weeks before it actually arrives. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now.

I like to listen to talks in my car from the previous conference. I have made some attempt to keep a growing list of my favorite talks and listen to them in the car too. We used to have to buy the CDs from ldsdistribution.org, but now they put the mp3s on lds.org and I download them within hours or days and burn them to CD. I didn’t want my several years’ worth of sets to go to waste so I gave them to other people to listen to. I was happy to get back so many “thank you”s. The warm fuzzies made it all worth it!

The new signin on the church’s web site allows users to keep notes online. I’ve been marking conference talks mainly, but also making some notes in the scriptures. That came in handy one Sunday in particular. I can’t remember if I blogged about it or not, but I’ve told the story many times. One Sunday there was a mix up with the elders quorum instructor and nobody had prepared the lesson. I borrowed an iPad, accessed my notes on the conference talk and we had a nice lesson.

I love technology.

I also love that song from Naponeon Dynamite, where I got those words/lyrics.

One silly thing about scheduling General Conference is that it’s not on “the first weekend of April/October”. It’s actually on the first Sunday and the Saturday preceding it. The “numbers guy” inside of me has been looking forward to this happening for a long time. I’m sure it’s happened in my life, but I don’t remember when. I’m happy to see that it’s happening this month. Conference starts on Saturday, March 31. Woo!

Our family has a tradition for watching General Conference that we started to get the kids excited to watch it. We talk about this tradition leading up to it and Skyler has already been talking about it. What do we do? We make peanut butter popcorn and chow down as soon as the first session starts. We have usually made a double batch, but found that it’s way too much for us. That was enough popcorn to give us a treat during several of the sessions and still have some left over after Conference weekend. We have trimmed down our consumption to one batch.

Here’s the recipe. It's from our friends, T&L.

2 poppers popped popcorn, remove unpopped kernels
1/2 cup white karo syrup
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt

Cook the sugar, honey and syrup for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and add the vanilla, salt and peanut butter. Drizzle over the popcorn and stir. (This is the end of the recipe. Try it. And enjoy. Thank me later! :) )

The peanut butter really stands out in this recipe. It’s probably all the sugar and corn syrup. We actually halved the sugar in the recipe and I think it’s tastier now. It was too sweet before. (The recipe listed here has the amount of sugar we use.)