On surviving the Krispy Kreme Challenge, Grace’s university selection, and the never-ending saga of our new oven (vol. xxvii, no. 2)

Dear Family,

Let’s get the important news out of the way first.

Saturday, February 4th was the 19th annual “Krispy Kreme Challenge,” a five-mile footrace that begins and ends at the North Carolina State University bell tower. It’s a fairly straightforward and not especially memorable out-and-back course – a few noticeable hills but nothing too daunting. 

What makes the course unique is the Krispy Kreme donut shop at the halfway point where everyone is expected to stop and consume a dozen donuts before running the 2½ miles back to campus. The challenge is to complete all this in less than an hour.¹

For some reason this sounded like a good idea to me, and so I pitched to my brothers the idea of all of us doing it together. In addition to being something I genuinely wanted to try, the race also functioned as a fairly transparent pretext for visiting my brother Matthew, who lives in Raleigh and whom we do not see often enough. (Matthew is the often missing Willis brother believed to exist by many members of the Silver Spring Maryland Stake even though hardly any of them have ever actually met him.)

It’s safe to say that the four² of us approached the race with different goals. Matt planned to walk the five-mile course, pick up his dozen donuts and take them home to his family rather than eating any of them himself. I guess that’s one way to do it. Grant and Andrew both planned to run the course but neither had any illusions about eating more than two or three donuts. 

I had somewhat loftier ambitions. Notwithstanding my less-than-impressive track record when it comes to food challenges,³ the nature of Krispy Kreme glazed donuts and my affinity for them gave me hope that I would be able to do it.

I covered the 2½ miles from campus to Krispy Kreme in a shade over 20 minutes and was promptly handed my box of donuts.

Hot from the oven, Krispy Kremes are basically inhalable in a single bite. Even at 200 calories apiece, the thought of downing 12 of them did not strike me as much of a challenge. However, it turns out that when they are not hot from the oven, but rather left outside in 25-degree weather for some indeterminate period of time, Krispy Kremes are barely edible.   

I hadn’t finished my first donut before concluding that I had no hope of finishing the whole box. But I kept eating them anyway. People employed a variety of strategies for ingesting the donuts. Some doused them in water. Others smashed several of them down together into two or three donut-shaped masses and ate those. All of these strategies grossed me out and I couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than just keep eating them one at a time. 

I was working on my 5th or 6th donut when some guy standing a couple of feet away started retching and vomiting back into his box of donuts. That was it for me. I tossed my box with a half-dozen uneaten donuts onto the mountain of other discarded Krispy Kreme boxes next to the overflowing dumpster in the parking lot and started running back to campus. It took me about 21 minutes to cover the final 2½ miles with the donuts inside me. I had spent about 8 minutes eating donuts at Krispy Kreme, and so my total elapsed time was a little over 49 minutes. The website lists me as an official finisher (and 6th out of 40 in my age group), but it’s not legit since I only ate half the donuts.⁴

According to my watch, I burned 661 calories running the 5 miles. According to the Krispy Kreme nutritional information, I ate 1,200 calories’ worth of donuts. I figure I burned another 500 or so standing around shivering and trying not to freeze to death before and after the face, so that’s about a wash.

Grant, Andrew, and I all finished at around the same time (though they ate even fewer donuts than I did). We quickly found each other and waited in the freezing cold for Matthew to finish. Matt, a power lifter, opted to walk the five miles because he believes running to be stupid. If you don’t know Matt, he’s basically a smart version of me. Like me, he is uninhibited in speaking his mind and it was not at all surprising to hear him wonder aloud (in the presence of runners) why these idiots would engage in a sport that is so detrimental to their bodies. Which is totally something I would say (if I weren’t a runner).

After the race, the four of us drove up to the same Krispy Kreme we had run by a short time earlier and actually bought more donuts. (Grant prefers the cream-filled ones to the glazed ones we got in the race.) We chased our morning donuts down with lunch from Chick-fil-A and and spent the afternoon playing Frisbee Golf, which I am almost as bad at as I am at real golf. We were joined there by my niece Morgan (and her boyfriend Cory) and by my nephew Henry and some nice girl Henry was seeing whose name I have long since forgotten (and whose name Henry may have forgotten by now, too). 

The Maryland Willis boys are going to need to come up with a new excuse for visiting Matt in Raleigh next year because I have no particular interest in engaging in any future competitive eating contests.

@#$%! New Oven Update

The saga of our new double wall oven finally resolved this month (we hope). As you no doubt recall from last month’s letter, January began with the delivery of this particular misbegotten appliance and ended with our awaiting a second visit from the service department (after the fix administered during the first service visit lasted all of about 30 minutes). 

The second team of repairmen came on February 1st to replace the part that the first guy had replaced a couple of weeks earlier. They must have done a better job because this time the oven worked for almost an entire day before crapping out again. I called the service department for a third time to offer my expert technical opinion (informed by my distinguished liberal arts education)⁵ that perhaps the failing part was merely a symptom of a more systemic issue and suggest that it might be easier to just give us a new oven. But it was after hours and no one answered the phone.

I was returning home from my morning run the next day while Crystal was pulling out of the driveway on her way to work. Usually when this happens (and it happens with surprising frequency) we either wave at each other or she rolls down the window to give me a kiss. This time she rolled down her window and I stuck my head in, but instead of a kiss she said something like, “You should feel free to give those people hell about our oven.” (Not her exact words – I may have cleaned it up a little.)

It amuses me that she apparently felt I required license from her to do this. She better than anyone is familiar with my propensity for becoming unhinged in response to frustrating customer service lapses (real and imagined). But I think I finally may have lived long enough and been through enough of these to realize that blowing up at people doesn’t usually help much. (Personal growth, baby!) And in a situation as absurd as this, simply articulating the facts in an understated tone was more than sufficient for the people at the store to conclude that a new oven was in order. 

The replacement oven arrived about a week later and miraculously continues to work even now, nearly three weeks later. I continue to live in near-constant fear that it could give out at any moment, something I attribute in part to recent experience and in part to the fact that I am my father’s son. 

Growing up I remember repeatedly complaining to Dad about the lack of power windows and locks in our family’s cars. Dad’s response to complaints of this nature was always the same: “It’s just one more thing that can break.” It’s the same reason why the house I grew up in contained the only kitchen in the known universe (or so it seemed) whose refrigerator did not have a built-in ice and water dispenser: “Those things always break.” (What’s funny is Mom and Dad’s current fridge does in fact have an ice/water dispenser and it really doesn’t work very well. Takes forever to fill a glass – like an old man with an enlarged prostate. The one in our kitchen works a lot better…for now anyway.) 

Waiting to replace old things until they succumb entirely to entropy is a trait I inherited from Dad and likely explains my aversion to replacing kitchen appliances more than once every 20 years. (This is also roughly the frequency with which we replace our cars, but that’s another matter.)

Replacing appliances so infrequently means that getting a new one feels a little like being transported into the future. I am amazed by all the fancy features and still trying to get my head around how the upper oven – something called a “convection microwave” – can somehow function alternatively as a microwave and as a convection oven.⁶ Someone will probably tell me that convection microwaves have been around since 1978 or something, but bear in mind that any kitchen technology invented in the past 20 years, I am just now finding out about it. 

Oh, and did I mention that our new gas range (which we also got last month, because why buy just one expensive kitchen appliance when you can buy two?) is wifi enabled? Until recently wifi-enabled appliances sounded to me like a solution in search of a problem. That all changed two weeks ago when Crystal texted me from yet another Sunday-afternoon church leadership meeting to tell me I needed to start preheating the oven. I was lazing in a recliner down the basement and did not relish the idea of standing up, climbing all the way up a flight of stairs, walking all the way across our modest-sized kitchen and pushing the start button on the range like a chump. And then it dawned on me: I can do this from my phone! Where have YOU been all my life? That’s why this was invented. For lazy people. Lazy people like me. That’s why wifi-enabled appliances exist. 

Grace is Going to College!

Grace’s acceptance letter to BYU arrived last weekend, slightly later than I expected.

It is relatively well known (I think) that BYU’s yield rate (the percentage of accepted students who ultimately enroll there) is one of the highest among so-called “national universities.” At 81 percent, BYU trails only Harvard and Stanford (both 82 percent).⁷ BYU’s uniqueness doubtless contributes to this. The Ivies have to compete with each other, but, for better or worse, there’s really no other place quite like the Y.

I mention this only because it appears Grace is going to adversely impact BYU’s yield rate by opting instead to enroll at Southern Virginia University, the small liberal arts college whose virtues I extolled in last month’s letter. Grace said she was half hoping BYU would reject her so her decision would be simpler. The fact that she felt that way solidified for me that SVU was where she really wanted to be and that she was making the right choice. 

And so even though a small part of me is sad to see her reject my alma mater (and the alma mater of her mother and two older sisters), and even though SVU is almost certain to cost me more money, most of me is happy to see her someplace she really wants to be, a place uniquely equipped to help her thrive. And all of me is delighted that she’ll just be a scenic three-hour drive away. I am genuinely excited for her. 

In other Grace news, she was the recipient of a “Gladiator Award” at the Northwood High School winter sports award ceremony and sang the national anthem at last Saturday’s regional meet and again at this morning’s state championships.

And with that, our youngest child is officially done with high school sports. The end of an era.

Fly, Eagles, Fly!

For only the fourth time in my life, I had the privilege this month of watching the Eagles in the Super Bowl.⁸ And for the third time in my life, I had the privilege of watching the Eagles lose the Super Bowl. Frustratingly, two of the three losses have involved fellow BYU alum Andy Reid (once as our coach and once as the winning team’s coach). 

The fact that we watched Super Bowl LVII⁹ at the stake president’s house¹⁰ and were joined there by the leaders of the Washington D.C. North Mission (both fully decked out in Chiefs gear – they are from Omaha) should dispel any notion that a consensus exists among Latter-day Saints about the appropriateness of watching sports (or anything secular – or anything at all) on TV on the Christian sabbath.¹¹ Fortunately the mission leaders went home at halftime (when the Eagles were ahead) and so I did not have to suffer the indignity of sharing the room with people who were happy about our team’s suddenly forgetting how to play defense in the second half. As miserable as I felt watching everything unravel in the fourth quarter, doing it in the exclusive company of green-clad loved ones made it marginally more tolerable.

It turns out that I enjoy watching the Super Bowl more when my team isn’t in it. Funny how that works.

Crystal

A number of Crystal’s social skills lessons this month have focused on helping her middle school boys with high-functioning autism learn how to see things from another person’s point of view, often with predictably hilarious results. (Saying “Joey stupidly thinks [x]” is not exactly tantamount to understanding Joey’s perspective.) I’m starting to think that boys on the spectrum are not necessarily any worse than the rest of us at appreciating other people’s perspectives. They’re just not as good at pretending to. 

Presidents’ Day, like much of the rest of this month, brought unseasonably warm weather. Crystal and I swam together in the morning and went for a bike ride together in the afternoon. It makes me think this whole climate change thing might not be so bad after all. I might feel differently in July.

Ari, Sophie, and Hannah

Ari spent President’s Day weekend (and a day or two beyond) in ProvOrem visiting their sisters. Ari intends to publish their own account of that weekend and the other goings-on in their life, which makes me happy. So stay tuned for that. I’m not sure when they will find time to do it as they have been busy staying ahead of project deadlines associated with their child development coursework at Howard Community College. But here’s a picture of Ari with Hannah:

It just occurred to me that I am the only adult member of this family who is only working (as opposed to working and going to school) right now. Crystal is teaching middle school and getting her masters at Hopkins; Hannah is working as a nurse while working on a masters in health informatics; and Sophie is cleaning toilets and taking out trash at the Harman Building while pursuing her undergraduate study at BYU.

If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then he hasn’t had much to work with around here lately. I’m sure you can relate.

Love,
Tim

1. Just to be clear about the rules, you can’t eat the donuts on the way back. You’re supposed to eat them at Krispy Kreme, show someone your empty box, and then run back.
2. Peter did not join us this year.
3. Notable among my long list of failures in this regard was a tradition known among Paris missionaries of my day as the “Molar-off” (I never knew how to spell it – this was an oral tradition.) The Molar-off challenge, as I recall, required contestants to eat 50 LU Granola cookies and drink one liter of milk in some condensed period of time (15 minutes comes to mind but I don’t remember for sure) and keep it all down for at least an hour. I was pretty well addicted to these particular cookies while living in France and the thought of eating 50 of them at once tended to fill me more with delight than dread. Nevertheless, photographic evidence exists of my having attempted the Molar-off on at least two separate occasions. I seem to recall having tried it a third time, but I don’t remember for sure. What I do know for sure is that I never succeeded in it. It is one of the great embarrassments of my life.
4. Not that I’m justifying anything, but mine was far from the only non-empty box in the giant pile of detritus outside Krispy Kreme.
5. BA, French, Brigham Young University, 1996
6. In the space of a month we have gone from having zero convection ovens to having three of them (counting the new gas range that we got at the same time as the ill-fated electric double wall oven). I don’t know how we made it this long, but somehow we did.
7. see: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/universities-colleges-where-students-are-eager-to-enroll
8. Pro sports team allegiances are completely irrational, of course. Players come and go constantly and, to quote Jerry Seinfeld, “You’re basically cheering for laundry.” Be that as it may, the durability of the bond that is created between an adolescent boy and his local sports franchises is rivaled by few other things. No amount of time living in the Washington D.C. area (and I’ve lived here for more than two-thirds of my life) can overcome the fact that I lived in the Philadelphia area from second grade through high school (including when I was 14 – scientifically proven (probably) to be the single most important age for nurturing a young boy’s lifelong sports loyalties). Consequently, I’m happy when the Nationals, Bullets (like a grumpy old man, I still refuse to call them the Wizards even though it’s been 25 years since they changed the name), Capitals, and whatever stupid name the football team calls itself these days do well. But I don’t feel any emotional attachment to those teams the way I do to the Eagles, Phillies and Sixers. (I don’t really care about hockey, but sure, go Flyers).
9. When it came to learning roman numerals in elementary school, nothing motivated me more than the Super Bowl
10. In case you’re not up on things, the stake president is my little brother Grant.
11. Everyone has their own way of observing the sabbath, and however you do it is fine by me. One way I personally observe it is by abstaining from training (or racing). Earlier this month, when an Orthodox Jew I sometimes train with on Tuesdays and Thursdays asked why I wasn’t at Sunday’s race, all I had to say was “Sunday is my Saturday.” Other people might have required further explanation, but she knew exactly what I meant. It also explains why we never bump into each other on weekends.