10 Things I Learned About Watching General Conference

General Conference was fantastic. I have too many scribbled notes, and fewer snacks than I started the weekend with.
The music was great, the speakers were great, and the voice-over translations for the Spanish talks were super helpful.

But all that aside, there are a few things I learned that do not pertain to the church this past weekend.
The random things that conference taught me, that anybody (someone who watched, or someone who did not) would understand.

1) Having fast internet does not mean that live streams will not fail. For both Saturday sessions and the beginning of Sunday's morning session there were hiccups in the connection. I know it wasn't my internet because the same issue happened while watching at the visitor's center. Always have backup browser tabs open for different sources - just in case.

2) If watching on the computer, wireless headphones are kind of a must. At least for me, as I was having to deal with letting the dogs in and out, or fetch beverages from the kitchen. Luckily, I just got a pair of these as the Mister upgraded, and that allowed me his old ones - which are wireless.

3) Do not expect your home to be distraction free. If it is never peaceful while the animals and/or other people are awake, it will be no different this weekend. The dogs do not understand conference (and neither does your Mister). They will still want your attention as normal, and you will have to explain multiple times that you cannot listen to two things at once. It will then be up to you to pick which to listen to.

4) Napping during the Priesthood session feels good. After watching both the morning and evening sessions on Saturday, another two hours that day was just not in the cards. And seeing as how the Priesthood session isn't "for" women anyway, it was awesome to have a rest, and wake up pretty much right when it would have ended.

5) I am a horrible note-taker. Oh I have plenty of notes, but I couldn't tell you who said all those cool quotes I tried to write down. And I couldn't tell you if I even got them written down properly. BUT, I can promise that I wrote down what was important to me, and that's really all that matters.

6) Do NOT try and follow #ldsconf on Twitter. Even with TweetDeck, which is an awesome thing, it was moving way too fast to try and keep up with even a little bit of it. Heck, my normal Twitter feed was moving far too fast to keep up with. Plus, really, everyone was "live tweeting" - there is no point to watch Twitter, if you're watching conference itself. But! It was trending all weekend - on Facebook, too!

7) (We are told to go into conference with a few personal questions, in regards to our faith or path in life) Do not be sad when the answers to your questions were not answered in a helpful manner. I sort of understand the answers I was given, but I do know that they are not at all helpful.

8) Do not laugh out loud at the hashtag jokes and expect anyone not listening to think it is funny as well. They won't understand why old(er) dudes making jokes about social media is funny - they will think it is embarrassing.

9) My attention span is just not at all what it used to be. I barely made it through the Sunday afternoon session. I'm not sure if 4 straight hours on both days would have been better than the 4 two hour blocks, but I was ready to be, well, not having to pay attention to something any more!

10) You will run out of the ink color you were using right in the middle of a section of notes. And you will be using your Coleto, and will not have another refill in that color, so your notes will be far more rainbow-y than you intended. And it kind of bothers you.

All in all, though, I am glad I took the time to watch.
Yes, it will take your whole weekend.
Yes, you will end up eating a ton of snack foods.
Yes, you will be sore from sitting for that long.

But so worth it.