Continuing my tradition for aggressive career moves, I recently acquired a shiny new job. While it can be hard to start working with a bunch of people you don’t know on unfamiliar projects and with foreign processes, at least my new desk was only on the other side of the building.
Dinosaur National Monument
When Shannon’s parents come to visit, we frequently head out on short trips with them. In the past, we’ve gone to Moab and Yellowstone. This October we went to Dinosaur National Monument, which has a somewhat misleading name.
Biker Boy
Maybe it’s the life insurance. As regular readers may recall, I took a beginning motorcycle class last summer after Shannon signed me up as an anniversary present. This year for Fathers Day, Shannon bought me a very nice Joe Rocket riding jacket. So I have to wonder why, when I’m surrounded by men saying, “Yeah, I’d love to have a motorcycle, but my wife won’t let me,” my own wife is largely responsible for me becoming a motorcycle owner.
Memphis Road Trip
When I tell people that my family and I drove from Utah to Tennessee, the typical reactions are shock, sympathy and sanity questions. I have to admit that before leaving, I was worried about going crazy myself. If the distance wasn’t enough, the car we were taking had only a radio — no cassette or CD player. But if you apply the moniker “road trip” to the experience, it takes on a new light. We’re not just driving, we’re having an adventure.
Genetic Obsessions
I was somewhat fond of Star Wars when I was a kid. I collected cards and action figures. I thought if I could just save up enough money, I could buy the Millennium Falcon. Unfortunately, as mentioned elsewhere, I was spending every cent I could scrape up seeing the movie over and over. So it’s a bit strange to find Ethan, and to a lesser degree Gerrit, obsessed with Star Wars without ever having seen the movie at all.
Kindergridiron
Ethan played flag football this fall. I felt like I had been lax in my fatherly responsibilities after his first practice. Ethan had heard of football, and had seen glimpses of BYU games occasionally, but I think practice may have been one of the first times in his life someone had thrown a football to him.
Un-Easy Rider
I’ve occasionally had dreams that I’m riding a motorcycle. Having done very little of that in real life, I think it’s something my subconscious pulls out to represent freedom, and escape from worries. Shannon, good wife that she is, tries to make my dreams come true, and so signed me up for a beginning motorcycle class.
The End of an Era
It is with some amazement that I announce the end of an era: Ethan is no longer obsessed with garbage.
Issue 28
| March 3, 2002 | Issue 28 | Lehi, Utah |
In this issue:
Weathering the Weather
One of the blessings of working with the Young Men is a tremendous appreciation for the simple things in life, like sleeping indoors during a blizzard, for example.
I gained this appreciation in December as the Young Men’s president, John Boyd, and I took a couple of boys camping up American Fork Canyon. The idea was to build snow caves, which I remembered being pretty fun when I was a Scout. Unfortunately, our expert assessment of the snow concluded that it was a little too dry and crystalline to make good caves. That assessment was concluded right after we dug John out from under our collapsed cave.
John, moments before the collapse.
Dec. 14, 2001
A better strategy might have been to just roll up inside a tarp, because at the rate it was snowing, you could have had a nice cave by just holding still for a while. Around midnight, when we were finally ready to attempt sleep, the snow had stopped. We slept under the stars inside our collapsed cave, because three walls are better than nothing.
It was mentally tough to strip off our outer layers of clothes in order to get into sleeping bags. What was harder was putting those outer layers back on again in the morning. There’s something disconcerting about seeing all the ice still caked on the outside of your coat exactly as it was the night before. I guess some irrational part of my brain expected it to melt instead of stiffening up even more.
We burned through the firewood we brought with us pretty quickly, but we were lucky to find a few small dead trees that we pulled down for fuel. While warming them over the fire, I discovered what the insides of gloves look like when one made that subtle transition from cold and wet to on fire.
The snowy night made for a beautiful morning.
Dec. 15, 2001
The morning was cold and clear, but when we finally broke camp (and after a little sledding) we discovered that the mountains had spared us of the wind portion of the blizzard. Back home, the snow had drifted several feet high. Shannon had been pretty worried about us as the house rattled through the night. It felt especially nice to curl up with her that next night, in a soft, warm bed, and with a roof over my head.
Olympics Photo Essay
Patrolling Blackhawk helicopters were a frequent reminder that the games were afoot. Other than them, and the torch relay, Lehi remained pretty quiet during the 2002 Winter Games. We did venture out a few times, though, for some Olympic experiences.
Waiting in the freezing cold to see the
Olympic Torch be carried through Lehi.
Feb. 6, 2002
After a quick warm-up in the Lehi Bakery,
we caught up with the torch-bearer for a photo-op.
Feb. 6, 2002
A highlight was a men’s hockey game at the Peaks Arena in Provo. Kerry and I went with Shannon’s parents (Shannon stayed home with Ethan, who was sick).
Feb. 13, 2002
We somehow managed some great seats to see
Ukraine beat up on France.
Feb. 13, 2002
We had dinner at the Rodizio Grill two tables away from Matheus Inoc�ncio (left) and Edson Bindilatti (right) of the
Brazilian bobsled team.
Feb. 15, 2002
Renato Mizoguchi, who rode luge for Brazil, was also there.
Feb. 15, 2002
We went downtown to check things out, but other than waiting in line for security checks, listening to the anti-Mormons, and watching thousands of other people wandering around, there wasn’t much to do.
Feb. 18, 2002
The Olympic Square had some good dancing music.
Feb. 18, 2002
Losing Ethan
Last Tuesday, I lost Ethan — every mother’s nightmare. It didn’t happen the way I’d always feared it would. I wasn’t shopping at the mall or the grocery store. I lost Ethan at home.
Ethan and Gerrit had spent the morning playing at a friend’s house, and when they got home, Gerrit was ready for his afternoon nap. After reading the boys a story, Ethan slipped away while I indulged in some rocking and cuddling with Gerrit. Leaving Gerrit in his bed, I glanced into Ethan’s room. Ethan wasn’t there.
Ethan is supposed to have “quiet time” in his room while Gerrit naps, so I assumed he was trying to play hooky — maybe downstairs playing on the computer. In any case, I thought he’d be my shadow in less than 10 minutes so I dropped into my favorite chair to read for a few minutes. Two chapters later, it dawned on me: the house was perfectly quiet — too quiet. Ethan was not playing on the computer, or hide and seek, or anything that would require he be in the house. Ethan was gone!
I ran downstairs to check the office — it was dark — called Ethan’s name, checked the back door — it was locked — ran back upstairs, yelled Ethan’s name with that special parental tone, a combination of ollie ollie oxen free and get out here this minute before I tan your hide — no response.
The first seeds of panic were beginning to grow. Fragments of our pre-story conversation were coming back to me. Ethan couldn’t find his robot and was afraid he’d left it at Danny’s house. I had brushed him off and said we’d worry about finding it later. Did Ethan set out for Danny’s while I rocked Gerrit? I ran out the front door yelling Ethan’s name. It was freezing cold and very windy. Ethan wouldn’t leave would he? Danny’s house was far away.
I ran back into the house and reached for the phone, torn over who I should call first, the police or Eric. Instinctively, I dialed Eric to report I’d lost his first born — and please don’t hate me forever. I was still searching the house, rechecking all the bathrooms calling, “Ethan — EEEETHAANN!” Eric answered, but before I could utter my first hysterics I dropped the phone. I picked it back up and told Eric that I had lost Ethan, and in relief, just found him.
Rechecking Ethan’s room for possibly the third time, I finally saw him angelically sleeping in a jumble of blankets on his loft bed. I was so relieved. I tiptoed out of his room, shut the door, and went back to my book, this time enjoying the silence a house with napping children. A part of me wanted to shake Ethan awake while crying, “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” But Ethan napping is such a rare thing, why ruin it because his mother is crazy?
Brain Surgery
I took a step deeper into Geekland recently by overhauling my home computer. Sure, I’ve been inside the case lots of times, but this time I pulled out and replaced the motherboard, main memory, and the CPU. In computer terms, that’s something like a brain transplant — or maybe even a brain and heart transplant.
I start to feel the need for an upgrade around the time that I can triple my computing power for a fraction of what I paid for my existing system. But I even showed some restraint and didn’t buy the fastest processor available — just a measly AMD Athlon XP 1900+ instead of the 2000+. I suppose that small discretion was offset by buying a bleeding edge motherboard.
I put in an Nvidia nForce based motherboard, which has so much stuff integrated into it that I went from having something packed into every expansion slot down a nice tidy chassis.
The bleeding edge part is that my system is a little flaky in a couple of respects. Hopefully newer drivers will straighten some of that out. The nice side is that my 3DMark2001 score (a graphics benchmark) improved from 900 to 2256. Whew! I was starting to get near the bottom end of the hardware requirements for the latest games.
Issue 27
Death
American Fork, Utah doesn’t seem a likely place for a terrorist attack. There’s not quite the same iconic visibility as the World Trade Center. If you stretch it a little, the 2002 Olympics are a possible target just a few months and a few miles away. Still, American Fork?
A couple of weeks ago, Shannon, the kids and I went to a custom frame shop to pick up a montage of photos from our Yellowstone trip. Shannon had ordered it a while back to send as a thank you gift to her parents. Then we went next door to Smith’s to get a couple of groceries. We weren’t in too much of a hurry, so I let the kids dawdle a little.
Later in the evening, Shannon and I drove by there again on our way out to dinner. We noticed a news truck, a bunch of police, and other emergency vehicles. We kind of wondered what was going on, so we watched the 10:00 news.
It turns out that someone had set off a bomb in front of Smith’s. The news report says that it was a pipe bomb inside a large container of fertilizer. Fortunately, the fertilizer didn’t explode, so there wasn’t any significant damage. A woman was right near the explosion, but she was unharmed other than a temporary hearing loss. The news clip had an interview with the man from the frame shop we had just been to that morning.
The bomb went off at about 11:00 AM, which was within minutes of when we walked by where it was. It seems so hard to believe. Who would do that? It doesn’t take too many “ifs” for a real disaster: if we had dawdled just a little more, and if the bomb had exploded completely, for example.
So far as I know, the police and FBI haven’t had any luck tracking down the perpetrator. [Update Dec. 20: Two men have been arrested, with the thought that they were going to try to use the bomb to rob the store. See the news article.]
The 9/11 attacks were horrible, but many smaller tragedies happen every day. I’m thankful that this wasn’t one for us.
Fame
Some may call me a name dropper, but I met Henry B. Eyring of the Quorum of the Twelve, an apostle of God.
Eric and I were having family over for a barbecue and I couldn’t find any paper plates so I packed up the boys and headed to the closest grocery store — Albertson’s.
I was pushing the boys along in one of those rare peaceful shopping moments. I wasn’t ranting, “No, we’re not buying: candy, toys, matches put that back!” Nothing like that when I looked into the eyes of a very tall man. He was well dressed white shirt, tie, glasses; bald. He smiled and I smiled and that was all. We were just two shopping carts passing in the night — I mean aisle.
I continued with my shopping trying to look normal while in my head an agitated voice was saying, “That was Henry B. Eyring. Henry B. Eyring just smiled at you. Henry B Eyring shops at Albertson’s.” I told Ethan and Gerrit we had just seen an apostle.
At the check-out I noticed Elder Eyring over in the bakery. By now the voice in my head had turned reproachful, “Why didn’t you speak to Elder Eyring — introduce the boys?” I felt giddy.
Never one to miss an opportunity for bodily harm, Ethan was hanging perilously out of the cart. The woman ahead of me mistook him for one of her own three boys and began reproaching him. She soon realized her mistake and apologized but I told her she could discipline my children any time. Since we were talking I couldn’t resist pointing out Elder Eyring to her and we laughed about proper grocery store etiquette. Is it really stalking if you follow an apostle through the market just to see what he buys? Is it inappropriate to go up and shake hands?
Well, after I paid for my paper plates I noticed Elder Eyring was now also waiting in a check out line. I truly agonized for a few seconds over whether I should go back over to him or just leave before my children broke something I’d have to pay for. I wanted my boys to shake an apostle of the Lord’s hand. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I took the boys over and said, “Elder Eyring I want my sons to meet you.” He was so kind asked their names and said they were fine young men and I cried — what a wimp.
After shaking Elder Eyring’s hand we left. I was feeling ebullient. The woman who’d been standing just in front of Elder Eyring caught up to me and said, “Was it really him?” Yes!
Now I’m left to wonder how Sister Erying gets her husband to buy milk and croissants.