Today my family came into town. It is the first day of Chris’s mission. So we dropped him off at the MTC today. It was interesting. It was the first time I have been beyond the front room of the MTC since my mission. We went to the whole orientation meeting and watched ‘Called to Serve’ and then Chris…or now, Elder Stiles went out the back door and we went out the front door. That was it. Now he’s probably exhausted and sleeping in his bed as I write this. He better be because it’s past the bed time that he will soon have for the next 2 years. When I walked through I had a lot of flashback moments. It was interesting. I guess it was the start of one of the most significant parts of my life to this point. I thought back to all the things I learned the troubles I had, the spiritual experiences, so many things. Now Chris is going to go experience all that. But at the same time his experiences will be unique to himself, while at the same time being extremely similar to those of every other missionary. We it’s a strange thing. But he is going to have the best time of his life.
After we left Elder Stiles we saw Uncle Ken outside. He was a bit late, but we talked to him for a while. Actually everyone else talked with him and I got to play with Aubrey and keep her occupied the whole time. That girl started running around and must have covered a full mile! So much energy! She’s just an adorable little girl though. I love it when Melanie and Mathis come down, or I get to go up to Bountiful. I can just play with my little niece and it’s sooo fun. And now to make it better, my nephew lives up here too! Who happens to love his uncles! I certainly don’t have a problem with that.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Festival of Colors
For the final installment of this weekend’s activities I’ll talk about the Festival of colors. And this time there will be pictures! Joy. So there is a Hindu temple in Springfield or American Fork or some town down South of Provo. Every year at the beginning of spring they throw a party at the temple to celebrate the first day of spring. They let people look around the temple and then they sell colored flour. Yes flour that is not white. It comes in the assorted colors of blue, pink, orange, yellow, and red. So when the place is packed and the flour is all sold, they take a witch that they made and light it on fire. I guess that’s supposed to scare away the witches that come by in the spring. Well the minute that they light the witch on fire, everyone grabs those bags of flour and starts throwing the flour everywhere. Up, down, sideways, diagonally, and at your friends. It’s a blast. So within seconds you are covered from head to toe in all these beautiful colors. It’s quite the site. I had the lucky opportunity to be in the line of fire of some random guy running by who landed a big puff of blue in my mouth. That stuff tasted really gross. I was spitting blue spit for 5 minutes, really dark blue as well. It was interesting. It was perhaps the dirtiest show that I’ve ever taken when I got home. All the colors mixed together to make a gross brown color in the shower. It was quite gratifying to become clean though.
Ward Talent Show
This last weekend was a busy weekend. I already mentioned the Frisbee scrimmage that we had. There were some other amazing events as well. Friday night was the talent show. It turned out to be a hit. We had about 20 numbers and they all were pretty cool, everything from people balancing books on their heads to a dude singing Brittany Spears ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’. I got to be the “tech guy” for the night too. I just took care of all the sound bytes that people needed and everything else of that manner. It didn’t go completely without problem but it all worked out. I also had two numbers that I was involved in. One was planned well in advanced. I played a song that I wrote called ‘No More Salsa’. It’s got a story behind it actually and I shared the story before I played the song. So I’ll share the story here.
It was a warm summer night in late August. Conditions were perfect and excitement was in the air. This night was to be a night of a legendary first date. The activities were superb and both parties got along with each other great. (Switch to 1st person). We made homemade salsa to start the date of. Straight from fresh tomatoes, onions, green onion, cilantro, and other secret ingredients that are only secret due to my lack of memory. So we made this salsa and it was a bowl of celestial goodness. Let me tell you. We were both in heaven and the best part was that there was leftover salsa. So we had some other plans that night, like horseshoes, and some Brian Reagan greatness. And my plan was to send the remaining salsa to her at the end of the date. Well we both forgot about it at the end of the date and I took her home. The next morning I realize my error and figured, well at least it’s a great chance to see this cool girl again and drop the salsa off. So morning made its appearance on Sunday and I popped out of my bed and went to the refrigerator to retrieve that Tupperware of sweet delight and bring it on over to that girl’s house. Well much to my dismay, upon opening the refrigerator, I discovered that there was no more salsa left. How could this have happened?! Did some little brother discover the addicting substance and devour it in a frantic frenzy? I hadn’t a clue, and my family was all gone to stake conference, so the mystery would remained unsolved for at least another 3 hours! What could I do?! So I went over to the piano to vent my frustrations about the loss of the tasty food and a perfectly good excuse to visit a cute girl. I started to pound minor chords and the result was this song, which has been appropriately named, ‘No More Salsa’.
Nice story eh? So I played the song and people seemed to like it. Or at least that’s what they told me. They probably felt bad for me after hearing about such a tragic event in my life.
Now I said I was in two numbers. The second number was even more fun. Here’s how it went down. On Wednesday morning I got a text from my friend Caitlin asking me if I had the music for ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’. Well I didn’t but I logged onto music-notes.com and bought it right then and told her that I did. The wonders of the internet are wonderful! So she said that she wanted to do it for the talent show. Later on that day I ran into her roommate who it turns out was the mastermind behind this plan. She also had plans to get other people to act it out. So Thursday night came and Caitlin came over so that we could run the song through a few times. It turns out that this song is a whole lot of fun to play. We had Tricia and Emily singing harmony and John playing the devil with Neal as Johnny. So we got to have quite the shin-dig for the last number in the talent show. Caitlin and I decided that we had the coolest parts of everyone. We just got to rock out the whole time. It was basically awesome.
It was a warm summer night in late August. Conditions were perfect and excitement was in the air. This night was to be a night of a legendary first date. The activities were superb and both parties got along with each other great. (Switch to 1st person). We made homemade salsa to start the date of. Straight from fresh tomatoes, onions, green onion, cilantro, and other secret ingredients that are only secret due to my lack of memory. So we made this salsa and it was a bowl of celestial goodness. Let me tell you. We were both in heaven and the best part was that there was leftover salsa. So we had some other plans that night, like horseshoes, and some Brian Reagan greatness. And my plan was to send the remaining salsa to her at the end of the date. Well we both forgot about it at the end of the date and I took her home. The next morning I realize my error and figured, well at least it’s a great chance to see this cool girl again and drop the salsa off. So morning made its appearance on Sunday and I popped out of my bed and went to the refrigerator to retrieve that Tupperware of sweet delight and bring it on over to that girl’s house. Well much to my dismay, upon opening the refrigerator, I discovered that there was no more salsa left. How could this have happened?! Did some little brother discover the addicting substance and devour it in a frantic frenzy? I hadn’t a clue, and my family was all gone to stake conference, so the mystery would remained unsolved for at least another 3 hours! What could I do?! So I went over to the piano to vent my frustrations about the loss of the tasty food and a perfectly good excuse to visit a cute girl. I started to pound minor chords and the result was this song, which has been appropriately named, ‘No More Salsa’.
Nice story eh? So I played the song and people seemed to like it. Or at least that’s what they told me. They probably felt bad for me after hearing about such a tragic event in my life.
Now I said I was in two numbers. The second number was even more fun. Here’s how it went down. On Wednesday morning I got a text from my friend Caitlin asking me if I had the music for ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’. Well I didn’t but I logged onto music-notes.com and bought it right then and told her that I did. The wonders of the internet are wonderful! So she said that she wanted to do it for the talent show. Later on that day I ran into her roommate who it turns out was the mastermind behind this plan. She also had plans to get other people to act it out. So Thursday night came and Caitlin came over so that we could run the song through a few times. It turns out that this song is a whole lot of fun to play. We had Tricia and Emily singing harmony and John playing the devil with Neal as Johnny. So we got to have quite the shin-dig for the last number in the talent show. Caitlin and I decided that we had the coolest parts of everyone. We just got to rock out the whole time. It was basically awesome.
Frisbee Shenanigans
So I’m a little behind and I’ve decided that in playing catch up I’m going to try to do many smaller posts instead of one larger post. Maybe that will work out. I’ll start with Frisbee golf. Basically that is one fun game. Well at least the way we play it. It turns out that the guys on my Frisbee team have a course that they have set up on campus. They have 18 land marks on campus that everyone has memorized and we go all around campus to hit these land marks with a Frisbee from a starting point. Every hole has a par and everything. We use some old junky discs because we wouldn’t want to ruin our nice ones by sliding them across the street. Well it turns out that I am not all that great at Frisbee golf. I’ve never been much of a long distance thrower when it comes to Frisbee. In fact I’m not all that great of a handler at any distance. But I’ve improved my short game a lot over the last few months. And my long game has gotten better too. However; I still have a lot of room for improvement. I was about 20 strokes worse than everyone else on the team. But that’s ok. I’m getting better, and I have other strengths in the game as well. Well… the Ultimate Frisbee game that is. Not really Frisbee golf. I’m all around bad there.
A little news from the Ultimate Frisbee team: BYU-Idaho came down last weekend and we we’re able to have a scrimmage game with them on Saturday morning. It turned out to be a lot of fun. And yes, we did win. A lot of the guys who came down were the guys who I played with a few months ago in the Vegas tournament. This time I was playing against them. It was fun to see the guys again. Even if we didn’t remember each other’s names right away.
A little news from the Ultimate Frisbee team: BYU-Idaho came down last weekend and we we’re able to have a scrimmage game with them on Saturday morning. It turned out to be a lot of fun. And yes, we did win. A lot of the guys who came down were the guys who I played with a few months ago in the Vegas tournament. This time I was playing against them. It was fun to see the guys again. Even if we didn’t remember each other’s names right away.
Monday, March 10, 2008
I slept in and Frisbee
Last Friday I had good intentions to come home from work and find someone or some people and go to the volleyball game and have a fun night. Well I got home from work and ate and then somehow I fell asleep and woke up well into Friday night, too late to get anyone to do anything, so I just decided to get ready for the Frisbee tournament the next day and go to bed early. I can hear all the priesthood figures around Utah cringing. It was a Friday night and I wasn’t on a date?! What was I thinking?!?! Well… er… sorry, I slept in…
So on Friday morning the team met at the DT field. Actually only five of us showed up at the field and the others made it up to SLC on their own, and just happened to forget to tell the captain till the last moment. But we all made it there safely none the less. When we got there we were informed that the tournament would be starting 30 minutes late because the U overbooked the field and there was a soccer game going on one of the fields. It was all good. After watching the soccer game for a bit we decided that they needed all the practice that they could get and so they needed the field for another 30 minutes. So at 10:30 the Young Guns took to the field, adorned in our snazzy Adidas Young Guns Jerseys and an assortment of wild shorts. Our shorts ranged from bright yellow flowery shorts to cow patterned shorts. We definitely won the coolest shorts award of the tournament. (For the record, my shorts were the bright yellow flowery ones. They’re awesome!)
The first victim of the day was Wyoming. I played this team when I went down to Vegas and played with the BYU-Idaho team. We beat them then and I figured that we would be able stomp them with the Young Guns team. Well I guess right because it was an old fashioned shut out. The poor guys never got a point. We waltzed straight up to 15 points with out a single problem. (The first team to 15 points wins.) It was good to start out with Wyoming because we were able to solidify how we were going to run our offense in the next two games. We run what we call an H-Stack Flow. I’m not going to go into the details of how it works because it’s somewhat confusing at first, which is good because it works really well against the other team because they don’t really know what is going on. So that was a good start for the day.
USU was our next opponent. We made quick work of them too. I enjoyed that because I got to play the last man on defense for a few points. Basically that is the equivalent of a safety in football. For those of you who don’t know what a safety is, it’s the person who stands far back to protect from any deep throws. What is means is that I don’t let anyone get behind me because I’m the last chance the defense has at preventing a point. It also means that when someone comes tearing down the field I have to be fast enough to stay with them and keep them from catching a long Frisbee bomb. So we wrapped this game up at 15-2 I believe. Or somewhere around there…
And finally we played Colorado. It was basically the same story. The wind picked up a bit during this game so we were able to practice a zone defense against them when they were throwing upwind. (Ask me about that later if you want to know why we only use it when they are going upwind.) I think the final score of this game was 15-4 or 5. So basically we demolished everyone. It was a good tournament all in all.
It looks like I have a decent sized entry here already so I’ll wait a little bit and make a new entry to cover the rest of the weekend.
So on Friday morning the team met at the DT field. Actually only five of us showed up at the field and the others made it up to SLC on their own, and just happened to forget to tell the captain till the last moment. But we all made it there safely none the less. When we got there we were informed that the tournament would be starting 30 minutes late because the U overbooked the field and there was a soccer game going on one of the fields. It was all good. After watching the soccer game for a bit we decided that they needed all the practice that they could get and so they needed the field for another 30 minutes. So at 10:30 the Young Guns took to the field, adorned in our snazzy Adidas Young Guns Jerseys and an assortment of wild shorts. Our shorts ranged from bright yellow flowery shorts to cow patterned shorts. We definitely won the coolest shorts award of the tournament. (For the record, my shorts were the bright yellow flowery ones. They’re awesome!)
The first victim of the day was Wyoming. I played this team when I went down to Vegas and played with the BYU-Idaho team. We beat them then and I figured that we would be able stomp them with the Young Guns team. Well I guess right because it was an old fashioned shut out. The poor guys never got a point. We waltzed straight up to 15 points with out a single problem. (The first team to 15 points wins.) It was good to start out with Wyoming because we were able to solidify how we were going to run our offense in the next two games. We run what we call an H-Stack Flow. I’m not going to go into the details of how it works because it’s somewhat confusing at first, which is good because it works really well against the other team because they don’t really know what is going on. So that was a good start for the day.
USU was our next opponent. We made quick work of them too. I enjoyed that because I got to play the last man on defense for a few points. Basically that is the equivalent of a safety in football. For those of you who don’t know what a safety is, it’s the person who stands far back to protect from any deep throws. What is means is that I don’t let anyone get behind me because I’m the last chance the defense has at preventing a point. It also means that when someone comes tearing down the field I have to be fast enough to stay with them and keep them from catching a long Frisbee bomb. So we wrapped this game up at 15-2 I believe. Or somewhere around there…
And finally we played Colorado. It was basically the same story. The wind picked up a bit during this game so we were able to practice a zone defense against them when they were throwing upwind. (Ask me about that later if you want to know why we only use it when they are going upwind.) I think the final score of this game was 15-4 or 5. So basically we demolished everyone. It was a good tournament all in all.
It looks like I have a decent sized entry here already so I’ll wait a little bit and make a new entry to cover the rest of the weekend.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Cross-country skiing, Tin-man and Ultimate Frisbee
I had the joyful opportunity to go Cross-Country skiing the other weekend. I took my good friend Kinsey, who was a darling to go even though it was short notice (Extremely short notice for the record). It was my first time ever and it was at night time. That makes for an interesting formula. There are some things that I seem to catch on to very quickly and can perform fairly decently. There are something that I don’t catch on to period and I while I can’t perform very well at that task, at least I can entertain others while I’m at it. I would say that cross-country skiing is in the latter. Even though the name shares two words with something that I am quite good at, (Cross-country running) this does not mean that they are anything alike. None the less I made it out with out any bruises cut or broken things. For a while I thought that I had broken my phone due to water damage, but I turned it off and once it dried, the trooper was back to normal functioning. Way to go Sanyo. Well afterwards we went over to a friend’s house and Kinsey and I both discovered that we were swamped. I guess it was more physically taxing than I initially thought.
Recently it seems like I’m turning into either a tin man or an old man. In other words I’ve been ridden with minor injuries. It all started when I got lost while running a couple of weeks ago. The lost-ness resulted in an extended run far longer than I had intended. About 5 miles longer than I had intended, which all adds up to 9 miles total. But I did pass some very pretty houses on the way. So it was normal that I feel quite sore, but it worsened a slight injury I had gotten at Frisbee practice just before the run. We were practicing dives for the Frisbee and at some point my left quad collided with someone’s knee. That put me on a limp for a day. Well I got over the limp on Saturday for the next practice. At which I somehow managed to cleat myself in the knee while going up for a catch. I didn’t think much of it until I stopped playing at the end of practice; I mean really, how hard can one really kick themselves at that angle? None the less I felt that for a few days and then just as it was going away I went on a run and wasn’t anticipating the cold as much so that inflamed the knee up again. Of course once I get my knee feeling better I slightly strained my hamstring while playing Frisbee on a field with a slight uphill slope. So what is the result? Well I feel like I’m getting old or something. I’m sure it will pass though and I’ll be right back to normal.
Speaking of Frisbee, this Saturday I will be heading north to Salt Lake City to play in the Zion Curtain Classic Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. Other teams that will be there will include the U, USU, SUU, Reno, two Colorado teams, New Mexico, and Wyoming. It should be a good tournament.
Recently it seems like I’m turning into either a tin man or an old man. In other words I’ve been ridden with minor injuries. It all started when I got lost while running a couple of weeks ago. The lost-ness resulted in an extended run far longer than I had intended. About 5 miles longer than I had intended, which all adds up to 9 miles total. But I did pass some very pretty houses on the way. So it was normal that I feel quite sore, but it worsened a slight injury I had gotten at Frisbee practice just before the run. We were practicing dives for the Frisbee and at some point my left quad collided with someone’s knee. That put me on a limp for a day. Well I got over the limp on Saturday for the next practice. At which I somehow managed to cleat myself in the knee while going up for a catch. I didn’t think much of it until I stopped playing at the end of practice; I mean really, how hard can one really kick themselves at that angle? None the less I felt that for a few days and then just as it was going away I went on a run and wasn’t anticipating the cold as much so that inflamed the knee up again. Of course once I get my knee feeling better I slightly strained my hamstring while playing Frisbee on a field with a slight uphill slope. So what is the result? Well I feel like I’m getting old or something. I’m sure it will pass though and I’ll be right back to normal.
Speaking of Frisbee, this Saturday I will be heading north to Salt Lake City to play in the Zion Curtain Classic Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. Other teams that will be there will include the U, USU, SUU, Reno, two Colorado teams, New Mexico, and Wyoming. It should be a good tournament.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Frisbee, Basketball and Snow Shoes
President’s day weekend turned out to be a very active one. I will be feeling this one for a couple days I’m sure. On Saturday morning I was back on the DT fields with the Ultimate Frisbee team. They were in Vegas at a tournament that I was not able to attend last weekend so I hadn’t played any good Frisbee for a couple of weeks. Well the field was quite interesting. Earlier in the week the weather was beautiful. I was out in short sleeve shirts. It was great. The sun was out, the snow was melting and life was good. All up until about Wednesday or Thursday. Then Mother Nature decided to have her way with things and plop another foot of snow on us. The result was that the halfway melted snow from before turned to ice, and then there was a nice layer of snow on top of that. It made the Frisbee game very interesting. A layer of uneven ice covered by a layer of snow. Yet somehow we managed to make it through 3 hours of practice without any rolled ankles. This morning we also played Frisbee on the same field in honor of Presidents Day. The snow had firmed up quite a bit. In some places you could step on the snow and not even sink. So today there was a little more traction.
Another highlight was the basketball game. We had a rematch with UNLV, the only team in the conference who has beaten us. So this was a rematch with a vengeance. On the road BYU is a somewhat streaky team. You never know how they are going to come out and play. But at home they are a hard team to beat. And the last 44 teams to play in the Marriot Center can attest to that. So we had a fun time there, the crowd was pumped, the basketball team was pumped and UNLV wasn’t feeling it. Of course the UNLV fans that have a vendetta out for BYU still take solace in saying that when BYU played at UNLV they beat them 70-41 which is a 29 point difference, whereas BYU only won by 26 points. It was still a very sweet game.
So after running around in the snow playing Frisbee on Monday morning I put on some snow gear and headed up into the mountains with a couple friends to attack the Stewart Falls trail. We had snow shoes and everything. Let me just say, snow shoes are really really really really cool. It was a ton of fun! The trail was pretty blazed for most of the way, but when we got close to the falls the trail disappeared and we had to blaze our way there. Don’t worry Mom and Dad; we weren’t wandering aimlessly in the Utah Mountains. By the time the trail ended we could see the falls at the bottom of the mountain we were on. So we headed straight for it and tromped our way through the snow. Basically it was a blast. If anyone wants to go do something in the snow I highly recommend that. Skiing sounds like a lot of fun, but it’s expensive. The snow shoes cost me 8 bucks to rent for the day.
Another highlight was the basketball game. We had a rematch with UNLV, the only team in the conference who has beaten us. So this was a rematch with a vengeance. On the road BYU is a somewhat streaky team. You never know how they are going to come out and play. But at home they are a hard team to beat. And the last 44 teams to play in the Marriot Center can attest to that. So we had a fun time there, the crowd was pumped, the basketball team was pumped and UNLV wasn’t feeling it. Of course the UNLV fans that have a vendetta out for BYU still take solace in saying that when BYU played at UNLV they beat them 70-41 which is a 29 point difference, whereas BYU only won by 26 points. It was still a very sweet game.
So after running around in the snow playing Frisbee on Monday morning I put on some snow gear and headed up into the mountains with a couple friends to attack the Stewart Falls trail. We had snow shoes and everything. Let me just say, snow shoes are really really really really cool. It was a ton of fun! The trail was pretty blazed for most of the way, but when we got close to the falls the trail disappeared and we had to blaze our way there. Don’t worry Mom and Dad; we weren’t wandering aimlessly in the Utah Mountains. By the time the trail ended we could see the falls at the bottom of the mountain we were on. So we headed straight for it and tromped our way through the snow. Basically it was a blast. If anyone wants to go do something in the snow I highly recommend that. Skiing sounds like a lot of fun, but it’s expensive. The snow shoes cost me 8 bucks to rent for the day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)