The Life of a Younger Brother

My life has been a series of huge ups and downs for me as of lately, and I thought each of you would like to know about these acontecimientos.

About 1-2 weeks ago, I found out that the Assistant job over equipment here at CMS was given to someone else with less experience and time as me. It was a huge blow to me because I thought that I was doing an excellent job working there. So with some egging on by the pads and other siblings, I decided to talk with Marlae (my boss) concerning her choice in Assistant. (Despite my record for having a short temper, I was very professional and diplomatic about it). I recounted to her my record at CMS (by showing that I had by far more experience that the newly appointed assistant-in-training. Well, she told me that they needed someone who had the hours available to dedicate to learning those responsibilities and due to the fact that I was working and going to school, they went with someone else. Well, due to spring semester confusion concerning the price of going to school, I decided to refrain from taking classes for Spring and Summer. So, in the end I have been stuck working only part-time while filling in for available shifts for other CMS employees. Well, that surprised her when I told her I didn’t have classes, but did not change the appointment. Well, today Marlae called me into her office and told me that Heather, the assistant over the employees, will be leaving come July and they asked me to take her spot. Of course, I humbly accepted the position. This basically means that I will be in charge of employee schedules and other junk (who knows what, though). But I am very excited and thrilled over this opportunity and I thought I would let all of you know about it.

Also, not really to celebrate, but for my own diversion, I decided to buy tickets to a very special basketball game by the name of AND 1. They are coming to SLC on June 15, and I bought two tickets and I am in the second row. They were somewhat expensive but, hey!, it’s AND 1. When will this ever happen again? For all the sibs, I checked out if they are coming close to you all, and they are going to be in San Antonio on June 25^th at the AT&T center while in Philadelphia, they won’t arrive until August 19^th at the Wachovia Center. Better get ‘em quick. Man, it sure is great not to be married…yet.

Big Boring Blog

Hey everyone, we are officially Texans now, and more importantly no longer Utahns…no offense to those still living there. As Chad would say, “I’d take a bullet for the place, but…” We drove straight through starting Saturday night and arrived at Chads’ Sunday night. It took about 26 hours in all which isn’t so bad. We passed right next to the border of Mexico (at El Paso) and were stopped to make sure we were citizens. That was about the most exciting part of our trip, unless you count the times we watched The Wiggles and VeggieTales to calm Oliver down. They’re not half bad.
Note: El Paso is officially the ugliest city I have ever seen in my life.

Anyway…we found an apartment that is a pretty good deal. It is litteraly right around the corner from Mikes work. When we went in to visit’s Mikes new store we were told by someone to stear clear of the apartments around the store and were pointed to some farther away. So, we went to the apartments that were recommended. After we were told that the smallest one bedroom started at $850 plus all utilities we knew we were in the wrong place. The lady tried to change our minds by telling us about the free maid service once a month and complimentary door step trash pick up. Yea like that's worth an extra $300. So we went back to the apartments around the store and found that they were actually better than what we were used to. People are so funny about their expectations for apartments. Anyway, we’re paying about half as the other place plus we get a washer and dryer. Awesome!

Mikes new store seems good. The store manager is a clone of Karen Davis for those of you who remember her. Everyone seems nice and pretty laid back. The down side to that is the store is pretty disorganized and needs some work. That's where Mike comes in.

So we can’t move in till Tuesday and Mike has now started work so I am left at Chad and Jenn’s by myself, (well with Oliver), but they have cable, which I’m not used to and also internet, which I’m also not used to. So this blog is just more of a way to fill up my time than anything else. Hence, the reason its not very funny or interesting. But what are you gonna do?

Gloria would have been proud!

Okay, so the ABC Family channel is staring this new TV series or movie called Karate Dog with Jon Voight. If I ever find out that anyone watches it, I will pull a Nick and forbid you calling me your brother or son. Don’t tempt me.

Onto the main event.

We attended a crazy celebration exclusive to San Antonio called Fiesta, which apparently means “excuse to get drunk” in Spanish. No one really knows why “we” celebrate, in fact the response to my question most of the time was “…uhhh, does it matter?” Fiesta is kind of like Prom: Everyone talks about it so much that you feel compelled to go, but once you get there, you wonder what all the celebration is about (not to say it wasn’t fun).

So there we were, taking advantage of my free downtown parking pass, ready to take on anything that came our way, including the glass of water that got dumped on Jenn’s head which happened during the parade. I turned around ready to nail the guy right between the eyes but after turning around to defend my wife’s honor and seeing a little girl with an upturned cup of water above us, I figured body slamming a four-year old wouldn’t make me feel any manlier.

Hey, there's my prom date!

I even did a little missionary work. Some guy passing out flyers for his church recognized my BYU intramural basketball championship shirt and asked if I was Mormon. Upon answering in the affirmative he was quick to point out that we have something in common in that we are both Christians. This surprised me in that most evangelical churches down here refuse to recognize that. Unfortunately he wasn't too interested in our championship run.

So instead of laying out the day a la play-by-play, I’m giving my top four highlights of the day-long event(in no particular order)—hold onto your sombreros, here we go…

4. Losing—then finding—then losing my phone
After the parade (which ended at 10:30 pm), we walked about six blocks to take down chairs that the stake set up in order to raise money for high-adventure trips for the young men. Well, as part of the young men presidency in my ward, I made an appearance. After that was over, we walked to the parking garage and left feeling good that we were still alive and had not had anything stolen. Of course, about a minute later, Jenn received a phone call from a lady in our ward who tells us someone called them saying they had my phone.

Luckily, the guy who happened upon my phone was honest and didn’t ring up phone charges making international calls. We met him the next day in the parking lot of Taco Cabana where his whole family sat in the truck while we exchanged pleasantries. I have no joke here.

By the way, it took me four more days to find my case after the Taco Cabana exchange.

3. Turkey Legs
No, I’m not talking about me wearing shorts for the first time in six months—I’m talking about eating a whole turkey leg that was almost half as good as dad’s barrel chicken (which says quite a bit). The food in general was everywhere. We couldn’t walk 10 feet without seeing a chalupa stand or barbecue stand. And that’s what Fiesta is all about—where else would you see such cultural cohabitation—a gordita stand next to a hamburger stand next to a shish kabob stand next to a funnel cake stand (the latter being the most heavily overrated). It was like the United Nations of Food. Sadly, there were no steak fingers.

Almost as healthy as lasagna cheese bread

2. Trash
I don’t know how a lowlight actually makes my highlight list. Probably because of the sheer magnitude of what happened immediately after the parade ended. As mentioned earlier, Jenn and I stayed after to help take down chairs. Simply put, there was more trash in the street than the inside of a Denny’s at 2 in the morning.

C'mon people, yo mamma don't work here!

Unfortunately I stepped on something that squirted something else on my leg about 4 inches above my left ankle. I still don’t know what it was but it was orange and slimy. Not wanting it to burn through my leg, I quickly wiped it off with tissue I was carrying in my pocket. Of course, the tissue didn’t provide much surface area for adequate wipeage, as it looked like it had gone through the wash about 83 times.

1. Parade
Ahhh, what is a party without a parade? The parade was almost as exciting as the Honeyville parade: Seats weren’t as good, no over-threatening emcee, no famous grand marshal grandparents and, of course, no ten dollar pancake breakfast plate. A parade is a parade but I think the highlight was when it looked like the Chick-filet float was throwing stuff out into the crowd and everyone was going crazy trying to get their hands on whatever made its way into the throngs of people. A fortunate parade viewer next to me grabbed one and triumphantly held it at arms length. As I looked over his shoulder, I noticed it was nothing other than a buy one get one free coupon. Talk about the find of a lifetime. That’s scrapbook material.

Wait, who posing for who??

It reminded me of when Jenn and I were at a basketball game in the Marriott Center when the blimp miraculously headed into our section and dropped what could have been hundred dollar bills, judging from the reaction of everyone nearby. I of course, wasn’t immune, and without vacillation showed off my lightning quick reaction as I snatched the piece of glossy paper from the outreached hands of an old woman who feebly stood in the aisle in front of me. The little piece of paper was a free Glazies donut. Is that the best they can do?

Well, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth…or can you? I have never understood this. Anyone who has taken any type of economics class can tell you that there is no such thing as a free lunch—opportunity cost is everywhere. If someone gives you a free car, it isn’t entirely free in one sense because you still have to get it registered which requires time and money. Just ask Oprah’s audience members. The same with a horse—the horse has to eat, be cleaned, poop needs to be shoveled, etc. You also probably have to hire one of your cousins to ride along with you to make sure that you don’t take the horse out to fast, heaven forbid. Also, what if the horse is sick? Then you have to either find a vet or send him to the glue factory, both of which require some form of expense. Therefore, it, in fact, would be prudent to look a gift horse in the mouth. Spread the word.

Where was I?!?!? Oh yeah, so the point is that I am not going to use gas money or time to get a supposedly free glazies donut. That’s another thing, everyone here says supposebly and it’s driving me crazy, and the Spurs just lost, and I can’t stand Tim Duncan’s whiny face, and when will Napoleon Dynamite officially be added as part of the missionary discussions, and….I’m done.

Bounty Hunter Weds

I hate to take away from the Sunday School discussion thread currently going on, but I just found out that Duane "Dog" Chapman finally got married to his common-law wife. I know, I too never thought this day would come. You can even find the article on Fox News.

Killing Them Softly

Unfortunately for all of you, I lived at home during my more argumentative period. Today I'd like to think that I'm a little more mellow and, as a result, try to avoid heated discussions. I admit that there have been setbacks like the time that a high councilman from our ward followed me out of Sunday School trying to convince me that a comment I made (regarding the finitude of the LDS concept of God) was wrong. Despite my repeated apologies for having made the comment, he kept insisting that he was right. "I'm sorry, vato. I see that you are wearing a tie and closed-toe shoes and since I am not wearing either you must be right. What was I thinking?" A similar situation occurred when discussing lesson-giving in the Church with some of Kim's relatives. Apparently, somebody had been in an important Priesthood meeting where the second assistant to the secretary to one of the emeritus members of the Second Quorum of the Seventy proclaimed very authoritatively that the lessons were to be given without personal variation due to Correlation, blah, blah, blah. I wish I had the following story to tell at the time.

Professor Daniel Peterson of BYU (and FARMS) relates:

Having, some time back, served on the Gospel Doctrine writing committee of the Church for nearly ten years, I would never, ever, take a Gospel Doctrine manual to be an official and binding declaration of Church doctrine. We tried to get things right, we prayed about our work, and what we did was reviewed in Salt Lake before publication, but it scarcely constituted scripture.

A story:

Once, the scriptural selection about which I was assigned to write a lesson included, among other things, Acts 20:7-12, in which the apostle Paul drones on for so long in the course of a sermon that a young man (ironically named Eutychus or "Fortunate") dozes off and falls from the rafters. Paul has to restore him to life. As a joke, I inserted a passage in my lesson manuscript that read somewhat along the following lines:


Have a class member read Acts 20:7-12. Have you ever killed anyone with a sacrament meeting speech? How did it make you feel? What steps can you take in the future to ensure that it does not happen again?


Members of the committee laughed, and the committee chairman sent my lesson on up, incorporating their suggested revisions but also still including my little joke, to Salt Lake City. Where it passed Correlation. (I can only assume that each member of the committee chuckled and then passed it on, expecting that somebody else would remove it.) When I received the galleys of the lesson back for final approval just before it went to press, the joke was still there. I faced one of the greatest moral crises of my life, but finally called Church headquarters and suggested that they probably didn't really want the lesson to go out to Church members entirely as it stood. So the joke was removed.

The point being that Gospel Doctrine manuals are not to be confused with authoritative divine revelations.

Homiletic Titillation

I find many church meetings bereft of anything interesting which is why I typically take something to read (currently the NRSV). Fortunately, there is the occasional pronouncement of random condemnation, the heartfelt confessions of impropriety typically received with awkward smiles and glances towards the bishopric, or the kid who throws things onto the stage while playing the harmonica causing all to wonder as to the identity of the parents. This past Mother's Day occasioned the advent of a new category for me: euphemized titillation from the Hebrew Bible.

Apparently, as mentioned by the missionary speaker, our bishop is particularly fond of the Ruth and Naomi narrative. I was absorbed by my reading until the speaker read Ruth 3:4-8:

And it shall be, when he lieth down, that thou shalt mark the place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do. And she said unto her, All that thou sayest unto me I will do. And she went down unto the floor, and did according to all that her mother in law bade her. And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down. And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.

As mentioned by the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd edition), "In Hebrew, feet can be a euphemism for genitals, thus giving a sexual overtone to Naomi's instructions and Ruth's subsequent actions." Unfortunately, as I looked around, I was the only individual who found this funny. Come on people, a missionary was talking about "feet" in Sacrament Meeting and it is the bishop's favorite story! I haven't heard anything that funny since a recent convert confessed to "smoking doobies" right before an appointment with the missionaries.

What's for dinner?

I hate to admit it, but I am a little tired of the recipes in "From Kim's Kitchen to Yours." It's long past time to start working on the second edition, and I'm dying for something new. Never mind that I need to make dinner tonight, and I'll pass on Weevil Tortillas, but please post some of your favorites so I can try out some new stuff. I am particularly interested in Mexican food, so if Trevor can pull himself away from the women for a minute, I would appreciate some good recipe ideas. Also, TexMex is fine, so I expect full participation from the Texan, and soon to be Texan, contingent. Thanks.

Cabbage?? We don't need no stinkin' Cabbage!!

Not that anyone reads this blog anymore but I thought I would be remiss to not write about the late night/early morning experience Jenn and I had last night.

Everything was fine and dandy until Jenn decided it would be easier to take the time to cut up an old cabbage head into 12 intricate pieces and stick them through the disposal rather than throw it in the garbage like any other rational human being would. Of course, since Jenn and I always start cleaning and straightening up around 11-12 pm, and since rational thinking goes to sleep around midnight, it really wasn’t her fault. After a couple of minutes, Jenn called me in to tell me that the drain was backed up. I go over and sure enough, the water is frothy (I love that word) and backed up. Trying to hide back the hereditary AG in me, I start taking out the stuff from under the sink as calm as possible while Jenn, knowing that I have no idea whatsoever how to fix it, gets online to figure it out (again, knowing that I would not listen anyway).

Well, I was smart enough to at least get a pan and put it under the pipes. It wasn’t the stainless steel throw-up bowl that we all came to know and love, but the pan I had worked well enough. As I started unscrewing some pipes, the water started flowing like the salmon of Capistrano. Now, there are only about three things that make me gag: bologna, sauerkraut, and those who quote Monty Python & the Holy Grail. Well, after what I saw, I had to add one to the list--It smelled Nasty!!!

Fixing a drain isn't all it's cracked up to be.

(Note: Portions of this photo have been edited for younger audiences)

After the draining of the cabbage and stuff, I screwed all the pipes back together, used the Allen wrench to dislodge anything in the disposal, and started the water, disposal, etc, thinking all along that I had fulfilled my husbandly duties with flying colors. My ephemeral jubilation quickly scampered away as fast as it had arrived as my worst fears were confirmed: the water was coming back up.

So now what? There was one pipe I had not checked—the one after the “trap” connecter-thingy. I did not think to check this one because it was larger than the others, and it seemed to have nothing stuck in it the first time. It also led into the wall after about a foot of piping and I didn’t know where it led. Well, I unscrewed all the piping once again, grabbed a flashlight and was horrified to find a wall of cabbage-looking stuff about a foot and a half in. I grabbed a hanger, made a makeshift hook and I let my natural skills take over. Fond memories of my flexic sigmoidoscopy came flooding to my mind as I metculously threaded that wire hanger through the piping. In fact, I felt like a cross between MacGyver and Bob Vila. After a couple of minutes, I had pulled out a huge pile of chopped cabbage. The wall of cabbage had gone on about 8 to 12 inches.

So I guess if you need any assistance with garbage disposal issues, y’all have my number. Jenn even found some good advice and tips on the internet dealing with the disposal that we fortunately didn’t have to follow. Oh, and I hope you’re not eating bierocks tonight.

March Madness Champ

It is now official. Chad is the champ. I found the cutest picture I could find and posted it. Way to go!!!!