Bizarre Bradyisms

Hmmm…

Someone recently told me that I always state that I am ‘fine’ as in whenever I am asked if I am hungry or if I am cold or if I am tired and need a nap. I don’t know why I say it as often as I do, but it is the truth. Life is going well and I do not have much of anything to complain about. Now, this is not to be misinterpreted as I am just idlely content and have no motivation to improve myself or my situation, but that things are going well for me (with the one exception of dating: surprise, surprise). I think the solution to this problem is for me to expand my vocabulary and find a synonymn or two to replace it with. Any suggestions?

So, it has been awhile since I have written anything here, and I have no excuse or reason for it. My job is bore, and although playing Lemmings and reading fiction novels all day every day while getting paid for it might sound like an great oportunity, it is only because it sounds that way. When you feel like you have not accomplished anything at all in a long time, you begin to become slightly depressed, and such is my case.

I do not remember if I mentioned it yet, but I had a job interview on Wednesday up in Salt Lake with Robert Half International, an IT Consulting company, which went really well. I spoke with one of their recruiters / managers and took some technical tests as well to see where I stood compared to their national average. Simply stated I did quite well, and the manager made it a very obvious point. In fact, take it for what it is worth, he gave me the best scores possible for appearance, technical expertise, and personality (can you believe it, me, a good personality, never thought I would hear that). It was also brought up that he usually never tells his interviewies about their score and that not many people do as well as I did. Not to boast or anything but, that can really boost someone’s morale.

Overall, if things work out well, I think this could be a great opportunity and might even get me a great job offer that would focus more closely to my career plans (Network Engineer). I am hoping to be able to stay in Utah county and mentioned that in the interview, but it was asked wether or not I would be willing to work in Salt Lake if the pay was good enough. I guess I have a price for everything because I gave in a stated that I would. I haven’t yet heard back about any position yet, but he said he hoped to find me someplace by the end of the week. Here is for hoping.

Because I was in Salt Lake already for the interview, I decided to take the rest of the day off and spend some more time (I was there all day on Saturday too) with my family. My grandma and my aunt live up their already, but my sister has been up there since Saturday when I dropped her off after EFY. Also, my sister-in-law Leah and nephew Hayden flew in that same morning to be there with them as well. I have never been around babies very much, but Hayden has to be the most calm, content, and cute (there’s some alliteration for you) baby I have ever seen. I was holding him for awhile after lunch and he ended up falling asleep on my chest as I rocked him back and forth for a little over an hour. It was an amazing, peaceful experience which heightened my limited understanding of how great being married and having kids can be. Gives me the warm-fuzzies just thinking about it.

So, I spent all day up there and was really enjoying not having to be at work. My Mom and Dad flew in at around 10:30 that night and I went to pick them up at the airport. They had been in New York (Buffalo area) for a vacation / aniversary trip / buisness trip for about a week and were quite tired. It was nice to see them and they offered me a bit of counsel and advice on my recent job changes. I have only recently begun to understand my appreciation for them and what great parents they have been.

As for now, I am sitting here reading “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe” at work hoping with as much zest as possible to recieve a call about a real job offer. Wish me luck.

? It’s Your Birthday ?

As much as I hate to regret it, the truth must be told. I am now 23 years old, or as you would say it in spanish, I have 23 years of life. I know that this may appear to be really young to a lot of people and I suppose that when I really think about it, I have a long time left to figure things out. So, my birthday was actually yesterday, and I have to admit that it was one of the best birthdays I have had in a long time. It is important to recognize that as one gets older, holidays seem to lose a large portion of their importance in their life; I have found this is be quite true for myself. The past few years I have either been fresh out of high school, on the mission (birthdays during that time are really quite lame), or just back from the mission and anti-social enough to not really have anyone to celebrate it with. This time was different.

On Monday Josh and Kyle called me up to ask if I had any plans for Wednesday and assuming it to be just any other normal calendar day I said no, and they then invited me to go out for dinner and said it was my choice of where to go. This seemed a bit odd but I passed it off as simply being awkward, but the awkwardness of the conversation continued to grow until about 1+ minutes into the conversation I relealized that Wednesday was the 19th of July and thus my birthday and that is why the conversation was occurring as it was. It was really funny, probably one of those you had to be there kind of things.

So anyways, last night we all (Kyle, Josh, Steve and I) went out to Macaroni Grill, their treat (Thanks guys!) and drew all over the table cloth with the provided crayons. It was nice. On a side note, when ever I go out to restaurants and peruse their menu, I always tell myself that I have to order something that I could not make on my own, although it doesn’t always turn out that way. We went through 4 loaves of their rosemary bread, and I think I must have gone through 4 or 5 glasses of strawberry lemonade (mmmm, strawberry lemonade) to go along with my Portobello Mushroom Chicken.

Afterwards, we went back to their apartment, and Kyle had cooked up an amazing two layer cake and struggled trying to frost it because it kept falling apart due to poor cookware and a lame oven. In the end it was beautiful, candles and all. And to finish off the night I learned how to play the card game Canasta and went through 5 rounds of it. A simple, but great, birthday.

Beyond all that, at work this week I have spent 8 hours a day staring at a computer screen doing absolutely nothing constructive. Or at least that is how the week started. For some reason or another it takes the company weeks and weeks (going on 5 now) before they can get all the logons and security priveledges granted to allow someone to actually work. I seriously do not know why, but that is the way it is. So around the latter part of Tuesday, I started playing with an open source web-based portal software called Joomla! And found it to be really neat.

So, using a VMware based Ubuntu 6.06 server image, I installed it and went to work creating a new portal / knowledge base / wiki / other stuff to replace a lame web site that had been created over the years to do the same basic thing. But it was lame. I spent the next 3 days adding modules and components to the base software package and finally near the end of the day I finished it to the point of where I felt comfortable to present it to someone. I sent an email out to a kind-of manager and we shall see how he reacts to it tomorrow. Not to be prideful, but for only 2 and half days, I think I did a great job, considering I built a server to put it on, set up the backend LAMP software, and managed to design it to function similarily and store the type of information that was already there.

Additionally, due to my boredness during work hours and because I feel that I might not really enjoy the job, I sent out my resume to another company and got a call back today. I haven’t actually talked to him, but plan to tomorrow. He left a message asking about more details of what kind of work I am looking for, so, well, you never know. If I do get another job offer it will be a difficult decision to work out because the paycheck here is nice and they offer health benefits and tuition rembursements which are hard to come by. However, if I can gain more experience and actually enjoy another job, I might really consider about switching, even though I do feel bad about having taken advantage of my current employer (using them for training and then up and leaving). Like I said, you never know.

P.S. – I am not really offended by it or anything because we talk at least every week and I just saw a few of them in person recently, the only family members who actually called to say Happy Birthday were my brother Nelson and grandma Jetta. A bit odd.

What a weekend…

I have had a busy weekend. It was not so much hat I had a lot to do nor was it that I got all that much accomplished either, simply busy. My mom came into town to drop my younger sister Tess off for EFY this coming week. She is staying with her sister up in Heber for a few days to kind of catch up and all (my aunt Melanie has been in Hawaii for around 9 months). So, I actually met up with her in American Fork for a parade that was happening there because my cousin, Logan, (aunt’s son) had his twin baby girls in the parade there. It was fun and hot and all around nice to be with family.

Due to the temperature, it got decided that it would be fun to go down the Provo River on an inner tube. Within an hour or so we had traveled up to Heber to pick up a canoe, an inner tube, purchase a new tube from a tire store, and were on our way down the river. I actually ended up in the canoe with my uncle, Carl, and my sister Tess and my cousin Margaret had the tires tubes. It was blast, very cold water, but great nonetheless. I actually capsized the canoe three times because of my anxiousness and ended up loosing one of the paddles down the river (Oops?). I think the section of the river we traveled was around 7 or 8 miles long so it had to have been a good hour or so on the river itself.

We all went back up to Heber, had dinner, conversed for a while and then I drove back down to Provo with Margaret. Because our family moved from Utah when I was quite young, I never had family around when I was growing up so I don’t really know my cousins or their families at all. I just mention that because I enjoyed talking with my cousin for the half an hour trip back into the city. I learned a lot from her and I think I could say that I even look up to her as an example (being married, graduating from school, basically surviving beyond the stage in life that I find myself right now). Truth be told, I think that was the first time, besides the formal hellos and such, I had spoken with her my entire life. I can only hope to be able to offer a similar relationship for my future children and my sibling’s kids.

Today, being Sunday, I attended just the first meeting a church at ward, then traveled back up to Heber to have dinner with all of them again, and afterwards some of us (Mom, Tess, Melanie) went to a spring located outside of Heber. It was beautiful. A joke was mentioned that if and when I ever have a girlfriend, this would be a great location to spend an evening together with her. Duly noted. When they’re right, they’re right.

I had previously accepted an invitation for a dinner group with the 1st Counselor from the ward and so, I had to spilt for home, grab a salad to bring with me, change back into dress clothes in the car (that was an interesting feat in and of itself), and make it back to his house all within an hour. I believe I did it in about 1:05 but got lost and spent another 10 minutes trying to find his house. Dinner there was great. He had a number of his own family there, all of his own young kids and two other guys from the ward. Although awkward at first, I enjoyed the company (especially the young children and all of the noises and sounds associated with such an atmosphere, really, I did).

Like I said, I did not get all that much accomplished, but kept myself quite busy. I believe between all of the trips back and forth over the past two days, I put on around 225 miles on my car. Also, my car, Gwen, got real dirty coming into and out of the road to the springs. She is due for a bath.

P.S. – I got a lot of new cook ware this week for very little money, it was almost like Christmas in July for me. :)

Sleep? How does sleep work?

I was really proud of myself today. As lame as it might sound, I was actually able to sleep in until 10:40 today without waking up previously. I have said for years now that I am already an old man because it is difficult for me to sleep in at all. For example, when I was working at my other job from 4pm – 4am I usually didn’t get to bed until around 5, but by 9am, every day I was awake and frustrated at my lack of sleeping skills. However, today was different; I fell asleep around 12:30 and slept until past 10:30, a whole 10 hours of sleep. It was amazing. Additionally, after church today, I took another hour and half nap and did not feel any shame in doing so. Overall, let it be said that I am well rested for the next week.

Now, focusing on more important topics brings me to write about the lessons that were shared in church today. The importance of gratitude and journal writing were focus of what was mentioned. To begin with, I must admit that I have never been really good at keeping a journal and although the word ‘blog’ comes from the word web-log (i.e. a log of events), I had never really considered this as a journal. However, now that I think about it, I believe it to be one. The only difference is that most people keep their journals personal and dislike the idea of someone else reading it. Obviously, that fact that this ‘journal’ is indeed quite public does change things a bit and makes it difficult for me to share thoughts and ideas that I normally would find it hard to express freely. While this cannot be avoided entirely, I have been thinking and believe that if I have nothing to disguise or keep hidden from the world, this should not be a problem. At the same, this should cause me to want to act a certain way or strive to become a specific type of person so that all the things I do and think about are okay to share openly and without reserve. One may think that this would cause a person to become superficial as I would then be only writing ‘good’ things or something similar. I want to and will keep myself from doing so, because the qualities that make a person who he is comes from not only the good things in life, but the frustrations and difficulties that he experiences and how to is able to overcome them. I can say that there are a select number of problems that I am experiencing right now that I will not share, but let it be known that I am working on overcoming them and when I am able to successfully say that there is no longer a problem, I believe, not promise, that I will then feel comfortable to do so.

Okay, time to get off of my soapbox. In the lesson manual for Sunday School, there was a quote from President Wilford Woodruff that read as follows, “I would advise you to get all of your blessings written and preserve them… I do feel to enjoin it upon you to make a record of every official act of your life. If you baptize, confirm, ordain, or bless any person or administer to the sick, write an account of it… If the power and blessings of God are made manifest in your preservation from danger, … you should make a record of it. Keep an account of the dealings of God with you daily, I have written all the blessings I have received, and I would not take gold for them.” I really enjoyed that idea and thought pattern and would like to be able to follow his example, specifically focusing on the blessings that I have and tend not to recognize. So, because I would like this to be on the top of my mind for the next few days, you may find that I write about such blessings in my future postings.

I am grateful for my family. As usual for Sundays, I was able to speak with my parents and just talk with them for about 20 minutes. To converse about how my life is going and find out what is happening with the family over in Colorado is always something I look forward to. Hearing about how my sister Eliza is coping with being pregnant and how my first nephew Hayden is growing up is always great. My kid brother Colin (I don’t know why I always call him that, especially now that he is 18, but anyways) is working as a type of roofer for some ~50 hours a week and is learning about how tired you can get and also made mention how he earned some $600 but only saw around $450 of it due to taxes (another republican is born). I am looking forward to being able to see my mom this next weekend as she drives my sister Tess to Utah for EFY (Especially for Youth). I love her and appreciate her more than words can express. My dad is a great man who has instilled in me such great qualities such as honesty, integrity, and many others for which I am deeply grateful for. I can only hope to and continuously endeavor to be worthy of carrying his name with me. I know that God lives and his wisdom in having such an organization during our life here on earth is often made manifest to me as I express my gratitude for my family.

I could go on for a while as one expression of gratitude leads me on to another, but I will refrain from doing so. I want to make mention of how I am really enjoying playing the piano as of late. I can’t say that I am good yet, but I can say that I have improved a ton and actually went out and bought some actual pieces of music to work on. It is really kind of relaxing and I only hope that I will stick with it long enough to be able to say I play well. This has been a long post and I don’t think they will all be that long, but let it suffice to say that I had a lot to write about

In closing, life is good.

July 4th

Feeling a bit adventurous today, some friends (Steve, Kyle, Josh) and I decided to go on a hike and enjoy the great weather so we headed up Provo Canyon and stopped at Bridal Veil Falls which is about 20 minutes away from home. The waterfall that is located there is really beautiful and having come up here a number of times before on my bike, we decided to try something different. On the top of the cliff where the falls begins there is an old restaurant that used to have a cable car running up to it (both of which have been abandoned for around 20 years) and from what we could tell that was the only real way to access it. This was it. Our chance to be a little crazy. We took off to the left of the main trail about 100 yards and just started climbing up the ravine where there were huge rocks that had at some time come from off of the cliff. As we made our way we realized that there were actually very few choices as to which direction to go, up or down. Well, to make a long story short we made it about 45 minutes up the mountain before we hit a precipice and realized we could no longer go up any more without risking death. As we turned around and looked from where we had come up, it was decided that going down that way was not an option and had to make a few changes. All in all, we lived, we enjoyed, and saw only a little bit of blood.

After cleaning up a bit, we all headed back and started getting ready for a barbecue. Kyle even made some amazing homemade rootbeer using dry ice. I can honestly say with out any reserve that it was the best rootbeer I have ever had. Really, it was that good. From what I hear as well it turned out to be quite cheap, around $15 for ~35 liters including the extract, sugar, and dry ice. I even capture a video of the process because I was that intrigued by it.

The barbecue turned out well and we had maybe 15 people show up. I, of course, had the priveledge of cooking the burgers and other people made some crazy good Jello deserts, cakes with strawberries, and other amazing cookies. It was just plain fun. Myself and about 4 other people even participated in a food fight afterwards as well. It was pretty messy but well worth it in my opinion. In the end and after everything was all cleaned up, we finished with playing the card game named “Scum” for about an hour. I admit that I am not very good at such games but I was able to hold my own just fine.

With it being the 4th of July and all it was necessary that fireworks were included in our festivities. Although we didn’t have anything really expensive to play with, the large number of sparklers that we did use turned out to be a huge success. I was actually really impressed by how the pictures looked and as you can tell, the long exposure time created some really neat photos.