We miss being single...

So, much to Mary's and my dismay, we had a rude awakening today. We thought we were forever leaving the awkward environment of the BYU singles ward. Not so. Today we attended our new BYU married ward for the first time. And we've both come to the same conclusion.

BYU married wards are just as strange as the singles ward.

No kidding. Literally, half the ward is pregnant, and other half have newborns. And, according the Mary, the Relief Society lesson was all about babies. "Multiply and Replenish" was the theme of the lesson today. Mary's wondering if we could get our old Bishop to let us back into his ward. At least that strangeness we're used to.

One of the oddities is that I sort of expected or imagined a married ward to have a lot more spiritual maturity. Again, not so. The people in our singles ward are just as 'spiritually mature' if not more than the members of our new ward. They just don't have spouses. Or babies.

So, in short, we miss being single. Or at least our singles ward. But sex is frickin' awesome. :)

One more day...

Tomorrow I will leave the realm of single-hood forever, hopefully :)

It's been quite a crazy adventure thus far. Mary and I have been super busy with all the planning and such. We've basically done all the planning ourselves, with some great help from Mindy. Mary has lamented at times about being frustrated with my lack of opinion when it comes to various wedding details. All I can say is, "Honey, I'm a guy. We don't care about this stuff. In fact, you'd be worried if I did care." So I've offered help where I can, but Mary has done most of the work. We have barely had anytime to really enjoy being engaged. We have often commented on how we can't wait till the wedding is over and things will quiet down again.

So... one more day. Sometimes we think we should have eloped. We hear that's much less stressful. But we're sure we'll have a great time tomorrow. Until then, lots of things still to do.

*sigh*

One more day...

She said Yes!

That's right folks. Somehow I have managed to convince Mary to marry me. After much begging and pleading and downright groveling, she finally agreed to let me marry her :)

So Mary and I have been talking about marriage for a few weeks now. And it's probably a good thing. I'm not an impulsive person and the idea of getting married has always been in the hypothetical future. "Someday I would like to be married..." But when in a serious relationship, the possibility of that hypothetical future becoming a reality scares me. So it's taken some time for me to warm up to the idea.

But once I made the decision, I knew I had made the right choice. I wanted the evening to be really special. Mary and I had plans with Mary's sister, Mindy, to organize wedding stuff. (Funny that we're doing stuff like that without having actually proposed and accepted.) So I got Mindy to occupy Mary until about 6:30 or so, when they would come back to Mary's apartment to plan. When Mary got home, her apartment was clean and there was a rose and a card waiting for her. The card said some romantic things and let her know I would pick her up for dinner 7:45.

When I went over there, Mindy was just leaving. Mary had asked Mindy to stay and help her get ready. Mindy left and Mary looked amazing. I told her I had something for her. I pulled out a small wrapped box. She thought it was the ring. It was actually a pair of pearl earrings. She put them on and we went out to dinner at her favorite restaurant, Tucanos.

Dinner was excellent. We played our little game of favorites. Basically, one of us asks the other one about a favorite. Then that person answers the question, and the asker also has to answer. And it just goes back and forth. We did that all through dinner. It's probably a sign that we know a lot about each other when it's hard to think of favorites that we don't already know. Before leaving I "had to go to the bathroom" and I called Andy.

After dinner, I took her to the Provo Temple. We walked a bit in the gardens and sat down on a bench and talked some more. It was a very pleasant evening. There was a slight breeze and the stars were out.

Meanwhile, my phone call to Andy was his cue execute his mission, which was to go over to Mary's and put down a bunch of rose petals, light some candles, and turn on the music. So he, Shawn, and Mom went to do that and to put the ring box on top of the entertainment center.

After some more favorites talk with Mary, Andy called me back and asked me a random question, which was my cue that they were done. So I told Mary I was getting the chills (yeah ... right), and went back to the car and we drove home. Mary was still very happy, but I could tell she was trying to figure out what was going on. As I opened up the door, her eyes lit up.

The candles were glowing, one of our favorite songs was playing, and there were rose petals everywhere. Mary was smiling from ear to ear. We danced and kissed for a while (our first dance actually) and I said some more romantic things to her. Then I reached up on top of the entertainment center to grab the box. I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me.

And she said yes.

We danced and kissed some more. Then she called her dad to tell him to good news (he already knew).

That's pretty much it. She absolutely loved the whole evening. She's been bragging about it all morning to everyone. So our wedding date is probably going to be on the weekend of October 17th. That's the best we can to do with family member's schedules. So it will be a hectic 7 weeks but it will be worth it.

Jib Jab video "Time for Some Campaignin' "

I know this came out a few weeks ago, but I think it's really funny and creative! Enjoy

Time for Some Campaignin' | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Where the Hell is Matt?

I've been aware of this guy Matt and his world travel videos. I particularly liked this one he just recently released. It made me smile.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Please don't be a lemming...

Tis the season for the U.S. Presidential elections! And we all know what that means. Tons of erroneous and fabricated emails passed mindlessly through the tubes.

Please don't forward them to other people, especially to me. Those emails are always crap; blatant fabricated lies or half-truths about one candidate or the other. I don't want to hear about Barack Obama being a closet terrorist or that John McCain ate the head off a baby kitten. I really don't want to hear it. Cause it's just not true.

If you believe crap in these emails, you're probably the ones that also believe the cousin of the deposed king of Nigeria needs your help. If you want to know the truth about a candidate, believing email threads is hardly the way to go.

Instead, put forth some effort and spend time learning about each candidate and what their views are by watching the debates, reading their websites, etc.

But please don't forward propagandistic emails. You're just perpetuating the problem.

My baseball cards are starting to pay off.

Back in elementary school, I collected a lot of baseball cards with my brothers. One of the coolest (ie most expensive cards) I got was a 1989 Fleer Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was worth about $10 as I recall. So I bought a nice case for it, and stored it away.

So I was being bored today and I ran across an article about Ken Griffey Jr and how he's approaching his 600th home run. That got me to thinking about that rookie card of his. I looked it up online and one site has the card listed for $49.95! Sweet!

As kids, we loved collecting baseball, basketball, and football cards. But mostly just baseball cards. I have no idea how much money we sank into those cards, either. It seemed like that's all I bought for a while. There was a sweet sports card store right in Alpine. "The card shop" as we called it, although I doubt that was the real name. We'd ride down there on our bikes or rollerblades and buy a few packs of cards and a soda.

The card shop owner was cool too. He'd shoot the breeze with us, give us deals on candy or cards. We'd trade for specific cards, or just plain sell them. We'd check out the latest Becketts (monthly price magazine for sports cards) and see if our cards had gone up in value. We knew most of our valuable cards numbers by heart, so looking them up in the Beckett was easy.

Ah... good times. Many hours were spent hanging out at the card shop.

Mom really didn't have anything against it either. She was just glad we were outside, instead of playing video games or watching TV.

We have boxes of cards somewhere, probably in a dark closet at my parents house. I wonder what they are all are worth.

Kiting... again

So we went out the next day. This time, Marc brought his 5 meter kite and we got to give it a whirl.


Here's Marc, showing us how it's done.



And then there's me. And yes, Andrew is holding on to my harness. The wind was super strong that day, and we were nervous about being thrown around by the kite.

All in all, a fun day. Marc has a kite buggy as well. I think we should try that out sometime this summer.

Let's go fly a kite!

Seriously, let's go fly a kite.

That's what I did this afternoon. My coworker, Marc, told me he and some people went kite flying today during lunch, and I mocked him. Something about how I haven't done that in about 24 years, being something I gave up when I graduated from kindergarten. Anyway, I was wrong.

The kites Marc has are some serious kites! There more like mini parachutes, really. The kite in these pictures is a 4 meter kite, meaning there are four square meters of surface area. Marc started me on the 1 meter kite. The "trainer", he called it. After playing with that one for a few minutes, he let me try the 3 meter kite. That pulled a lot harder, of course, than the 1 meter kite.


In these pictures you can see that this 4 meter kite has four main strings, and the handles are actually strapped on to me! The straps are for safety, believe it or not. If the handles were to slip out of my hands, the straps would pull the strings in such a way that the kite literally collapses and falls gently to the ground.

The handles allow me to control the kite, and I can make the kite turn to the left or right. I'm told this is method of control is very similar to the way parachuters control their chutes.


You can see from this pic that I was doing everything I could to stay in one place. This kite had some serious pull to it. It's hard to stay in one place wearing flip flops. I think next time I should wear cleats. Even then I'm sure I'll get pulled around some. Like I said, this kite is only a 4 meter kite. Marc said his 5 and 10 meter kites have harnesses that you put on, like a climbing harness! I'm thinking I may want to strap that harness to a car or something.


You can view all the pics that we took on my PicasaWeb album.

Scuba diving at the Crater

So Mary and I just completed our first scuba diving class. We took the class through Scuba Ted's, a local shop in Springville. The class was great. It was four Friday nights worth of class room instruction and pool time at the local pool. Scuba Ted's had all the gear for us to borrow during the class, including the BCDs, tanks, regulators, fins, and masks. We really liked the staff there, too.

We did our open water certification at the Crater, a geothermal pool up in the mountains above Provo. The Crater is about 60 ft deep and maintains a temperature of about 90 degrees. When we went, the water was 92 degrees. We went down 20 feet or so and did some exercises like flooding and clearing our masks or establishing perfect buoyancy. We did four dives on two different trips to the Crater. The owner Ted and our instructor Greg were both really nice and made the class a lot of fun.

Here are some of the pictures that we took at the pool and up at the Crater.

Scuba

A Totaly Money Makeover

So I was introduced to a book called Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I'm usually not a fan of self help books, but his book really hit the spot. I recommend it to anyone. For the $17 cost, it's entirely worth it. His book is all about the down-to-earth wisdom of getting out of debt, and how to stay out of debt.

His book doesn't contain any secrets. Nor does it contain any special financial products or services. It's just plain reason. He explains the fallacies and myths that a lot of people believe in. And he explains the simple plan of getting and staying out of debt.

In all my 28 years, I have never kept a budget. Never. I never thought I really needed one. But this week I will create my very first budget and I will keep it. I have come to the realization that I need to take control of my spending and focus my money on staying free from financial bondage. One thing that I really like about this book is that the ideals taught in the book are the same ideals taught by the Church. So after having read his book, I look forward to taking control of my financial future.

My parents are giddy.

So I met this great girl a week before Christmas a few months ago. Her name is Mary. She's from Texas, and is going to school up here in Utah. She works at Novell in the corporate sales department. She works in another building, so thankfully the faux pas of dating someone you work with really doesn't apply here :)


As I mentioned, Mary is great! She's very athletic and adventurous. She loves kayaking, camping, hiking, and just plain being out doors. She has a ton of gear, so she can hit the mountains at the drop of a hat. She has recently picked up skiing, and I'm taking her snowboarding next week. (Hopefully I can convert her)

Anyway, I brought her up to meet my parents and they adore her. On more than one occasion my mother told me "She's a keeper". Both of my older brothers also voiced their approval (not that I need it, but it's nice to have anyway). Andy and Shawn are super excited to have Mary and me join them on some road trips and vacations.

In three weeks I'm taking the plunge and flying to Houston to meet her family. I've heard a bunch about her family and she talks to them on the phone almost daily. Mary tells me that they're going to love me. I sure hope so. It would make for a really awkward weekend if they didn't! (and Texans all have guns... and her dad is an ex-cop, so.... yeah). I'm looking forward to the trip and hope I don't make a fool of myself. :)

Anyway, my parents are just really excited to see me dating such a great girl. We'll see what happens!

Brighton discount tickets

Being from Utah, I grew up going skiing and snowboarding at Brighton. It has always been my favorite place to go. I especially like their night-skiing. It allows me still go snowboarding, but without having to take the day off of work. And it's always less crowded than day skiing.

So Brighton always offers discounts for their night skiing passes. I called them up just now and asked them where to get the discounts. So here goes:


Mondays: Download and print the coupon from Warriors Against Tobacco and get 1/2 off (ie $15).

Wednesdays: Get your 2 for 1 tickets from Arctic Circle. One combo meal will get you the discount ticket.

Fridays: X96 night. Show your X 96 Freeloader card and get 2 for 1.

You can also get $10 off by purchasing two Peanut Roll candy bars.