Things to be grateful for...

I started this post around Thansgiving and never finished it or posted it. So hopefully you can figure out what I'm thankful and just pretend like I'm 3 months early instead of 9 months late. Well I guess I'm 15 months early since Thansgiving won't be celebrated in Scotland. Oh well!

Baby pics

So I have started the process of scanning photos for the wedding video and I thought it time to share a few of the gems I've come across. I don't know that they need an explanation so I'll let you enjoy. This is me two decades ago. Sometimes I think I look the same and other times I wonder who that child is.

Scottish Parliament

So I don't know that I have anything really exciting going on at the exact moment in time, but I think it is probably time that I should blog once again. I had the chance to go tubing today somewhere up in Morgan and it was a ton of fun. One of the girls that we went with fell out of the tube a few times and so I got to jump out and attempt to save her from the rapids. The water wasn't too cold and I managed to eventually get back in the raft, well the first time I did.

I finally heard back from the dude that takes care of the internships in the Scottish parliament and he seems interested in hearing more about me. I have to send in a CV and references, so if some random guy calls you make sure you say nice things about me. Unfortunately it would be an unpaid internship but it would give me something worthwhile to do while Kristen is earning her degree. I should have more news at the end of the week.

What else? Life is quickly moving along. I've been engaged for two months and I'll be getting married in just a little over two months. Crazy how fast time can go and what can happen in a year. A year ago today I was on vacation in Taiwan swimming somewhere with a bunch of my best friends. Since then I have had two jobs, met and got engaged to Kristen, graduated from college and a bunch of other things that are probably important too but I can't think of them at this moment in time. I haven't gotten a visa though and I'm hoping that will be happening in the next little while and also hoping the process won't deserve a blog post. That's all for now. I'm off to the REAL soccer game.

Where are they now?

Do you remember a long, long time ago when I used to live in Taiwan? Some days I sort of wish I was back there and could take my sweetheart along with me. But it won't be happening anytime soon, since we are moving to the far away land of Scotland. But Taiwan hasn't completely faded away yet. I still managed to talk to most of the people I lived with over there and because I know that you are all so curious about what they are doing I thought I should give you a little update.

Let's start with Joseph. Laura calls him my eternal buddy and apparently we have both agreed to be eternal friends cause we kind of tend to follow one another. Joe moved to Columbus, Ohio for graduate school this past year and when I graduated I got this wonderful idea to visit him. After graduation I bought tickets out there and convinced Sara and Jessica to come along. We had a great trip and had to add the international flavor to it by traveling up to Niagara Falls, the Canadian side that is. It was a nice vacation and when we left Joseph was crying. His tears cleared up really quick though cause we called him back about ten minutes later to tell him our flight wasn't leaving til the next morning. So he got to see some more of us. Anyway, he finished the school year and will be completing an internship in St. Pete's, Russia this summer. Sadly he won't be making it to the wedding this September, however he will be hanging out in Russia and the U.K. long enough to come into Scotland two days after we arrive to spend a week with the newlyweds. I am pretty excited and of course we can't rendezvous in America cause we just don't know how to do that.

Moving down the Berhan fourth floor we come to Sara Hawker. She is living life up in Salt Lake City, Utah, or somewhere nearby. She works for an insurance company and also at the Home Depot. I get to see her quite often and we still get along, apparently the behavior modification really worked out in her favor. I could give you more details but I should shut up before I put our friendship back on the rocks.

Tammy Wheelwright is no longer a Wheelwright, having moved up in the alphabet to Stevens. She married the dude that came to Taiwan and he joined our little group. Oh, his name is Lorin. They are a cute couple and she teaches special education at one of the schools in Cache Valley and I believe he is getting his master's in engineering. He was talking about it at one of our get togethers but it seems that most of it went over my head.

Whitney continues to travel the world, currently residing in Grenoble, France or Switzerland (can't remember which). She is teaching a language and of course the language escapes me too. She is due to come home to Montana in a few months before she gets to fly out of the country and try somewhere else. Tammy is planning a vacation to Europe to visit Whitney. I would be a little jealous, except for the fact that I'll also be moving out of the country.

Lish, um I don't have a clue what she is doing with her life. She did stay another semester with Jessica teaching in Taiwan, but seeing as she has probably been home for six months now I have no excuse for not knowing what she is doing with her life. Hopefully good things.

In the next room we had Destiny Palmer. She is on a mission out in Hong Kong preaching the gospel in Cantonese. I believe she has run into my aunt and uncle out there and it sounds like she is loving her mission. She was speaking the language rather well even before we left so she must be doing killer now.

Katie went back to get a master's degree in teaching of some sort. I kind of follow her blog and if I understand it correctly she should be finished. I think that if you want to find out more info about her you should talk to Joseph, cause I think he talks to her more than I do.

Sain applied for graduate school down at BYU, among other institutions, and I think she was accepted. She should be doing piano performance and other cool things

In the final room at Berhan we have the room where I still talk to everybody. Jessica is going to school up at BYU-I studying...scholarly stuff. She sounds like she is having a great time and she manages to come down every so often to visit a few of us Berhaners. I do talk to her a lot but I currently don't know the latest so I'll just have to leave it at that.

Mary is living the dream in Waco, Texas. As I recall she was a little concerned about moving home and adjusting to life down there. But she keeps super busy with a real full-time job and a calling in the Young Women's program. She loves her family and we are all praying that she uses her extra vacation time to come up to Utah someday and visit us.

Laura moved out to Washington, D.C. to find her dream job. I told her when she found her dream job she had to hook me up and get me my dream job too. She does have a job at the moment working for a tax something agency. I don't know really what she does but she seems happy when I talk to her. She is another one I am trying to convince to come out to Utah for certain future events but I really don't know how successful I'm going to be.

Emily Joy Miller is no longer a Miller, having gone the way of Tammy and moving up the alphabet all the way up to Bell. She married the man who came to Taiwan to visit us, well her really. Emily and Colby like to go to the temple, well I think they do cause I saw them there tonight. They live really close to me and they are the best at planning our parties. It is nice having someone so willing to plan them, so thanks. I believe that Emily holds the record for the longest stint in kindergarten. One year in Taiwan and then another back here in the states, good work.

In other news, not related directly to Berhan but still important...Li, one of our friends from the other English school in Taiwan, went on her mission to Taipei, Taiwan. I was really jealous, wishing I could move back there myself. Liz Thackeray is going to graduate school back east cause she is really smart. Liz was the mastermind behind the Thailand trip and got adopted into the family along the way. I think that pretty much covers everybody. Hoped you enjoyed the update and if you have anything else to add or for me to amend let me know, cause boy do I ever make mistakes!

Hate to break it to you Bat Slugger, but the bat fairy is out of town

I recently started a temp job for a baseball bat company in the warranty department. It is a job that I can handle but it really isn't my favorite. People expect you to jump through all sorts of hoops just so that they can recieve their bat for their son, aka the next Babe Ruth. I thought that baseball and softball were kind of dying out across America but apparently that is not the case. Everyday millions, well probably just thousands, pick up a baseball bat and aim for the moon. I don't think that most of them hit it, being lucky if they can make contact with a baseball sized object. Apparently they do hit the ball sometimes, hard enough to have to call us and ask that their bat be replaced, hence my sweet new job in the warranty department.

People love to call in and give us their wonderful sob stories. It would appear that scouts are lining up to get into every high school, softball and little league game across the country. I never knew there were so many scouts out there. I wonder what they thought of me when I swung at everything coming my way and dropped the bat everytime it came into the outfield. Pretty sure that nobody ever wanted me to get paid to play the sport. Anyway, some people like the game and I'm so proud of them. I used to be a baseball fan myself but then I grew up and realized that there are more sports, i.e. soccer, that move a little faster and that I am a little better at, volleyball.

So back to what I do. People call in to tell us about their broken bat. Telling us things like their kid really isn't that strong so they are surprised the bat broke, or they have been saving their pennies for years to buy a baseball bat. As a sidenote it is pretty crazy how much these people are willing to spend on a bat. So after they call we get all the necessary information from them and enter it into the computer. My favorite piece of information is the date of purchase. Our warranty is only good for about one year and we always get people who bought the bat a few years ago. We tell them that the bat is no longer under warranty and they tell us we don't stand behind our product. When they tell me that I tend to get a little teary eyed because it is usually followed by something like, "We'll never buy your bats again and we're going to tell all our friends to stay away from you." At that point I really don't know what to tell them. I know what I want to tell them though, "The bat fairy is not here at the moment but if you call our competitors you might be able to reach her." But of course I have to say something like I'm sorry you feel that way and we are doing the best we can. And we really are. I don't have magical bat powers and cannot magically whisk a bat to Vermont by tomorrow morning for the season playoffs. Unfortunately for these people, if I had a magical power it wouldn't be to whisk things through the mail.

But for the most part I do enjoy my job and the people I get to work with. I figure that I only have to make it through the end of August and then I am off for a new adventure. So I'll just keep smiling and laughing about baseball bats.

Demolition Derbies

I will never forget the day my mom told me how wonderful demolition derbies were. I kind of gave her a funny look and wondered what had happened to her. I always thought they were the sort of thing for people from the deep South. You know, those people that love to watch racecars drive around a track 600 times. I just didn't understand how anybody, let along my own mother could find so much joy. But I decided to take her word on it and attend one myself.

Well, that was three demolition derbies ago and I have since become a convert. I love watching the cars crash into one another and nothing is more exciting than a car tipping over or catching on fire.

It seems that I am also impressed with the other amazing feats which are performed at these outdoor events. Who doesn't want to see a pair of people eat three Whoppers and three Jr. Whoppers faster than three other teams? It seems that I was pretty excited because I was cheering quite a bit.

I suggest that anyone who hasn't yet attended a demolition derby to try it out. I enjoy them but more importantly my mother does too. So give'em a chance, you just might get hooked too.

Tour

So right after I got engaged Kristen left to go to check things out in Colchester, the city we were supposed to be moving to. I figured that as long as she was going to skip town I could get away with doing that as well. So I chose to go on tour with the Choraliaires. If you remember correctly this was the group I was going to leave after I graduated and found a job. Well I didn't find a better job until after the second semester ended and the job still allowed me to go on tour. So I headed out into the vast unknown otherwise known as Taylorsville, Tooele, Ely, and Elko.

Tour basically means that we get to sing a whole lot in a multitude of differing places and ride on a bus to get there. We sang at rest homes, seminaires, railroad stations, stake centers, etc. We also performed the show that we did at Weber State back in April. We didn't get a whole lot of sleep during the week, but it was an experience that was quite unlike anything I'd experienced before.

We get the chance to stay in member's homes for the week and they were kind enough to make us breakfast and pack us a lunch. Sometimes we hit a homerun with the lunches they packed for us and other times...not so much. The first night the family we stay with had a party with the young choir members and the old members of their ward. It was a fun time and probably the most eventful night of the tour.

We meet a whole bunch of cool people on tour, not only members of the choir that I never talked to in class but different generations as well. At the end of the week we picked awards for one another and I ended up with the person most likely to come away from the rest home with a new best friend. I think this was probably pretty accurate.

But we don't just sing on tour, we also get to see some pretty sweet sites. We went to the cooper mine and got to play around for a bit. I had been there once before a long, long time ago and not much had really changed. Still the large tire and the big open pit. I think that the video they showed us was new though. As a side note, our tour directors had us wear matching shirts everyday so we could all look goofy together. I didn't mind it so much, except now when I look back on the photos everyone looks the same and it sort of bores me.

We also went to the Benson Grist Mill near Tooele and had to pose for photos.

In Ely we went to the local museum and this was painted on a building nearby. Here I am with my roommate for the week, Austin Packer. We did make for quite the interesting pair. I have served my mission, taught in Taiwan, graduated from college and I am getting ready to get married. Austin on the otherhand did early college and is eighteen. We did get along well though, especially after we realized that had I signed up to be a counselor for EFY this year I could have been his.

Our last stop was the Salt Flats. They were nice to stop by and see but I'm really not sure what all the hype is about. We ran around and even licked the salt but other than that I wasn't real sure what I was supposed to be doing. There are some videos of the running and licking but apparently I can't add the links from facebook, so you'll have to get there by yourself. So it was a fun week, full of adventures but I did miss Kristen, who attempted to find us a sweet place to live in England but instead got accepted to the University of Edinbourgh in Scotland and so we will be moving there instead and pushing up the wedding by a few weeks.