SICKER THAN A DOG, THE PORTUGUESE SHAKESPEARE AND RELAXATION

I hate being sick. I usually only get really sick once a year so since I got sick over Christmas Break in 2006, I hope that now that I’m sick again, I’ll be good to go for 2007. Becca’s friend Tessa came over last Tuesday and Becca took care of her while she was sick. Becca told me to take a vitamin supplement called “Air-borns” and I didn’t. Becca is fine and I’ve been sick since Thursday.

I thought that’d I share a poem with you like I did a year or so ago when I was taking a different Portuguese literature class:

Love’s a fire that burns though undetected;
It’s a wound that aches but without pain;
It’s contentment that is discontented;
It’s not painful though the hurt’s insane;

It’s wanting nothing but our wants consented;
It’s wandering lonely through a crowd and on;
It’s never, with contentment, been contented;
It’s anxiousness one gains when it is gone;

It’s seeking prison by one’s own free will;
It’s serving who’s the victor in this art;
It’s having, for whom kills us, loyalty.

But how can love produce its favor still
With ties of friendship in the human heart,
It Love to self contrary be?
(Translation into English by Frederick G. Williams)

Those who wish to read the original Portuguese can click here. This was written by Luís Vaz de Camões, basically the Shakespeare of Portuguese literature. Instead of being a playwright, he wrote a long epic poem called Os Lusíadas. They’re inspired by the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey but instead of being about Odysseus trying to get back to his home (which many believe to be modern day Portugal) they’re about Vasco da Gama and his historical voyage to India. In his book Moby Dick, Melville says through Ishmael that anyone who wants to know about the sea should read Camões. This is just one of his poems and I hoped that you liked it.

Business is great and keeps me on my toes; school is interesting and requires a lot of reading. Dad and Penny’s gifts to Becca and me this year were some nice watches. I like mine but am having a hard time remembering to wear it since I haven’t had a watch since I lost mine in 2001. Crazy, huh? I’ll get back into the habit soon.

Well, I need to go cough my lungs up so I’ll leave the rest for the lovely Becca.

My poor sweet hubby has been running quite the fever. Last night I wanted to dunk him in an ice bath!! Work has been tiresome. Business has been booming, and more therapists have been hired, yet I am still tired. The place where I work is a massage only place. Its focus is on being therapeutic, and having the therapists work things out. This is what I thought I was getting into, but the more I massage, the more I realize that a lot of the people coming don’t want you to do anything more than relax them. Now, the phrase “I just want to relax” sounds very simple. But every single person has a different idea of how they want to relax. To some, that means deep tissue, and to others a feather duster could work… So when people come in and say that to me I brace myself for what is to come. I try my best to communicate on the pressure and get them to tell me what they want, but in the very act of doing that, you have already done something wrong. Some people like the communication, and others do not. All of them expect you to read their minds when they give you a general phrase, while wanting you to be specific to them. Now yes, therapists often times use their intuition to guide them in a massage, but what the body may need or want, and what the person actually wants can be two different things. Anyway, work has been frustrating for these very reasons. I can do my very best to try and give them what they want out of a session, but some people will be unhappy no matter what you do. So I have been wearing down. I do have regular clients that love me, and only come to me…they are the ones that keep me going. I love massage. I love helping people feel good. I don’t like people assuming things, and getting frustrated when they don’t get what they want, because they expect you to read their brains. Overall I love my job…but everyone has things in the office they don’t like..right???

Anyway, enough about that. Ryan and I are getting more and more excited about Brazil!!! We have paid our first “installment”…and only have 2 left to go, plus plain tickets. WE ARE SOOOOO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, it is getting late and my hubby would like to go to sleep since he isn’t feeling very well. Please keep him in your prayers!

Love you!

Becca and Ryan

INTERRUPTED POST

It’s Sunday morning and I’m feeling like I should write this now. Becca invited one of her clients over for dinner tonight and I don’t know if I’ll end up writing. Speaking of doing things now instead of later, I prepared almost all of my invoices for the last billing period. I hate preparing invoices and usually procrastinate but this time I decided to do it when I had it calendared. Most of the time I get paid between three weeks and a month after I send them out but occasionally I have to get on people’s cases; another thing I just love to do.

I went in and had my interview with Prof. Hague. He’s my lawyer turned translation professor. I had a New Testament professor that once said that at least one lawyer would come every month and say, “I hate my job! Please let me come and teach at your university!!” I guess Prof. Hague was one of those guys. He graded the first 500 words that I translated for my “senior project” and then we chatted about a few things. I made no translation errors as far as meaning is concerned but he did dock me for grammar and a couple of word choices. I’ve gotten almost all A’s in my English classes for as long as I can remember so it frustrates me that I would get marked down for grammar mistakes. Prof. Hague is really nit-picky. Aunt Debbie recommended a grammar book to me a couple of years ago (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) and I think that it might be a wise investment for me.

Later in the day

I was interrupted by a phone call from someone from church and that was that. The dinner guest is late so I guess I’ll write a few more words. I’d like to invite you all to read my brother Grant’s latest post on his blog. He’s having fun in high school and talks about some of the literature he’s been reading as well. You’re also welcome to read the comment I posted answering a question that he posed. I don’t think that my dear wife will be writing tonight but I hope that she does.

Well, I will write a little. This week has been a normal week. Today was fun, I made Paella, a fresh green salad with pears, pecans, parmesan and a homemade vinaigrette, and lace cookies with 62% melted cacao smothered on top. My client came over for dinner so that he and Ryan could meet. I wanted Ryan to feel comfortable with the idea of me having male clients. It is part of my business…doctors are professional, and so am I, so there is no issue.

Anyway, it is time to go to bed. We love and miss all of you!

THE PORTUGUESE NATIONAL ANTHEM, CHEAP BOOKS AND GOALS

For me, this was one of those weeks that was long but that somehow had days that went by very quickly. I have to pat myself on the back, I set myself quite a few goals for this week and I did almost every single one of them. As my mother can willingly attest, I am not much of a goal setter and never had been. That is not to say that I’ve never identified things that I want to achieve, I just find that writing them down precisely and then giving myself an exact deadline has always felt restraining and discouraging. Last semester, however, I spent a lot of time feeling overwhelmed and disorganized so I decided to right down what my priorities were. As I did, I decided to write down what I would do to live my life to be guided by those principles. I suppose that those things turned into goals for the week.

This first week of classes was a good one. I am extremely happy about how much I’m paying for books this semester. My Portuguese Lit. professor is about to publish a bilingual anthology of Portuguese poems on the left side with his English translations on the right hand side. He gave us the second to last draft that will be sent to his editor and said that if we helped him find spelling errors we didn’t have to pay for the book! It’s just a bunch of big pages with a spiral binding but I’m sure that he saved me about $70.00. I bought just about all of my other books online at amazon.com and ended up saving between ten and ninety percent (including shipping) on the price I would have had to pay at the BYU book store. The only problem is that the books won’t get here for a few more days so I’ve had to be creative about getting some of my reading assignments done.

Two classes are particularly worthy of mention because I’m taking them from two amazing professors. One is Hispanic American Lit. with Dr. Ted Lyon. Everybody and their mom wanted into that class. The department told him that he could only accept thirty students per class but he couldn’t bear to send so many away and ended up keeping thirty-four. This guy has traveled to all the Spanish speaking countries of the world and lived in several. While an undergrad, he went to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship and studied at the Catholic University of Chile. Many of his college friends died a few years later protesting the military coup of Augusto Pinochet. After getting his doctorate, he hung out with 20^th century literary giants like Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. That in and of itself is pretty cool but he also served as the mission president for my mission from 1998 to 2000 (right before I got there) so he knows southern Chile very well AND the church asked him to volunteer another three years of his life to run the Missionary Training Center in Santiago, Chile from 2002 to 2005. At the end of last year he was made honorary Consul of Chile for the area of Utah, which means that if Chile has any diplomatic issues in Utah, he will represent them. I could go on but those, at least to me, are the highlights.

This week, I have to say that I enjoyed this next professor’s class even more than Dr. Lyon’s. My Portuguese Lit. professor, Dr. Frederick G. Williams, III (yes Grandpa, his is a direct descendant of that Frederick G. Williams), was mainly raised in South America while his father was a mission president in Uruguay and then worked for the State Department. Because of this, he grew up bilingually in Spanish and English. Later, he was a missionary in Brazil and I guess that’s where his love of Portuguese literature started. He’s done studies in every Portuguese speaking country in the world (this includes South America, Europe, Africa and the Far East). He taught for 25 years at U.C. Santa Barbara where he had a lot of interaction with the Azorean communities. Subsequently, he’s published a book about the Azorean people in the 20^th century both in California and in the Azores. He’s translated four collections of poems from English into Portuguese (from Portugal, Africa, Brazil and one of the authors from Goa, Macao and East Timor). This is in addition to all of the other books he’s published in Portuguese, Spanish and English. The crazy thing is there are only three students enrolled in his class so we meet in his office so I’m practically being tutored by a man who’s done extensive translation work and speaks my three languages! How perfect is that?!

It is interesting to me that even though there are at least ten times more returned missionaries that went Brazil than Portugal, half of the Portuguese majors at BYU are returned missionaries that preached in Portugal. Another thing that is kind of funny is that they all know the Portuguese national anthem. The other two kids in my Portuguese Literature class both served in Portugal and at the end of class sang the Portuguese national anthem in two part harmony. I don’t remember how the heck we got to a point in the conversation for them to start singing but they did and now Prof. Williams thinks that it would be a good idea to come up with and sing some three part harmony of one of the poems in Portuguese while he accompanies us on the piano. Here’s my wonderful wife to tell you about her week back to reality.

Well, I was pretty busy this week. Saturday was a 10 hr day, with 7 ½ hrs of massage. Now a 2 ½ hr break sounds nice, but it was in small 20 minute segments or so…and in those segments, I wasn’t really sitting down, I was getting things ready for the next massage.

Anyway, enough about work. Ryan and I are, as most of you know, saving up for Brazil, Argentina and maybe Chile. I am glad to say that my tip money is adding up slowly but surely! I have made a thermometer graph on MS Excel to track how much money we have saved up all together so that it doesn’t seem as daunting as it really is (and so that I can keep track of it all better). And it helps! It is all about perspective! I calculated that it is pretty much as expensive to go to Latin America for 5 months as it is to stay here in Utah...except that we will be having WAY more fun!!!! And, Ryan can still run the business, so we won’t be loosing out on income. The trip just sounds better and better!!! It will be great to travel somewhere and learn and have fun without the pressure of children, and them being safe. We will love to travel when we have kids, but it is a good experience for now.

We have set a goal to do 15 minutes of cleaning every day. Since we have had to unpack, and we left the house out of order before we left, the last week has been taking care of all that. We are starting to get to the actual house, and tidying it up. It is a great goal. We have both enjoyed being able to have a cleaner habitat. We will soon get to the point of doing more of a deep clean. Our house will soon be impeccable, without a lot of daily stress over it either. We turn on the timer for 15 minutes and the music and go to it! When the timer beeps, we are done. It works great. That way we don’t feel like we have a daunting task ahead of us. The worst task is the clothes. There are so many of them, and a small bedroom closet, and one small dresser. So since it is hard to find a place for all of them, the clean clothes stay in a pile as we work our way through them. This too can change though because we have 1 bigger closet in the office, and a coat closet. Both have inefficient use of space. Anyway, we are becoming more of a team…which is our little saying “we are a team!”…and we are enjoying life more fully because of it!

Well, I am going to go wash the glasses since Ryan’s hands are too big (our next place WILL have a dish washer!!!), and I’m going to prepare some sides for dinner.

We love you! Ryan and Becca

COOK BOOKS AND NAUSEA IN THE MORNING

The holidays have been wonderful despite almost my whole side of the family getting sick! It was nice to spend so much time with the Schwartz and Tobey Families. Everyone is doing well. I have tonz of cookbooks now! Well, at least I’m getting a good variety, I actually only have 7 that are hard bound: Indian, Brazilian, Greek, Chocolate (teehee), Thai, and 2 that everyone should have to get a variety of the basics (Betty Crocker style). The rest are small paper bound ones. It makes me very happy. I went through the Greek one today, and put tabs on all the recipes that sounded nummy. I was fasting at the time, so there are a lot of tabs! I plan on going through all of my cookbooks and doing that. I think it will help when I want to cook something/get a craving to be able to look through the tabs at all that I have been interested in the past.

I was planning on getting back to work on Friday and Saturday, but very early Friday morning I started getting excruciating pain in my abdomen as well as severe nausea. I could not sleep (because of the pain) or stand up (because of the nausea)…it was horrible! Now, a little background: I have determined that no one pregnancy sign is a true sign of pregnancy-except throwing up (as you all know Ryan and I want to start our family, and we thought it has happened more than once). The reasoning behind this is that I DO NOT vomit. It just doesn’t happen (except twice in my life as a child) even when I wish it would. So around 7am (I had been in pain since 4) I woke my hubby up for a priesthood blessing. He left around 8:30 or so to run some errands, and around 9:00 it happened…I threw up, a lot (and my cycle is 3 months off). So why all the details? Just that my theory is now broken, for I am not pregnant. Now, I don’t know what to think. It will be a huge surprise to everyone including me, because I will now never be able to guess/predict if I actually get pregnant.

So did I leave you wanting to get to the end of that paragraph? If I did, I’m glad! Hehehe. When I do get pregnant, it will be a surprise; you won’t see it coming…muah hahaha!! It will be very clear and not at all tricky in anyway when you do find out though. I promise.

So, there was absolutely NO snow while we were in MI. We left the winter wonderland, and had about a 40 degree Christmas. Poo. I only like snow on two days of the year. It has happened before, and it is wonderful. Oh well.

Well, here is my absolutely wonderfully amazing hubby!!

It is 11:00 pm here and I want to get to sleep to start this semester off right. We’ve been enjoying some couple time since we got back but our friends are hinting that they want to get together so couple time will probably end soon. Please keep me in your prayers for these next four months because I have high expectations and a lot to accomplish. Thanks for reading.