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