A Happy Linguist, Technical Difficulties and Working with the Youth

This week we start my virtual bilingual call center. An elementary school and a high school will be able to call a toll free number whenever they need to talk to Hispanic parents and I’ll be on the other end interpreting for both parties. It’s a trial run that I’m doing for free until the end of the month. We’ve already run into some technical difficulties, which is quite frustrating, but I hope to find solutions for them with the help of my good friends Dan and Cameron, who I eventually would like to hire on full time.

We had a scare this week. Becca has been having some very weird symptoms off and on for the past two week or so. She gets achy bones and a headache for about four or five hours, usually in the evening, and then the fever breaks and she’s fine the next day. My mother-in-law, a former nurse, said that it sounded like textbook pneumonia so she went to an urgent care facility where she was told that she didn’t have pneumonia but did seem to have some other type of bacterial infection. They gave her antibiotics which seemed to rid her problems but then last night she felt sick again. That was frustrating to say the least. Perhaps the antibiotics haven’t really had enough time to work and maybe these are allergy symptoms. We’ll see. The important thing is she doesn’t have pneumonia, which took Bernie Mac’s life a few weeks ago.

My language blog is getting more popular. I was interviewed about language learning on a more popular language blog and the recording of the interview, as well as a link to my website, is posted here. That got me a lot more hits. In June my site was averaging 53 views a day; in July it averaged 65 and this month it averaged 92. On Tuesday some friends of mine and I will get together via Skype and have a conference call meeting. We’ve decided to form a club of linguists/business men where we share ideas, set goals and try to keep ourselves motivated and competitive in the language area of business. I’m actually pretty excited to get that going.

Today Becca and I were called to work with the youth of the Church. The bishopric had some miscommunication about where Becca was going to serve and she was accidentally asked to serve in two spots: teaching the little kids and helping the teenage girls. It was decided that she would serve with the teenage girls but when the bishop asked for a sustaining vote in Sacrament Meeting he accidentally said Young Men’s Organization instead of Young Women’s. He caught himself after he said it but it was still pretty ironic. I will be teaching a class to the 15 and 16 year-olds boys about becoming men in the Kingdom of God. I’m actually really looking forward to it.

Thank you for you emails. We love being close to my side of the family (we’re barbequing at my dad’s tomorrow!) but we really miss our family that’s in Utah and Michigan. We’ll have to take a trip some time.