Dumb Cat, Language Club and Not Many Massages

The huge economic recession has been scary to watch. Becca’s job has been really slow. I am very grateful that my business is doing as well as ever, something we thank the Lord for quite often. For the past ten years or so, in the LDS Church, we’ve been receiving counsel to avoid consumer debt, buy houses and cars that we can afford and to live within our means in general. This big crisis has come about largely because of unwise spending and living on borrowed money. Even though things are tough I remain optimistic about the future. I think that it will take us five to ten years to get out of this mess but I believe that America has the ability to get out of it and continue prospering.

I took the written portion of the state interpreter’s certification test at the end of last month. It was amazingly difficult and had very little to do with the courts and legal-lingo. It’s just a filtering test to get rid of people who don’t have a solid grasp of both English and Spanish. I need to find out what a passing score is. If all I need is a 70% then I feel pretty sure that I passed. If I need an 80% then I might have paid a bunch of money just to have a learning experience. I’ve also started taking an agricultural labor management course and hope to be able to couple that knowledge with being a certified interpreter. We’ll see.

While I was taking the test in Sacramento Becca was being graciously entertained by our good friends the Schofields. They were wonderful to include her in their plans, pick her up and drop her off, with such short notice. After going to Sacramento, we went to see one of the linguists that I interviewed a few months ago for my blog. Dr. Alexander Arguelles is a scholar who knows 30 different languages. He invited us to his home and let me look through his extensive language library. He was a gracious host and answered a bunch of my questions.

While there, his wife and two young boys came home. He is married to a very nice and pretty Korean woman and their two boys are between the third and fifth grades. Dr. Arguelles speaks mostly French to them and has enrolled them in a Spanish immersion school. The oldest boy explains communication at home like this: Korean is for shouting and for prayers, French is for being at home except when company is over and English is for every other time and when we can’t think of the word in French.

We love being in the Central Valley with so many friends and family close to us. We often felt alone and left to ourselves in Utah. Today we helped my Grandma Barbara set up her Wii and ended up bowling and playing tennis. Grandma is catching on very quickly and my Aunt Carrie is a natural. It was a lot of fun.

As much fun as it is to be here we miss our good friends who are spread out all over the place. Lately we’ve had some good chats with friends in Utah and Texas. Some friends and I started a sort of linguists club where we get together online once a month via Skype. We’ve had two meetings so far. In them we talk about language related topics, share our goals, give each other suggestions and then in following meetings we share how our goals went. The meetings have been great about getting everyone focused and encouraged to pursue our professional and personal goals as well as for giving us a place to talk about these subjects that we like so much.

We are also very active in Church. My past two lessons to the 14 to 16-year-olds have been about how to set goals, including spiritual ones, and to stay chaste until marriage. Becca has been very busy with activities for the teenage girls of the ward. We were both asked to speak in Church a couple of Sundays ago and I think that things went well. Becca, who was worried about having to speak for ten to fifteen minutes, ended up talking for twenty. She did a very nice job and everyone liked her talk. We were asked to talk about the witness’ of Christ that we had received and how they affected our lives.

Life can be mundane, overwhelming and demanding but all in all I’d say that things are going well. Thanks a bunch for your phone calls, emails, blog posts and for all of the other things that you do to stay in touch with us. I’ll leave you with a short video of one of our cats chasing imaginary monsters: