Marketing and Mountains

 

This is a view of the mountains from a little recreation area the Church has right across the street from our chapel. I really like having a five minute walk to church. As you can tell, Becca and I enjoy the scenery a whole lot this time around. I wanted to make it up Mount Y twice this last week but I got a cold and only made it up once. It was a good hike. I found a trail on GoogleMaps that extends from the trail I normally take that leads you up and around to the peak. That seems like a good Saturday hike to me.

I went to a BYU Management Society, Hispanic Chapter, meeting a week or so ago. People were shocked that I spoke Spanish. Mexicans are funny. They look at me perplexed when I speak Spanish and usually ask, Where are you from? I speak with a South American accent (as opposed to a Central American accent) and and it really throws them off. As usual, the speaker they got for us was great. My old means of drumming up new business have not been working as well as they used to and this presentation was on marketing small businesses. Perfect!

At the end of the presentation the marketing guru let us ask her three questions specific to our own businesses. Who do you think was the first person to raise his hand? Since my target audience is spread out so widely and doesn't get on Face Book, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. much, I needed some special advice. Why not hold a conference call/webinar? A topic that schools are interested in and that I like to talk about is breaking down cultural barriers. Anyone have any other ideas about what I could talk to school administrators about that they would be interested in hearing?

Sorry about the bad lighting. Becca made some neighbors one of her famous flourless-chocolate cakes. Both spouses were missionaries in France and I thought they'd like the treat. She really got into it and ended up making a blue-berry cream topping. Are your mouths watering yet?

I am under 190lbs.! I've been at least 25lbs. over weight for about seven years now and I am on track to be at a healthy weight by my birthday at the end of next month. Eating in moderation and moderate exercise have been my thing since right after Thanksgiving of last year. I am on track to reach my goal weight by the early fall.

Our church choir is performing today. Our choir director is a professional song writer and we're performing a song that is already on CD but he's rearranged it for choir instead of a soloist. How cool is that?! I think it would be awesome if he wrote something for my voice but since that's how he makes a living I don't really feel comfortable asking him to do that. Maybe I could be his demo guy. Before he pitches a new song to a professional artist he could have me perform it first. Who knows?

One of the fun things about scanning all of these pictures is finding ones that wouldn't be hung on any wall. The above is a candid shot from a Christmas photo probably from 2002.

Talks on Faith and Back Up the Y

Hiking Y mountain last week was so fun I decided to hike it again. This time there was no one to take my picture so I took one of Lucy instead.

 

I found a website this week that has links to digitized language courses that are now in the public domain. There are extensive or basic resources for over 400 languages there. I now have over twenty two gigabytes of PDF and audio files for over 100 languages on my laptop. If bought originally from the publishers, the full length courses would have cost about $150 each. Since I will never get around to studying all of those languages I took advantage of being at the pulpit today and invited people at Church to approach me if they, or someone they knew, were interested in learning a language. To my surprise, three people have already approached me about Spanish, German and Korean.

Becca and I both spoke in Church today. We were asked to speak about increasing faith. Becca talk was very good. She shared that she has learned that increasing faith can be achieved by aligning our will with God's. She shared some scriptures and two quotes from a talk by Elder Bednar in addition to sharing her own testimony regarding the subject. You all would have been very proud of her I'm sure.

I spoke about how, in order to have faith in God, we need to have a correct understanding of who He is. I think many Christians profess a belief in His omniscience but don't really believe that He cares about what's going on in their lives; that He loves them but that He has favorites and perhaps we are not His favorites. It is difficult to have faith in a Heavenly Father who neglects us or does not think much of us. I spent a lot of time using stories from 1st Chronicles about David and his relationship with God. I really believe that one of the things that allowed David to become Israel's most successful king was his attitude towards God. He didn't believe in a distant, disinterested God who forsook His children when they misbehaved. I prepared too much material and had to cut some parts of my talk but Becca said she didn't notice at all.

We've been watching a canceled show on Hulu about a Russian chess master who solves crimes from a hotel in Toronto. There is a bit in one of the episodes about about the hotel's Macedonian head chef getting the traditional Slavic Easter dessert pashka wrong. Stick to baklava! shouts the Russian. The chef gets it right by the end of the show. As many of you know, Becca has a great-grandfather who came from Ukraine so she has an interest in Slavic things. She went to the store the next day, bought the ingredients and made us pashka. She's having some trouble getting the mold right but it is DELICIOUS! We both like the idea of making it an Easter tradition in our family.

Salvadorian Food and Hiking the Y

I hope Elder Boothe and Lorena had nice birthdays. My friend Doug also had a birthday. Come to think of it, a lot of people I know have had birthdays lately. Mountain weather in the spring is gives you a little bit of everything. We’ve gotten snow, rain and some very lovely days. This teaches you to get outside when the weather is nice. Yesterday I hiked up to the Y on Y Mountain. Not only am I pleased with getting to the top I am also pleased that I am only a tiny bit sore today. I came across a Dominican family on my way down whose teenage daughter was having some big issues getting to the top. In that sort of playful, whiny adolescent way she said, ¡Caminar tanto casi me da un infarto! (Walking so much has almost given me a heart-attack). Since she and her family were all talking so loudly I thought it wouldn’t be rude to encourage her so I said, Vale la pena llegar allí arriba. (It’s worth it to get to the top). They all gave me a really weird look. They must be new to the area. Hundreds of white guys speak Spanish here in Happy Valley.

For those of you who don’t know, I didn’t get into BYU’s MBA program. As I feared, my GMAT score held me back. I’m going to see if I can’t talk to some people and find out if that was the only thing, though I suspect it was. I’ve already checked out a GMAT preparation manual from the Springville's big new library. BYU offers a preparation course for the GMAT. That’s good for me because no one close to Modesto did so that wasn't an option before. I plan to take a GMAT prep. course in the early fall, retake the test at the end of the course and then reapply to the MBA Program at the earliest date possible. They’ll keep my first application on file for two years so all I will need to do is update it, pay the $50.00 and everything will be good to go.

A small group of family got together at our house for lunch on Good Friday and we went to Becca’s cousin’s in-law’s house for dinner on Easter. They’ve been really great about helping us and making us feel welcome now that we’re back in Utah. It was really nice to have somewhere to go on Easter. Holidays, especially religious holidays, are good opportunities for families to come together and reestablish their shared identity.

 

We thought of RossAnne and Walter again this last week when we went to the little Salvadorian restaurant in down town Provo. We ate there about five years ago when my in-laws came to visit. It’s a real hole in the wall, complete with a dirty carpet, missing light bulbs, a poorly translated menu and very tasty food. Becca and I are sure to go back.

I’m singing in a quartet today in church. We’re going to sing Hymn 102, Jesus Lover of My Soul. It starts out with a duet and then the chorus splits into four parts. I start by singing the melody and then they asked me to sing alto on the chorus. Harmonies are usually less rich when a man sings the alto part an octave down. The harmony is not as rich. To make things interesting I switched into falsetto and sang it in the woman’s range. The group wasn’t entirely sure at first but they really like it now since it adds a very missing dimension to the harmony.

Becca bought tomato and pepper seeds and has been growing them with lots of dedication. She’s put them in containers that she made of newspaper and cardboard and then put them under a reading light with tin foil directing the light and keeping the heat in. I’ve noticed that the tomatoes sold at the stores here in Utah are tastier than in California so I am really looking forward to homegrown tomatoes. I’ve already made two batches of delicious salsa and I’m looking forward to making more.

 

I’m going to start up again with my family history project today. I was rather discouraged when I started a couple of weeks ago because my scanner is so slow. My friend Luis suggested that I record all of the family pictures with a digital camera instead. I’m going to give that a shot today. That should be a much better way to digitally record all of the family pictures I inherited from Mom.

The Move to Springville

We are all moved in to our nice little house in Springville UT.  The move went very well. This is largely thanks to my wonderful in-laws. How many people would take their vacation time to fly 2/3 the length of the country, pack up boxes, load U-Haul’s largest truck and then travel over 660 miles in one day to unload it? Not many. We were able to leave almost nothing behind because my father-in-law put his Tetris-like mind to work packing the van as tightly as could be. He did this being over sixty and with a cold.

We had lots of support on both ends of the move. More people showed up to help load the van than I expected. All four missionaries and three friends from the Branch came in addition to Dad and Penny who stayed about half the day. I was shocked at how much garbage we were holding onto. The branch president offered to haul it the next day for me, for which I was very grateful. There was a branch movie night at the Church that evening which gave Becca and me the chance to say goodbye to the many people we had served side by side with for over three years. We miss them a lot.

Grandma Barbara was an excellent hostess the night before the move, seeing us off at 4:30am. Walter had hitched up our little blue Toyota the night before so all we needed to do was load the cats into their crates with me in the moving van. Becca, Walter and RossAnn and the dogs followed me in the little gray Toyota up until Reno, NV. Dad had told me not to put any academic type podcasts to listen to on my iPod on the ride over and he was right to say so. I turned them off while approaching the mountains when I realized that, for the first time ever, they were putting me to sleep. How did I stay awake? I found that singing worked best. I made it 2/3 of the way through Les Misérables before my memory started to fail me and I couldn’t remember anything more than the highlights. The bumpy roads scared the cats tremendously and their loud meows sounded like a chorus accompanying my howling rendition of Who Am I?

Walter accompanied me the rest of the way. It was grueling to travel that long stretch between 45 and 60mph but we had plenty of time for conversation. That’s good because we don’t see Becca’s family as often as we would like. We arrived in Springville at about 7:45pm, just as the last rays of twilight were fading. I was a bit concerned to only see about five guys from the ward there waiting for us but, as we were unhooking the car from the trailer, another 15 magically appeared. We unloaded everything in under an hour. Walter’s bucket-line system kept things very efficient, so much so that several people said that it was the most efficient move they had ever participated in.

 

We were particularly grateful that the electricity was on and the water was running when we got there. Because the sale on our house closed in three weeks we weren’t sure about when we could get the utilities in our name and turned on. Fortunately the City of Springville was willing to work with us and we didn’t have to pretend we were camping that first weekend.