Emily and Calvin spent a month and a half in Utah while Calvin was out of school for the summer. I stayed home for a month so I could keep working. Technically I can work from anywhere, but I have a fair amount of hardware that I use when testing various functions of our software, and it’s hard to lug it all to a different place. Also, I tend to have an easier time being emotionally stable when I’m at home in my home environment.
We don’t go to as many car shows as we once did, as Calvin seems to have lost interest in them somewhat, but every now and then we make it out.
Welcome to 2025. 2025 is definitely a number.
October is a time of year. Oh yes, it is. It’s the time of year to go to a pumpkin patch with cousins while the cousin’s mom (Janae) deals with complications from having a baby (Penny). It all turned out ok (SPOILER ALERT). This year, it was also the time of year that my parents visited from the land of Arizona. They went to the pumpkin patch with us, and later we all trekked to the zoo.
Summer 2024. It was one for the ages. Emily went to Utah for 2 months and I stayed in Oklahoma. In July, I went on a road trip. First stop, Durango where I met up with my parents, Shauni and Jordan, Megan and Todd, and their respective families. We did Durango things. Rafting, ruins, ice cream, dinner and a show, mountain biking. That sorta thang. I stayed by myself in a basement in someone’s house that takes a long time driving on a dirt road to get to. This was the view. See? No people. It was perfect.
In March, my parents visited from Arizona. We took them to nowhere Oklahoma to eat some yummy food and go to a museum. The restaurant we were going to go to had an hour-long wait time so we settled for some yummy pizza, with which we were not disappointed at all. Calvin was so nervous when he started preschool last Fall. It was heartbreaking when it was time for him to get out of the car the first day and he was clinging to Mommy and crying. It soon turned into something that he looked forward to each week, and it was a sad affair to have it end. Now he has the summer off and Pre-K to look forward to in the Fall.
Hurricane We went on a trip to Hurricane UT which we tend to do twice a year. Even though the temperature hung around 40 degrees Fahrenheit (or 4 degrees Celcius for those who want to use a system that makes sense), Calvin wanted to hang out in the pool for several hours every day. The pool cover also makes a good driving surface. We’ve introduced Calvin to bowling, which is a great cold-weather activity.
9/3/2023 I was lying on the couch inside the house. I realized the mushrooms were beginning to take effect when I looked out the window at the clouds and saw a bright white cloud peaking up over a mass of gray clouds. For a second I was certain I was looking at the top of a mountain peak. As I continued looking at the clouds, I began seeing shapes form in the clouds. I saw dinosaurs move past, and then three kids playing together, and then a giraffe head. My guide suggested I move outside to which I agreed.
Well, we’re all another year closer to death. We’ve been in Oklahoma for a year now. I wouldn’t say it feels like home the same way the hot, dry desert in the Southwest does, but it’s nice nonetheless. When I drove from Idaho to Oklahoma for the first time I started to get a bit alarmed. The drive through Wyoming and Kansas is a long time to go without seeing trees. Thankfully, Oklahoma has trees. Mountains or hills may be a no-go, but at least there are trees - and cousins.
Emily has been attending dance class and has been working on a performance inspired by the Barbie movie. Watch the video here and see if you can spot her: I’ve been going to Ninja Warrior class that Mark introduced me to which has been a fun (and challenging) way to stay in shape. I was quite bad at it at first but have improved drastically since I started attending which has been rewarding.
What’s nifty about where we live is that a berry farm is right down the road where can go pick fresh blueberries and blackberries, but 20 minutes away is a big-ish city. We’re not the best gardeners (yet), but we recently harvested the first thing we’ve successfully grown. Calvin was pretty excited about that. We went to a little amusement park about 40 minutes away that is geared toward kids Calvin’s age. He rode all the “roller coasters”. We always wondered if he was having fun because his facial expression was usually some variation of this:
In November we travelled to visit Owasso, Oklahoma to visit Janae and go house viewing. Calvin got to play with his cousins and we got a reprieve from the bitter Rexburg winter. The fact that we could actually go outside for more than 5 minutes without cursing our very existence was a good sign (also with the way the housing market was going in Idaho, pay a premium for the priveledge).
I, seeking greater enlightenment, embarked on a journey. I had a guide with me who was there to be there with me to help me through the experience and who was able to write my thoughts and insights as I verbally expressed them. My trip was not what I was expecting. I was anticipating that I would put on my headphones and experience music on an entirely new level. Instead, I experienced trees.
We’ve built up quite a montage of Calvin playing with cars and trucks and digging in dirt. I think we’ve identified his favorite activity, and one of our favorite activities is taking redundant pictures of his cuteness. He also humors us and goes on hikes (eh, more like nature walks), but maybe that’s because he knows we always have some trucks stashed away to play with. On our walks, we often stumble upon highly diggable dirt and those come in handy.
Kev’s been spending a lot of time doing what he loves to do most. play with cars play with trucks look at cars look at trucks request that we talk about cars and trucks We had one last hurrah with Jane and Mark’s family before they headed off to Oklahoma. We tried to ‘hold down the fort’ with the kids while they had a yard sale, and then went out for ice cream. We will miss having them close by.
Kev’s been spending a lot of time doing what he loves to do most. play with cars play with trucks look at cars look at trucks request that we talk about cars and trucks We had one last hurrah with Jane and Mark’s family before they headed off to Oklahoma. We tried to ‘hold down the fort’ with the kids while they had a yard sale, and then went out for ice cream. We will miss having them close by.
This might seem like it’s coming out of the blue but we’re changing Kevin’s name to Calvin. We’ve been thinking about this since almost the day he was born. When we were picking a name during pregnancy for the life of us we couldn’t decide on a name for a boy that we liked. Ramone was our favorite, but we were reluctant to use what traditionally is a Hispanic name as his first name. Additionally, we (mostly Emily) were concerned about trying to incorporate a family name. We thought about using the name Don(ald) but President 45, who we weren’t particular fans of, ruined that idea for us. We wanted a name that would go with Ramone and since we are fans of my dad we went with ‘Kevin Ramone’ which has a nice ring to it.
Hobbies I’ve loved collecting vinyl, much of it from criminally obscure bands who only pressed 300 copies of a record in 2014 or whatever. A part of me thinks of record collecting as ‘archiving’. You might ask why I collect vinyl if I can hear the music on the internet. Or you might not ask, in which case I will give the answers unsolicited. Vinyl sounds better than the compressed digital counterpart sent via electrical pulses through wires. You can actually see the album artwork too. I seem to be nearly incapable of listening to an entire album on the internet. I get distracted, my player of choice is shuffling before I realize it, and I get distracted. I also get distracted. There’s something about the ritual of pulling out a chunky piece of vinyl that is not only viscerally satisfying but also commits me to listen to a continuous piece of music the way the artists intended. Songs on an album are often sequenced in a way such that the sum of greater than it’s parts. One example I can think of is Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality when the second to last song Solitude quietly invokes images of a large starry desert night sky, proceeded by the last song Into the Void with one the most monstrous, kick-ass riffs in rock n’ roll. That transition is such a good moment, one which can only be experienced through the album format. Not all records I’ve bought can be easily found or accessed on the interwebs. I recently heard a song called Let Them Eat Valium on a weekly late-night radio show from LA that plays a lot of crazy, weird, and obscure stuff. This song about knocked me over, and I was compelled to track it down. The problem was that the only thing I could find on the internet was a youtube video - of someone playing their vinyl record. I researched the song and discovered that nobody really knows much about the band, who put out one single on a 7” decades ago before sinking back into the darkness of obscurity and nearly being lost in history until someone found a copy at a yard sale and began spreading the word. There are probably a few hundred copies of this record in existence - and might I stress that the song is damn good. Luckily I was able to find a copy, for under 15 bucks too! It’s kind of cool to have an obscure song nobody has ever heard of that’s actually quite catchy. I recently discovered a band from the mid-2000s that I truly believe could have radio hits, even today (maybe add in a little bit of autotune for the kids; and yes, new vinyl is being pressed to this day). I’ve been a little obsessed with them and found myself scouring the internet for a reasonably priced record that is inevitably out of print and few have ever heard of. A few weeks ago I walked into a record store and saw just the record I was looking for, for 7 bucks.
Kev is still learning to talk and the words he uses don’t sound like the words we use, but we’ve learned to pick up on which of his sounds equates to words we use. Here’s a sampling of sounds and their associated words: Bwow! - (probably his favorite word) means truck, car, or any kind of vehicle with wheels really. Me! - help me! Ball - ball Eh - egg
I was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when I was 8 years old, which is the Catholic equivalent of being baptized as an infant, and I have been a faithful member for most of my life since then. The LDS church is not just a church to attend on Sunday. It’s a lifestyle that governs many, if not most, aspects of one’s life. All of my major life decisions have been influenced by my belief in the teachings of the church.
In case you didn’t realize, the word “suffiently” on your site is spelled incorrectly. I had similar issues on my website which hurt my credibility until someone pointed it out and I discovered some of the services like SpellHelper.com or SpellingCheck.com which help with these type of issues. AUTHOR: Kyle Anderson AUTHOR EMAIL: anderson20173@gmail.com AUTHOR URL: http://theluckystreak.com SUBJECT: [Devil’s Avocado] Contact IP: 192.99.100.141 Array ( [1_Name] => Kyle Anderson [2_Email] => anderson20173@gmail.com [3_Website] => http://theluckystreak.com [4_Comment] => In case you didn’t realize, the word “suffiently” on your site is spelled incorrectly. I had similar issues on my website which hurt my credibility until someone pointed it out and I discovered some of the services like SpellHelper.com or SpellingCheck.com which help with these type of issues. [email_marketing_consent] => [entry_title] => Contact [entry_permalink] => https://devilsavacado.com/contact/ [feedback_id] => f6a1973caa1a77a5dfd845ac2e756c40 )
January has historically been the toughest month of the year, at least the years where we’ve lived somewhere cold. The thrill of Christmas has gone the way of the carbonation in a flat, half-finished can of coke and the road to spring looks arduous and cold. Emily might seem nice and all, but as long as I’ve known her she has had a deep, abiding hatred in her heart for snow. Indeed, our ideal location is somewhere in the beautiful desolation of a warm desert with NO SNOW. We’re not totally sure where that is, but wherever it is we’d prefer to know we’re living in the desert, not just a city with hot sidewalks (like the center of Phoenix). We would love to live somewhere with big starry nights, open desert land, and ABSOLUTELY NO SNOW. But that’s just a dream at the moment.
There is the way life works and there is the way I wish life worked. This is how I wish it worked: if you have good intentions, you are guaranteed to make good decisions. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to produce scenarios where this isn’t the case. For example, I may have good intentions to fix my friend’s car, but unless I’ve gained knowledge in car mechanics somewhere along the way, I may actually do more harm than good. Or I may have good intentions by giving an alcoholic family member money when this could likely be enabling bad behavior. This is also very applicable to politics. A politician claiming better intent than an opponent does not automatically mean proposed policies will make the world a better place, and in fact could be utterly counterproductive.
Several months ago I wrote about my job search, and some of the failures along the way. In September, I was brought on board to SpotOn as a software engineer, using a language called Go. This is a language I’m new to but is one that I was very interested in gaining more experience in. At least 6 months before I started this job I read a book about Go and started solving programming puzzles through a website called exercism.io which has volunteer mentors to help you learn a language. I also started building an app for analyzing expected moves in the stock market using Go. In the end, this was enough for me to land a job. This the formula I’ve used to find employment in software engineering without a college degree:
There’s a common type of social media post, most typically from parents of small children. You know the ones. Parents are overflowing with gratitude and positivity. I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of such posts. However, I don’t believe they adequately capture the full spectrum of the wellspring of emotion that comes with being a parent. I’m a parent (as of one year ago) so I can say with some first-hand knowledge that sometimes you do feel an extra measure of gratitude and joy, but more often life just as glamorous and romantic as it usually isn’t. For some, I imagine candor about the negative aspect of parenthood might seem selfish or overly despondent. However, I don’t think it’s wise to brush reality under the rug and pretend that parenthood is a perpetual Christmas card family portrait. Prospective parents should be given as much information as possible about what to expect after they’re done expecting.
Boundaries, a book by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, makes me wonder what percentage of human malcontent is a direct result of some level of inappropriate boundaries. The subject of boundaries is a meaty one as I’ve discovered, but I will sample a few specifics of what I found to be the most thought-provoking ideas: Having appropriate boundaries in our lives means having the discernment to know when to say ’no’ and when to say ‘yes’, which is fundamental to healthy, fulfilling, and mutually beneficial relationships.
In August we traveled to Hurric-un (it’s a hick Utah pronunciation - just go with it) for the annual family vacation on Emily’s side. To kick things off right, we did the nerdiest thing you could possibly do other than larping. Dungeons and Dragons, which all we all know, is Satan’s game. This is what it looks like to be sucked into the occult. I think we won the game.
Emily and I have a lot of overlap in our music tastes. While I have more of a tendency to roam into the heavier music, and I seem to have a greater affinity for ska and reggae than she does, we both enjoy much of the same things. One of the bands that we both love is a band called Screaming Females. Screaming Females is a great band name, but a bit of a misnomer. While the band is indeed fronted by a female, the other two people in the band are dudes. Also, there’s no screaming; at least not very much.
It’s a fantastic time to try and find a new job, and so I’m taking full advantage of these flourishing economic times. It certainly helps that I’m trying to switch to a new programming language and I’m going for a bit of a salary increase. I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing lately, and it’s been interesting to see the different interview styles. Software engineering interviews are always different but still have some common characteristics. For example, they don’t ask or seem to care about academic credentials, and there is always a code challenge of some sort.
We started feeding Kev solid foods, though it doesn’t seem like much of it goes to the correct location. Still, it’s good for him to practice, and at the very least it seems like he enjoys playing with all the interesting textures. Here’s a video of him trying solid food for the first time. We now let him play with his food, which means he gets really messy and disgusting, and so we make sure to eat dinner right before bath time.
I haven’t written a proper monthly update since July of 2018, which is almost 2 years ago. Time has been a very limited resource lately, and so I’ll make that my official excuse. Yeah, that’s it. I have been feeling the itch to start blogging again, although I’m not yet sure exactly what form it will take. The monthly updates are fun, but I also would like to write more “big idea” kind of stuff, and sometimes I just want to talk about me, which is what most of this post will probably consist of. Maybe I’ll just let inertia have it’s way with me, and I’ll do precisely nothing. But in all seriousness, blogging really is time consuming, and time is the most precious resource in the world to me.
Kev was born on 7:11, Tuesday morning, after a greuling 48-hour marathon. For the remainer of the day, we had visitors and nurses coming to our room every 30 minutes to poke and prod kev, give us advice, give Emily medicine, poke and prod Kev again, check to see how much he poop he ejected out of his bum, repeated ad naseum. Similarly, most of our memory of the subsequent stay in the the hospital is mostly of people checking up on us and giving us food, and even a nurse once offering to take Kev to the nursery at 2 in the morning so we could get an hour or two of sleep. We learned right away that he seemed to really, REALLY like to eat. During his first breastfeeding session, our nurse was impressed that he went “a full 30 minutes”. Another nurse later commented that he was a “pirahna” when she saw our written log of how long he was eating. This was all just foreshadowing. That night, we wrapped Kev up in his swaddle for the night, and we lay down, hoping to get at least an hour or two of sleep. It was only a few minutes before we heard him getting restless and in the dark, and we heard “smack smack smack”. We recognized this as a sign of hunger so we dutifully got up and fed him again. After 30 minutes or so, we laid him down again. Again, we heard him stirring restlessly and we were dismayed to hear more lip smacking. Finally, at a little past 11 PM, he fell asleep, thankfully. We were able to sleep intermittently for a few hours (he still woke up hungry every couple of hours), followed by a glorias 3-to-4-hour chunk of uninterrupted sleep early Wednesday morning, which was sorely needed. He slept most of the day that following Wednesday, and we didn’t realize it then, but he had what seems to be a common condition in newborns, where he had his days and nights mixed up. We ameloriated it fairly quickly in the coming week by simply making sure to wake up him every couple of hours during the day, and within that first week, he was doing most of his sleeping at night. Wednesday night, Kev wouldn’t sleep and he seemed like he was only happy if he was breastfeeding, and that’s what we did for hours and hours, watching new episodes of TV shows that we had prescentially been avoiding so we would have a nice backlog of stuff to watch. At 2 AM, he still wasn’t sleeping, and seemed to be inconsolable. Our nurse entered the room (they came into our room at all hours of the day and night), and offered to take him to the nursery and wrap him in a warm blanket to see if that would help while we tried to get a couple hours of sleep. She had offered this previously, but we declined, wanting to make sure we were self-sufficient for when we went home. This time, however, in the wee hours of the mroning and not having had much sleep in the past 96 hours, we accepted and did indeed get 2 or 3 hours of sleep, by which time of course Kev woke up and was ready for more. We were slated to go home on Thursday, which was Thanksgiving Day, which meant there weren’t many people on duty, except the one fill-in nurse who normally doesn’t work in that section of the hospital. The hospital treated us with a special Thanksgiving-style meal before we left, which was hospital food - but nice hospital food to boot. The anxiety induced by the thought of going home and being on our own was starting to take effect. You see, at the hospital we were waited on and pampered, we had nurses delivering medication and answering questions, and making food for us. We knew this wouldn’t, and shouldn’t last forever. Soon, like a parent pushing their child out of the nest so that they can start dealing with the realities of life and grow and become self-reliant, the hospital needed to kick us out of our comfortable existence. We hadn’t really made arrangements to have anyone help us at home, because we didn’t exactly possess a crystal ball, and we assumed we’d want some peace and quiet to get adjusted to our new life. That was partially correct, but we obviously didn’t know that Emily would be coming home with a 2nd-degree tear, and Kev would have a symobotic relationship with the breast. The day we got home from the hospital was possibly the hardest day - and night - of my life. That night after coming home from the hospital is permanetntly seared in my brain. Kev was unsatisfied if he wasn’t nursing every waking minute, Emily could barely walk, and her nipples were beaten to hell, which now amounted to pain whenever she fed Kev, who seemed to be eating almost more than he was sleeping. We had planned pretty well for coming home with a baby, or at least we thought. Our swaddles didn’t quite work as well as we’d hoped, neither did the bassinet, and we needed a few other supplies like ice packs and medicine to help with Emilys pain. I needed to go to Wal-Mart, but I was scared of leaving Emily because she couldn’t easily get up to change his diaper or handle any other emergencies. I relucantly left her sitting in the recliner, with diapers and supplies close by while I navigated the store at 10 pm through bleary eyes and a haze of exhaustion. I had forgotten that it was the night before Black Friday, but it didn’t take long to figure that out. It’s already a rather offensive event to me and one I choose to avoid if possible, but now somehow I found myself in a parallel universe navigating through the gluttinous crowd of people already congregating after completing the task of being thankful and were hungry to buy more crap. I made it through the checkout line and told the checkout person that everything was great, no problems whatsoever, like you’re supposed to do. Back at home, 12 AM turned into 1 AM which turned into 2 AM. Kev did not seem interested in being put down to sleep. We were under the impression that we should be “responsive to cues”, meaning if he’s crying, we should try to fulfill his needs, which in our case seemed to mean stuffing a boob in his mouth. We didn’t have any pain mitigating ice (not sure why I didn’t think to get any from Wal-Mart), and in my haze I couldn’t think of a place to get ice at 4 AM (Maverick, duh!). At some point around 3 or 4 I had tried to lay down to get some sleep, but I felt so bad for Emily who was still on the couch trying to soothe Kev and just seemingly going through hell. At 4:43 AM, I texted Emily’s mom and said “I think we might need your help sooner than anticipated, we’re just feeling overwhelmed right now”. Well, as it turns out, Emily’s mom was recovering from a bout of food poisoning, but she got a hold of Emily’s dad and stepmom, who said they could come the next day. In the meantime, we decided we were heading out to the pediatricians office as soon as they opened at 7 AM. We had to go get him tested for Bilirubin anyway, but we were also desperate to talk to somebody about what was going on. Knowing that it takes 30 minutes to get to Idaho Falls, we left at around 6:30 in a move of desperation-mixed-with-wanting-to-actually-do-something-about-this, even though we hadn’t confirmed our appointment yet. Luckily, the pediatrician was able to see us right away. On our way there, I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner (or much lunch) on Thanksgiving, the day before. I don’t remember much of what we talked about with the pediatrician, but I do remember we felt a palatable sense of relief. Breastfeeding was still a painful experience for Emily but we decided we were going to see the lactation specialist as soon as possible, which would have to be the next day. Chris and Annette arrived later that day and helped us get back on our feet, making ice packs, running errands, and helping out wherever they could. It was what we needed to feel like we could breathe and take care of ourselves again. We went to the lactation specialist’s office on a Saturday. She normally wouldn’t have been working that day but she had taken Thanksgiving and the day after off and felt like she needed to be there, and we were grateful that was. She helped Emily with her technique (which ended up being a game-changer), and also gave her a nipple shield so her body could heal. The next weeks and months were still difficult, with having to get up and feed Kev every two hours during the night, and our struggling to get him to fall asleep. Emily feeding him for 12 hours a day (not exaggerating) didn’t help. We realized that he might have been sleeping when he was “eating”, but we were following the directive we had been given to be “responsive to his cries”, and the only thing that seemed to satisfy him was to eat. We were looking for clues that he was just comfort sucking, but he had a massive amount of dirty diapers so we figured he was actually eating, and he would actively sucking and swallowing the entire time he was being fed. In short, the first month was confusing and exhausting. We started looking forward to each new milestone, which in our minds was every completion of a week, which happened every Tuesday (the weekday he was born). Somewhere along the 2 month mark, we found ourselves not counting and trying to just make it to the next week anymore. Kev was still waking up a couple of times in the middle of the night to let us know he’s hungry, but we developed a system in which I would get up the first time he woke up and feed him formula, and Emily would get up the second time, and having a somewhat predicatable routine was a morale booster. We were expecting parenthood to be exhausting and horrible in many ways, and it actually kind of was. But I think the fact that our expectations were suffiently tempered helped us fully live in the moment and look for the good. It also started to get easier over time, and now 5 months in, we’re finally starting to get a full night of sleep again (spoiler alert). He has always insisted on sleeping with his nose pushed up against something. From almost the day he was born, no matter where we put him in his bed, he would somehow end up like this, or some variation thereof.
Our doctor, Dr. Allphin, let us know in one of Emily’s appointments leading up to the due date that he was going to be leaving on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday. That information coupled with the fact that he didn’t want us to go past 41 weeks of pregnancy meant that we might have to make a hard decision. We had never really thought too hard about induction. For some reason, it just didn’t seem like something we needed to worry about or mentally prepare for such a possibility. For some reason, a C-section procedure seemed like a more likely scenario than having to be induced, and we were more prepared for that. As the due date approached, and passed, and we started looking at it in the rearview mirror instead of a future impending event, we realized we were going to think about being induced. Today was Wednesday, and Dr. Alphin was going to be leaving the next Tuesday. If we wanted to make sure he would be present for the delivery, Emily would need to be induced on Sunday evening, ensuring that we would be done by Tuesday. We could wait to see if labor would start naturally, but Wednesday would be our cut off date, and if we went that late, we would have to go with a doctor we were unfamiliar with. We decided to go ahead and schedule the Sunday evening appointment, but we were still hoping earnestly that labor would start naturally and we would have to cancel the appointment. I think part of our reluctance was that we were dreading going through the experience of “this is the last time we do this by ourselves”, “this is our last night”, and having a countdown clock to our lives being turned completely upside down. We would much rather have the eventuality sprung on us unsuspectingly, not giving us time to think about what was about to happen. Emily had started getting “fake” contractions, and they had started getting worse as the days advanced through Thursday and Friday. In fact, we had a false alarm on Friday when it seemed liked contractions might be starting, but they suddenly stopped. The next day, on Saturday, the contractions started up with a vengeance and it seemed like it was for real this time. It was around dinner time and typically I’d start preparing a meal, but we decided we’d rather just go the easy route and get some Five Guys rather than make and eat dinner through the contractions. I was mildly freaking out, evidenced by the fact that I totally forgot where Five Guys was, even though I’ve been there several times before and it’s in a prominent place in the little tiny town we live in, and you have to be blind to miss it. I eventually got my wits about me and turned around after having completely bypassing it and finally located the building. After returning with the food, we ate, and started the process of gathering the necessary belongings that we would need at the hospital. Disappointingly, the contractions suddenly stopped yet again. We still held out hope that contractions would start up again on Sunday. It was mid-morning on Sunday and there was absolutely no hint of a contraction whatsoever, and we were finally forced to face that, yes, Emily is going to have to be induced. Emotions and tears started flooding in, everything from “oh wow, it’s hitting me how totally inadequate and unprepared I am to help you through labor”, to “this is it, our happy, comfortable routine is over and our marriage is probably going to fall apart once we’re stressed and have had no sleep for days on end”. We were due at the hospital at 7:00 PM. I made dinner, but neither one of us were in much of a mood to eat. We eventually choked down some food, and I’m glad Emily was able to get something in her system because this would be her last meal for 48 hours. We packed up the car and had a few minutes left and we just sat in our living room, just sitting and knowing life is about to change forever. It was a long, silent drive in the dark to Idaho Falls, with a lot to think about. It was 30 minutes but it felt longer than that but at the same time it ended all too soon. We weren’t sure what was awaiting us when we arrived and I don’t know that we were too eager to find out either. Once we arrived at the hospital and got settled into our room, and Emily changed into her hospital gown, I think we both started feeling more at ease. I think a lot of nervousness and dread comes from having a lack of information, and being in that room and realizing this is where it’s going to happen, gave us just enough information to calm our nerves a bit. We also had a very nice, competent nurse named Leah, which I thought was a good sign because I have a niece named Leah. We were warned that we probably wouldn’t get much sleep that night. Dr Allphin had already made us aware that it could take up to 16 hours, so we were prepared for the long haul. It took a while to get Emily hooked up to her IV, because they kept hitting a valve, which meant there was blood, and I was getting uncomfortable. They eventually switched arms, but even when they successfully stuck her, there was a blood spurt just to spite me. I was glad when that was over. After the initial dose of Cytotec, there was nothing left to do at this point but wait. I laid down on the couch with a blanket and tried to get some shut-eye. I would wake up when the nurses would come in every hour or so to check up on Emily, but Emily and I were able to get a bit of sleep. At 3:40 AM, after her second dose of Cytotec, Emily felt a gush of liquid. She reached for the button used to call in a nurse, and was so surprised that someone started talking to her through a speaker, that in her groggy state of mind, all she could say was ‘oh’. Leah came in soon after and checked her and confirmed that her water had broken. They gave her mesh underwear and gigantic pads, because as it turns out, you keep gushing liquid throughout the entire process. Emily’s water breaking gave us hope that the process was progressing at a quicker pace than expected, and we would be able to continue labor without the aid of medication required for inducement. The medication that would have been required would cause contractions to happen closer together and make for a more painful, and unpleasant experience, which is why most people who are induced have an epidural. We were excited that we might be able to forgo all those drugs. At around 8 AM, the contractions really started picking up. I started applying pressure and helping as best I could, dutifully fulfilling the responsibilities I had prepared for, and trying to help Emily get through each contraction. I could see on the monitor when each contraction arrived and how big each one was. Emily started experiencing simultaneous intense back and thigh pain. Whenever a contraction would start I would put pressure on her back so she could get through it. We listened to a bit of Jim Gaffigan, and eventually she moved to a side-stomach position she had practiced, and turned on some music. Periodically she would switch to her other side, and every hour I would remind her to go to the bathroom and change out pads. This seemed to work for an hour or two. When the pain started to intensify, and I helped her walk around our room for a bit. I was surprised at how little we saw our nurse during this time (Alicia was our new nurse after the shift change at 7 AM), and how hands-off it seemed. The benefit is that we had privacy to work through some intense stuff on our own, but I also felt unsure about whether we were doing it right, or how long we could expect all of this to even last. As the pain just kept getting worse, we were getting anxious to see what kind of progress she had made and what positive news we had earned from the last four hours. When the nurse finally checked Emily, she reported that she was exactly the same. 3 cm, 80% effaced. There was not even a little good news to report. We had been fairly optimistic and ready to power through anything, but this report was very disheartening. It seemed like we were going through a pointless exercise of pain for no observable benefit. We decided to take it hour by hour. Emily’s contractions were getting more and more painful with every passing moment and I was doing everything I could, but now her thighs were hurting in addition to her back, and I needed 4 arms at that point. After an hour, Emily got checked again. The only positive thing to report is that Emily was still at a 3 but “maybe” at a 4 at that point. We started talking seriously about asking for an epidural. We had prepped ourselves that we would only discuss it in between contractions, so as to make the most rational decision we could. We decided to go yet another hour. After another hour had passed, there was still no progress, so it seemed appropriate to ease the pain and try and speed up the process. It had already been 12 hours since her water broke, and the longer it takes to deliver the baby after that, the more nervous doctors seem to get. It was an emotional decision because Emily felt like she was giving up on her goal of doing this naturally. We talked and we realized that we were still proud of ourselves for trying, for going through something intensely difficult, even if it didn’t turn out as we had hoped. It was time for Emily to get some pain relief. At about 2:30, the anesthesiologist, Walter, came in and walked Emily through the process of sticking a giant needle in her back. She also received an initial dosage of Pitocin, which makes the contractions come more quickly. Alicia set up a competition where the four of us stated our predictions of the birth weight, the length, the time, and gender. I think we both appreciated that she did that, it lightened the mood when we really needed it. In fact, all the people who worked with us at EIRMC were outstanding, and we truly appreciate them. Alicia, Emily and I all predict the birth time to be between 6 and 7 PM. Walter prefaced his prediction that we weren’t going to like it. He predicted 9 PM. After the epidural medicine kicked in, it was obvious that it wasn’t strong enough. Walter had mentioned that he was going a little light on the dosage because Emily is petite. After it became apparent that Emily was still in pain, he upped the dosage, which seemed to do the trick. Not too long after Emily received the epidural, she got checked again and was at a 7, and it looked like things were progressing nicely. It seemed like we were past the worst of it, which was a relief. I was able to take a shower, and Emily tried to get some sleep, though it was difficult because her legs were spontaneously moving. I think it was because her contractions were getting more powerful from the Pitocin and it was causing her legs, which she didn’t have any control over, to move. It was really bizarre, and none of the nurses we talked to had ever seen it before, but they didn’t seem concerned. After a few hours, and a bit of downtime and some sleep, we found out that Emily was still at a 7. We were hoping she would be able to start pushing at that point, but zero progress had been made. There was nothing left to do but settle in, try to get some sleep and wait it out. At around 10 PM, Emily started to be able to feel her legs again and the back pain was returning. They had to bring in an anesthesiologist (who was on-call) to administer another dose. That helped for an hour or so but the back pain started returning yet again, and this time the thigh pain was starting to rear its ugly head as well. And so the anesthesiologist came back to give yet another dose. Again, that helped for another hour, but the pain was insatiable and kept coming back for more. It’s all hazy now, but I seem to remember the anesthesiologist coming back for a total of 4 times. Finally, at 1:47 AM, we were told that Emily was almost 10 cm dilated. She was writhing in pain at this point, with brief periods where the drugs eased the suffering a bit. It seemed no matter how many doses of drugs she received, the pain just wouldn’t let up. At around 2:30 or 2:45, she was fully dilated, and this is typically when “labor down” starts, where the mom waits at least 1 hour before pushing, to allow the body to bring the baby further into position as much as possible. At 3:10, the pain was so severe that waiting any longer didn’t seem like a viable option. The nurse suggested maybe she should start pushing now, and Emily agreed. We felt like getting the baby out as soon as possible was the best option available. The staff in the hospital seemed a bit thinly staffed, which I suppose makes sense given it was 3 in the morning. There had been a shift change and there was only one nurse Amber, there with me at that time. In an effort to set our expectations she mentioned that pushing typically lasts 30 minutes to 2 hours. I distinctly remember thinking “that means it’s going to be four hours”. Pushing was indeed slow going. Emily was “pushing through the pain”, meaning the only way to make it stop is to push and get the baby out. Amber would coach Emily through the contractions as we each held a leg. I remember hitting the two-hour mark and at that point, it wasn’t clear to me how much progress had been made, which was discouraging. I did know that we were only barely starting to glimpse the head and what looked to me like black hair, but I didn’t know what that meant in terms of how far along we were. Amber started leaving the room periodically, leaving just Emily and I. I can’t remember exactly why she was leaving, but I believe she talked with Dr. Allphin at least once. Once I started being left alone with Emily, my emotions and my stamina were starting to really be put to the test. Emily continued pushing through her agony, and I as an untrained professional tried to coach her, as calmy as I could, based on what I heard Amber do. Inwardly I was totally freaking out. I just had no concept for whether or not I should be concerned, or how normal this was. I supposed I could have tried to get a better gauge of the situation from Amber, but I was totally focused on helping Emily. I was told our baby was trying to work its way past the pelvic bone. I don’t think that helped my state of mind. It seems everyone I know who has gone through labor has had horrible traumatic experiences, and I started thinking about my sister Janae, who had a C-section after her baby just wasn’t making it past the pelvic bone. The pelvic bone seems like a troublemaker, and I was imagining that Kevins was getting stuck like my niece had been. Out of the past 48 hours of labor, those final hours of pushing were by far the worst, the scariest, the most doubt-filled, the most painful, and the most exhausting, exacerbated by the fact that we hadn’t slept much and Emily hadn’t eaten in a couple days. She continued to push and push and push, through excruciating contraction upon excruciating contraction. I was at the end of my rope, and it was at this point that in desperation all I could think to do was send out a text to all the family members that I had been sending updates to throughout the process. Admittedly it’s a text that would have freaked me out if I had been on the receiving end. With no other context, it said simply, “please pray for us”. Not soon after that text, at about 6:30 AM, Dr. Allphin walked through the door, and it seemed like a cloud began to lift. Emily was still working like hell through her pain, but as more and more people began to pour through the door, the mood in the room started to lighten up a bit as people were joking and having casual conversation. Dr. Allphin didn’t seem worried, and so I felt somewhat reassured. At the very least there were other people there to help us. Dr. Allphin rolled a stool my way so I could sit down as if to say “I’ve got this”. I sat down, I got up, I paced, I sat down, I stood up again. We could see Kevin’s head being pushed out with every contraction, but when the contractions would stop, he would recede back, seemingly erasing all the progress made from Emily’s hard work. We were so close, but it didn’t feel like each push was getting us any closer. At one point Dr. Allphin reached for Emily’s hand and directed it to Kevin’s head so she could realize how close she truly was. This was very encouraging for her. After all, she was the most frustrated person of all that Kevin seemed to be taking his sweet time. It must not have been long after that, at 7:11 AM, and after some Herculean pushes, Kevin’s head and shoulders broke free and my breath was taken away when I saw his face for the first time. He was purple and covered in a white film, which made him look akin to an alien, but his face seemed very human. He was placed on Emily’s chest (after pooping on her first), and she had a “wow, nice to meet you little guy” kind of moment. Emily accidentally felt his junk right way and knew that it was a boy before I did. Dr. Allphin had me announce the gender. It had been over 4 hours since Emily started pushing. We had a difficult time picking a boy’s name so we always joked that it was definitely going to be a boy, coupled with the fact that I’m terrified of trying to raise a boy, so it seems inevitable that it had to be a boy. At that moment I didn’t care all that much whether it was a boy or a girl. It was over, and we finally got to meet that stubborn little turd face to face. There was a flurry of activity around us, and somewhere along the way Dr. Allphin handed me a pair of scissors and I cut the umbilical cord, which felt a bit like cutting through a piece of chicken. Emily had a 2nd-degree tear and Dr. Allphin started sewing her up as we watched this little human slowly turn from purple to pink. Emily had to stop him because she could feel everything and he administered a dose of anesthetics before continuing on. We and Kevin just kind of stared at each other for a bit while the flurry around us continued. The reality about going through something as difficult as labor is after the magical moment of meeting this brand new person, you don’t get any rest, seemingly ever again. It was off to the races and we haven’t really stopped since. Immediately a nurse came in to start Kevin breastfeeding, and to show Emily how to care for herself in the wake of her body being beaten to a pulp. In the meantime, I started moving all our belongings to one of the aftercare rooms. The minute I had all our stuff moved, and Emily had been wheelchaired over, and I sat down to catch my breath, people starting pouring in, wanting this thing or that. Kevin had to get checked out by the pediatrician, the lactation consultant wanted to make sure Emily was figuring out breastfeeding, it just never seemed to stop. I wish we had at least half a day of stillness to rest without someone needing to talk to us. In fact, one of my regrets about this experience is having family over. Kevin was very sleepy that day, and we should have taken advantage of it and gotten some rest. We really didn’t sleep much that day, and we were up with him all night, and up with him the next night. And the next night. I wish I could go back in time and tell ourselves to take full advantage of that precious time and keep visitors away at all costs. The first few days after coming home from the hospital were very taxing emotionally and physically. Emily could barely walk, making it difficult for me to feel good about running errands with her to fend for herself. Kevin wouldn’t stop eating and we stayed up most of the night with him. We have since adjusted, as best you can, and it has slowly been getting more manageable, and more enjoyable overall. But I’ll leave the full story for another day. Skin to skin time with dad Thanksgiving meal before we head home. And then there were three.
People are excited for us to have a child. Are we excited? It depends on how you define excited I suppose. If we stick to the dictionary definition, “stirred emotionally; agitated”, then yes, I guess we are excited. Are we excited as in “I’m not happy and fulfilled until x event happens”? Absolutely, unequivocally, no. We’re comfortable - perhaps a little too comfortable. When we tell people that we’re incredibly nervous about parenthood, the response is typically reassurance that we’re going to be fine parents. While that is appreciated, it’s really not the central reason for our trepidation. After a lot of thought, here’s what I think it is: We’re just not sure we’re going to be happy. We were never desperate for offspring. To be fair, we haven’t necessarily been opposed to it either, which is why we’ve been going without birth control for a few years.
I work on a computer all day and I had set a reminder to buy tickets to a band called the Distillers, a punk rock band who were reuniting and playing together for the first time in 14 years. (“Fun fact”: the frontwoman of the band, Brody Dalle used to be married to Tim Armstrong from Rancid, and whose breakup is immortalized in the Rancid song Tropical London.) Thanks to my timely notification, I hopped on immediately and bought two tickets the exact minute they went on sale, and to my suprise, the show completely sold out approximately 3 minutes after they were first made available. As I was perusing the internet trying to figure out why the show I acquired tickets to was so fashionable all of a sudden (I’m really not used to that), I discovered that there were superfans out there who were very distressed that the show sold out. There were people who had been planning on traveling from Canada and Mexico to Arizona to see the band play at the Crescent Ballroom, which is a relatively small venue. Without realizing it, I had snagged tickets to a hot, exclusive event! There was a twinge of contrition because while I’m a fan of the Distillers, especially their brilliant album Coral Fang, Emily is a casual fan and probably knows only a handful of songs. We weren’t sure what to do and we considered selling Emily’s ticket, but ultimately decided to keep it, because I don’t know, we got there first fair and square? I hope those people get a chance to see the Distillers at some point. I’m still not sure why they didn’t play a bigger venue like the Marquee. Apparently, the band and the promoters weren’t even expecting this level of demand. It’s all still a little strange to me. The night of the event we had to walk through people seeking tickets and decline offers. Never have I felt so chic going to a grimy punk rock show. When we got inside the Crescent Ballroom was jam-packed full of people. There are some risers in the back that you can sit on if you don’t want to have any fun. We sat on those for the opener, The Flytraps. They were an all-female Bikini Kill style band who were loud, aggressive, in your face, and the lead singer seemed quite drunk. They kept me entertained and I enjoyed their set, although I don’t think I ever checked out their music afterward so they must not have made too much of an impression. Since I do in fact like having fun, I made the mistake of suggesting we try and get up to the front. Usually that works, but this time we were all packed in like sardines and couldn’t quite make it. Poor Emily couldn’t see much except the back of some punk rockers sweaty back patches. While we were standing there watching people on stage set up for the Distillers show and standing uncomfortably close to the people in front of us (knowing if we allow any space somebody is going to muscle their way in front of us), a girl turned to Emily and said “you’re the only normal person here!” (…hey!). We had a good chuckle at that, but as we looked around, sure enough, there were a lot of weirdos. The crowd began to get more excited and impatient and somebody felt the need to turn off the rambunctious punk rock that was blasting, serving as the house music, and turned on some chill electronic stuff that was just awful. We had to suffer what must have been 20 minutes of that. When the band finally took the stage and started into their first song the place absolutely exploded with excitement and energy. There was a girl with a giant pink mohawk piggybacking another girl and they were both jumping up and down pumping their fists with the lyrics. I could see her mohawk getting closer and closer to my face almost in slow motion, and I started to try and maneuver the upper part of my body backward to try and avoid getting a mouthful of pink hair and hairspray or glue or whatever keeps that thing together. As I was doing this I was twisting my face to the side and I saw Emily watching me and cracking up. Even with such potential discomforts, I always prefer being in the middle of the craziness, but when Emily is with me I can almost always get us to the very front so she can see, and keep out of the craziness a bit. Not this time though. I had a fun time but I think Emily was a little frustrated, with a hint of claustrophobia. I think she felt doubly bad about using up a coveted ticket because she couldn’t even really experience the show since she’s only 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall. I don’t know why, but people at shows always demand an encore, whether it be repeating the name of the band in unison or chanting “one more song”. Bands usually oblige, and I think it’s a corny tradition. Some bands, like the Distillers have strategies to get around this. The Melvins were very tactful and closed their set by inviting the opening band to play with them, and then all bowing at the end. We just knew that was it, there’s no encore. The Distillers took the brute force approach and at the end someone flipped on the lights and started blasting house music. The encore was quelched. Good, I say. Now we can go home and get some sleep and get on with our boring lives. After the show as we were walking out the girl who asserted Emily’s normality status exclaimed “You’re so cute!”. The next week, we went to the same venue to watch another band, the Lawrence Arms. The venue wasn’t nearly as packed but we ended up sitting on the risers in the back anyway, mostly because of our previous experience, and I wanted to make sure Emily could see. I think Emily likes going these things to people watch as much as the music itself. She pointed out that the crowd seemed a lot more “white collar”. There were even a group of guys who looked like they had come straight over from work selling insurance or something, only stopping to take off their ties before heading inside the venue for an evening of rock n’ roll. Rock shows are fun. I live in Idaho now and I miss them. I’m probably the only one within a 300-mile radius who has ever even heard of the Distillers, The Lawrence Arms, or the Melvins, much less listened to them. Being old, slow and boring is probably inevitable, so hey, maybe I’ll get a head start on that.
I’ve been struggling with motivation for writing these blog posts. One reason I know for sure is due to how busy we’ve been this year. I’m working full time, as a software engineer remotely while going to school part-time (a little more than part-time actually). I first started writing monthly updates in the form of a blog post sometime in 2014 when we decided to pack up and strike out on our own in the mythical land known as Arizona. We didn’t have jobs or a place to stay, we just arrived and said “Here we are!” and Arizona stared blankly back at us. Thankfully found an apartment and jobs within two week weeks while we were crashing with my brothers family. We’re already looking at that as one of the best choices we’ve ever made. The time we spent in Arizona was a period of deep growth and development. When we moved to Arizona was when we became truly independent and self-reliant. I can’t say it was immediately easy though, as nothing that makes you grow ever is. As I mentioned we had jobs, but they didn’t pay very well. We were both working less than part-time, I was at an “internship” making 10 dollars an hour and Emily was working as an office assistant making 14 dollars an hour. We only had one old Camry between the two of us, but we really lucked out because our jobs were within a couple of minutes of each other. It was enough to pay our bills, and that was about it. We lived like that for about a year. Looking retroactively, I feel stressed for our past selves, however mostly what I remember about that time was feeling happy and content. Emily and I grew to love and support each other as we learned how to support ourselves and use our hard earned money to pay our own rent, internet, food, everything without the aid of student loans or parental charity. I wouldhighly recommend going through at least a lean year or two as a young married couple. I, perhaps stupidly, never bothered to try and get my “internship” to count as a real internship. I was too busy soaking in as much knowledge about programming as I possibly could. We would come home from work around 3 or 4, we’d make and eat dinner quickly, maybe watch half a youtube video about board games or something (we would literally pause a video at the halfway mark to save time), and then I would start reading or practicing programming until bedtime around 9 o clock. I did that every single day for an entire year, as well as spending as much time on Saturday as I could. After a year I became incredibly bored at my current 10 dollar an hour job, and I started interviewing. I got a job offer at a more established company that provided a similar service to the one I was trying to escape, but it was in the complete opposite direction of Emily’s workplace, so I turned down the offer. However 40,000 seemed like a ton of money to my 10-dollar-an-hour self and it was then that I realized that I could actually do this - I could get a real “grown up” job. Eventually, I found a company that was building and maintaining a large backend web application which was more of what I was looking for rather than building dumb word wordpress sites and optimizing for search engines. I ended up getting offered a 45,000 dollar salary, which meant we weren’t just scraping by anymore. Except that we decided we should just scrape by. You see, we had been (stupidly) living on student loans for a while, and we felt we couldn’t be truly independent while we were beholden to someone else by the way of debt. We upgraded our standard of living a bit by moving to a better apartment, but after that we didn’t eat out, or spend money on any frivolity whatsoever, except for the occasional McDonalds ice cream cone from the spare change we collected. Every last penny we could spare we threw at the debt, while I listened to Dave Ramsey every day on my way to work to keep my motivation going. After it was over, we went to Texas Roadhouse and celebrated our freedom. Again, I look at that time of scrimping and saving and associate that time with a feeling of general happiness and contentedness. We simply didn’t need money or things to be happy. We had each other and our united pursuit of worthy goals. We decided that we didn’t really have any excuses to not have kids at that point, and we moved into a two bedroom condo. It’s not like we were desperate to have kids as apparently a lot of other people in similar situations are, but we just decided we would no longer actively prevent pregnancy. Well, it didn’t happen that first year but I scored another job upgrade, this time it was work from home and so the second bedroom functioned as an office. It was very nice to have a work from home job but I felt like I was in over my head and I was the weak link on the team. I remember being so stressed out at times that I would get physically dizzy, and I would often work late into the evening. After a while, the pressure eased as my skill level grew and I started to fit into my role better. About a year into the job I was starting to get dissatisfied and bored again. It was somewhere at this point that the idea of finishing up school entered my mind ever so subtly like a tiny seed planting, and started to grow slightly every month. It was many months before I was even slightly seriously considering going through with it, but I started to get an acute restlessness as my skill and growth started to stagnate and every day started feeling more and more monotonous. Maybe if we would have had kids at that point, I might not have felt so restless about “what’s next”, or maybe I would have freaked out due to the fact I was working at a place I was dissatisfied with. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I did the only thing I could think of doing: interview for another job. I eventually got hired on with a startup in Scottsdale, Arizona, helping write a large medical device inventory management and surgical appointment scheduling system that is hopefully going to cause some disruption in an industry that is stuck 1995, technology-wise. It seemed like an exciting opportunity, but it wasn’t too long I realized it just wasn’t doing much for me. I felt far too comfortable and stagnated from the beginning. It was a far cry from my previous job where I was about to pass out from the stress of it all. Although I was making good money, I couldn’t help but feel like there was so much more out there to learn and experience, but I was here in the office using the same framework, the same language, with coworkers who are half as skilled as my previous job (sorry, but it’s true). Emily and I were both in a funk at this point. We had moved to a three-bedroom house that we didn’t really like and was sucking too much money from us, which meant we didn’t have the consolation of “hey at least we’re saving a ton of money!” (although were and always are saving money). We weren’t really pursuing anything, we weren’t having kids although admittedly we were still only kind of half-heartedly trying. C’mon, having kids is incredibly scary! Around this time Emily started getting really bad periods. She’s always had pyscho, irregular periods, but when she started throwing up, that’s when we decided it was time to see a doctor. She waited 2 hours, was seen for 10 minutes and told to go see some specialists and we were charged 200 bucks for the visit. We weren’t too happy about that one. It probably didn’t help that we already have a mistrust of the medical industry, as it wasn’t too long previously when a simple checkup at the dentist turned into a 4000 dollar charge that we had to pay out of pocket, without any consent or warning beforehand. Our attitude lately has been to avoid seeing a doctor unless we feel there’s a danger we’re going to die otherwise. It was at this point that we were robbed, and although that was indeed a horrible experience, I see it as a necessary experience for us. Otherwise, I don’t know how long we would have lingered in that miserable rut we were in. We had spitballed just up and moving somewhere, perhaps to Oregon, perhaps to the East Coast or even somewhere crazy like South Africa, but going back to school had been one of those spitballs, and after the stress and trauma of the robbery it was suddenly crystal clear that was the best decision. We sure as hell weren’t staying at that house, and I didn’t particularly care for my job, so to Rexburg we went. I had previously already started taking online classes in anticipation that I would someday make it back to Rexburg, but the robbery incident propelled us far more quickly in the direction that we were already heading. In a way, I’m so glad that our house got broken into and our personal space invaded. Coming back to this quaint Idaho town was a huge culture shock for us since we had lived in the massive metropolitan of Phoenix for the past 5 years. Everyone is so homogenous and everything is so tame and quiet. At the last house we lived in, it wasn’t uncommon to hear what sounded suspiciously like gunshots in the middle of the night. Now we’re living in a place where doors aren’t locked. When we moved into our apartment they told us to just head right in, that it wasn’t locked. That was a Friday, and we didn’t get the key until Monday. We were still emotionally on-edge from the robbery, so we were afraid to leave the house. At some point, we both had to leave for some reason and Emily tried to make our Bluetooth speaker look like a camera and we put up a sign that essentially said: “We’re watching you!”. Needless to say, our stuff was safe. Now we laugh at that and every once in a while don’t even lock our doors. One of the first weeks we were here, somebody at the gas station approached me and my instinct was to reach for my wallet so I could throw him a dollar or whatever, but it turns out he just needed to borrow some jumper cables. After a while, we got used to the fact we’re surrounded by LDS farmers and LDS college students. Life here is certainly quiet, and we don’t really fit in, but we’re making progress again in our lives and we’re content. Emily went to a doctor that my sister Janae recommends to get some help with her issue, and he was empathetic and spent time with her to try and figure it out. She mentioned that she didn’t want to go on birth control because we were sort of trying to have kids. His response was that one of the ways to alleviate the awful periods would be to get pregnant, and prescribed her Chlomid, to make that easier. We didn’t really expect it to work, but it did and we’re freaking out a little bit even though we’re probably as well prepared to handle this huge life-altering commitment as you can be (I hope). It sort of feels like we got hired for a job we know nothing about, and we’re going to be at that job forever. I guess the only thing you can do at that point is to hope and pray that it’s a job that has some perks and we don’t dread going to every day. It was hard leaving Arizona because we have so many memories and it’s generally a place we like living, including the climate. I was feeling nostalgic and made a quick slideshow referencing the good times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVPFsBtr4Co&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3AePIaO3NtbYk468w2NMBVKkI3nl8AMNFaT5CARmD9GrMgsHWkTQCUp9Q
Oh hey, it’s been a while! Oh boy, do we have some stories to tell. So what’s new with us? Everything. Everything is different. Let’s start from the beginning because I always tell people “yeah we’re in Idaho, it’s a long story”. Well here’s the long story: In February of 2018, we moved from an apartment in Tempe to a rental house in Phoenix. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I quit my job because I was already at that time getting excruciatingly bored. Emily had already quit her job, and not knowing where the next job opportunity would be, we decided to move to the center of the crushingly massive metropolitan area that is Pheonix, and coincidentally enough, back into our old ward. We had no way to know what a huge mistake moving would turn out to be. As soon as we moved in, everything just felt wrong. Part of the problem I think was that the new job I moved to was the first time in 4 years that a job change felt like a lateral move instead of a huge step up. That was bothersome, but we also just weren’t excited about where we were living. It could have been because we ended up having to pay every utility, plus pest control, plus 1250 a month in rent for our three bedroom house. I think we were unhappy with the amount of money we were able to save each month. It could have been a combination of those reasons or something else, but the excitement of the adventure of the past 4 years of forging our path in what felt like a foreign city to us was gone. And we really did have a great 4 years gallivanting around the desert, but like the great BB King would say, the thrill was gone. I wrote in my journal “I feel like I have a gaping hole and I don’t know how to fill it”. I think Emily felt that even more strongly than I did. When we went on trips to visit family, we found ourselves dreading going back home, which was very unusual for us, because we’re generally very happy to get back and get on with our lives and sleep in our own bed. When Labor Day rolled around we decided to get out of the sweltering heat and head to the Arizona pines for the weekends, despite feeling uneasy about it. It amounted to a great weekend in the mountains. When we arrived home and walked through the door, we were surprised that we had left the light on. Then we noticed that the sliding door was wide open and the curtains were flowing in the breeze. Our hearts sank and we knew one of our biggest fears had come true - we had been robbed. I’ve never had the displeasure before of having someone break and enter into my personal space and forage through my personal belongings that I worked hard for and casually help themselves to whatever they want. Having to replace all of our electronics have clean up the vomit on our kitchen floor was secondary to just the feeling of being violated, of knowing that a stranger had been in our house, knew where we live, and even had the keys to our car. We became jumpy, and every little noise we heard in the house or Alexa suddenly babbling about some update was cause for anxiety. I tried to go into work the next day after the incident, but I just couldn’t concentrate, and I came home and almost immediately started packing up. We were getting the hell out of there. The only problem was, where to go and the biggest question: how to get out of our lease? We had been talking about finding a way to get out of our lease ever since we moved in, but we weren’t serious enough to actually act on it, it was more just wishful thinking. Now we were serious and we were motivated. For the last several months, in our search for direction in our lives, we decided to go to a huge park, complete with a pond and a long walking path and we just walked and talked about everything. I mentioned to Emily that I was interested in Data Science and she responded essentially “that makes a lot of sense”, and it became the new goal. We had been exploring ways for me to get into Data Science and there seemed to be two options: Either join a “bootcamp” type program that would take about 6 months to complete if I was able to set aside 20 hours a week or go back up to Idaho to finish my college degree. About 4 years ago, I had dropped out of college with only a few credits left to go in my Computer Information Technology. I had been profoundly unsatisfied with what I had learned and didn’t revel in the idea of doing whatever job having a degree in CIT would supposedly magically earn me. After we had moved to Arizona to forge our own path, I spent almost every waking spare minute of my life either reading about programming, or actually programming. I barely took my foot off the gas for the next 3 or 4 years, and as a result, I had almost quadrupled my income in that time. I didn’t need a degree and still maintain that I absolutely do not need a degree to make a good living. But after four years in the software industry, I was getting kind of bored, and that’s why as early as the middle of 2017 I had begun to play around with the idea of finishing my college degree, as much as anything to stave off monotony and boredom. I was really taking my time on it though, as anyone who knows me knows that finishing my degree would be a radical 180 from my previous position and attitude. By September of 2018, I was taking a couple of classes online, though I knew that very soon I would have to take classes in a Rexburg, Idaho classroom to continue my Data Science pursuit. We assumed we would have to wait another 8 months or so for our lease to expire before we could start on that path. It turns out living in a place you hate, in an occupation that’s grown stale, and having all your stuff taken by an unknown, intoxicated, is what it takes for me to get serious about moving across two states to a climate akin to Antartic summer, and to pay 2,400 dollars to get out of our rental lease in order to do so. Thankfully we run a tight ship financially and were able to pay off our landlords and get all the moving stuff squared away using our emergency fund. My dad offered us his old 2000 Toyota Camry so we decided to give our 1997 Toyota Camry to our bishop who was going to keep it until he found someone who needed it. Even though our “new” Camry has 300,000 miles on it, it still feels like an upgrade - not only due to the conspicuous lack of a bashed-in hood, but it has a V6 engine, and it’s just overall in really great shape. We’ll see how many more miles we can squeeze out of her. I have to admit saying goodbye to our car was a little sad, since that was our sole form of transportation for most of our married life. Prepping for winter Before: After Getting the heck outta Dodge Here’s the obnoxious structure I passed by every day on my commute to work - I don’t know why I’m posting a picture of it other than to tell you people that it’s dumb. One last stop at my favorite record store. I go for records, Emily goes for dogs. The day of our move we found ourselves in the middle of the most intense rainstorm I’ve ever experienced in my life. I know that’s not just hyperbole because that month Arizona set the record for the wettest October ever recorded. If we weren’t moving we probably would have stayed at home and hoped that the rising pools of water outside didn’t decide to make themselves at home inside our house. Instead, we had really no choice but to run errands like renting a shop-vac to vacuum seal our mattress to make it suitable for moving. We didn’t get many good pictures because we were too busy trying to avoid getting trapped in floodwater. We must be crazy or something, but we did the ENTIRE move with just the two of us. We moved the mattress, dresser, and bookshelves and all the lots of boxes of books by ourselves. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but we don’t want to try and get help especially considering how many times we’ve moved. Truthfully it also feels good to be independent and able to take care of ourselves. After a day of packing the truck full of our crap, we drove off to Nathan and Corris and spent a couple nights there while we put the finishing touches on the house before handing it over. We had a great time hanging out with them, doing family night and playing with the kids. When it was time to leave, it hit us that we were actually doing it- we were leaving Arizona. Emily called me as we were leaving (we were traveling in separate vehicles) in tears about leaving the place where we’ve had so many adventures and seen so much growth in ourselves. We almost feel like completely different people from when we first moved to Arizona to when we left. For some reason, we can’t seem to sit still and settle down. But to be honest, I don’t regret chasing adventure and experiencing different areas and meeting new people. We’ve always valued progress over comfort and because of that, we’re off chasing a new adventure.
We went to Hurricane for our annual summer vacation with the in-laws, and we had our usual MO of crap tons of board games and quiplash. Oh and this thing almost killed us. Well, not really but the story is that we heard a loud noise, and looked over and saw a dust cloud billowing up from the wall of the yard. We come to find out that a man had lost control of his boat that he was pulling, and it came careening into the sidewalk and almost into the wall, but it missed, nobody was hurt, and it all turned out amazingly well except for some bushes and a flat tire or two. Needless to say, it could have been a lot worse. Welp, that’s the only thing exciting that happened this month. Ha! Just kidding, we went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert. You know Smashing Pumpkins right? Voldemort looking guy? This is the last picture I’m going to take and before I let the monkeys with their glowing rectangles take pictures for me so I can snag them from Facebook and I can actually enjoy the moment. The show deserves full review treatment, so here ya go: The concert featured all the original Smashing Pumpkins members back together, minus D’arcy, who seems to still be harboring some acrimony towards Corgan, a first since the falling out and breakup in 2000. The openers were the band Metric who I think have had some radio hits, but we missed most of their set because we forgot earplugs, so we had to pay a visit to Wally-World, then we had the bright idea to take an Uber from there to the show to avoid paying the crazy 35 dollar parking (that’s arena shows for you). The show started with a video montage of Billy Corgan’s childhood photographs with lyrics being drawn on top, along with various cover art images from their classic albums from the 90’s. (I have major 90’s nostalgia even though I wasn’t really old enough to fully appreciate that era). After the video, Corgan came out by himself wearing a silver skirt and a black robe with the inscription ZERO on the back, which was a pretty on-the-nose throwback to his original 90’s era Pumpkins garb. He stepped to the microphone with an acoustic guitar and played Disarm, which is an incredibly personal song about his childhood and his abusive parents. It was an unexpected opener for me, because usually I expect rock bands to come out swinging with three bangin’ songs in a row, then they stop and say hi, then get back to the rocking. This bucked that precedent in an interesting way, and it worked. This show had a lot of “moments”. The David Bowie Space Oddity cover was one of them. He donned a silver robe (a different robe) and a hood and stood on a platform with a space montage playing on a screen behind him, singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity. It worked quite well. What didn’t work out so well was their cover of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. It started off cool enough with some piano, but by the last third of the song when it came time to shred some guitar and belt out the lyrics Robert Plant style, it became evident - trying to be Robert Plant is a dangerous affair. He just doesn’t have the register for it, just like the rest of the world’s population. Jimmy Page shredding was pretty close but was still just a bit off. Needless to say it kind of fell flat towards the end, but I do commend them for tackling such an iconic and difficult song. As far as the show goes I don’t have a lot of comparisons I can draw from, because I can count on one hand the number of arena shows I’ve gone to, but the overall production blew me away. Usually, I find the screen backdrops to be kind of a lazy way to try and add something interesting to the show, and is often distracting more often than not. However, with the Smashing Pumpkins, it seemed like it was part of one big art project that they had a lot of fun putting together, and flowed seamlessly with the music. It also helped that it wasn’t just screen backdrop the whole time. They were constantly moving things around on stage: platforms, lighting pillars, screens. The video playing on the screens were often featured dancers, several which were almost ballet. One video featured a paranoid, near skitzophrenic Billy Corgan stumbling around, looking generally out of his mind. About halfway through the show, we started noticing common elements and people in what appeared to be some sort of abstract narrative that seemed to flow together somehow. It was without a doubt Emily’s favorite part of the show, which might be the Humanities major in her showing. The other beef I had with the show besides the lackluster Led Zeppelin cover, which I’m going to knock off a star in my non-existent rating system for, is just..the middle of the show. They played for a good three hours, and the show started off with a bang in the first hour. Some Siamese Dream bangers here, some Mellon Collie bangers there, including the best Pumpkins song ever: Zero. But towards the middle, the tempo downshifted in a big way. At one point Corgan changed outfits (he changed outfits 4 or 5 times throughout the show), put on a crown, climbed a platform that was made to look like a Rapunzel-esque tower, on which sat a piano, and proceeded to play every friggin’ slow song he’s ever written. That lasted at least an hour and I think Emily fell asleep and I was slipping fast. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so it’s probably just me. Billy Boy has a gift for rock music and he can melt your face off with his guitar shred, and Chamberlain is one of the best drummers around so I hate to see them waste their talents on things like piano. It picked up in the last hour though, the rock and roll commenced and recovered nicely. During the encore they played a new song, and then a song from..Dumbo? It was an excellent show overall. Speaking of things no one cares about, I was informed at work that the previous tenants left a box full of records and that I could take whatever I wanted. You don’t have to ask me twice. To be honest though I wasn’t really expecting much, maybe some Barbra Streisand, maybe some Bing Crosby, but there was actually some really cool stuff in there. Included in the spoils were some Clash, Bowie, Adam and the Ants, Blondie, and Bob Marley, among others. Oh yeah, I’m not working from home anymore. *Queue tear drops*. I decided to jump on board a bit more of an interesting opportunity, not to mention a bit of a pay raise. I guarantee that I’m going to work from home again at some point in the future, because office life is really not for me. And now for your weather update. (It’s a slow news month, ok?) It rained. It usually doesn’t rain. When it rains, it really rains. And the winds blow. The winds really blow. When it’s not raining, the sun is melting things in your car. And this is why we’ve been traveling to the White Mountains of Arizona every weekend we can spare, because I just can’t take it this summer. We figured we have been married for a few years and we haven’t ever taken pictures with just us, and what better time than when I look like a hippie and/or Jesus? Here’s some of my favorites. Brace yourself This is what I look like now. Get used to the new me!
We’ve turned hipster. I have proof. Look: I will now tell you the story about our search for a plant. We went downtown where there’s artsy fartsy murals… And we bought a plant… The end. There’s a band that mentions Arizona sunsets in their song, probably because they look like this: At some point we went to see Lay Mizz (which is how everyone says it) with my bro and his bro (bro as in friend, except for the first one which is in reference to my brother from the same mother). This picture doesn’t do the height factor justice, but I was getting some vertigo when we first walked in. And yeah it was pretty fantastic. Not as depressing as I remember (I’ve only seen it once which was the most recent movie) I was woken up at around 2 or 3 am by lots of flashing lights outside and a helicopter circling around the neighborhood. It was quite irritating. Not as irritating as being murdered though, so I’m happy it wasn’t us who was murdered (I actually don’t know what the deal was). I started listening to the police scanner out of morbid curiosity since I wasn’t going to sleep with the giant mechanical bird in the sky, but really, police officers need to work on their pronunciation skills. I heard something about an apartment complex and a dude with corn rows though. To prove our true hipstership, we spent a couple days in Bisbee, AZ. My cousin was getting married near there, and it’s where my dad grew up so we jumped on the opportunity to take the tour from a local. First we stopped in Tombstone, which is a tourist trap, one which my dads family always made sure to drive on past. It’s pretty hokey indeed but hey, they make some delicious Saspirilla over there. Every building in Bisbee is at least half a century old with wood floors and all that. Here’s our hotel room at the Canyon Rose, which I highly recommend. The town is literally on the border of Mexico. My dad used to play around in the desert here as a kid, and there wasn’t this wall thingy there, so they had to make sure they didn’t wander too far and end up over the border. We went to an amazing Gelato shop where we watched some cartoons for a bit. And we went antique shopping. Damn it feels good to be a hipster Bisbee reminds me a bit of San Fransisco. There’s lots of weirdos everywhere and there roads are narrow and scary, and everything is old. Here’s the mine where my Grandpa worked, which shut down in the 70’s. And we saw a bunch of dust devils. How cliche, Arizona. You know, this is a good metaphor for life. Sometimes you can see something cool in the far off distance but right of front of you is a bunch of bug splatters. We should remember to focus on the cool view in the distance. Oh yeah we went to Weird Al concert. He played a bunch of his original songs (yes he has a lot of original songs). This is my view. This is Emily’s view. Oh look, we went to some other show. Ok bye
Last month I left you on a nasty cliffhanger regarding Emily’s job. The past several years Emily has worked 3 different places in an office administrative assistant role. Realizing that administrative assistance isn’t her life’s work prompted her to start learning web design. I was working on a project to help us as a household manage our recipes and grocery lists, and I recruited her to make it look and feel nice and pretty. This past year we decided she more or less has mastered CSS which is what makes sites look pretty, and she decided to delve into the world of javascript, which is what makes websites feel sleek and polished (instead of refreshing the entire page when you login, for example, javascript would enable you to seamlessly transition what’s on the screen without needing to refresh). We decided we would try and work a little bit every day on pair programming, where you sit down, looking at the same screen and take turns writing code. We’ve been building the grocery list app that I mentioned again from the ground up, but with Emily doing all of the CSS and most of the Javascript. As it turns out, when you know how to write code, businesses seem to like that, and she was recently hired on in web design role, and has discovered that she wants to emphasize in web animations, which from my estimation demand for is going to continue to grow, and is currently not a widespread skill. I believe that it’s important to find a niche or an emphasis and learn the crap out of it (my emphasis and “passion”, I guess, is automated testing, for example). Emily’s first day of work The highlight of the month was going to Emily’s dad’s baptism. Emily says: “I’ve actually had a hard time putting into words how happy I was that weekend. I had never really expected my dad to rejoin the church and had accepted that so when he called me to tell me he was taking the missionary discussions and then that he had set a date it was like I won the lottery or something. Totally out of the blue, but totally awesome.” Chris was getting his World War II jeeps ready for an off-roading excursion in Moab, Utah, so we were able to take them out for a test drive. …and I got to check out the new Mario Kart, and I can confirm it’s definitely a Mario Kart game, which means it’s awesome. We went to a restaurant named after a lizard of all things, Red Iguana. It has some of the best Mexican food I’ve ever had. Highly recommended. Emily had a birthday dinner courtesy of brother-in-law Robert’s chef skills. (This is actually a picture from a meal provided by my parents a couple months ago, but it looks similar to what we had, so let’s just roll with it) Man, nobody talks these days, they just look at their phones!!!! (people pictured are playing a game that requires technology, and it’s a very social game so take off your white wig and stop judging!) There’s a crazy little game we like to play that involves sticky tounges Emily gets very, very competitive and aggressive when we play games as you can see And guess what, it snowed *shakes fist* We started a game of Pandemic: Legacy Season 2, a game which continually morphs underneath you as you permanently alter the game as you proceed from game to game. When we started the game, we were prompted to name initial starting “haven” cities. So we named them after…cereal? I don’t know, we were tired, ok? Hey, turns out it rains sometimes I traveled to New Jersey to meet my coworkers, some of whom I had worked with for over a year and only knew them from their voice. It was kind of weird experience in which I felt like I was meeting strangers, but I felt like I knew them at the same time. That was literally the first time I had ever traveled east of the Mississippi. I don’t get out much. Chicken and waffles are great, by the way. That’s basically what New Jersey looks like, I’m sure. White Castle is gross. It’s like McDonalds. My sister and brother-in-law, Shauni and Jordan were visiting from Utah so we borrowed Jordans dad’s house and had dinner. I took the opportunity to observe the children in the wild.
Emily went to Oregon and Watched a few basketball games Visited a huge bookstore (Powell’s books) Had some amazing ice cream (you wouldn’t think Pear & Blue Cheese ice cream would be any good, but you’d be wrong). Of course, played some games. And more She had a marvelous time with her mom, sister and extended family and came home tempted to move up to Oregon since we don’t move nearly enough already. Speaking of moving, this dog has the right idea. In my last update, I told the story of my turning down a job opportunity at a company helping out the lovely, enchanting porn industry. In this episode of dubious job opportunities, I met with some dudes probably somewhere around my age in a fancy office in Scottsdale, and they told me tells of riches and a new cryptocurrency. Basically they’re a marketing company wanting to create their own cryptocurrency and use their marketing department to advertise it and make millions or something. My job would be to create simple advertising webpages and essentially copy bitcoin’s open source code, with the promise of 1% of the “mine” in addition to the 70k salary. Honestly, I seriously considered it, not because I’m particularly interested in get-rich-quick-schemes, but it’s more that I’m starved for something interesting to do. I’m not afraid to get another job if and/or when the gravy train stops or more likely, I find out there’s no gravy in the first place. I had my finger on the trigger and was about to accept the job, but I just felt sick. Was it cowardice, or was it rational thinking and prudence finally kicking in? I do know I wasn’t very thrilled with working in an environment where people seem to only care about money. I’ll never know what would have happened. I just hope this wasn’t my only chance to throw caution to the wind and actually do something interesting. Or maybe I’ll have safe, boring jobs for the rest of my life. First World Problems, amirite? God Bless America. Have some pictures with no context: Emily did some charity work and gave an ice cream code to the local homeless guy. Oh, our stake received a surprise visit from Jeffrey R Holland, who had come down for a funeral during his weekend that he had off. There is a mission president in our stake who had a daughter in her 30’s who unexpectedly passed away and left behind a husband and children. His main message, at least what I got out of it, was words of encouragement for those going through difficult times, in the eloquent, powerful way that is unique to Jeffrey R Holland. Well, I even hate to bring it up, but we moved. Again. We hired movers because we’re tired of moving things. We found a nice three bedroom house to rent in Phoenix, and that means that we can finally get a dog!! Also, we kind of live in the ghetto. It’s interesting over in our part of the world. But hey, we live close to this place where the rawk happens: (featured, Dead To Me with lots of excited yelling people) Also I saw US Bombs. The US Bombs are fronted by a former pro skater who now hobbles around with a cane. If anyone has seen The Other F Word (highly recommended documentary about rockers coping with the responsibilities of fatherhood), he was the one who told the story of his son being hit by a car. (not actual footage because I usually try and actually watch the show in real life instead of through a glowing rectangular screen) Emily has some interesting news about a web design job offer but I can’t tell you any more details because it’s the wrong month for the blog post. I can tell you she’s now doing a little bit of freelancing though. I think she might be interested in doing more freelancing, though I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say that. Here are some weird pictures of Emily. And here’s a weird picture of her foot.
I’m sure you noticed that I haven’t written in a couple months, and I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry to ruin 2017 for you! If you can’t function at full capacity I totally understand. Boy howdy, what an eventful couple of months. Sit back, your feet up, and let me tell you all about it. First, Emily quit her job because, well, it’s quite the story so you should ask her if you’re dying to know. My little sister came to visit around the Thanksgiving holiday, and we took her to the amazing Joe’s Italian Ice. It’s pretty cool, it has a lot of vintage stuff like telephones that transmit signals through telephone lines, lololol. And she brought her child and left her husband at home. If anyone wants to come visit, that could be you too! Its sunny and warm here, you know you want tooooo. Then we headed out to California to celebrate Thanksgiving with Emily’s grandparents, and caught some rays at the same time, which is obviously the best way to celebrate Thanksgiving. I unexpectedly got a phone call from a prospective employer, and things were going great..until I learned it’s essentially a porn company. I said no thanks. Sometime after we got back we went and did service at Feed My Starving children once again, which I highly recommend as a great way to do some service and feed some starving children. It pretty much consists of spending an hour packaging up food to be shipped off to third world countries. We headed off to Utah to attend a Lower Lights concert. Random airplane guy and I are study buddies! They look happy, but they’re freezing and sad Midnight I-Hop run for some reason (I’m getting too old for this kind of thing). Behold, our Christmas decorations. That’s about the extent of it: We spent Christmas in Lakeside with my parents. It was super relaxing and enjoyable. Then we went and visited the house where I lived for the first 11 years of my life in Podunk, AZ. The house is a shell of its former glory. There used to be a beautiful green lawn with rose bushes, and I don’t remember the siding looking like crap, and oh well, This is seriously one of Emily’s favorite things of all time: big open sky. Taco Bell is good and I’m sexy We traveled to Northern Utah to visit Emily family for “Step Christmas” which is pretty much just Christmas a week after actual Christmas day. We used to do long 12-hour drives but these days it just seems so..long. We decided to stop on our way to Utah someone’s house courtesy of Airbnb in Kanab, UT and discovered they have an awesome dog! (I’m accepting sponsorship from Airbnb if any representatives happen to see this) Dogs are cool We like dogs Someone else likes dogs too Somewhere along the way, we took a picture of a rock There’s this whole tradition thing where we go to the store on Christmas Eve (or Step Christmas Eve) and get cereal. I got Fruit Gushers because nobody is stopping me and I’m like, an adult, and Fruit Gushers are reeeal good. (I’m accepting Fruit Gushers sponsorship if anyone from there is reading this.) Step-Christmas morning Pacman makes a great stock stuffer by the way. PRO TIP Go to Cupbop in Utah, it’s really good Korean barbeque. I can’t remember where it’s located though. I think it’s in the city with all the Mormons. On the way back from Step-Christmas we visited Monument Valley. It was reeeally quiiiet. Just the way I like it. And we stayed in a cozy little cottage thingy And this thing is where I want to live someday: I saw a little up and coming band called the Descendants (lolololol) best known for their hit singles I’m Not a Loser, I Like Food and My Dad Sucks. They actually don’t tour much because their singer, Milo, is a biochemist by trade and doesn’t generally have a lot of time to play punk rock shows these days. However, they’ve been playing weekend shows all across the country for several months now, and they graced Arizona with their presence. They’re all getting old, pushing 60, but they’re still a bunch of goofballs, which is fitting for a band who has an album called I Don’t Want to Grow Up, and often sing about how boring old people are. It’s all very inspirational. Oh and I was poisoned by some meat I ate. Do vegetarians eat at Sweet Tomatoes every day or something, cause that’s what I’m going to do. (I’m accepting sponsorship from Sweet Tomatoes, just saying)
One time we decided to spend an entire Saturday in a magical far away land called Prescott, because it seems like a mysterious mystical town tucked away somewhere in the Arizona desert, and also we’re looking for places to live that’s not in the center of a giant metropolitan. It was a pretty cool place, and we found some Super Cute Little Houses that probably aren’t available because they’re too small and cute, but we were still taking notes. And we got some delicious tacos - reason number 58 to move to Arizona: Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy Any place that uses an upside down ’e’ in the place of an ‘a’ is fine by me. Then I helped dig ditches for a service project at a church farm with beard man. Then the Tuskan Raiders got us. Type F to pay respects F Now to the portion of the blog that nobody cares about, but we had front row tickets to the Screaming Females in a dingy basement club underneath the skyscrapers of downtown Phoenix. It was amazing and I’m officially a mega fan of this band. The crowd was fairly hipster which means it was less weirdos being weirdos and more bearded people with glasses. Hipsters are very timid and docile; there was a lot less jostling about than I’m used but I guess I can live with not getting kicked in the head or something. I wish I could say more, but suffice it to say I’m pissed off that this band plays dingy basement bars. The greatest band in the world, The Ramones played clubs for 20 years, so people just have bad taste. Have fun listening to Train or whatever. We were trying to get a picture of the sticker on Marissa’s guitar which contained the imprint “Keep Off Facebook”. I knew I liked these people. If you want to know why I hate living next to a noisey freeway near a noisey airport, in the middle of college student land, where everyone has a loud fancy car (that their parents probably bought them), it’s because this is where I grew up: Trees are neat WOWZ a few more pictures like this and I’ll have lots of friends! My favorite hobby these days involves rummaging through stacks of vinyl records. That is all. Here I am conversing with our future overlords. It’s all very exciting! Sex machine: We babysat our friends fishy We went to the grocery store and there was no ice cream so we threw ourselves on the ground and screamed. Emily went to something called Pinners Conference which has a lot classes to learn various things. Emily got to learn how to do water color painting. PONIES ARE EFFIN CUTE! Emily bought some flamboyant shoes to go clubbing with. Yeah people in Utah are homogonized and cookie cutter and yeah there’s a major keeping-up-with-the-jones kind of attitude there, but we also really like not having mountains around: There’s at least one good looking female in this picture Boo!
We’re sick of doing the same things over and over, so this month we tried something a little different. This month, we played board games and went to music things!!!!11 There’s this little band called the Melvins. Never heard of the Melvins? But you’ve heard of Nirvana I’m sure. Nirvana wouldn’t have existed without the Melvins. These guys are legends. Legends who happen to play smallish clubs, including the Crescent Ballroom in downtown Phoenix. One of the reasons I absolutely needed to see them live was to see King Buzzo’s hair in all it’s magnificent glory. In case you weren’t aware, King Buzzo has beautiful, wonderful, magnificent hair and wears strange robes. Wait, hold on, I don’t know if I can explain it properly, just take a look for yourselves: What a great human. I desperately want this hairstyle. Curse my slightly curly hair. Also checkout this clip of Buzz trying to buy a house with his street credit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=308&v=HFn1UUI6bj8 After my being severely punished by the Melvins, it was a time for Mr. Stravinsky to punish us with his loud, dissonant, and creepily themed Rite of Spring. I guess people hated it when it first came out, but did Mr. Igor care? Nope, he knew it was great. The guy was a punk rocker. Also, there was a guest violin soloist named Phillipe Qunit who does stuff with a violin I’ve never seen anyone do before. The guy could really shred. Have a sample, samplers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2D-0ptU1GY Then we went shopping for dogs, hoping to find the correct select. We found Franky, who didn’t bark, but opted for the howl instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd-vAKkAvYk&feature=youtu.be Unfortunately, I don’t think our apartment complex is going to allow such a dog, because certain breeds such as Mixed are far too dangerous. In protest, we attended a music thing: One of the greatest rock and roll bands of our generation: The Dirty Nil. Last time we saw them, there were MAYBE 15 people in the audience. Now they’re playing to crowds of several hundred. Our little bands are growing up. I can prove the Dirty Nil are on the greatest rock and roll bands, because Luke chews bubblegum while he’s playing and singing, and this is a real thing, evidenced by the fact that he blows bubbles while he’s doing rock and roll things: He’s very dynamic though, he’s not always vaunting his rock and roll maneuvers. He has the ability to bring it down and tell you he don’t care about your boyfriend. Then I got to hang out with the Rock n’ Roll man himself. I can’t believe I forgot to ask him though. What happened to Dave?!!! This is going to haunt me. DAAAAVVVE Then, what the eeeeeeehhhh, wait is that a UFO?????? (Not another music thing, I don’t want to hear about any more music things!!!) What if I told you, this music thing involved a guy with a Baritone Saxophone and pink hair, a flamboyant trumpet man, and a dude carrying a bass drum. THAT changes everything. Look here’s a photograph of this very thing: Hold on, I’m not one of those jerks who takes pictures in the middle of concerts! And I was too busy dancing, erm jumping around like an idiot. That’s right, these guys made me “DANCE”. AND I LIKED IT!!!!! The music isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard before, but their genre is self-proclaimed as “Brasshouse”. I can’t describe, just check out Too Many Zooz playing on a subway train in New York: https://youtu.be/IMyqasy2Lco?t=1m12s This was actually the first time they’ve ever been to Arizona, and I wasn’t sure if they were going to have much of a following, but people were jumping around and going crazy. It was a very good reception, especially for first-timers. Then we escorted some chick named Princess Leia to a happy place where nobody wants to shoot at you, but we got a bit jammed up, as if we had eaten nothing but cheese and crackers for a week. In the end though it all came out nice and smooth. As for the rest of the month, it was pretty much “I sat by the computer for hours, programming various things”. Oh, what a good blog that would have made.
Primus show! If you don’t know who Primus is, think of an eclectic mix of Rock N Roll, Larry Graham-esque slap bass, and Willy Wonka. It’s truly a beautiful thing. If you don’t like Primus then, up yours, you silly non-freak person. I met up my buddy Colton who I haven’t hung out with in literally 10 years. He’s been into Primus as far back as I can remember, but I’m ashamed to say I never got into them. A few years ago I realized I had made a grave mistake, and I have been trying to rectify it ever since. Look, he’s real We’re standing in line to get tickets for the big gig baby. Good thing we got tickets ahead of time because it sold out. Those Primus boys seem to do pretty well for themselves. During Clutch’s set, who was the first band to play, we, unfortunately, positioned ourselves right up front directly in front of a giant speaker, and every time the drummer stomped on the bass pedal, it blew you backward 3 feet. During Primus’s set, we moved back a bit - probably too far back but we wanted to get away from The Pounding. Kids, if you don’t have tinnitus already, that’s a good way to get it, especially if you don’t wear earplugs. Primus was great - of course, Primus was great. Everyone knows Primus Sucks*. *Primus Sucks means you like Primus in Primus-speak Wow so many pretty lights! And then we went to St George, Utah to get out of the heat (har har har) Escape Rooms: a fun way to spend a lot of money to feel like an idiot for an hour. We hung out with Moose, the mammoth dog. Our Sweet Baby I purchased a new Mac because macs are awesome: The sky grows dark and foreboding as the dust descends on the valley We didn’t save the world. I’m so sorry. Look, we bought a new car with cold hard cash, and remain 100% debt free (yaaaaay) It’s an older Camry, a 2003 model with only 84,000 miles on it. Welcome home, car. I love cars. Our other, older Camry, randomly got a flat tire. I hate cars. There was something happening to the sun that got everyone riled up. Booooring. Third rainy day of the year, only two more to go. Watching: This Is Us (my little sister made us watch it and it’s actually not terrible) Reading: Tech book, tech book, and more tech books Einstein by Walter Isaacson Listening: OMG r u serious I drove to my stupid job today, got stopped at an intersection 15 minutes of my life just rolled away I looked at the guy next to me he didn’t seem so happy no ones happy but everyone’s too busy to see let’s go shopping today drive our fancy cars to the fancy malls and for lunch we’ll have Big Macs I wish I could turn the clock back to when i was ten when I wasn’t scared of everything and everything wasn’t so fetchin’ crowded and I wonder if my kids will ever see a horizon untouched by billboards and shopping malls and I wonder if this crazy world thinks i’m the one who’s crazy what if i’m the one who’s crazy? - 15 Minutes by The Broadways
Our A/C went out and the apartment complex we live in paid for us to stay in a hotel. We traveled to California and ate food next to dangerous chemicals Eat up! And then ate food next to a safe lake. And then ate food and was informed of good things to come. Flags representing missions where children and grandchildren have served. Ya know, if the state of California were a little more friendly to things like freedom, I might want to move there. Continuing on the food theme… Chick-Fil-A serves you caca, try some Raising Canes instead! Oh yeeeeah Ssssh don’t tell anybody. Num num num num num We are going to be fat. Graeters ice cream is one of the clients that I’ve been working with for the past year. I discovered they distrubute their wares at our local grocery store. It’s too expensive though so forget that, I’m just going to pose and put it back on the shelf. This month we got to see Laura Stevenson for the third time. Doors were supposed to open at 8:00 but here we are past 8:30 with a long line of people. Not sure what that was about. While we were standing in line, one of the guys from one of my favorite bands, Andrew Jackson Jihad came by and played with the kid that you can see with that glow stick (it sounded like he was friends with the dad). We just assumed he was there to watch the Jeff Rosenstock/Laura Stevenson show, since it seems they’re all friends and stuff. As it turns out the guys from AJJ were there to play their first show as a band called Wiccan Babysitter. Their roles were reversed - the singer/guitar player was the bass player and the bass player was the singer/guitar player. That was a fun surprise, and I ended up buying a Wiccan Babysitter record. And Laura Stevenson was amazing as usual. (and I implore you to check out this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGxt1h-2XdY - Am I crazy for thinking she should be bigger than she is? That’s not a fat joke. Maybe guitars scare people? I need answers!) And we got to talk to her for a bit after the show. When Jeff Rosenstock’s band took the stage the place exploded with energy. People were jumping around and going crazy. It was a sight to behold. We were off the side as to avoid getting crushed by the unrestrained enthusiasm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IJCPdhazNY&feature=youtu.be Mountains making you claustrophobic and gross inversion making it hard to get oxygen in your lungs? Move to Arizona, where the sky is big, and the sunsets are large. And I had one of those days where you’re traveling down the interstate and a building explodes. You know what I’m talking about.
Check out this photographic essay chronicling our adventures for June 2017 which finds our heroes traveling to Maine to surprise unsuspecting brides, the conquering of the land of Yellowstone, and a cute baby. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjAwR8vp9kY?ecver=1&w=560&h=315]
Howdy y’all, this past month saw us doing a whole lot of NOTHING. At least from an outsiders perspective. But first I must mention that Emily visited her family in Utah and she met the new little rat dog named Moose. Emily likes dogs in case you didn’t know. She also likes llamas Emily works at a company which sells accessories for people who drink wine. One of the new products in their line is a purse in which you can store wine. It has a spout so you can get your fix anytime. It’s for alcoholics basically. This thing has kind of gone viral, they have a couple of videos featuring this bag for alcoholics, and they’ve gotten over 100 million views and counting, and the orders have been rolling in. This is a small company, so needless to say Emily has been very busy at work. She’s also going to be getting 2% of the purse’s sales! Hope you people are taking notes, that’s a good way to motivate your employee’s. My paternal grandpa passed away about a year ago, and during my sister Megan’s wedding a few months ago, I happened to sit across from his wife and we got to talking about music. It was funny to hear her describe my grandma’s intense love for music. He knew all the back stories of the composers and the compositions, and it sounded a little bit, well, like me I suppose. As it turns she has been wanting to find a good home for my grandpa’s record collection and offered them to me. How could I say no to that? We went to her home in Flagstaff a couple months later, had lunch and picked up the record collection. It consists mostly of classical, jazz, big band, and…opera *clears throat nervously*. I’m unfamiliar with most of it because I’m a uncultured punk rock loving cretin, but believe it or not, I’m a fan of most music - as long as it’s not cheesy or pretensious (VERY IMPORTANT). This has made my record collection kind of weird. Now Mozart and Glenn Miller are sitting on the same bookshelf as Minor Threat and the Ramones. I’m pretty sure my grandpa hated rock music and I can’t decide if he would be horrified that someone inherited his records with such a deep love of all things raucous, or happy that I’m experiencing the classics. I’ve been slowly making my way through each record. My favorites so far are James Galway, aka The Man With the Golden Flute. That’s right, he’s a killer flutist, and it’s actually really good. I also quite liked the Dukes of Dixieland, which was an early New Orleans jazz band. Maybe it’s the ska fan in me, but I really enjoy them brass instruments. Emily recently completed a DNA test and here are the results. We confirmed that she’s very white. I’ve been reflecting on the past few years and how far we’ve come. in 2014 I completed 98% of my college courses, with the exception of some research paper thing. We uprooted ourselves moved to Arizona entirely because it just sounded more appealing than where we were living. Emily had a part-time admin assistant job and I ended up getting a part time “internship” making 10 bucks an hour. We were barely scraping but we were able to make ends meet. Unfortunately, I learned very little about up-to-date, real-world programming in my Computer Information Technology college classes, and so I visited my code mistress every night in order to learn a marketable skill. I spent every moment of my free time learning and practicing coding for a year. I Eventually got a much higher paying job as a developer, Emily went full time, and we were able to become completely debt free. I continued to visit my code mistress, and a year and a half later I landed a sweet remote job working in my favorite coding framework(!). Emily now has an even better job, and it’s safe to say we’ve been very fortunate and blessed. I hope I’m not being ungrateful by having more ambitious plans for the future ;) That’s it. I’m kicking around the idea of doing short, weekly blog posts. We’ll see.
We moved …again. Here’s basically why: this is a decibel reading from our old front door. I think I have a higher than average sensitivity to noise. Even small noises have always bothered me. It’s nice to have the fan on when I’m sleeping, but if it makes even the slightest bit of unusual noise, fuh-get-about-it. We lived in a nice Condo, but there was also a lot of variety in noises that you could hear no matter where you were. Whether in the bathroom, in the bedroom, sleeping or pooping, this is what you would hear: RRRRRRRRffffffff…swoosh swoosh swoosh….BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM bllgh blllgggh blllllgggghh swoosh swoosh RRRRR BOOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM………sweet silence for 8 seconds….VVVRRrooommm……..schwump schwump schwump schwump..swoosh tuckaTHUCKtuckaTHUCKtucka BOOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH The nightmare is finally over. We moved to place only a couple minutes away, but my gosh, I am tired of moving. Enough about you, let’s talk about us. Emily got her wisdom teeth taken out. It’s always very nerve wracking doing anything healthcare related. We essentially roll the dice, and we could end up paying nothing or thousands of dollars, who the hell knows! Luckily this only cost us less than 200 dollars, and now I know what Emily is like as a druggie: Cats suck Even foxes are better Emily went on splits with the missionaries and got to do some street contacting! Missions are really easy. I recently found this letter from my mission, which provided some beautiful, beautiful, reminiscences: https://dallincoons.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/oakland-mission-chronicles-a-day-in-the-life/ One solution I’ve been exploring to the noise problem is to try and go deaf! So that’s why I attended a couple of shows this month. First off Teenage Bottlerocket. The best Ramones-core band out there! People were jumping around going crazy, and it was a fun time. The drummer recently passed away, and he was the brother of the guitar player featured prominently in the image below. This was the first time they’ve visited AZ since that time, and you can tell that the band is still grieving but at the same time playing shows seems to be therapeutic. And everyone knows that ska-punk sucks. But real ska is awesome!!! I went and saw The Slackers, who are definitely better than the Beatles. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a real ska show before. It was different. No mosh pits, no stage diving. Just a lot of dancing. It was really fun!
_I recently came across this mission letter I wrote toward the end of my mission and consists of some fairly mundane details, however, I thought it was a good demonstration of a day in the life in the mission - or at least my mission. I share this partially because it’s an amusing retrospective but also because I want to add a bit of realism to the naively romanticized idea what missionary work is like that most prospective missionaries have, including myself once upon a time. _ (horrible grammar included). We had a surprise when we had gotten the call that Elder F wa leaving, apparently Elder A was going to go to the Antioch 1st ward which is a bike area and he called and said he couldn’t be on bike and so President Beck made changes in the transfers, it’s likely there were some other situations too. So I was here just a couple weeks before I got a new companion but I feel like I’ve gotten to know the area pretty well in the time I’ve been here. Elder A is one of the first missionaries to come out of Myanmar (Burma), he’s 30 years old, he has special permission from the 1st Presidency. From the 2nd or 3rd day he has been here he has been constantly angry, with no break to speak of. He’s not just lazy but very headstrong. [several sentences written and then scribbled out] We had a good week, we added 2 solid investigators, one who is a young adult named Brian who I have a good feeling about. I think it’s been a really good week. I kind of feel like I babysit the district, this morning I had to tell a companionship they need to stay together then had to go pick him up to take him to his companion who had gone off with a member. It’s really funny in it’s own way I guess. It’s been raining non-stop for several days now, it’s really the first time it’s done that all winter. Well I love you. Take care! Love, Elder Coons
Looks who’s back! Did you miss us? You know, I’m terrified of becoming a boring, old, low-energy 9-5 commuter who no longer finds child-like joy in the world. That’s partially what the blog is for. It’s one of the tools in my toolset to help keep the adventure alive. I’ve consistently written a blog every month for the past few years. One of the qualities that I like about myself is that I generally have a lot of self-integrity: when I decide to do something, I do it. If I decide I’m going to go to the gym every day, I go to the freaking gym every day. When I decide I’m going to write a blog every month, that’s what I do. The past few months however, every time I’ve sat down to write a blog, I get an overwhelming sense of apathy. That’s frightening to me. What’s happening? Is this what getting old(er) feels like? Have I officially been inducted into the rat race, of which the requirements for membership are apathy and exhaustion? I don’t want that to happen. In the words of one of my favorite bands, Andrew Jackson Jihad: I want to put on my sweatpants. But don’t you know I’m trying to quit. I want to give a sh** again I’ve been acquiring vinyl records at an alarming rate! How much is too much? Should we have an intervention? Look we have friends. You can’t tell us we don’t have friends, we made sure to take a picture to prove it, so back off! They even do cool things like magic. When it’s raining, the ONLY logical thing to do is to go get ice cream. Phoenix/Tempe/whatever in the middle of January. Sometimes we forget heinous and depraved things such as snow exist. I came across this picture the other day of myself and some old buddies in my preferred environment. No cars, not technology, no people - except cool people. Wow, look at those muscles! mmm mmm mmm Do I even need to comment on this! NO If you’re going to live in the desert, you really should have a giant cactus in your front yard. You really should. Arizona sunsets!!!!!! California sunrise!!! Dogs are learning how to drive!!! Someone left us a little St. Patricks Day surprise. Thanks! But please don’t ever do that again! Damn alcoholics… We attended the Phoenix Symphony because I thought they were playing The Planets by Gustav Holts. As it turns out they played a smattering of various spaced themed classical pieces, including Mars from The Planets. Darth Vader made an appearance to conduct the Imperial March. Aaand Superman. Because Superman I guess is from a different planet or something? Emily’s brother Keaton were married in March. They didn’t want to go the same old conventional route, and so they decided to get married in In-N-Out!! Hey, why not? Here’s the birthday boy! Look at theses smug people though, it makes me sick! With all the love in the air, you can’t help a couple guys getting a little carried away! There’s no excuse for these pictures! Then the cops showed up. With as much fun as we were having at the wedding, we never wanted it to end, but unfortunately, we had to go home :( Amazingly enough, the next week we attended a wedding for my sister Megan. They were married on the top of a mountain at Lowell Observatory under a giant telescope where they first met. Not as original as In-N-Out pretty good! People are getting married left and right! Well I’m back in the saddle folks. See ya next month.
We travelled to Rexburg for my sister Janae and her husband Mark’s graduation from BYU-Idaho. It was good that we went there in the winter time because we didn’t feel as nostalgic as we were worried we might be. We’re happy living somewhere warm, thank you very much. In Rexburg, sometimes you have to scrape the inside of the windows. You can’t even see their dresses because of the stupid coats. We travelled to Hurricuhn for Christmas, and you would think that travelling from Arizona to southern Utah would be a warm, uneventful affair but no, we encountered a lot of scary snow and almost died. Look it’s even snowing in Hurricuhn. Not cool. Look how much fun we’re having! Christmas is rad! We visited a Taco Bell seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We had a pretty sick view. Taco Bell makes absolutely no sense! But they make good burritos so who cares!!! We read booooooooks We went to a party for Emily’s work. Everyone got drunk except us, so we had to act like we were totally wasted to fit in! We watched the Phoenix Symphony perform Handel’s Messiah. We made sure to hold our cell phones really high through the entire performance! No cake for my birthday, just ice cream! How could you forget my birthday? That’s really immature. In case you haven’t heard, or you’re an idiot, it’s the end of the year! I really like stats so here are some numbers from 2016. Yes I keep track of how many times I play each board game. I told you I like stats, don’t ask questions. Three most played board games in 2016: 3) Pandemic Legacy - 16 2) Spyfall - 33 1) Codenames - 37 I checked out a lot of new music this year. Around the year 2000, I used to download music from Napster, and as cool as that was at the time, having to wait for an individual song is downloaded before being able to listen to it by today standards seems laughably archaic. Now I can get to almost any song by almost any artist with the clicks of a few keystrokes. In 2016 I listened on Spotify to 683 hours of music on Spotify, or 28 solid days 990 total unique artists 5,244 unique songs We watched probably 5 or 6 movies this year. I’m a harsh critic on movies but here’s a couple that I loved: 10 Cloverfield Lane, Eddie the Eagle, and Rouge One. We watched four tv series over the course of the year. They were four amazing, amazing, shows. These are now four of my favourite shows of all time, ranked by preference, although this may be splitting hairs somewhat because they’re all so good: 4) Walking Dead 3) Stranger Things 2) House of Cards 1) and my favorite, Breaking Bad. I think I’ve discovered that I really like anti-heroes. I tried to make Emily pick her favorite, but she can’t do it. In 2016, my favorite accomplishments: I got a work from home job!! We built a recipe/grocery list manager, called PepperRodeo.com, which we learned A TON from doing, and are continuing to improve it. That wraps up 2016. 2016 was cool because it’s a nice round composite number. 2017 is a lame prime number :( Ok bye.
Good Life - Weezer I love the early Weezer songs because of how much honesty and personal history is infused in each song. This song was written after Weezer had a very successful debut album and Rivers Cuomo, the singer and main songwriter, decided being a rock star sucked. He decided instead of being a rockstar, he would attend Harvard. This is part of a batch of songs that were written in the middle of winter in Boston. This particular tune is one of a Harvard student wishing he could go back to “The Good Life”. At this time he had to undergo surgery due to a defect he was born with in which one leg was shorter than the other, and so had to walk with a cane. He also had a big bushy beard and nobody ever recognized him as the singer for Weezer.
Simple Man - Bouncing Souls No this is not a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd. There’s two eras of the Bouncing Souls. The first 5 albums were overflowing of with pure youthful energy and absurdly relatable songs to normal people who are simultaneously excited and scared about life. The latter half of the Bouncing Souls catalog is music from seemingly boring, old, mature dudes. But between those two eras is this album, an album chronicling the feelings of people who are getting older and wiser, but not quite boring and jaded yet.
Hey Brother Christian with your high and might errand, Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Hey Sister Bleeding Heart with all of your compassion, Your labors soothe the hurt but can’t assuage temptation. Hey man of science with your perfect rules of measure, Can you improve this place with the data that you gather? Hey Mother Mercy can your loins bear fruit forever? Is your fecundity a trammel or a treasure? Hey Mr. Diplomat with your worldly aspirations, Did you see the children cry when you left them at the station? Hey moral soldier you’ve got righteous proclamation, And precious tomes to fuel your pulpy conflagrations. And I want to conquer the world, Give all the idiots a brand new religion, Put an end to poverty, uncleanliness and toil, Promote equality in all of my decisions I want to conquer the world, Expose the culprits and feed them to the children, I’ll do away with air pollution and then all save the whales, We’ll have peace on earth and global communion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2nlrpudHIM
Google thought they would be clever and look for things related to “Christmas Party” and associate an image with it. Silly Google. We played Sheriff of Nottingham, which may or may not involve smuggling contraband. This guy is definitely shady. All you have to do is look at him to know that. I’m not like that other guy - there’s absolutely no contraband here. Emily as the “sunbeam whisperer”: My sister Janae and her husband Mark flew down from Rexburg for Thanksgiving. We then travelled out to the middle-of-nowhere in the deserts of Southern Arizona for Thanksgiving, where we hung out on a pseudo farm thing, ate food and played with dogs. Have I mentioned that dogs are Emily’s favourite thing ever? That golden retriever likes to, well, retrieve things. We played a game with her by throwing a ball on the roof and she would have to anticipate where it would come down. Well, this one time, I threw the ball very poorly and it got stuck on the roof. Luckily, my brother-in-law, Mark, volunteered to get stuck up on the roof and I generously assisted. You can see the fiasco he created as people scrambled to set up the ladder. Good job, Mark, you almost ruined Thanksgiving! Look at these jokers.They look like this pretty much all the time. Emily and I have always dreamed of starting a business. So we’re creating a product. Boom. It’s called PepperRodeo. Feast your eyes on the beautiful login page. Punk rock is generally accepted to have more or less started around 1977 with the arrival of bands like the Ramones, The Clash, and the Sex Pistols. Bad Religion formed not soon after in 1979. They made a name for themselves with prominent three-part vocal harmonies, really good guitar playing, and perhaps most defining: intellectually intriguing subject matter. “We write songs about what separates man from the animals? Is there a free will? Is there an immortal soul? What’s the purpose of a government?” Singer and founding member, Greg Graffin is an Anthropology professor at UCLA and Cornell University when he’s not gigging with Bad Religion. They seem to see themselves almost as a continuation of philosophers such as Socrates, or I don’t know…umm Kant or something (Don’t judge me, you people who know philosophy really well). “The pleasure in life is continuing to look for an answer, even though we recognize if it doesn’t have an answer because it’s actually part of human history since time immemorial that these questions have been asked and it’s our duty to provoke them and to provoke people to think about them.” 35 years later, they’re playing Tempe and I’m quite interested. Emily came along for the ride. She’s probably not as obsessed with the genre as I am, but she “gets it”. We parked in some random parking lot, hoped we wouldn’t get towed, and walked the 15-minute trek to the venue, across this lovely bridge: . Against Me! was opening, which is a very cool band I’m a fan of. And wow, the singer is transexual, check out how hip, cool, and inclusive I am! The punkest punk rocker I’ve ever seen. Hiding from the authorities I thought punk was dead, but look at all these freaks! They’re starting to show their age, but man can they still rock. It was a fun, fun, show. We had a farewell dinner with our friend the Gill’s. We met them in our first church ward when we first moved to Arizona, and we’ve been like two peas in a pod ever since. And now they’ve moved to Illinois so they’re dead to us! Just kidding. Here’s our last supper at this cool outdoor restaurant thingy: We miss our homies. That’s all folks. Sorry if you were expecting more but there’s no refunds and I’m calling security.
Emily and I attended a band that we’re both fans of - The Dirty Nil. This young band is the glorious mixture of Classic Rock and Punk Rock. In fact, the main front man, Luke Bentham has a tradition of taking the stage wearing a star-smattered shirt in homage to MC5. These fellas know how to put on a great show. Luke is one of the most charismatic and entertaining frontman I’ve ever seen. Somehow he’s able to act like a rock star and pull off rock star “moves” while on the small stage without becoming a parody. If I was to put on my non-existant-marketing-hat for a moment, I feel like these guys are memorable, not only because the songs are hooky but because they just have their own style. For example, I already mentioned that Luke wears his star shirt, which is reminiscent of frontman like Billy Corgan who was famous for always wearing his “Zero” shirt. He also for some reason is always chewing bubble gum and blowing bubbles in between songs. And why does he always use a cord for his guitar that looks like it could have been plugged into a telephone from the eighties, when all the hip modern people are going wireless? I don’t know, but it’s awesome. All that being said I was bummed to see that there were maybe 20 people at the show. I know these guys have a bigger following than that, but perhaps the Arizona punk scene just hasn’t caught on yet - they are kind of new, they’re from Canada, and most of their releases up to this point have been only on vinyl (this isn’t hipster crap, punks have been doing vinyl way longer than hipsters). This month we trekked across the desert again to visit the polygamist oasis we refer to using lowbrow, cowboy accents as HurriCUHN. In between here and there we stumbled upon a stoplight in the middle of nowhere. Risk Legacy war briefing: The major super powers were established fairly early in the game. Emily’s dad took North America, I ruled Europe with an iron fist, Robert holed up in Australia. Emily’s brother Keaton was trying to establish power in Africa but chaos, corruption, and power struggles deprived him of his ambitions. While we were busy fighting amongst ourselves, Emily convinced us she was of no concern while she quietly built a coalition in Asia. After we completely wiped out the powers the be in North America and just when victory was in my grasp, Emily launched an offensive on my stronghold in Russia. We held on as long as we could but the onslaught was too much. Emily came away with the victory, and she was able to permanently alter the board by increasing how valuable Australia is. The rest of us who managed to not be eradicated were able to place stickers on the board, thus establishing cities. Robert named his “Sore Loser” to go along with my city named “Butthurt”. Look at these Fracture Prune doughnuts and salivate: We play games about trees We got to be parents for a few days. Yes, that’s right, we watched my nephew for a few days while his family was living it up in Disneyland. Despite Cason being a very good natured child, this experience confirmed our suspicion that being a parent is difficult. You heard it here first. Now I wanna do this: Pictures from the road: I suddenly have the almost irresistible urge to create a slideshow with bizarre and grotesque music.
One normal, average morning Emily went outside to find…all the cars missing in the parking lot? Did somebody still everybody’s cars? Nope. The pavement needed a manicure and so someone towed every car to the other side of the building without warning us(!). I’m far more amazed, even impressed, that someone actually did this than I am put off by the confusion and slight inconvenience. Everyone needs a giant teddy bear in their lives. Just ask Random Dude and Creepy Emily. We went to Utah for two weeks in September to visit family and Emily’s dog, Morgan (more on that later). On our drive, we encountered an atomic bomb explosion. These are not gross! They’re not! Why do you think they’re gross? Aah another Legacy game, this time of the Risk variety. Your actions in one game affect the board, cards, etc and all future games. You rip up cards, you write on the board. I can’t tell you more than that or I would have to kill you! Look how much FUN we’re having! FUUUUUUUN Focus!! FOCUSSSS! In other news, Emily turned into a Troll. And we got to see Shauni and Jordan! We played Ticket to Ride Europe and we discovered that Emily’s sister Cassi lived very close and so she joined us as well. It was fun to meet their dog Banana and see their awesome garden and eat spaghetti with sauce made from their garden. Jaren and Emily discovered that our Camry is actually an LE despite it looking janky. ;) This is Morgan. Emily’s family got her over 10 years ago and was Emily’s companion on many a walk. Recently though her health started to decline and she was diagnosed with leukemia. The family made the tough to decision to not let the disease get to a point that really put her in pain. And so we spent a week hanging out with her and everyone else. We took her and Tim the cat on walks. (How cool is it that the cat went on walks with us?) Gave her lots of pats. And then said goodbye. She’s happily chasing buffalo in doggy heaven now. Farewell Morgan, you will be missed. Bon Voyage.
Songs 100-91 The Passenger - Iggy Pop We’re jumping in the way-back machine for this one: 1977. The legendary Iggy Pop. This is a slower meandering tune. I can visualize myself cruising down the highway underneath the stars. The pacing, the melody, and the lyrics come together to perfectly capture this feeling. I recommend this song to the non-punkers out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhN__oEHaw Our Own Way - Hot Water Music Ah, we’re getting gruffer with this tune. This is probably my favorite band of all time. I remember listening to years ago and my mom mentioning that the singer really needs to clear his throat. That’s about right. This song is a good example of why I love the band so much. It’s gruff, it’s gravelly, it’s noisy, but it’s really positive and always makes me happy.
Well, well, well. Fancy seeing you here. Come on in and I’ll tell you all about our comings and goings. Have a seat. Allow me to be introspective for a moment. This was my first month of working remotely. The people I’m working with are “A players”, which is simultaneously very good and very stressful because I also have to put forth my best effort, and I often feel like an idiot. But you know what? This is exactly the kind of environment I want to be in. I have a tendency to throw myself in uncomfortable situations for the sake of education. “Real” education isn’t always fun and often comes at a price. At my last job, I started off overwhelmed and I left a year-and-almost-a-half later because I had gotten too comfortable. That and I outgrew my salary. I have this ever-present concern, perhaps even a fear that my growth will stagnate and I won’t learn as much as I should, and that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’m like the programmer who learned UniBasic in the 70’s and never learned anything new and is now obsolete in the marketplace. Speaking of dust storms, here’s a picture of one. We went to an amazing Andrew Jackson Jihad show, which served as a record release show for their new album. I believe the show sold out, as when we showed up and bought our tickets, they said there were only 43 tickets left. To demonstrate how much I love this band, I recently compiled a list of my favorite 100 songs in which I probably have more of their songs than any other band. I didn’t want to take a picture during the actual show because that would just be stupid, so Emily took one of me in between sets of the opening bands so that I could share my excitement with all the world: Birds! Pidgeons made a home on our balcony and laid eggs. I know, many people view pigeons as vexing pests, but we don’t go on our balcony in the summertime, are you crazy? So we may as well view nature take its course. Shhhhhhh. Look its hatching Speaking of animals, I don’t like cats. But cats like me apparently. Just for the record, dogs are a 1,000,000,000,000,000 times better than cats. But cats are ok if there’s nothing else around. We’re nerds! So we went to a UX TV show taping. For those of you who don’t “habla Espanol”, UX is a dumb and inaccurate acronym for User Experience. You know when you go to a website and you can’t frickin’ find anything but it’s a government website or something so there’s no competitors and they didn’t feel the need to hire any User Experience people? Or when you visit something like Amazon and you have a 20% chance of accidentally buying because it’s so easy? Anyways, this “TV show” which is more like a youtube show, was about exactly that. They had people who built websites and apps compete for whose is easiest to use! Riveting! And we look super fancy! All right! WOW! One day, we went to Tuscon to attend a surprise 85th birthday party for my Grandpa. In case you don’t know, Tuscon is a land of tumbleweeds and saloons, where the dresscode is cowboy hats and flannel and you have to say stuff like “howdy pardner”. Oh and did I mention that if you wear a tie, they’ll cut it off and hang it up! ‘Cause that’s how it’s done in the Wild West. In the West, there’s certain rules for how to eat your cake: That feeling when there’s no more cake to be had: We went and watched some folks jump off roofs and blow stuff up: Here’s the posse And meanwhile, the birds just kept getting bigger My GOSH I’m sexy
Born Free - Bouncing Souls Born Free has a wonderful sense of urgency and purpose. It knows exactly where it’s going, it came to deliver a message as fast as possible, in a just a little over a minute. I can’t help but think of this as a libertarian anthem. The way that dictators and “progressives” of all types have always gained power is through playing on fears that come innately as humans. The antidote to tyranny is the renunciation of fear:
We kicked off July with trip to Huntington Beach California, which is where Emily’s grandparents are from. Despite the fact that we were at a beach, which is supposed to supposed to be always warm and sunny, it was cold and windy. Some took drastic measures: There were certain people we didn’t really care much for…so we buried them. And we forced people at gunpoint to play games: And of course, we partook of the Holy Burger. I want to make a pilgrimage to every In-N-Out in existence. Only partially kidding. Several weeks later, we went to my hometown of Lakeside which is by Show Low, or Snowflake maybe you’ve heard of it there’s a temple there yes it’s sort of by Flagstaff I mean it’s on the same side of the state at least… Here’s where Lakeside is: It’s located right at that bulb syringe. Let’s zoom in and take a closer look, shall we? . There’s all kinds of stuff to do in Lakeside. Like farmers markets. You can take hipster photographs. And there’s tons of scenic hikes The original goal was to go camping. I soon realized that: a) there was a huge fire that almost burned down the whole town, so no campfires were allowed except in designated camping spots. b) you have to pay to camp at designated camping areas. c) I’m not about to pay money for something that is outrageously abundant (although I do pay for bottled water sometimes so it must not bother me that much). Thus we decided to camp in my parents backyard: Emily woke up to the sound of a hummingbird doing hummingbird things: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-y9_W1kwCs] It was a great time. I like small towns, ya know? My sister Janae, and her husband Mark “some guy” Johnson, came for a visit. You can check out her side of the story, but I’ll tell you how things really went down. We went to Golden Coral. It really isn’t the best food in the world, but it has cotton candy and cute kids. We went to a place called Bookmans that is a playground for nerds. We bought Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ender’s Game and the next books in the series: Speaker of the Dead and Xenocide. We also bought the unabridged Les Miserables because we’re HARDCORE. And we bought some Harry Potter books (because we’re…hardcore?). Reading is frickin’ cool. Look at these people: We played some crazy games of Cosmic Encounter, in which people are wheelin’ and dealin’ and you can totally trust me, I have your best interest at heart! This is a crazy, crazy, game. I can’t repeat the things that I’ve seen and heard. Well, I finally pulled the trigger (so to speak) and quit my job. Now I will be working from home with a company that uses Laravel…..the best way I can describe it is I’m now able to work with something that is like the Apple product of the PHP programming world. It’s sleek, elegant, and generally a joy to work with. I could hardly of asked for anything better. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE *The reason the town next to Lakeside is called Show Low is because two guys who were equal partners in a 100,000 acre ranch decided there wasn’t room enough for both of them (!) and so they played a game of poker to determine who would get the ranch. During a rousing night of poker, Marion Clark said “If you can show low, win”. Corydon Cooley turned up the deuce of clubs and that was that. He named the settlement Show Low and the main street became the “Deuce of Clubs”. Now you know.
We’ve been working on the design phase of an recipe and grocery list web app named Pepper Rodeo that we are building. We’ve determined that we want to spend 90 percent of our time designing it and so when it comes time to code it, you can bang out the code in no time flat. That’s something I learned at college. See? Sometimes college isn’t always a waste of time. Basically we created as many “Use cases” and “User Stories” as we can think of. From there we went through all the nouns and talked about whether it was a candidate for it’s own class in the system (jargon warning). We then looked through all the verbs and wrote down methods and attributes that may belong to the classes (jargon warning). I should probably stop. I am working on a technical blog which I hope to document the whole process. You know what, enough of that boring stuff, let me show you pictures of our super sick-as-in-cool vacation in Hurricuhn, UT. This trip really helped motivate us to get out of the big city. Somehow, someway, we’re going to figure out how to do it. Note: sorry for the lack of wordage in this blog post. I used too much of my blogging energy on this monstrosity: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3poDe7GRpyE&w=560&h=315] Invigorating Robert? What are you doing? Dallin overcompensating for never getting drunk. Tatooine: Loneliness. When it’s time to party we will party hard Home sweet home. Yup, we live in Wal Mart. Fun fact: I’ve tried to log every single board game I’ve played this past year, and here’s the statistics.
Well we moved to a new place YET AGAIN. Why? Cause we get bored, that’s why. And I wanted to be closer to work I guess. Yes we successfully moved to Tempe, which is the city next door to Phoenix. Tempe is a poop dump. Well not really, but there’s a lot of college students. That’s it, I’m flossing. I had to go to the dentist to get some teeth filled. My mom’s enamel sucks and seems like I inherited it. Going to the dentist isn’t bad except when you have to hold your mouth open for an hour straight while you periodically get waterboarded. There was one time this week where I went to work (it was another long 20 second commute), and I sat down and I said, screw this crappy job, and I left (it’s ok, I just took paid time off). That weekend Emily’s brother Keaton and his friend Landon came to town. We hiked Camelback mountain which was like doing stair steppers with 1000 city slickers. The view was spectacular, though. It made me want to do a “real” hike, which I haven’t done in far too long. We played Dead of Winter and I got the betrayer card AGAIN (hehehe). I stabbed everyone right in the face!! We’ve been partying like it’s 1699 Thanks Monica for being the genius behind this^. Emily went to a Business Boutique and learned from a lot of great speakers like Rachel Cruze (Dave Ramsey’s daughter) Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and lots of other people who have created businesses. When she arrived on the first day she had just sat down when she recognized an old friend, Stan Kjar who with her her daughter had flown in from Utah. After the event we went to In-N-Out, obviously, and then we went the Phoenix temple but as it turns it closes early on Saturday. Whoopsies. A week later before our Pandemic Legacy game night with Nathan and Corri, we thought we would be clever and go to the Phoenix temple since it’s sort of on our way. Well, as it turns out, it was closed for maintenance!!!!1111 We were too far away to return home and still had a couple hours left until game night, so we decided to do the unexpected - the unthinkable. We went to a movie theater! I’m serious, we NEVER go to the movies. Number one, we very rarely watch movies, because I look upon movies with scorn because they suck and Emily doesn’t mind my snobbery. Well, we went all dressed up to a ghetto theater to see a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane. Well Ladies and Gents, I had my doubts but that was an amazing movie. It wasn’t the horrifically cliche action flick like I assume of it’s progenitor (Cloverfield), it was something of a “psychological thriller” that kept you guessing. I was never sure if the protaganist was a crazy guy or if he was a crazy guy and he was actually telling the truth. It was fascinating. A pitfall I see in a lot of movies (or rather, saw in a lot of movies) is they explain too much and don’t allow for any tension as the viewer tries to figure it out themselves. Two giant acid barrels up for 10 Cloverfield Lane. Our game of Pandemic Legacy has been very exciting because we found out that [REDACTED] I would do almost any calling if it meant I didn’t have to be a primary teacher. I would give a talk every month and clean the toilets rather than be a Sunbeam teacher. So of course we were called to be Sunbeam teachers. At least Emily is really good at it. I like Emily. Emily and I are attempting to go out and do one of those business things. We’re continuing to build websites as practice. I’ve been relearning a framework called Laravel that I haven’t touched so I created my blog over a year ago. We’re still figuring out what our “product”. We really want to create some kind of service that people would pay a subscription or something to rather than creating websites for small businesses. By the end of the year, either we have a business up and running or we have killer portfolios.