Kama’aina

I have fond memories of the semester I spent at Ricks college before I went on my mission to California.  Today, I was reminded of why I had such a good time.  I was going through my i-Tunes library and found the band Nerf Herder.  Nerf Herder’s music is really funny stuff.  My favorites are their songs about Van Halen, eating candy, and a girl named Diana.

If you get the jokes, the music will give you a belly ache laughing.

I don’t like daylight savings. I think that Arizona and Hawaii have right idea by not giving into peer pressure and keeping their time the same all the year round. I mean why is daylight savings time so important? It seems completely arbitrary to me and makes one Monday a year about one hundred times worse than every other Monday of the year.

I thought about calling in sick, but then decided against it. I’ll take a mental health day sometime soon. Not sure when, but soon.

The other night I checked out a book by Leonard Arrington entitled Adventures of a Church Historian. This book is Arrington’s memoir about his work as a college professor, LDS Church Historian, and later as the director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute at BYU.

I have enjoyed the first seventy five pages and am about to start on why I wanted to read this book in the first place. I wanted to read Arrington’s account of what it was like to work as Church Historian and his interactions with Church general authorities.

When I read Church history, I must admit, I have bias towards the more human stuff. I really enjoyed Ed Kimball’s books about his Dad (Spencer W. Kimball), Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, and what I have read of Arrington’s bio of Brigham Young. I doubt that I will ever read Mark McConkie’s books about Joseph Smith or much of what his brother has written either. They are too parochial for me.

The only thing I am concerned about is that Lavina Fielding Anderson assisted Arrington in writing this book and, according to some, wrote some sections herself in behalf of Arrington. So the problem is to figure out when Leonard is telling the story and when is Lavina telling the story.

This book is out of print. You can buy it on Amazon.com for over one hundred dollars. A better option would be to check it out from the Provo or Orem public libraries for free.

Movies:

I like bad movies.  There are times when a movie is so bad it is good.  Some examples include, but are not limited to “Red Dawn”, “The Black Hole”, “Flash Gordon” (Queen did the soundtrack for this one), and “The Monster Squad”.  All of them deserve watching because they cross the threshold from being merely a bad movie to beings works of art.  Someday, I will watch Ed Wood’s classic “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.

Books:

99.9572% (with +/- .o2 percent margin of error) of all the books I read are non-fiction.  There are some books that are exceptions within the last year such as “The Da Vinci Code”, “The Things They Carried”, and “World War Z”.  Most of the time, however, I am some thick tome (an exaggeration) on LDS Church History.  Why just the other day I made a list of Church history books I want to read in the next year.  We will see if I get through them all.  My guess is probably not.

Food:

I am a foodie and collect cookbooks.  I conquered the barbeque and now want to take on the Crock Pot as I love slow cooked foods.  Hopefully someone will give Tina and I one as a wedding present.

Fears:

When I was in the scouts, I used to be afraid of forrest fires.  One summer our troop went to Scout Camp during a week of severe forest fire warnings near Mount Hood.  I must admit that I was afraid of having to leave all my new camping stuff behind to what ended up being non-existent flames.

Quirky Habits:

It takes me quite a while to get out of bed in the morning.  My alarm goes off at 6:45am but I am rarely out of bed before 7:15am.  I like having that time to adjust to being awake though it makes me late to work almost every day.

I have been away for far too long. I have been writing, just not here. I don’t feel bad about it. I just don’t have the time.

It seem like everything lately.

For those who don’t know, over the Holidays (Christmas and New Years) my girlfriend and I decided to get married and got engaged. About a week and a half ago, I gave her the ring and formally proposed. We then celebrated by going out to eat at Harvest at Thanksgiving Point. The food there is great. I highly recommend it.

Work. All I can say is that things have been crazy lately. Between school (BYU) and making wedding plans, work has kind of taken a backseat which is too bad. I like my job and feel bad that I have been kind of coasting. However, I have resolved that this week is going to be different starting tomorrow.

Spiritually, I am doing much better now than I was a couple of weeks ago. As friend of mine described his own situation, I was going through my own private recession but am glad that emotionally things are getting back to normal. I love reading the scriptures and am devoting more of my free reading to doing that.

So, things are good and getting better. I will write more sometime this week.

Hey all, I have some good new. Tina Davis and I will be getting married in April.

Merry Christmas.

Today was pretty low key.  We all woke up early because Jon, Emily, and my little nephew Jack all had to leave by about ten thirty.  We started opening presents around seven thirty, took a break for breakfast, and then finished opening stuff up.  After that the rest of the day was spent sleeping, eating, playing with my new iPod, talking to Tina on the phone, and anything else which did require mental or physical exertion.

I also started reading a new book entitle “Shooter”.  It is the autobiography of a real-life Marine Corps career scout sniper.  The book basically details all the people this guy killed during the Iraq war.  Thankfully this book flies unlike most things I read.  I will finish “Shooter” sometime this week.

Tina comes tomorrow.  It will be good to see each other after being apart for about a week.  I hope she likes Altanta and likes hanging out with my family.

All in all, it has been a good day.

Third Eye Blind is not my favorite band but I do like this song.  Here’s “Non Dairy Creamer”.  I hope you like it.

Well, winter has arrived in Utah in a big way.  We had a massive snow storm this afternoon, perhaps one of the worst I have ever been in.  By all rights, I should not have been driving.  I came close to running into another car while making a right hand turn on Center street in Provo.  I-25 was nasty.  Literally, it took close to two hours for me to drive from my house in Provo to the airport.  If you are on the road, stay safe!!!  Getting there safe is more important than making good time.