I know it's belated....

But this one is worth it. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a prosperous new year to everyone!




Seriously, though, it has been a great year full of blessings and new experiences. In church Lorie arranged a beautiful hymn using the children's song "Stars were Gleaming" and an Italian Hymn based on the text of Psalm 100. We sang it and there was a wonderful spirit there. It reminded me of the great love that our Heavenly Father has for us, the guidance he has given our lives this year, and how grateful we are for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
2010 will be an amazing year too. Just watch...

um...ok...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19067777

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?

A: One is a slimy, bottom dwelling, scum sucker. The other is a fish.

'sno joke

Houston broke a record today. Today is the earliest day in the year (for all of recorded history) that houston has had buckets of snow. Last year we made a snowman and gave him a cowboy hat and a sniper rifle. This year...well, the novelty is starting to wear off. But hey, I guess it beats hurricanes. And we'll be back up to the 60's by Monday. Now to figure out where that ice scraper's been hiding...

USB garbage

Retro baby! At the height of ridonculousness (although they freely admit what they are doing), an enterprising company has come out with the USB pet rock. I really want to know how many they sell. I would almost be willing to pay to know. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Oh, and I was wondering why I've been seeing these disclosures at the bottom of all the blogs I follow. Apparently you can now be fined up to $11,000 for not disclosing ties to marketers! So no, I have no ties to anyone from whatever company the Pet Rock company is, other than the fact that I am sometimes jealous of the guy who came up with such a profitable an idea. At other times, I do not know how I would live with myself.

Destiny

Somewhere for free I acquired a calendar of motivational pictures and phrases that I have kept at my office. It has been interesting through the months to see the phrases coincide with my life. When I needed to rely on coworkers and stretch to meet my goals, it would be a month of 'Teamwork', and so on throughout the year.

December is 'Destiny' and the phrase is, "You decide your own direction, so make your journey one you'd want to read about." This is perfect for me as I just finished crossing some major milestones in my life. I am ready for a change. I am ready for the next obstacle that life is sure to present me. I want to rise to the challenge and overcome what faces me.

Manny and I watched "Paycheck" over the Thanksgiving holiday. That movie always reminds me that seeing our future is NOT how life is meant to be lived. Struggling to mold ourselves into something is what life is all about. It is up to us to decide what we want to be. So before the break was over, I cut my hair shorter than I have in the last 20 years and smiled while the pieces feel to the ground, never looking back. This year is going to be a good one.

Oh....possum

The stairwell that I usually take up to my office (gotta get that morning exercise in) was blocked off this morning, with a huge metal grate that said "the bathrooms are closed for maintenance. Sorry for the inconvenience." "What a curious way to block the bathroom," I thought. I looked around to see what was going on and peeked up into the stairwell. Didn't find anything. When I had the grate half removed, I looked over in the corner and saw a huge possum! For those of you not familiar with the south, possums (short for opossums) look like huge multicolored rats. And they smell. And they might have rabies.

Anyway, I pushed the grate back, ran away, found some friends, and came back. There was a lady from Houston dept. of Wildlife Management (they actually share the building with us) with gloves and a net. She scooped the critter up, and carried him outside to who knows where. Maybe under my car. He bit her hand in the process.

For a clear image of what went on, here is part of the wikipedia article on opossum:

When threatened or harmed, they will "play possum", mimicking the appearance and smell of a sick or dead animal. The lips are drawn back, teeth are bared, saliva foams around the mouth, and a foul-smelling fluid is secreted from the anal glands. The physiological response is involuntary, rather than a conscious act. Their stiff, curled form can be prodded, turned over, and even carried away. The animal will regain consciousness after a period of minutes or hours and escape.

Yee-haw.

Expense reports

The irs has just hired thousands of new employees to raise more money for the government...specifically, investigating certain areas for compliance, including expense reports. Frankly I never did understand the system: If you spend $900 on a client for a business meeting it is cool but if you lost your receipt for getting yourself a sandwich then it is trouble city. At least at my company it always was. Anyway, now receipts are always required so instead of the sandwich, it is the two Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers you got at Wendy's that will get you into trouble.


Apparently (according to Cialdini's "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion") there is a correlation between food and a party's compliance. That's why legislators are swayed over meals and fund-rasiers involve plenty of food. Just like Pavlov's dogs, people will associate the pleasant feeling with the person across the table from them, instead of the food, and trick themselves into compliance.
Maybe that's also why people always propose over fancy dinners.




The first words ever stored on a hard drive were...

"This has been a day of solid achievement."


While you're pondering this, here is a picture of our politicians hard at work:



Blog puke

The things that I have been wanting to write about, but haven't had the time to refine. I still think they deserve to be said, though, so here it comes, in unprocessed chunks:

President Uchtdorf came down for a conference a couple of weeks ago, and we got to talk with him a bit. He has an iPhone. His wife is so hilarious, and such a bright personality.

We got an article published in the ensign, sort of! They bought the copyrights to a piece we wrote like a year ago, but don't know when they can fit it in the magazine. So keep an eye out!

I had a 32 oz. chocolate shake the other day at Whatabarfer. Never again...

We booked tickets to Panama for our anniversary, woot woot! No matter how many economics courses I take, I don't think I will ever understand airline prices. Cost of flying roundtrip from Houston to Panama on Continental: $800. Cost of flying roundtrip from San Antonio to Panama on continental, connecting through Houston on the same days on the same flight: $380. wth?

Working in the family history center I found names on my dad's line in Spain back to about 1700. Actually, the church did most of the work - it's pretty amazing. I'm planning on making a family history book for when we go down there. Also, a guy came in one day who wasn't a member but his ancestors were. He showed me a family heirloom he had - a ticket to the dedication services at the Salt Lake Temple! It was neat. I helped him find his line back to like 1600 in Sweden. He was so grateful because he had been looking for that info for a long time.

Finally, our garden is growing. We tried square foot gardening this fall, which I would totally recommend if anyone has at least a patio. It's good stuff.

Life's Too Short!

What kind of Ridonculous phrase is that? Have you talked to a lady who just gave birth. She won't tell you that the last 9months have been too short! What is that phrase mean anyway? That I need to worry every second because tomorrow I might get hit by a bus or kick the can in some random-against-all-odds way? OR is it referring to the fact that many people reach the end of their life expectancy and look back over their years only to realize they haven't done what they wanted to or accomplished things they had hoped to? May I state boldly that I disagree with both definitions and I propose that we cease to use this silly phrase and instead remind ourselves that life is LONG and in some occasions feels TOO long.

I look to great examples like Einstein and Socrates. One dedicated his life to studying Pi and the laws of gravity and the other studied philosophy (something not even concrete nor fully attainable in this life). Both are things that require patience and lots of time. I heard on the radio yesterday that one girl has been heading up a 10yr study of Narwales. She and her crew go out to the ice every year and just wait to see if they can catch one of these huge whale type animals with long horns on the front of their foreheads like unicorns. 10 years she's been tracking them! She definitely views life as a long journey with plenty of time to do what interests her most. These people are inspirations to me.

People who believe in the latter definition of the phrase "Life is too short," as listed above, generally are firm believers in bucket lists. A bucket list is a list of items made by a person who is near the threshold of death. The list includes items they SHOULD have been doing their entire life and that they don't want to miss out on before they keel over. I think that Denzel Washington portrays this group of people perfectly in the movie "The Bucket List." In this movie he leaves everything that has been so important to him for almost his entire life so that he can travel the world to see and experience all the wonders it holds. At the end of the movie, he finally realizes how important his family really is to him and he returns to his wife and kids. The movie portrays him as a hero and a completely happy man when he dies. But, they don't really portray how hurt his family must have been when he left without giving an explanation and how irrational it was to leave his life behind for a mere pleasure trip just to appease his own desires.

Now don't get me wrong I have nothing against bucket lists, in fact my now husband and I had a bucket list when we were dating and engaged, and we frequently add to it now. I know how exciting it is to cross something of the list and to look at the progress we've made and feel like life has really meant something to me. And that is the point. The list helps us to accomplish what we want to and we do it together or support one another to reach individual goals. It has become a great way to fill up an otherwise empty hour or Saturday night. Every time that I look at the list I realize how much time has transpired since we first completed our first item. The time has flown by quickly, but I would never say that it has been too short. In contrast, I have realized how much one can do in one month or even in one week. Therefore pointing to how long a life is.

One last example of how long life is. It can be explained in one word, Glenora. She is my step-grandma and as dear to me as any grandma could ever be. She has been on a feeding tube for many years, and despite her elderly age has remained independent and strong. She knows her limits, but she exceeds everyone's expectations who knows her. When I visit Glenora, she reminds me how long life is with her stories that seem to span back to the pre-dinosaur era. But, she also reminds me of how much joy can be felt in one life, how much happiness can be spread, how many things can be done with people that you love, how much service can be rendered and most of all how much one can accomplish when they never give up. In one sense you would say that she has seen it all. She reminds me that when we maintain an attitude that life is long, then we never give up and we have no reason to let life get us down. We not only accomplish what we want to accomplish, but we spend as much time as we need doing it, and we do it cheerfully because we know that nothing else matters. We don't let deadlines and expectations hang over our heads. We live long and prosper.

NPR = awesome

...or something like that. I just thought it was time to pay homage to the best program available on the airwaves. People will say it has a liberal bias, and others will say it has a conservative bias - if both are true, then it is doing a good job of reflecting our diversity. What was relatively unknown to me 5 years ago has become a comfort to me in a lonely America. The stories are interesting and not too overbearing (except for when they ask for money =/) My favorite programs by far are "This American Life" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."

Point of this post: I've been listening to the audiobook of "This I Believe" and heard a guy talk about his 50-percent theory of life. I thought it was very interesting and a good representation of the last two months for me. I've had lots of good and bad and just plain neutral days. However, optimist that I am, I tend to believe in a 60-percent theory of life. Cyclical ups and downs, but in the end leaning toward the good. It's that extra bit that makes every moment of life worth savoring.

Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

Everybody may have seen this already, but I thought that this representation of the U.S. National Debt in $100 bills was pretty interesting. Scary, maybe, but I tend to be optimistic about our debt ratio. I think the real key is educating our society to become more productive (and probably also to want less). But what do I know. If you're really concerned, you can send checks to pay down the national debts if you want to (no joke). Write in the memo section of the check that it’s a gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public, and mail it to:

Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

Chase sucks. Run away!



Most of you who have been watching bank rates know that savings account yields are pretty terrible right now, due to federal lending rates being so low. Lorie and I have both been pretty disappointed at the rate we have been getting on our accounts for the past year. However, the most laughable rate belongs to our friends at the worst bank ever. On its savings accounts, Chase is offering a paltry 0.01% APY. And, if you don't link it to other accounts or have a $15,000 minimum balance, you will get hit with $15 monthly fees. So, let's see....if I invest $10,000 today, I will have gained $1 in interest by this time next year, and this privilege will only have cost me $180 in fees.

As a company, it has probably the best balance sheet of the megabanks, and has yet to report a quarterly loss in all of this mess (thanks to Washington Mutual). I understand that the overnight lending rate is practically zero, so banks can loan to each other for free. I'm just a little concerned about how much longer the boys at Chase can expect their savings-account holders to be providing them with interest-free loans.

My favorite video to exercise to...

Buy buy buy!

As long as you are going to be staying somewhere for a predictable while, it is getting to the point where there is absolutely no reason not to buy a house these days. $8000 in free money, houses on the cheap, and low mortgage rates make it a buyer's market like never before.

There are possibly perks if you take out your mortgage from a bank as well. We took out our mortgage from Bank of America because it was a good program and good rate, but we also found out that having that mortgage gives us the privilege of higher savings account rates, free paper checks on demand, and a free safe deposit box rental. It all depends on whether those things matter to you, but for me it was pretty sweet...

on eating out

I feel very lucky to be living in a place that has been shielded somewhat from the effects of the recession. That being said, it is kind of hard living in a place where the streets are always crowded and the stores are always so busy. We went to Chick-Fil-A last weekend (using a free coupon from the mail, of course) and it was absolutely nuts. Nary a space in the parking lot, 20 cars in the drive-thru, and people running around, well, like headless chickens. Of course, the food was delicious. From what I read, the business is doing really well and is gaining popularity everywhere. Maybe it really is God's chicken.

Because of the crowds (partly due to the fact that Houston is huge, and also to the fact that a lot of areas were very poorly planned), we mostly eat in, even though we both work and it takes a lot of planning to pull off. I read an article about how eating out may save you money, but I think that is absolutely preposterous. Over the long run you don't save money and around here, you definitely don't save time. Just in case, though, we plan on keeping track of our prices and times for cooking at home. Empirical data may get the best of us yet.

Why haven't U2 found what they're looking for?

Because the streets have no names.

Roach in the box


I recently read about how municipalites and state governments are pushing to have the calorie content of menu items published next to the items themselves in chain restaurants and eventually all restaurants. I first wondered if this would really make anyone change their eating habits, but apparently at least one person has.


So I guess my real beef with this whole thing is that I feel like I am being herded like cattle. When I was in college, the combination of high calories and low price was what I was looking for. Since then, I have begun to yogurt up a little, but it has been easy to educate myself with the current tools available. Is the major retooling that this is going to require really worth all the time and effort? Will chefs have to give up their freedom and variety and make the "daily special" a thing of the past? I hate not knowing what is in my food as much as the next person, but won't this just make it worse? You are not requiring restaurants to teach nutrition, you are requiring them to post one variable of a lengthy equation. Furthermore, it's something that they can easily get around by putting crap like olestra back into our food again. I don't know the answers to these questions, but this is starting to make me hungry for some taco smell...

On service

As I type, it is five in the morning on a Sunday. I am on a unit startup in Baton Rouge, and we have a little bit of downtime as we wait for some furnaces to do their “thang.” Once you get used to it, the night shift is great – the pace slows down, and while you sit in dimly lit rooms staring at graphs with strangers who ultimately become friends, you naturally begin to wonder at the natural variety in life, and what it is that brought you to this point. In other words, it’s the perfect time for a letter. The radio is playing Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you,” which is kind of an odd thing to hear in a control room. I guess it was Saddam Hussein’s campaign theme song, so I guess no scenario can be weirder than that.

I think that both Lorie and I would concur that this week has been good. We are beginning to see a glimmer of progress in the organization of our house and in the garden. This week seemed to pass by in a blur, however, as both of us have been swamped with work and longer hours. Just when I was about to leave for the weekend and bask in freedom, I was given the “Jack Bauer mission,” as Lorie playfully quips, to go to Lousiana. It’s fun, and I love my job, but that just wasn’t the right time to be receiving that news. For those of you that have seen Office Space, you know what scene I’m thinking of.

It wasn’t all bad, though, as Lorie and I still had the pleasure of a date night on Friday. We ended up helping our friend Daniel move a motorized bed out of his home and move another one down a flight of stairs. If you’ve never moved a motorized bed, then congratulations – your back is probably still aligned. That was, hands down, one of the heaviest pieces of furniture I have tried to move, including the piano that I suspect gave me that last subconjunctival hemorrhage.

So today, aside from being tired out of my mind, I feel very sore. But it feels good – it was really a lot of fun. Throughout life I have always felt a very strong conviction that we should seek out the opportunities to serve one another and help in making the world a better and more comfortable place to live in.

I think that I first realized the true value of service while in college. Before college, service meant going to pull weeds on a widow’s lawn. Always. In school, however, I found that there were many ways that one could serve. I cleaned up both disgusting parks and beautiful gardens in the city. I helped kids with their math homework. I gave blood. I helped people with their taxes. And really, I could tell that people truly were grateful.

School really isn’t about the books, and neither is life, so to speak. I only truly enjoyed the practicality of being an engineer when it was applied to service. Oddly enough, the service I gave was what made me want to fully pursue my degree. Service really does give you a new perspective on the world; it can change your day and really lift your spirits.

I feel the following quote by Mother Teresa is applicable: “Do not worry about why problems exist in the world -- just respond to people's needs. We feel what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean, but that ocean would be less without that drop.”

Since college, I’ve found myself starting to focus on the causes of problems in our society and in the world. It’s all too easy. Perhaps it is time for me to bring back the focus to my neighbor, and to bringing a spirit of service back into my life.

Perhaps this is one of the main reasons that we are told to multiply our talents. The more talents we have, the more ways that we can serve. And when we have a greater variety of ways in which to serve, it becomes more fun (reference weeds above). We better equip ourselves with the ability to understand and to respond to the problems of others. Learning and growing is the first step, and applying the knowledge is the next.

Haha, well the song on the radio has changed by now. “This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given. Use them and let’s start trying to make it a place worth living in…” How very timely. 10 points to the first person to identify the song without looking it up.

The Symphony of Modern Humanity

I echo the words of Ne-Yo when I say, I am so sick of love songs...I think it is time to turn off the radio! It seems that almost every song on the radio is to the theme of falling in love, breaking up, hating love, or wanting love. If they're not about love then they choose something completely obscure or random to talk about, like "chiggity china the chinese chicken, you have a drumstick and your brain quits tickin'." Mindless lyrices only contributes to a mindless and lost generation of fanatical teenagers sold on any group regardless of their lyrical ability.

I commute for at least 2 hours a day and despite my disappointment in the main stream music industry, I find myself listening to Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Beyonce all day long (these ridiculous song stick to the brain like superglue). One particular day on my commute home I landed on Katy Perry's song, "Thinking of you." As I actually spent a second to listen to what she was singing about, I got to thinking what LOVE means. As defined by her song, it is an obsession of one perfect person that is your "soul mate." According to her, without being in a relationship with that one person we are forced to, "settle for second best." Although she has a man, she is always thinking what it would be like if he, the soul mate, was the one spending the night instead of the one she is with. Really, is that love? NO, that's sick! Get to thinking, Katy, and move on! I know it's not always that simple especially falling in and out of love... but I highly doubt that what she is feeling is actually TRUE LOVE. Same goes for you and your love story Taylor Swift, sounds more like a shotgun wedding.



So this brings me to my point. Why do we let the media tell us how to live our lives anyway. I understand that musicians are merely people trying to blog about their lives and therefore have the right to sing about whatever they'd like. But, that doesn't reduce the fact that I just get so sick of seeing the rising generation stuck on this mumbo jumbo. I've come to the conclusion that life is so high paced and so over stressed that people are too busy to think for themselves. Don't even get me started on the difference in media coverage between Bush and Obama, one can't do anything right and the other can't do anything wrong. When will we find the balance? When will we learn to think and understand for ourselves and turn off the noise?

Sometimes I make the 2 hour commute with the radio off. Manny thinks I'm weird to do this, but sometimes I just can't handle the sensory overload. I hate that whatever I want to think or feel someone has already done and has written a song or book about it to tell me how I need to live it. I know it is good to learn from others, but sometimes I want to EXPERIENCE life for myself.

We is smarter than you think we is

I regularly peruse the findings at http://www.factcheck.org/ simply so I can see what kind of garbage the politicians have been lying to us about lately. It does a great job of exposing how terrible both parties are at keeping the ninth commandment. A recent post was interesting, refuting Obama's claims of the dire situation of our education system. Highlights:

1. He said the high school dropout rate tripled in the past 30 years. The DOE says it declined by 1/3.
2. He said 8th grade math scores have fallen to ninth place compared with other countries. Actually, they have risen to that level, with a low of being in 28th place in 1995. Remember, the alligator eats the bigger number.
3. He said he wanted us to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Currently we are in second place to Norway, trailing by one percent.

I thought this was interesting because there is actually something good that this nation is acheiving compared to the rest of the world, among with all of the other frog spit that we churn out on a regular basis, and our president doesn't want us to hear about it! He just wants us to be scared so we will spend more. Who do you take us for, a bunch of dummies?

New Blog - Unearthing the functional, the objective, and the ridonculous in life

Everybody clap your hands, and say hello to new beginnings! Did you just think that after we got married, we would vanish from the face of the earth, leaving nary a cyber trail? Not so, our cyber trail is very alive and active. I've decided to keep our blog because:

1) I love getting updates on everyone through blog feeds (I like google reader because it delivers them all to my home page). All of my friends collectively are very interesting on a daily basis. We want to keep all our friends and family updated on the semi-interesting and mundane things that happen to us.

2) The way we've run our household so far is...unique! We want to share it and see if any of our quirks can help others, while we learn from their quirks.

3) Most things in this life have only one word (pioneered by Mr. Jack Black) to describe them...ridonculous. You can't make this stuff up, and you definitely can't pass these things up without writing them down for the world to see. This will be their repository.

On those rare occasions when we do have a deep and intricate thought, it'll be posted on my pensive Camacho Libre blog.

We hope you enjoy it and we really hope we can get this thing moving along! Any suggestions to help us?

Proposing: A Dude's Perspective

When people ask how I proposed to Lorie, it’s usually kind of hard to explain. The short answer is: Candles. Gifts. Poem. But for those people who are really interested in hearing the whole story, here it is…

I remember when I realized that I wanted to marry Lorie. It made me happy. I also remember when I realized that she wanted to marry me too. It made me even happier. When I started thinking about the next steps, though, I admittedly became a little nervous. It wasn’t the ring (I mean, all you do there is plunk down a bunch of cash and hope for the best, right?); it was mostly the proposal. My family didn’t usually tell proposal stories around the campfire, but I knew people were going to ask later. I mean, a bad proposal either becomes a family joke (if she says yes) or a sad warning tale to everyone on the block (if she says no) in the end. Best to sit on this, I thought, and let the creative juices simmer for a while.

The idea sort of came to me when we were hiking up Ensign’s peak in Utah. In retrospect, maybe it was the high altitude… Lorie commented to me that when she was in college and went on hikes in Utah, she would always see groups of high school kids going on group hikes before a dance. (This perhaps merits some explaining…Utah has a unique system of guys asking girls to high school dances, which includes a series of creative puns or puzzles that eventually lead to the name of the person asking you to the dance. The answer must be reciprocated in kind; a simple “yes” or “no” would not suffice. The dance is not just a trip to the dance and back, either. It includes dinner and a day-long activity; ergo, hiking. As far as I can tell, it arises from Mormon dating rituals in the 70’s. There’s some more info about it here).

Anyway, the point is she felt like growing up in Texas she missed out on a lot of that because she never did the fun activities beforehand, and she never got asked in the crazy ways. I replied with something trite, like that I would have asked her if we were in high school. She commented that she didn’t like going to the dances that much anyway. Hmm….asking to dances without the dancing…would this work? My mind thought it over and, at the very least, I would get a few points for originality. All systems go.

Back in Houston, I went to work putting everything together. Now, I remembered that there were a few rules that others had told me about proposing. One was to personalize rather than generalize. That part was probably the easiest for me. If you’ve never heard of the short-lived MTV series Daria, I don’t blame you - but Lorie has, and we both loved the show in our earlier years. So I found some DVD’s online and ordered them. I made T-shirts for the band that we had formed with our Guitar Hero characters. I painstakingly made a dorky little picture frame with all sorts of mementos of ours scattered around it.

When the day came, I told her I had a gift that I had made her for our four-month anniversary present. We’re all into personalized gifts, so it’s not that uncommon. She came over to my place after work and the dance “tickets” were all lined up for her – homecoming, prom, etc. Each ticket had a gift, a separate activity, a separate dinner (usually restaurant gift cards), and of course the puzzle/pun. There were secret messages and word searches, basically a panoply of creative ideas. I made sure to include plenty of cheese in there, like the classic “Now that I’ve kissed the ground you walk on, will you go to prom with me?” That at least got a laugh – and the context made it original. Everything was going according to plan.

In all modesty I think I did a pretty good job of not making her too suspicious about it. After all was said and done I wished her a happy anniversary and read her a poem that I had written. The last line of the poem said, “I can’t do anymore than give you this…” “Give me what?” she thought… At that point, I handed her a beat-up old wallet with stickers on it that spelled out her name. Inside was another beat-up picture of the temple and a beat-up card that said “Will you marry me?” Luckily, the sheer ridiculousness of that item had distracted her attention enough to get me on my knee with the ring out in front of me. And then I said it out loud for her, “Lorie Franklin, will you marry me?”

This was what I had waited for – the reply. For those few moments, the tension built like the inside of a volcano. Then she broke the silence with…
“Are you joking?”
“Does…it…look like I’m joking?” I said, not sarcastically, but truly unsure. I furtively glanced at the ring to make sure it was still there. Maybe I had made her a lot less suspicious then I thought.
“Yes, I will!”
The tension was broken, happy moments ensued, and the rest is history. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad it's done.

RSVP

To help us get a better feel of how many to plan for at the reception, please RSVP by leaving a comment on this post. Thanks much!

Beliefs

For those interested, here are some resources that detail our shared beliefs....

http://www.mormon.org/
The Family: A Proclamation to the World
The Holy Temple

what people eat

what people do

what people say

what people believe