My Mission Revisited -- June 1999

By this time I was really started to get a good feel for the language, to the point that I was really starting to enjoy the people of Basel. Elder Bohm and I were getting along great and had just found out that we were going to be together for another month. This was a great time in my mission. Elder Bohm was one of my favorite companions. The journal entry below is from a really fun day I had with the ward in Basel.

June 20, 1999 -- Basel, Switzerland

Wow, I've been writing in my journal pretty regularly lately. I think it's because everything is going so great right now and I don't want to forget to write it all down. Yesterday the Basel Elders (Bohmie and I) and the Sisters from Bottmingen (Sisters Dougall, Little and Niederhauser) went on a hike with our ward. It was sooooo cool. We hiked all the way into Germany where we got to a really cool look out point and had a barbeque. I felt like I was at home. It was so great and so wonderful.

All of us sang Swiss folk songs around the fire, played some Fuessball (soccer) and just really enjoyed each other's company. It was a good change of pace in this missionary work. I've realized how important it is to feel like a normal human being every now and then. I love being a missionary, but it was also really nice to do a normal "ward member" activity.

Today was cool. One of our best investigators, Herr Arnosti came to church and things went really well with him. Plus I gave a talk today in sacrament meeting in German! Wow, it was hard, but cool at the same time. Well tomorrow Elder Bohm and I are heading to Missionsrat (Mission Conference) in Zurich. I'm sooo happy, I love Missionsrat! Well, anyways, that's all for now. The gospel's true, I love it!

--Elder Q

Life as a Single Dad -- Days 3 & 4

Day 3:

We did an "official" outing yesterday and went to the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy. I had never been there before so I wasn't sure what to expect but it was a cool place, I'd highly recommend it. On the way there though we had a little run in with the law...

Okay, prior to this past month I have been pulled over a grand total of 3 times in my life. In the last month I've doubled that quota and have been pulled over 3 times in the past month alone. The 1st time I was definitely speeding and just wasn't paying attention to the speed limit (I was going 54 in a 35) I leveled with the cop, told him exactly what happened and he let me off with a warning. Whew! The 2nd time I got pulled over right by our house for not coming to a complete stop on a right hand turn when I had a red light. That ticket ticked me off because all four directions had red, while North and South bound traffic had green left hand turn arrows. I figured I was fine to go. I fought it, went to court and lost... GRRRRRR! The 3rd time happened yesterday. A local officer started tailing me really bad, trying to get me to speed. So I let off my gas and slowed down to below 20 mph. I then started to wave him by. He threw on his lights and pulled me over. When he threw on his lights I started yelling "Oh come on you freaking jerk!" All of which Brooklyn heard. So when the officer asked me why I was going to slow the first thing he heard was Brooklyn yelling "you stupid jerk!" Good times for me! Luckily he laughed about that. I told him that I didn't appreciate him running his car through my spare tire and that I felt like he was trying to bait me into a speeding ticket. I told him that it was dishonest what he was doing and that if he chose to give me a ticket for going to slow (which he threatened to do) I would fight it tooth and toe nail with his superiors. He let me off with a warning. :)

After the whole bad cop incident we ended up at the aquarium. See pics above. Carson and Brooklyn both loved it. I let Brooklyn be our tour guide and just followed her wherever she wanted to go. She really enjoyed that. Carson loved the sting ray pool where you can touch actual sting rays. One jumped up and rubbed noses with Dooder. He laughed his head off but Brooklyn screamed. Carson's younger than her but braver already.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.

Day 4:

Today Brooklyn officially started to really miss her mommy. Both her and Carson have been crying quite a bit today. Every time Carson sees me and realizes that I'm not Britney he starts to cry. I should be offended by it, but I'm not, because I know why they miss her, she's amazing with them. Brooklyn's been telling me all day about everything that I'm doing differently than mommy and that she doesn't like it. All day... :) It's definitely time for Brit to come home from her Vampire Homage tour. Luckily she'll be home tomorrow night. Brooklyn was excited when Brit's parents came over to tend tonight so that Britney's dad and I could go see Transformers 2. (Good flick, lots of action, some very odd crude humor though that almost ruined the whole movie. I'd still recommend it, but Star Trek was definitely better.) I think Brooklyn enjoyed the break from my constant teasing. :)

I've had a lot of fun though being a stay at home dad for a few days. I've got some great kids, who have exercised a lot of patience to have to deal with me for as long as they have. I'm lucky to have them.

Life as a Single Dad -- Day 2

The theme of our day today was eating way too much! We just hung out at home today with the exception of 1 little outting to get paper towels (I'm sure you're all really interested in that). Outside of that, we did 1 of Brooklyn's favorite activities, we baked!!! She loves baking cakes with daddy, so we baked a cake this morning and then baked chocolate chip cookies tonight. We had some people over to watch the NBA draft, which mainly involved me watching our house get destroyed by kids, but outside of that today was really a lot less interesting than yesterday, which made me happy! :)

Life as a Single Dad -- Day 1

So, I'm officially a stay at home dad... for the next 5 days at least. :) Britney and her sister Ashlee abandoned their husbands and their kids for a pilgrimage to Forks, WA (Yeah, the place where the Twilight Novels take place... woooo hooooo) for 5 days, meaning that I'm learning what it's like to be a single dad. Ummmm yeah, okay so it's only been 1 day and... BRITNEY PLEASE COME HOME SOON!!! LEAVE EDWARD AND BELLA BEHIND AND SAVE YOUR HUSBAND!!! :) Actually, it's been pretty fun for the most part, here's a breakdown of day 1:

4:00 am ish (I have no idea what time it was) Britney woke up to get ready to go catch her flight.

4:00 am ish (again, I still have no comprehension of what time it was) I believe I fell back asleep

5:00 am ish (again... yeah, you get the point) I tell Britney to not get bitten by a vampire. A dead wife is definitely a marriage show stopper for me.

8:00 am I wake up for a rigorous workout involving Wii Tennis

9:00 am I have both kids dressed and eating breakfast. I'm off to a great start!

9:30 am - 11:30 am Brooklyn and I clean the house, she's a great helper.

12:00 pm - 12:45 pm We go to Burger King to get lunch. While we were in the parking lot Brooklyn dropped trow, and I had my hands full with Carson and a diaper bag. I looked at her and saw that her pants were down and asked her "What are you doing!?!" Her response: "I had a weggie that I need to fix." Of course while I'm getting Carson back in his car seat to help my daughter get "decent" 4 women walk out of BK and ask me what I was doing with a pant less daughter in the parking lot. I try to explain and they continue to give me condescending looks like I'm the worst father alive while they get into their car. Other than that though, lunch was fun.

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm We make a trip to Walmart where I end up forgetting half the list because I spend the majority of the time waiting for Brooklyn to walk. (She got her cast off last week and is still limping around).

2:00 pm - 5:30 pm Carson takes a nap (hip hip hooray) while Brooklyn helps me balance the check book.

5:30 pm - 6:00 pm dinner is served.

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm we do a Family Movie Night. I pulled all of the cushions off of the couch and made a huge bed. We ate popcorn, fishy crackers and watched Wall-E

8:00 pm - 8:15 pm Get both kids into bed.

8:16 pm Carson starts screaming because he doesn't want to go to bed.

8:17 pm - 8:30 pm I make a stand and refuse to get him out of bed because I know he just wants to stay up.

8:31 pm I try to get some work done using my Work at Home station but have computer problems.

8:35 pm I call our Helpdesk and start a conference call with them to solve the computer issues. All the while Carson is still crying.

8:41 pm Still on conference call when I hear Brooklyn start screaming bloody murder.

8:42 pm I hang up on our Helpdesk guys and run upstairs to find Brooklyn screaming in front of her door saying that there's a huge spider on her teddy bear. All the while, Carson is still crying.

8:45 pm I find the HUGE FREAKING GODZILLA SPIDER and immediately start tearing Brooklyn's bed apart to kill it.

8:51 pm Spider's dead, Brooklyn and Carson are both crying, Brooklyn's bed is torn apart and I don't know which kid to turn to.

8:53 pm I check on Carson who's still screaming and lift him out of bed. The screaming doesn't stop which is really weird for him, so I start to worry. All the while, Brooklyn is still crying.

9:00 pm Brooklyn, Carson and I are all sitting in the living room not sure what to do.

9:15 pm I've given Carson half of a Pepto and some Ibuprofen, he's either having teething pain or a stomach ache, so hopefully the combo will help him out.

9:20 pm Brooklyn, Carson and I put Brooklyn's bed back together and thoroughly check her room for spiders.

9:30 pm Both kids are back in bed, Carson is still screaming.

9:45 pm Carson stops screaming (knock on wood), I finally get to call Helpdesk back, and now I get to go back to work.

Tomorrow's going to be a better day!

Britney, I love you.

Seat Pirates, Power's Out, Fort Battles and More... Oh My!

We've been having a lot of fun lately! This last weekend we went to the Art City Days parade here in Springville. We weren't going to go because of the weather but it cleared up just long enough for us to get the parade in with Ashlee, Adam and Brooklyn and Carson's super cute cousin! We had a lot of fun after we got past the seat pirates...

Brooklyn came over to the parade area with me early to save seats. I made sure that she went to the restroom before she came with because I told her that once we left our seats we may lose them. Of course, with about 20 minutes to go we had to walk back home and go to the bathroom. On our way back I told her that we had to hurry before the "Seat Pirates" stole our seats. Yeah, I'm not the brightest star in the galaxy. After that Brooklyn started yelling "get away seat pirates" and swung her fist at any one who walked by. Just imagine the chagrine on my face when I had to explain to a few people that she didn't mean anything by it, all the while she was calling them seat pirates and telling them to get their own seats... humpf! I finally told her that "daddy was just kidding" and that there was no such thing as seat pirates. As soon as the parade started she forgot all about seat pirates and started focusing solely on the candy that was being thrown out of the floats. Here are some pics of our parade adventure:

After we got home the storms moved in with lots of rain and lots of wind! We had some huge gusts come through and one of them knocked the power out for close to an hour. Of course the power went out while I was taking a shower in our downstairs basement. There's nothing like washing your hair in the dark to put a smile on your face!

Then tonight Brooklyn, Carson and I built a fort! It was a ton of fun, here's some video of our fort:

Everything was going great for about 5 minutes. :) Carson kept knocking down the back wall, which got Brooklyn all mad. She kept trying to push him out of the fort, so I had to get in the middle of it and "keep the peace." Finally I just tore the wall down which opened the fort up into a tunnel. This is when I realized that I still have a lot to learn about this parenting thing. When I took the wall down both kids went zooming back and forth through the tunnel without any arguments. They had a blast...

Well that's our update for now. I hope everyones' week is off to a great start!

Anyone Offering Free Golf Lessons?

Okay, so for as long as I can remember I wanted to learn how to golf, and this summer I actually decided to give it a try. I went out for the first time about a month and a half ago with some friends, using a set of borrowed clubs and completely stunk up the joint but loved it! It's now become my number 1 obsession (with the exception of my wife and kids of course). I try to go to the driving range at least once a week and last Friday I got to golf Thanksgiving Point (one of the nicest, and hardest courses in Utah, see pic below) for free (paid for by 1-800 CONTACTS! I love where I work!) It was amazing! Normally it would have cost $100 per person to golf the full 18 with a cart, but me and 3 fellow co-workers got to go for free. We had a great time, but I quickly realized something... I'm terrible at golf!

I now have my own set of clubs and keep working at it, but seriously there were times when I literally wanted to just drive around the course in the golf cart and leave the golf to the other guys I was with. I'm pretty decent off of the tee, but terrible with my Irons... So, if anyone is interested in helping me out I'd love to have some regular golf buddies to go golfing with.

I seriously shouldn't be so hard on myself, I mean I've only gone golfing 2 times in my entire life, but I really need to get better... If anyone wants in, East Bay in Provo is only $16 with cart on weekends for 9 holes...

:)