..but sometimes I wish it would. Since I last wrote I haven’t had a quiet evening to myself. Always something going on.

Monday night was the FHE activity I wrote about last week. Tuesday night I went on a double-date with my roommate, to Value Village (think DI). His idea mostly. Thankfully my date was just as reticent as I was about accumulating more random stuff. I had to try very hard to keep my roommate from getting a large canvas print of the aurora borealis to put up in our living room, which is already getting pretty crowded from the other pictures he’s hung up. He eventually did get the print but just hung it up in his poster-covered room.

On Wednesday I was set up on a blind date by a friend, we just went out to eat. Date was done at 9, I was looking forward to a quiet evening, but my roommate had guests over so we just shot the breeze for a few hours.

On Thursday my team at work did an “off-site”, a fun team activity. We’d decided to go to a local shooting range. I was kind of bummed we couldn’t go skeet shooting with shotguns, but boy howdy there were some fun guns to shoot there. My boss even brought his AR-15.

That evening I had a dilemma. The Nintendo Switch was having its midnight release that night. I could’ve gone and stood in line for hours in the cold rain. On the other hand, a friend was having her going-away party, leaving for two years to join the Peace Corps in Albania. I ended up foregoing the Switch, hoping to be able to snag it later on the following week. The party was fun, I was able to run a game of Conspiracy – a cross between Mafia and Bang! that my former roommates have been developing for years. Can’t wait to play it at the next cabin get-together.

Friday night was round two of the Star Wars multi-week marathon. Episode V was up, considered by many to be the best of the original trilogy. The chief chatters of last week weren’t able to make it – pity. There was still some talking, but the major dialogue was understandable, so it was mostly all good.

Saturday morning I was flicking through some news websites on my phone, when on a whim I checked and a nearby Target had the Switch in stock! I hurriedly showered and shot out the door. Unfortunately the site was a lie. They wouldn’t get a new shipment in until Sunday. I’ll just hope they have left-over units by tomorrow.

I had no plans for the rest of the afternoon. I ended up just wandering aimlessly down a road, towards what looked like food. Had to wander a bit further than I thought, but I got to see some pretty cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been able to do had I been driving around.

When I got back I decided to do some prep work for the Switch. When I wired up my TV I didn’t bother with an HDMI cable. All my viewing is done via Ethernet. I had ordered an HDMI cable that was long enough, but the plastic conduit I picked up from Home Depot was not large enough to fit it along with power, an AUX cable, and two Ethernet cables – one for the TV, one for the sound bar. You wouldn’t think a sound bar needs network connectivity, but like the TV it has built-in ChromeCast support, so I could use it to wirelessly stream Pandora or whatever. While the bar does have built-in wifi, I didn’t want to clog up the airwaves. With the arrival of the Echo Dot last year though, I haven’t had a need for any streaming directly to the bar. And I’ve only ever once needed to actually use the AUX cable I ran.

At the time I set all this up I figured (hoped) I wouldn’t ever need a device that delivers HDMI to the TV. The Switch changes this up. And I really didn’t want to have a random cable running off the side of the TV, that’s the whole point of the conduit job. So out came the sound bar’s Ethernet cable and the AUX cable, in went the HDMI cable. At its worst it looked pretty bad.

These conduits really were not made to easily open back up after being clipped shut. (Nor were they made to come off of the wall without taking any of the wallpaper with it… but that’s a problem for later.) Thankfully the adhesives were able to fasten back to the wall without much difficulty. The only indication that anything’s different is an extra pipe running up between the sound bar and TV.

Now just to pounce on the Switch when I can. I hear amazing things about the new Zelda game, and I hear there’s enough content that I’ll probably still be playing it by the time the Europe trip comes around, so that’ll be something to do on the plane.

All in all this afternoon on my own did me good. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite scenes from Monk.

 

That evening I attended a friend’s pre-birthday party – her actual birthday is today, which she’ll be celebrating with family. Today we’ve got church, then right afterwards a break-the-fast dinner at a friend-of-a-friend’s house. I was planning on making a dish, but my roommate wants me to make myself scarce this afternoon while he serenades a gal in our living room. So I think I’ll just pack up the components and prepare it in the church’s serving area. Fudging the rules a bit, but, ox in the mire. I hope for everyone’s sakes that things go well for my roommate.

Monday night will be FHE again, and we’ll see just how long this busyness goes.

Love ya!

As I begin this, I’m taking a brief respite in my room. We have a good chunk of the ward in our apartment tonight for “small-groups FHE”, where two homes host different groups. This as opposed to one large FHE activity at the chapel. (For some definition of “large”; this ain’t your BYU singles ward here.) And as the other group’s event got canceled due to inclement weather, we’ve got quite a lot of people here.

I’ve gotta put up a disclaimer for this post, it contains a bit of griping. I promise I’m a generally good-natured fellow.

As for the title of the post, almost a week ago I was at Institute, at a lesson taught by one of the senior missionaries in the area. It was essentially a marriage prep class, and he gave some pieces of advice that I take extreme issue with.

First of all, he conveyed a story about some area authority traveling on a plane, spotting a young couple a few seats ahead. The guy was engrossed in some mobile game, and the gal was leaning her head on his shoulder, massaging his neck and hair. And this guy’s reaction was to mentally shout at the guy, “WAKE UP!!! SHOW SOME AFFECTION!!!” Which, I guess, sure, that might be nice, but what’re you doing judging this couple just from this scene? If this traveling elder’s being internally consistent in his passing of judgement, this young fellow must show never-ending devotion, never have any time to himself, lest he draw the righteous indignation he obviously deserves.

So the lesson’s not off to a great start. Then, the teacher offered this bit of advice for young married couples. “Go move two hours away from everyone you know, and especially your parents.” He went on to tell horror stories of his own parents and their intrusion into his and his wife’s boundaries. Now, I guess that would’ve been nice for him, but as general advice it’s completely off, in my opinion. You want to take two people who’ve just made an incredible adjustment to their way of life, and tear them away from their entire support group, friends and family alike? What about when kids come into the picture? Grandparents are an incredibly valuable resource in that regard.

One more gem. And this was told by his wife. A story about how her husband had come home from work one night and was eagerly greeted by his kids and the family dog. His wife was hard at work doing dishes. He walks up, gives her a kiss, then remarks, “How come you’re not excited to see me? Even the dog is more excited.”

Mhmm. Comparing your hard-working wife to an emotional dog.

Well, it did, the story had a happy ending, the wife agreed and changed her ways. I guess this is all just a generational thing. Whatever.

On Wednesday we had the first of a series of Star Wars movie nights. I went on a date with a girl who’d never seen any of the movies, so of course we needed to fix that. I really wanted to try the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI. We had a great turnout, everything was going smoothly. And then the opening crawl started. And people were still talking. I tried shushing, but to no avail. I tried pausing the movie when we couldn’t even hear the dialogue, but to no avail. I tried pointing out that we had people here who were watching for the first time, and even got one of the chief chatters to acknowledge “that’s his way of saying ‘shut up!'”, but to no avail. They. Would. Not. Stop. Talking.

It was absolutely infuriating to sit through that. In fact, afterwards one of the noisemakers acknowledged, “I’ll be quiet during a new movie, but I’ve seen that one so many times, so, y’know.” So these people for whom this was also a new movie, they just don’t matter, do they? Not one bit? Incredibly rude and selfish, to ruin the first experience they’ll have with Star Wars, because you just had to point out “oh, here it comes, here’s the line, it’s so funny!”

I’ll continue holding these things because the show must go on, but from now on I think I’ll be up front about it: I don’t care if you talk, but if I hear any off-topic chatter from people who’ve already seen the movie, I’m pausing it, with no exceptions. I figure after the third or fourth time people will get the message. Or I just don’t invite the noise-makers; but I kinda want them to be aware of the effect they’re having on the group. Like that guy yesterday in church who was banging away at his laptop keyboard during a video presentation in class. Sometimes I want sounds to have a visual representation, a rapidly-expanding sphere to help these people know just how far their noise carries.

Anyways. Just had to get that off my chest. They’re all sweet spirits, honest.

On Friday I attended the birthday party of a friend, whose actual birthday was the following day, but couldn’t be celebrated then due to a talent show. It was the sort of party where you can’t hear yourself think, can’t have a private conversation; kind of like what’s happening out in my living room, actually.

I met up there with a friend who’s over here visiting from Germany. She was actually booked to leave back to Berlin the following day, so this was her last hurrah. While the rest of the birthday bunch headed off to an improv comedy event, she and I split off and explored Seattle a bit. We later met up with another friend, and ended up staying out till 5am. My gosh. I’m glad there were no police officers on the highway on my way back, because I was honestly driving like a drunk, veering off into neighboring lanes. I evidently lived to tell the tale, however.

Right, so the reason that birthday party happened on Friday was because of a talent show on Saturday. Which was under the purview of the Service & Activities committee, which I co-chair along with a very competent gal. We spent what seemed like the entire day prepping for it. My roommate arranged for his band to play, which contributed to the complexity. But also the technical impressiveness of the set-up, since they were well-equipped to facilitate a musical event. Well, that is true, but it turns out that a family in a neighboring ward is just chock full of audio-techies, and they brought their equipment as well, resulting in an interesting interconnect of equipment, but an excellent sound design.

So that was exhausting. Luckily I didn’t need to be at church until 1pm the next day. There they announced that we were having small-group FHE at our apartment. Well, they announced they were having it at “Michael’s apartment”, you can get the address for Michael’s apartment from him, Michael will tell you all how to get to his apartment. He’s understandably a much more extroverted guy, I get that, I was just a bit miffed, as the one who furnished the place and who’s paying a vast majority of the rent. Heh, I even ran into a couple friends in the ward as I was getting back to my apartment after work, who were here for FHE. “Oh, you live here too? With Michael?”

I am glad though that my roommate’s on his feet and has his own “place” in the ward. And to be entirely fair, Facebook postings included both our names.

Yesterday evening I watched The Cokeville Miracle for the first time. Interesting stuff. That night I stayed up to hopefully snag a set of Paris Temple open-house tickets. Not knowing when they were to become available, we could only see that reservations would open “on Monday”. Well, midnight counts, technically. So at 11pm my time I furiously refreshed the page, but no joy. Hmm, the other pending open house invitation said it’ll be open up at 10am – on a different day, but it was a fair guess that the same time would hold for this reservation set as well. And in a couple more hours it would become 10am in Paris. So I stayed up till then. I was quite tired, but my strategy was to stay out in my living room with the heat off; I dozed, sure, but the cold woke me up frequently enough that I was able to check at 10:10am Paris local time. Still, no joy. It wasn’t until this morning at 10am MST that reservations became available, at which point Dad and I tag-teamed it to snatch the tickets at the earliest opportunity. Hoo-rah.

Well it sounds like enough people have left that the ambient noise level is manageable again. I’ll leave you with a very cool motorcycle I came across the other day at work.

Love ya! Can’t wait to see Dad and Mattie in Europe!

…is what my beard would title this week’s post, as it got a mite shorter.

On Friday I went out on a fourple-date to see the new Lego Batman movie, which I highly recommend. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

On Saturday a friend from my Provo days came to town to visit family. We went together to another friend’s “Roarin’ 20’s” birthday party. I brought the fixin’s for popcorn, cause I figured, ‘they ate popcorn in the 20’s, right?’ Everything was going well until I realized that in my rush to head out the door I’d left the kernels on the kitchen counter. Takes some next-level skill to make do without those.

Today we had Mix ‘n Mingle after church, which was great cause I was getting the trembles, being all tired and hungry. The theme was “food you wouldn’t want to eat on a date” and featured spaghetti, musubi, corndogs, cheesy-bread, the works. I actuall had hoped to make musubi, but couldn’t figure out how to make it and have it still be warm by the time it was eatin’ time, so I was glad someone else made it.

After church we had a “member-missionary fireside”, a program put on by the mission for the benefit of new members and investigators. My roommate spoke, and gave a very abbreviated version of his conversion story.