Christmas with the Family - All of Them!

This Christmas, Brandon, Keaton and I all drove all the way back to Chicago.  Friday night after Keaton got off work we drove up to bountiful and stayed at our Uncle Lon’s house.  Brandon got to go to a play with Uncle Lon because he had one extra ticket.  He said that he enjoyed that a lot.  Keaton and I stayed at home and made a puzzle with Aunt Ellen.  We slept and then got up very early to try to beat the snow storm that the valley was expecting.  But I guess it wasn't early enough.  There was a lot of snow for the first two or three hours of our trek.  We had to go extra slow because of it.  We saw many semi-tractor trailers rolled off the side of the road as well and that was a little scary.  But we drove and drove and drove.  It is about a twenty hour drive and because of our delay we did it in about twenty two hours.  On the drive we listened to Ender’s game which was also a phenomenal book written by Orson Scott Card. 

When we finally got to Naperville area, I missed our turn on the highway and didn’t realize it until far too late and had to take a different way home which did not add to the speed at which we arrived home.  But we got home and slept several hours before being awoken the next morning.  For several days while the youngest siblings were still in school we each went shopping with mom and to Dallin’s basketball games.  We all just relaxed; after all we had all just finished finals!  We enjoyed Christmas traditions with the family like drinking lots of egg-nog and orange juice and mixtures of the two (orange-nog), and baking good Christmas treats, and making homemade caramels.  Christmas eve we had some family friends over and re-enacted the nativity as we do every year.

Christmas morning we got up at perhaps 7:30 and sorted presents and ate a delicious breakfast, then spent about three hours going around one at a time and enjoying opening presents.  I appreciated my new shoes which I desperately needed as well as some new Sunday shirts.

That night we packed up and loaded the van.  We left early the day after Christmas headed for North Carolina.  It ended up snowing quite a bit through Ohio and it was slow going for a while.  Then all the sudden it became very difficult for dad to drive and we found out that we had two popped tires!  Both on the same side of the van!  We couldn’t figure it out!  Because we must have ran over a board with nails in it or something cause it was extremely strange.  We waited for the tow truck and watched a movie in the van for a while then walked to the nearby Wendy’s off of the highway.  The tow truck took forever and then tried to fix the tires then and there.  A mistake!  We just wanted to go to the shop to get them fixed!  Plus because it was so crazy out all of the shops were closing up!  One man said he would stay open for us though.  An answer to prayer!  Dad ended up having to pay for four new tires because you can’t just replace two or it is uneven or something.  Kind of expensive!

We did end up getting to North Carolina though late that night and Justin came to the hotel and picked Brandon and I up.  We bunked at his place on an air mattress and the couch while the rest of the family stayed at the hotel.  Nathan had thrown up a few hours before we got there and that night Keaton was doing the same at the hotel.  Kind of a rough ride out to North Carolina. 

Brandon and I were awakened by our two little nephews Andrew and Isaac.  They are the best ever!  Two years old, talking, walking and running, opening doors, playing with cars and airplanes and trains.  It is just so fun to be with them.  Mom and dad got them the magic school bus series for Christmas and they absolutely love it!  Brandon and I had previously recorded some clips of loaders in action and cranes and other trucks, and the boys were just glued to the videos!  They loved them so much!

While there we had some authentic southern food with fried kiesh and fried chicken, pork and beans.  We went to the hotel pool and swam with the twins and they had a blast.   We went to the North Carolina Basketball museum and say all of Michael Jordan’s stuff amongst many other incredible players and coaches.  The older family members went to the Raleigh temple one morning.  On the drive there we got to see the beautiful country and small homes on large properties.  It was good to spend time with Justin and Melissa and their boys. 

Grandma and grandpa building trains with the twins

Isaac tries really hard to smile when we are taking pictures of him!

We drove back to Chicago and picked up Brandon’s girlfriend Christine from the airport.  While she was here we ate out at Portillos, our favorite Chicago still restaurant as well as Giordanos, our favorite deep dish pizza place.  I love their food!  It was a great Christmas break; lots of rest and lots of time with family.  I love my family!

Christine, Brandon, Me, Dallin, Keaton, Nathan

Thanksgiving Break

This year at BYU I have two other brothers for a change.  Since getting home from my mission I have been all alone in my studies here and it is nice to have some of my loved ones around.  Keaton, Brandon and I loaded up on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and made our annual trip down to see our grandparents in Arizona.  It is about a ten hour drive if you do it right.  It was kind of funny to me because on the way down we do a lot of up and downs on the highways due to the mountainous terrain.  Our little Mazda is a stick shift and on one such stretch of ups and downs Keaton was driving and having a lot of trouble down shifting into fourth gear.  The poor guy.  We ended up going super slow up some of those hills and other cars were getting mad at us because of our delay.  Ha!  A fun experience to remember!

On the way down we listened to Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card.  If you haven’t read any of his books, REPENT!  So far all of the books I have read that he has authored have been phenomenal!  Course I love the sci-fi futuristic kind of plots so keep that in mind if you want to read them.  

We stayed at Grandma Willis’ house while we were there.  Wednesday morning all three of us got up and went to the Mesa temple and met Grandpa Joe and Grandma Karen (my father’s parents).  Brandon and I did a session there and Keaton did homework.  Then after wards we followed them over to great aunt Sheila’s place and ate lunch with them and other extended family. 

We locked our keys in the car and grandma is trying to get her arm in and unlock the car for us!

While at Grandma Willis’ we helped he to hang up a lot of her Christmas stuff.  She loves to decorate and has loads of Christmas decorations!  But we love helping her out and especially because there were three of us it went much faster.  We found an old slide projector and old family slides and pulled them all out and projected them onto the wall.  It was really fun to have our grandma explain some family history to us.  She has been through a lot with her family and it was good to see those slides and talk with her about the many experiences that she has had in her life.  We also found a lot of grandma’s old records and played many of her favorite ones on her record player.  That was really cool too. 

Keaton running the slide projector

Grandma loves to play dominoes and we played several games with her and really enjoyed her company and her stories.  One night while there, we went to the temple again to see all of the beautiful Christmas lights and admire the beauty of the temple.  On our way home Keaton was driving and while leaving the temple parking lot turned left and cut off a cop!  The cop turned on his lights and pulled us over.  Came up to the window and said “You know why I pulled you over?” Keaton had a conversation with him and then all the sudden our car was light up by a police helicopter in the area.  The cop said “Shoot! Now we got the Ghetto Bird on us.”  He radioed to them that the situation was all fine and let Keaton off with a warning.  We all got such a big kick out of the whole thing!  The “Ghetto Bird!” Crazy! 

Mesa Temple 

We also had a hilarious time with our mentally handicapped aunt Cheryl.  She is usually pretty happy but for some reason we all had a really fun time making her laugh and say funny things.  Grandma made us fantastic food while we were there and we watched lots of movies with her.  She really likes to watch Hallmarks. 

Aunt Cheryl

Being silly for Cheryl

Aunt Julia and Grandma Karen helped me with a history project while there.  I made clay pipes from scratch to try and match those found in ancient Rome and other second century pipe uses.  Keaton, Brandon and I all went to hike Thunderbird mountain, a family tradition that goes back decade now.  It seems like the mountain has shrunk a little because it didn’t take as long as I remember to hike to the top!  We all ended up jogging up any way.  On our way to the hike we passed so many wonderful and beautiful Arizona mansion homes.  They have such a unique design and style and I love it so much!

I tried to activate my new Samsung Galaxy SIII while down there but had some complications with the dumb phone company receptionists that couldn’t speak English!  I wouldn’t have minded if they had spoken to me in Spanish but they didn’t know that either!  I spent over an hour trying to get this woman to figure out that I wanted to activate my phone with my previous phone number!  It was unbelievable!  It is okay, I have it all figures out now and I love my phone!

Clay pipes

On T-Bird

Arizona Mansions

My favorite Arizona Plants!

My Awesome Phone!

Grandma sent us home with tons of food for us and we are so grateful to her for how much she takes care of us.  She really is an incredibly compassionate person.  On our drive back to school we were going over the hoover dam on a bridge and saw a sign that said “Dam Bridge” and got a kick out of that.  But it was especially funny because at the time we were passing a car going the same direction as us that had a license plate that read “Big A.”  Forgive me for not being entirely appropriate but it was just so funny to us clean Mormons that we were on the “Dam Bridge” passing a car with a “Big A” license plate!

Anyway, it was a fantastic trip!  We love our family!

Summer in Provo

So before I had left for Spain this past summer, I interviewed at Geosys Design, a private geotechnical engineering firm.  The owner named Brian Garrett had been given to me as a contact form his brother in-law that had been my professor that semester prior.  So I had emailed Brian with my interest and a resume and cover letter.  A few weeks later Brian came and spoke at a seminar for all civil engineers at BYU and after his presentation, I approached him and introduced myself to him and he seemed very pleased to have met me in person and invited me to check in with him again before the summer came to see if he had any job openings.  I did so and ended up interviewing with him only two days before I left for Spain. I explained to him my study abroad opportunity and he said that he thought it was great and it worked out just fine because they weren’t going to start having a lot of work until June or July anyway.  So I corresponded with him in Spain a few times and it ended up that he offered me a job though I didn’t begin until a few weeks after coming home from Spain.  Those three weeks were some of the hardest ever! But I learned a great deal in the internship that helped me along in school and provided me with some fundage for the coming school year.

Right after getting back from Alaska in August, I went to Solvay Chemicals with my Uncle Lon to help him do maintenance on the fire extinguishers there.  I got to go down into the mine with his assistant Alex.  Pretty cool down there.  Driving through all of the tunnels in jeeps and seeing all of the big machinery.  We would drive from site to site with a guide to service all of the extinguishers.  Often times we would have one ready and grab that one that needed to be serviced and drive to the next site while I in the back took it apart and serviced it on the bumpy road there.  We wore hard hats with the miner lights on them and got some nice gloves from the facility to use.  At one point we serviced extinguishers on a machine they called the snake, a long conveyor/grinder combination.  And going along the bumpy road in the back of a jeep and bouncing around it seemed totally like the ride at Disney land called Indiana Jones!  It felt the same!  Just darker and quieter for the most part.

I was awarded a Pell Grant this school year!  What a tremendous blessing!  On top of that I was awarded my textbook scholarship again, as well as a half tuition scholarship from my department!  I am richly blessed by the Lord!  I need not worry much about funding for school this year due to these rich blessings!  Which was an even greater blessing than I knew at the beginning of the semester, because I ended up having to stop working because of how incredibly heavy my school work load was. 

As life progresses I continually gain new and life changing experiences!  I love to live and am extremely blessed here on this earth.