I'm back again

Mom and I just got back from Colorado. I think the total number of miles driven was 1064 or something. I think Macey might be getting tired of road tripping.
The weekend was absolutely wonderful--the Colorado cousins always make sure of that. We took forever saying goodbye, which is crazy because they're totally driving to Utah tomorrow and I might see them as early as Monday night. But that's where it's at, family that you don't want to say bye to.
Speaking of goodbye: ¡Suerte para Brock! You're totally an official missionary now! Set apart and everything. ¡Las minas extranjeras (chilenas) te van a encontrar riquito! ;)
I got to see Becky this weekend, too, as she'd recently returned from teaching in Spain (and traveling all over).

It was a great weekend, yo.

HAIR! HAIR! HAIR!

YEEOW.

You know what bugs me?

What bugs me big time is when people watch these trumped-up, half-truthed, doom-and-gloom videos about political candidates online and then believe them. These videos are of the same ilk as anti-Mormon filth, shunned by these same people with the statement, "If you want to know the truth, why don't you go to the source rather than someone on the outside who hates us?"
Arrrgghhhhh!

Seriously. No, seriously?
Any moment I see one of those videos about anyone, I get so ticked off. They are a great plague of our political atmosphere.


You know what negative political ads are meant to do? The main goal of a negative ad is to make someone not vote, not to make someone vote for your guy, but to make someone who was teetering just stay home. It's wrong and it's a sign of someone who can't win on truth, but would rather not lose on a lie. Wimp.
Arrrgghhhhh!



I'm done typing now, but it might take me a while to cool down.

Anybody remember this?

It should look familiar to all of you from the 1st Stake. Remember the slingshot at President Pope's cabin? We never got to do this:

Things to be wary of

Over the next few months, we're going to be bombarded with lots of words and phrases from the presidential candidates and the media. Here are a few things to really pay attention to:

1 The Budget: Big Government/Fiscal Conservative*
Neither party (or candidate, really) is for a small budget anymore. Both want all that money in Washington.
What you need to pay attention to is what each candidate says he wants to do with the money. The idea that Democrats spend more money than the GOP hasn't been true since, oh, Eisenhower. Hence, what we should all do before the election in the fall is look at what the candidates and parties want to do with the money. The whole budget thing is really just used to throw us off our game. Tricky politicians!

2 Flip Flop
These two F-words are going to be thrown around like hot potatoes this election season.
Truthfully, both McCain and Obama have changed views on things.
Ignore the Flip Flop. Just totally ignore it.
Smart people look at the current situation we're in and look for the best way to deal with it. What we need to do is listen to what the candidates have to say, see if that is what we think will be best for our country, or city or state, and then vote.

3 Obama is the most liberal senator.
He's not. First, that's rather hard to gauge. Second, I'm sure that Bernie Sanders, the Senate's socialist senator, would be really ticked off about not getting that billing.

4 McCain will not be a third Bush term.
He does have his own agenda. We'll notice more similarities between Bush and McCain, but they're both Republicans.

5 Obama is an elitist.
Since when was it a bad thing to be in the upper echelon of intelligence when you have one of the hardest jobs in the world? What people are trying to do with "elitist" is derrogatorily say, "Not one of you."
I want my president to be better than me.

6 McCain is a maverick.
On a couple of issues he stands away from the GOP, but he's usually at about an 88% voting record with the Republican party line, and it gets closer during election season.
McCain is smart. He has gotten the media and lots of people to believe in his maverickness. It's not really true. Now for you hard-line Republicans, this is good news. For you independents and dems...I dunno...



*The last time we had a bona fide Republican fiscal conservative in office was Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan wasn't a fiscal conservative, he spent, spent, spent. It was Nixon who was fiscally conservative in some ways, but he was very militarily active and he didn't change any Democratically driven social programs. George H.W. Bush continued Reagan policies and W. Bush has made Reagan's policies look so conservative. Clinton balanced the budget, yes, but he raised taxes on the more wealthy.

Something Rúbia pointed out to me tonight

I'd never noticed this before, but Professor Bateman looks a lot like Niles Crane.

1775 miles and my tough fingers

1775 is how many miles I drove from Thursday middayish to early Monday morning at 1:30am. I was really sorta punch drunk when I arrived.
But the weirdest thing that came of all of this is the callouses that my fingers developed. After having my hands on the wheel for so long, my fingers became tough. Here's a picture arrowing in on my weird callouses:


Seriously who gets callouses there? Not even when I was playing basketball or baseball at full tilt was I getting these types of callouses.


The last leg of the drive was somewhat taxing b/c I was so tired. I was awake and alright while I was driving. I was kept that way, far from dangerous fatigue by Emily asking me to conjugate verbs in Spanish, letting me explain the deep grammar of the Personal Infinitive and Future Subjunctive in Portuguese. She explained chemistry to me. I blathered on about the stars and planets.

Here's a map of what we did. If you zoom in on Mission Viejo, you'll see the exit we took to try and find a place to stop when we called Bepa to call for help. She totally saved our necks right there.

And here's a map of what we should have done.
It was a grand adventure. I love the internet and how it saved our necks that day.

I'm back

Anna-Lisa and Juan Carlos are totally married:

It was a great day. There were TONS of tears around the sealing room. The ceremony was really beautiful.
There are more pictures floating around, but I don't have any because my camera is pretty dead. But as soon as i get pictures from other people, I'll probably post them, too.
See Anna-Lisa's brother on the left? He'd gotten back from his mission at 10:30 the night before the 9am wedding. He was pretty wired.


One of the excellent things about this wedding was the fact that I got to hang out with friends, especially those I don't get to see as often, like Em, Lori, Angela and Shelton. A large portion of the weekend was spent laughing.
The Emilys and I also made a border run on Friday to Tijuana, where I finally got up the courage to barter in Spanish.
Unlike the last time crossing the Mexican to U.S. border, I did not make a stupid mistake when the agent asked me if I'd bought anything to bring over. When I crossed from Juárez I said that I was bring "Coke" with me. Ack! Coca-Cola. Man, that was dumb.
Oh, and you can't tell from the picture, but I got a nice sunburn.
Yo estaba tan jot así.


In between the wedding and the reception later that night the EmilyX2 and I went to Solana Beach. The waves breaking were a lot louder than any beach I remember visiting. Brasil was not surprisingly calmer than California.


Emily T looked for pretty rocks and seashells to take home to remember the beach. Emily D looked at the rocks and quietly admired the view. I threw the rocks as far back into the ocean as I could and gleefully popped the kelp bubbles.
I think what we did at the beach might be a perfect example of our personalities.

Wrong Person

There's this CNN.com posting that says:

• iReport.com: Send questions for Ron Paul

But I keep reading it as "Send questions for RuPaul."


What would you ask RuPaul?

Here's the link to another blog that I created early this morning.
I like pictures, so I thought I'd make a separate blog to post and discuss them.
http://photosbyvanessa.blogspot.com/

The license plate saga *or* 11 man hours of other people's time to help me

As reported before, changing the old license plates out to put on my new ones has been nothing short of a saga.*Old plate w/Westminster College cover*

The first time I tried, I couldn't get the screws to turn, it was more like I was destroying the grooves in the screws' head. So I called Andy, who I'm sure thinks that no matter what he'll always be my home teacher b/c I'm always calling him for something. (Shout out!)
That first night we stood outside trying to figure out what to do to get the old license plate off, since we'd already replaced the front one. We went to Macey's to get WD-40, applied it to no avail. Hmmph
The next morning Andy came over with his new dremel that he'd bought just for the purpose of helping me. We finally just decided to cut off the heads to the screws so that I could get the old plate off:
Notice in the second picture how Andy is trying to slice some grooves into the screws to try one last time to unscrew the screw remnants. Nope. It was decided that probably the only thing to do was drill into the screws. I placed my license plate in the back window propped up by a Travel Brazil book .
Weeks went by and I consistently forgot to deal with this problem. Then the cop pulled me over, and tried to help me get the screws out, also finally deciding that the way to go was a drill.
I ended up not driving to Wyoming, so I postponed the dealio again. (Slacker!)
On Memorial Day, I drove to Julie Rae's in-law's where she and Brian were. I very greedily enlisted everybody there (and Shirl's copious tools) into helping me put on the license plate.
*Brian turned to me not long after this and said, "Remember how I told you that you'd probably have to drill thru the trunk and that I told you that I better not end up being the one doing it?"

After Brian and Shirl worked and drilled into the screws, creating a nice hole in Right Screw, Left Screw became extremely stubborn and refused to be drilled into anymore. The tip of the drill bit was white hot and then blended into a nice blue shade.
The Simmons family gets a huge shoutout right here because they seriously helped so much.

Brian decided that we should at least attached the plate to the right spot on the car so that the chances of a cop pulling me over were minimal. So, in a very red-necky moment, my license plate was attached with plastic:

*So low class!

I called Andy yet again and asked (begged) his help with Left Screw that was needing the file end of a dremel.
Thursday morning Andy came over and started dremeling from all angles:


Andy dremeled and dremeled until the files were rather file-less. So, off to Lowe's looking for drill bits for the drill, the screws, washers and nuts, and dremel materials. Later on that Thursday, Andy and I drove to Spanish Fork (no plug for the drill at Old Mill).
Andy proceeded to drill and dremel, drill and dremel:
Then, all of a sudden, Andy had created to beautiful holes that the screws we had bought fit in nice and snug:
Isn't this one of the most beautiful things you ever done seen:



There were at least 4 people who gave up a lot of their time to help me with this frustrating rusted screws. Seriously, I've got way too many good people in my life willing to help me out.

Highlights

At the end of Relief Society today, Sister Peterson stood up and made a great comment at the end during the testimonies. She mentioned how when she reads the section about the stripling warriors she always ends up thinking about the stripling sisters, the sisters to these brothers that stayed home and ended up doing not only their chores, but whatever else needed to be done when these 2000+ young men went to battle. So who did I think of? Her. But not just Rosie, a Nephite-esque hybrid. Rosie sorta dressed like this, or this. And she wasn't working on a car or an airplane.
**That's Queen Elizabeth on the right during WWII! She totally worked in the factories!

Anyway, this Stripling Rosie the Ammonite Jack-of-all-Trades, was out there, in the fields, hoeing the 63 B.C. row, then carrying the water home, washing clothes, cooking food, and whatever else needed to be done.

Part of the reason why all of this popped into my head is because I was doing everything I could to hold in my laughter. The teacher had benignly mentioned this story about a young man who had had a desire to climb Everest ever since he was young. He did it, event though he was blind. That's when I had to do everything in my power to hold in my uproarious laughter (which can be really loud, as you know), because of this video:

I seriously spent the next 20 minutes until the end of the meeting holding back with all my might. I didn't make a comment because I knew I wouldn't be able to make it thru. Oh man, it was bad. But once I got into my car: Bwahhh! I lost it.
Wanna watch the poor blind guy's reaction? Here you go.

Church seriously was funny today.