20th Blog

Blogging has been a cool way to share a cyber journal.  Of course I don't write the same things on my blog as I do in my journal.  I don't believe a person should be sharing personal stories on the Internet anyway, but at the same time I think it depends.  For example I remember a girl had a very bad accident and to self sooth herself she would write about how she was feeling, and how life was going.  By doing this she received a lot of support from people she didn't even know from her blog.  Like I say, It's just my opinion about people not sharing personal stories, but at the same time I think it depends.  In my blog I never did share a super personal story, but I felt like I shared enough to allow people to connect with me.  Now, I'm a dude so I don't have the cutest blog in the world, but I tried to make it look as good as possible.  I think blogging is more of a girl kind of thing to do.  For example Morgan just took a look see at my blog and did all sorts of things to it to make it look better.  I had no idea you could do some of the things she suggested that I change on the blog.  Right now I'm looking at all the blogs of my classmates and it looks to me that they've all done a better job than I.  Not because I didn't put a lot of effort into it, I just don't think I'm a great blogger.       

Peruvian Houses

In Las Flores I had some of my best mission friends.  Las Flores was an area in Lima Peru.  In our mission due to safety all the gringos had to have a Latino companion.  Don't get me wrong I loved all of my companions, but living with someone from a different country that doesn't speak your native language it can get tiring.  This area that I was in was so awesome because I had so many friends in it.  Not only Latino friends but Gringo friends as well.  We all decided that we were going to have some big service project every friday before lunch.  One such project took us many weeks.
In Peru they will just dig a whole into a rocky mountain and build a home in it.  You may ask from the picture, "How do they get concrete up there?"  Well, I'll tell you, they find missionaries who are willing to haul it up a 300 yard staircase.  We were always willing do service like that.
It was the most hilarious thing hauling all of that sand up there with those friends.  So many of them complained, and I'm not sure why but the way they complained made me laugh.  Elder Memmott was always the most funny when it came to complaining.  He would always talk about how after all of that hard work he was going to get a crappy lunch.  Sometimes the lunches were pretty bad, cow stomach was never my favorite thing to eat after hauling a bunch of sand up a mountain either.Although some of the service projects were really hard we had so much fun doing them.  I can remember accidentally poring the sand from the meshy bags onto my friend and just laughing.  Of course he wasn't laughing in the moment, but I was.  

Havasupai

This past summer I went on one of the best vacations I've ever been on.  The place is called Havasupai.  It's an indian reservation located in the middle of the Grand Canyon.  My brother and seven other friends planned to go in August.  When it came time to go many of our told us they weren't going to be able to make it.  It definitely bummed us out they not that many people were going to go, but my brother and some other friends were determined to go.  I've always liked to finish what I start.

When we got there it was two in the morning, but when you get there you aren't quite on the reservation yet.  You have to hike in ten miles.  So that's what we did after driving almost twelve hours.  It was one of the most awful hikes, but when we got there with all of our packs and such it was a blast.  We would go hike to all of the different water falls, but my brother and friends and I would do it a little differently.  When we hiked, we would basically river hike down the river.  This was the best part of the whole trip.  We would come to certain rocks during the river hike and do some flips off of them and things.  If I can just give you a quick visual of what we looked like.  We had on our bucket hats, with our camel backs with some water shoes.  There were times when we would be fully submerged in the water with all of our clothing on during the river hike.

Before you would get to the place where you could pitch your tent, you had to pass the indian village.  As I observed them I don't think they liked living on that reservation.  They all seemed so depressed and by the way it seemed like I was in third world territory.  It was very dirty, no plumbing no nothing.  Although there were little houses that looked nice to live in, but it was definitely a village.  When I smile at someone I usually get a smile back, in fact I expect a smile back.  During my time in the village I would try to talk with people or just smile at them and I got nothing in return.  We didn't hang around the village all that much, we just played all day hiking in and out of water falls.  

Ouch and Yikes

The other day I got this photo.  The first words that come to mind when I saw this was, well I actually laughed first.  Then I wondered how in the world it had happened.  She told me that she tripped while she was curling her eyelashes and ripped half of them out.  I saw her later that day and I had to give her a little smirk and she asked how bad it looked.  It did look bad… But it was probably because I was looking for it.  I immediately went searching the internet on how to grow eyelashes to see if we could help her out.  Turns out she was doing all of those things, like not using certain mascara, to use vaseline when taking make up off and all that stuff I have no idea about.  There was something she wasn't or hadn't used.  It was call Latisse.  It was some expensive solution that you put on your eye lid to help them eyelashes grow.  She has been using the solution for a month now and has made good progress.  Poor girl I thought to myself.  Isn't having luscious eyelashes one of the most important things for girls to have on their face?  Anyway she has been a trooper through the whole thing.  She acted very confident through it all and didn't make it seem like it was a big deal, even though it was for her.  

When bad things happen in life I guess you just have to stay confident through it to stay a stay a happy camper.

"What the Heck"

My grandpa has always taken us fishing.  Fishing is a great thing to do with a grandpa.  All grandpas like to teach their grandchildren how to fish.  When fishing with grandpa we do it on a boat, his boat that is a totally ghetto boat.  We put down riggers in the water to gauge the depth that we want with three other poles trolling the back of the boat.  There is a total of five poles in the water which means for a lot of catching.  In the Soldier Creek reservoir in Utah the fish we catch are good sized rainbow trout and cockney salmon.  What my grandpa taught me about cockney salmon is that they have very soft mouths.  So if you wrestle with one he will rip the hook out of his mouth.  All cockney salmon do is wrestle with you when you're trying to drag them in.  To remedy this problem he put elastic rubber bands on the ends of the hooks.  A very smart idea to catch the better tasting fish.

When I caught one he said it was too small and that I needed to put it back in the lake.  As I was taking the hook out of his mouth I forgot for a second that fish don't breath out of the water.  Due to that fact I had the fish out of the water for too long and when I finally got the hook out of his mouth it was too late.  The fish was dead.  I tried to run the water through the gills, but it didn't swim off, it just turned belly up.  When that happened my grandpa got very irritated with me and let out a few curse words.  When my grandpa curses at me I've never taken it personally, I just laugh.  I like when grandpa is that way with me actually it allows me to have a closer relationship with him.  

Mom's back

My brothers and I were very close growing up and still are.  I have a picture that brings back some memories, which is the photo on this post.  When Mom was single she would run a lot of marathons and half marathons with her friends.  She left for a weekend to the Oregon coast to run a half marathon.  I never have understood running marathons and such.  The greatest distance I've ever ran was three miles, and I only did that to complete a requirement for scouts.  When I finished I said to myself, "Well I'm never doing that again."  I actually never have ran that kind of distance since, sad to say.  Anyway back to Mom.  We always did miss her when she left for whatever reason.  And as you can see in the picture we were very excited to see her when she came back from Oregon.  In that picture she brought us headbands and T-shirts from the race and we were very happy to receive them.  Hayden (the littlest one) didn't have one because he probably would have been swimming in it.        

Guitar at home

Playing guitar has been one of those things for me that I really just like to do.  I started playing when I was twelve years old.  I can remember that birthday, I was sent on a treasure hunt and that's what I found.  There were a couple of things that inspired me to play the guitar.  The first thing was my step-father.  He didn't play a whole lot, but he did play enough for me to realize that that was something I wanted to do.  The second was a movie with Jack Black in it called the "School or Rock."  When I saw that movie I decided that playing the guitar was something I wanted to do.  Come my birthday that's what I got, and I've never put the guitar down since.  Kenny and I would always play, but now that I don't live at home we don't get the opportunity that much.  One of the highlights of me going home for the holidays is to play the guitar with him.  Since I've gotten a guitar Kenny has stayed stagnant in his progression which means when we play now I have to play easier stuff so he can keep up.  I've tried teaching him new things, and it's not that an old dog can't learn new tricks it's that they don't want to learn new tricks.  That's the case with Kenny, he just doesn't want to put the time in to become better.  Despite all of that it's still fun to play the guitar with him.  Thanks to Jack Black and Kenny I have a hobby that can last for the rest of my life.