Books read in 2007

In no particular order, these are the books I completed in the year 2007.

Master and Margarita--Mikhail Bulgakov
An Unfinished Life--Mark Spragg
The Mission Song--John Le Carre
The Last of Her Kind--Sigrid Nunez
Doctor Zhivago--Boris Pasternak
Little Children--Tom Perrotta
Lolita--Vladimir Nabokov
The Road--Cormac McCarthy
Corelli's Mandolin--Louis De Bernieres
Voyage to Arcturus--David Lindsay
Snakes and Earrings--Hitomi Kanehara
Jacob's Room--Virgnia Woolf
the Hours--Michael Cunningham
Salome--Oscar Wilde
Ender's Game--Orson Scott Card
Garden of Eden--Ernest Hemingway
Atonement--Ian McEwan
Flashforward--Robert James Sawyer
The Bus Driver who Wanted to be God--Etgar Keret
Tropic of Cancer--Henry Miller
Black Sun--Edward Abbey
men are from mars, women are from venus--John Gray
Miracle of the Andes--Nando Parrado w/ Vince Rause
Devil in the White City--Erik Larson
The Girls Who Went Away--Ann Fessler
You're a stepparent…now what?--Joseph Cerquone
Collapse--Jared Diamond
Lone Survivor--Marcus Luttrell
Between a Rock and a Hard Place--Aron Ralston
Rasputin, the saint who sinned--Brian Moynahan
Bad Childhood, Good Life--Dr. Laura Schlessinger

Truck Update

We were told by the officers to stand ready to pick up the truck within the hour that they call us to notify us that they've found it. So when our phone rang at 2 a.m. we were expecting to jump in our car. However, it turns out the truck made its way to Twin Falls, Idaho. So the HB is on his way there in the morning thanks to the good nature of our wonderful neighbors who are giving him a buddy pass on Skywest. Of course the Guitar Hero III game wasn't recovered, but it sounds as if the truck and most of its contents were left in decent shape.

Truck Stolen

Christmas Eve morning:
Dressed in my gym clothes, I go outside to start the truck. I return inside to make a piece of toast. I pick up my bags and open the door, the truck is gone. Wasn't it just there? I immediately knew it had been stolen. The HB calls 911 and files the report, the officers show up within 10 minutes. The Christmas present I bought off Craigslist for Tyler and Caiden was in the backseat. The officers say they usually recover the vehicles in 2-3 days. Tyler sends me to the gym and I come home to shower so he can take me in for my half day of work today. We'll see how it goes I guess.

end of an era

For the past 5 years since living in Utah I've had a routine of working out at the gym, showering there, and going to work. Occasionally this is thrown off by missed alarm clocks, forgotten items at home, or too late of nights, but rarely.

Because of this routine, it's also necessary to pack my breakfast with me, and eat it on my way to work, or just after getting there. Usually this is a yogurt, and a plastic baggie with grapenuts poured into it and mixed up.

Until this morning. The last few days this breakfast has tasted like the worst thing on the planet. I got halfway through this morning and just couldn't do it. Even as I bagged the grapenuts last night the thought of my breakfast was disgusting, but I did it anyway. I should have known better.

So I stopped at the gas station, bought some juice and a maple bar, and for the first morning in a week, it didn't seem like a chore to eat breakfast.

Juno post 2

Last night the HB and I were able to see the movie Juno. I've been waiting months to see this movie, ever since I heard about it. Unfortunately, I think the story of girls that give up their babies for adoption has gone untold for the most part. And yet every personal account I've ever read, be it modern stories or from a book about women that did so in the 1950's, every girl said it was the pivotal point of her entire life.

Watching it made me really sad in some ways, but I totally loved it as well. And it was crazy to realize how young we all were when those decision had to be made.

Because it was an advanced screening we all got free t-shirts named after the running group in the movie, the "Dancing Elk Condors."

The weird thing was that last night I dreamt about my baby boy. He's 9 years old now and in my dream I was watching him play baseball. And he was sooo beautiful.

Go see it.

The Speer House Rules

The HB and I recently did our first groundings. Caiden may be too young for it, I'm not sure, but after a few days of really poor behavior at school, we made him stay in his room at night and only come out for dinner, no computer games, nothing (though he did have the toys in his room). It seemed appropriate, but he's so young too. I"m not sure if it helped though since he didn't seem too phased. He's such a great kid anyway.

I was grounded a ton, but grounding didn't do much because there wasn't much I was allowed to do in the first place, and I was always in trouble, regardless of my degree of adherence to rules. Here are some of the rules I had growing up. They are harsh, but the rules weren't even the hard part of it:

Jeans can only be worn to school once a week
A dress/skirt must be worn to school once a week
No name brand clothing
No solid black (black top with black pants)
No listening to any radio stations except for soft rock
No phone calls to boys
No talking on the phone except to make arrangements for meetings
No dating non-Mormons
No two-piece bathing suits
Shorts and skirts must reach your knees, tank tops or sleeveless shirts
No playing with friends on Sundays
No jumping on the trampoline on Sundays
No swimming on Sundays
No cussing
No funky hair colors or cuts
No tight clothing
No big earrings
No smoking/drinking, etc.
No tv shows with innuendos or opposite sexes living together (why i've never seen 'friends' or most tv shows on in the 80's and 90's)
No mtv ( we didn't have cable anyway)
No spending time with non-mormons, male or female friends not of the faith
No grade lower than a B and anything less than an A also incurred lectures

unspecified, but frowned upon (might as well be a rule):

Too much make-up or none at all
Wearing a piece of black clothing too often
Receiving phone calls from boys (this could result in huge trouble)

Chichen Itza

I think 9th grade was the first time I actually wrote a research paper about the Maya, though I remember checking out library books on them long before that. That paper was 25 pages, doublespaced. Then I didn't do another one until I was a freshmen at BYU. I took a 300-level class called Mesoamerican Archaeology from Professor Stephen Houston, a world-famous Mayan expert. I was unaware of his reputation for being such a hard professor, and I think it impressed him that I was brave enough to take his class the first semester. When it came to paper time we had to discuss our idea with him for further advice. I wanted to write on the ruins in Tikal, in my mind, the most magnificent because they harbored the tallest Mayan pyramid. So he suggested a set written by Michael Coe based on his excavation work there. Later, I walked away from the library with all 14 volumes, half in my backpack, and half in my arms. I bore through page after page of reports that sounded like recipes--recordings of how many meters or centimeters of dirt had been removed and in which 1 meter x 1 meter quadrangle a certain piece of wall had been found. But eventually I devoured the chapters on the Temple of the Giant Jaguar and found plenty of good stuff for my paper. The history of the building, the architectural technique and style, the message of the carvings, etc and I wrote my paper on that.

I learned more about other Maya sites in the class too, Palenque, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Bonampak and more. I took another class in Maya art, the symbols in their writings and in their carvings, the historic records of battles and successions. The more disgusting the information I learned, the more fascinated I was. I guess nothing makes me feel quite more alive than all that thinking about blood, though I'd feel guilty describing them as not much more than brutal tribes because they were skilled astronomers, mathematicians, artisans and more.

So upon finally visiting my first Mayan site, I recognized some of the carvings I'd studied. Chichen Itza is, I believe, the ruins with the most buildings remaining standing, though I know there are many uncovered mounds and buildings throughout Yucatan and the rest of Maya land. It was so much fun to explore the area with Tyler and actually see and touch some of the buildings. Much to my chagrin, we weren't able to climb the pyramid, but other buildings we were allowed on and there was plenty to see.

As for the rest of our vacation, Tyler is writing some great detailed day-to-day reports so check out his blog here

And I think I resisted any overseas shopping blunders, but am sad that many of the souvenir gifts I bought ended up broken in pieces in my luggage.