Month: May 2018

Seen in traffic just now:

Fascinated, when I returned to my office, I looked up “unicycle football”. And sure enough, Wikipedia says:

No surprise there, I guess: it’s exactly what it sounds like. This proves there really is a sport or hobby for everyone.

The wife of Kyra’s mission president often posts photos on the mission Facebook page, showing the missionaries serving in the Bakersfield area. Yesterday she posted this:

Quite a sight, indeed. It looks like one of those dystopian-future stories, where the world has become a desert and the cities are all falling apart and occupied either by zombie hordes or apocalyptic armies. Kyra often makes jokes about how it’s a hundred degrees and only getting hotter, so I’ll be thinking of this photo when she does.

Yesterday was a gorgeous sunny day and I had some errands to run around town, so I hopped on my bike and headed out. I decided to swing by the old sugar mill, which is a “historic landmark” on the eastern edge of town. The buildings are decrepit and, in some cases, actually falling down. It makes for a pretty cool scene and an opportunity to test my camera skills.

Here are some of the shots.

Back in 2007, one of my clients was IZZE, the Boulder startup company who makes sparkling fruit drinks. Every time I visited their office, they insisted I take home some product, so I’d often leave with a trunk full of several cases of IZZE. We really enjoyed it as a family, and it became a traditional part of our weekly pizza and movie nights.

Zack loved it, and I caught a shot of him toasting me with his orange IZZE back in January 2007:

Yesterday one of my seminary students left a little surprise package on our doorstep, thanking me for being her teacher. It included orange Starburst, orange gum, orange IZZE, and a little card with (surprise!) an orange pun. When I saw the cans of orange IZZE, I was reminded of that long-ago shot. I asked Zaque to pose with the can.

He may look a lot different after eleven years, but he’s still the same goofy kid.

It’s been a while since my last ultimate league championship, but apparently spring is my season. Last night my team pulled off a hard-fought battle to take the Longmont league crown.

After a crushing 13-1 victory in the quarterfinals, we fought a close game in the semifinals. Two of our five women were late arriving, so we played both games more or less savage. That was rough, and meant they were working hard on the field. By contrast, we had all nine of our men, so there was plenty of time on the sidelines. I managed to take a few nice action photos with my new toy.

Here’s Shelby concentrating as she throws a smooth forehand past a screaming Malia:

Trevor (the opposing captain) towers over Billy:

And no one out-jumps Sam. No one.

For comparison, the guy in green is about 6’4″, and Sam is clearly a good six inches above him to get the disc. As an aside, Sam was my “mystery pick” at the draft… he moved here from the East Coast, so no one knew who he was. Not surprisingly, he sort of hung around on the draft list until the later rounds (everyone picks people they know and feel will make a good addition to their team). As it turns out, he was arguably the best player in the entire league. Good pick.

In the final game, we traded points for a while and then pulled away, finally winning a decisive 12-6 game late in the evening. We played like a well-oiled machine– everyone contributed, and everyone had a grand time. This was one of the best, most fun teams I’ve been on.

At the end of the night we posed for our championship photo:

And of course our goofy shot:

We were imitating our team mascot, the Chthulu, which is a demonic tentacled monster from the ocean deeps. A note of explanation: at the start of the season, it was decided by a vote of the captains that our league theme would be “mythical space monsters”, so each team came up with a crazy mix of space and monsters. When I asked Zaque for an idea, he suggested Chthulu, and I turned it into Cosmic Chthrewlu (see what I did there?). We decided to print some custom t-shirts just for our team, too. Wicked fun.

Good times, a good season, and now I can look forward to the summer season in a couple of weeks. Man, I love this sport.

Last night it was kind of a special moment when I turned off my daily 5:15am alarm…

There are four more days of high school this semester, so I was planning on four more days of seminary (we have class every day there’s school). But to my surprise– and the surprise of all the other seminary teachers– last night there was an announcement by the program leaders that today would be the final day.

Although I was happy not to have to wake up at 5am for three more days, I also had to scramble a bit because I had to combine some lessons I’d planned, and then figure out how to throw the end-of-year party I’d been planning. So I spent some time re-planning my lesson last night, gathering some party supplies, and even stopped off at the grocery store around 5:45 this morning to pick up doughnuts and drinks (doughnuts are always popular in seminary).

When I arrived in my classroom, I was treated to an impressive display of table-stacking, Jenga chairs, and a breathtaking amount of toilet paper.

We all laughed a lot, then cleaned up surprisingly quickly, dug into the food, and I taught a 15-minute rush lesson. We ended with a hilarious award ceremony and some class photos.

And of course the “Oscar selfie”…

Man, I love these yahoos. It’s been a privilege and a blessing to spend 165 of my mornings with them this school year. They’re amazing kids.

Now, I can look forward to staying up late and sleeping in again…

Yesterday in seminary we were talking about good and evil, and I gave the class a quick “pop quiz” (I do that a lot) where they had 2-3 seconds to see a photo of a fictional character and write down whether they were a good guy or a bad guy.

Some were easy:

Some were a little more complicated (he was good, then bad, and then good again?)

I was surprised how many of the kids didn’t know a classic bad guy like Prince Humperdinck:

But the best was when I flashed up Khan and they had no idea who he was. In fact, several of them thought he was a somewhat unattractive older woman.

Really? Khan? What’s this world coming to when the rising generation doesn’t know the classics?

Kyra just sent me this photo, from a store she and Sister Williams are currently shopping. I can’t even imagine what else is on the shelves…

… Oh, wait, my imagination need not run amok. She followed up with another photo a few minutes later.

Wow. Just wow.

In our conversation with Kyra yesterday she mentioned that she loves receiving photos. We told her there really isn’t all that much to photograph in our daily lives, and any pictures we send would be kind of boring. But she insisted, so now it’s my goal to capture all the mundane activities we do.

To wit…

Zaque plays video games with friends:

Alex reads a comic book:

I work on my seminary lesson:

And who would want to miss the thrill of Laralee drying dishes?

Yep, I’m pretty sure Kyra will be excited about all of this.