6/03/07

Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy Yo!

What’s crackalackin’ young cracker? It’s that time once again for your weakly letter. Yeah, I spelled that right, I think I’ll be writing this letter a little bit weakly again this week. Not a lot going on really. Brinlee, Aynslee and I went with Mom to Dad’s Corvair Club gathering at Sugar House park. Suzanne had a shower for a co-worker today, so she didn’t go. You would have had a lot of fun there. Brin and Grandma and I went and fed the ducks, geese, seagulls, and little scrounge birds, along with the baby ducklings and goslings that were swimming around there too. That was fun. We had hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, all kinds of salads and pastas and cookies and drinks. Good times. I went around and judged about 18 different ‘Vairs. There are some nice ones there. Dad’s looks pretty beater out there compared to these shiny looking ones. So Mom and I were talking about everyone going in on a pain job for Christmas or his birthday or something. This will have to be stricken from any replies back to me for surprise purposes, but keep that in the back of your mind for right now. Or write back incognito or in red font or something so I remember to extract the sensitive material from my forwarded e-mails to family. Dad would be proud as a peacock with a shiny new coat of vintage metallic aqua marine on that pup, eh? Mom and Dad brought your letters and news article over yesterday. That was fun to read. On the letters, I know what you mean about house prices out here. You can’t get a house for under 200 thou anywhere. Even ghetto shantys are selling for about 196 just because they can. It’s ridiculous. We stand to make an easy 100 thousand in straight equity when we sell our house if we sold it today. That’s how much the market has gone up on houses. Can you believe that? That’s awesome for us for getting in when we did. The house across the street from us which is the same size and condition as ours just sold for almost 250 K. But it’s a family of 22 mexicans that have packed about 5 moving trucks full of junk in there. We are nearly surrounded now by junkers and we aren’t psyched about it. We might consider moving pretty soon before our property values go down too much. They are about as high as they will get for a while right now, I bet. We are looking at a lot close to here and considering building new. That would be cool so we could customize our house a little bit. But I’m so comfortable with the low rate I’ve managed to get, the low balance on the house, I mean, we could pay it off in about 10 years. How sweet would that be? Be totally debt and payment free except for the bills and taxes? We’d be saving some bank-ola. Suzanne would be able to quit working finally. I like this idea more and more of staying. We’ll have to see. It’s a big decision.

Back to your newspaper article… I thought that was nicely written. When I did an article for the newspaper, I got all misquoted, words turned around, and looked like an idiot!! I hated that! It made me so mad that they misquoted me so bad and twisted my words to come out how they wanted to hear it. So I’m glad you didn’t get hosed on your quotes. I did like the bugger quote. Funny! I thought the whole thing was positive and good PR. That’s an awesome thing to keep around forever. I wish you would have got more copies. I wanted to trim it up and scan to the blog, but I don’t want to cut up your only copy.

No worries about not writing last week. I knew the libraries would be closed, so I didn’t sweat it. Did you get my e-mail from last week too?

I have to teach the EQ lesson tomorrow. It’s my turn in the presidency rotation. My topic is on Tithing. I am supposed to use the conference talk “Will a Man Rob God” which is fine, but it is only about a full page long since that Japanese Elder, I can’t remember his name right now, talks so slow, the information is much less. But I have a bunch of other resources I will try to use. Including PMG by the way. We’ll see how that goes in preparing an Elder’s Quorum lesson. Should be useful.

I watched a show on KBYU last night (well, it was on a week ago, but finally watched it on TraVo) called the Mormon Way of Doing Business. It had a bunch of muckety muck mormon CEOs of large organizations and it was pretty decent. Some good thoughts from some of them. You might have heard of that book. They are selling it at deseret book and seagull, so this was kind of a infomercial for that book more or less since it was only a half hour, but the interviews of these guys were pretty decent.

I like that you have been encouraged to be more bold in your statements to call people to repent. It takes a certain kind of missionary to be bold in statements like that and actually doing it rings any feelings of being timid out of you like wet rag. The easier it gets for you to be bold like that, the more it will come in handy later in life. Later is not really accurate, since the benefits of that ability are immediate.

Oh, Brinlee was at the doctors office the other day to be checked out. She got some sores in her mouth, we think as a result of her swimming class she has been taking (which she passed by the way). She will jump up to the next level now. Anyway, while at the doctors office, she got up on the computer at the check in desk (you know, where you tell them your symptoms and stuff) and turned to Suzanne and said, “So what do you want to say to Mike” just like I do when she comes down when I’m typing you a letter. Suzanne said it was really cute.

Here is the quote of the week, getting back to your calling peeps to repentance…

Our missionaries, young men and women and older couples, are workers for world peace. By inviting all to repent and come unto Christ, they are working for peace in this world by changing the hearts and behavior of individual men and women.

- Dallin H. Oaks

So do you have a picture card to send home anytime soon? Or have the pictures tapered off? I’ve been waiting for a card for a while, but no sign yet. Let me know your card status and when to expect it if anytime soon.

What’s new in the way of investigators lately? How is the finding going? How is the teaching going? Any solid prospects lately? How is the training going? It sounds like the DL calling is stretching you and helping you grow in all the right ways. That’s awesome. Keep up the good work there.

Work is keeping me busy. I need to get organized and put a plan together for this coming week so I don’t flounder around so much trying to decide which of my fifty A priorities I need to get to first. I was interviewing a guy this week that didn’t disclose that he did some time in a federal penitentiary. I caught him as I was checking into some gaps in his employment and he told me that he was wrongly charged (aren’t they all). He went off on his story for a while and I was getting a weird vibe from him, so I busted out some W-Z method interrogation tactics and within 5 minutes had him totally busted for lying to me. I didn’t call him out on it, just led him down the road to where he had to realize I knew all of his lies with a few key questions. He finally said he was going to stop talking now and I gave him a knowing glance and wrapped up the interview. He left with a defeated look and knew this interview was a bust. That was the first time I busted out the tactics in a job interview, but it was cool. I would have sent him on for a second interview and he probably would have been hired easily since we are hurting so bad for employees right now. So money well spent, yet again for that training. Well, I better get back to my lesson. I need to get going on that. I have a PPI with a member of the stake presidency tomorrow too, right after church. Then it’s off to Suzanne’s grandpas grave to see her dad dedicate it. So a busy Sunday yet again. I’ll hold off on sending this until tomorrow in case something comes up tomorrow that I want to throw in. Check you tomorrow.

Ahhhhhhhight, it’s Sunday night at 9:30. Today was a cool day. Sundays are super busy lately, I almost feel like I need a weekend to recover from just Sundays. But anyway, I got up early, got my lesson finalized and felt pretty good about it. Went to Sac. Meeting and Chad’s dad Leon got up to bear his testimony and told us how his mom just died of a massive heart attack on Monday or Tuesday. He just buried her yesterday and you could tell he was having a really hard time with it. I cornered him after sac meeting got out and put my arm around him and told him I was sorry to hear about his mom. I asked how he was doing and he told me he was having a harder time than he expected he would. I squeezed his shoulder and told him to hang in there and let me know if I could do anything for him. His eyes were welling up with tears so fast he just wanted to make a bee line for the door. He scrammed after a quick thanks but I was still kind of concerned about him, especially since he didn’t stick around for the other two meetings. But Sunday school was good. Then I taught EQ and my lesson turned out awesome. Like I said, I felt a lot better about it this morning than I was last night since tithing to me is kind of a cut and dried sort of commandment and it’s just sort of a get ‘er done sort of deal. But anyway, I found some awesome stuff on it outside of the talk by elder kikuchi from Brigham Young who never has a problem being bold in everything he ever said. David O. McKay had a good quote about how he learned the concept of tithing from his dad, and Heber J. Grant has some of the coolest Doctrinal thoughts on tithing I have ever found. I was stoked to use that stuff. So anyway, we had really good conversation, participation, and spirit. It got me kind of jones’n to teach again. I taught so long as EQ teacher and Gospel Doctrine teacher then moved to the Sunday school 15 year olds for 3 years, that I forgot how much I kind of missed it. Well, after church, I went with the presidency to the stake center and met with Pres. Hanson who used to be my bishop before my current bishop. He is the first counselor in the stake presidency now. The 4 of us in the presidency, came in, we all kneeled in prayer, then discussed the concerns of the quorum, what we are doing well, what we wonder about how we are doing, and then sat and heard counsel from Pres. Hanson. It was awesome. I haven’t had that kind of experience since my mission. It reminded me a lot of president interviews, which I always loved just like you do. So that went for about an hour and before I went home, I went with the President and first counselor in our presidency to Leon Johnson’s house and woke him up from his nap. I felt bad about that since there’s nothing better than a quick lunch after church and a hearty nap in the air conditioned room. But we went in, visited with him for a bit and offered to give him a blessing. He said he would love that. He told us that when he talked to Chad when he called to tell him about his grandma, Chad asked how he was doing and told him he needed to get a blessing. Leon just didn’t get around to calling anyone and was grateful that we just dropped in and asked. So that was awesome to stand and give him a blessing there in his living room. His younger son is about to go to Washington for the summer to be with his mom. I looked at leon and asked what he is going to do all summer without him since basically he will be alone now. His eyes welled up again and he said don’t even get me started with that. So I was really glad then that we got over there to give him a blessing of comfort and throw a little Priesthood blessing his way. I am going to go way out of my way to keep my eye on him and give him as much friendship as I can give him over the summer. What a lonely time to be alone while your son is on a mission, your other son is up with your ex-wife a few states away, and you just lost your mom. That poor guy! He’s a stud though. I love to talk with him about random stuff. Especially our missionaries that we are both so proud of. I told TJ (the EQ president) that I would just walk home from there so he drove off and so did Scott. Suzanne saw them both drive by and knew that TJ gave me a ride from church to the stake center. She was out front waiting for me to get home so we could go to her family’s house for lunch. So she looked down the road, saw me coming and rushed me along. I hopped right in the car, we motored to Patt and Ron’s house and had lunch. Then we all caravanned up to Tooele to her grandpa’s grave and dedicated it since they didn’t do it at the funeral a couple of weeks ago. So that was cool too. So now I’m home and it has been an action packed Sunday. Now I need to get ready for another full week at work. Oish!

I just got off the phone with Ma too about the Hein family reunion. You wouldn’t believe how involved and detailed this is. I mean they have activity after activity laid out by the minute for 3 solid days of ever lovin’ family reunion extravaganza! So I just RSVP’d to Margaret. I’m going golfing tomorrow free of charge at Stone Bridge with Clark and Brad. Clark gets the hook ups at work so we are in for free. Then I have a golf tournament on Saturday up at the Homestead in Midway. That one is for FranklinCovey. I’ll let you know about that next week. They give away a ton of free swag too, so I’ll see if I can score any of the goods. They are nice prizes too, so here’s to hoping. Stay tuned for next week’s letter.

I hope all is going well this week. Keep up the hard work. I’ll talk to you again next week.

Love you,

Trav