03/02/08

Hey Chochy,

I still have not heard from you, so I will just try to bust out the one sided conversation again this week. I’m beginning to feel like a radio talk show host with no callers. I’m going to run out of material pretty fast, but I’m working hard to keep it entertaining. How has your week gone this week? What have you been up to the last couple of weeks?

We taught our Sunday School lesson last week (well, Suzanne did) while I attended to Aynslee and played bad cop with the kids. They were rowdy of course and wanted to see how far they could push the envelope. After several times of telling them to be quiet, I finally shut them all up, went off on a discourse about disrespect and rudeness when someone is talking to you, has spent quality time preparing a lesson for you and is trying to teach you something while you all go about talking, sassing, and showing total disrespect for that person and I won’t allow it anymore. I could have dialed the volume down a bit, but I thought it was an appropriate level at the time. A few minutes later a Primary presidency person came in and told everyone they were going to come up with a reverence contract they would all sign. First strike, they get a warning. Second strike, they have to have one of their parents sit with them in primary. Third strike, you have to talk to a member of the bishopric. Ha ha. They all agreed to it, but they were all whipped into shape a few minutes before that anyway. I wonder if she had heard my lecture earlier standing outside our door. Oh well. Come to find out, the most rowdy one who I focused most of my lecturing energies towards is the Bishops daughter. Ha ha. They are always the worst, aren’t they? What’s up with that? I need to prepare the lesson this week cuz it’s my turn on the every other week rotation plan. Suzanne gets to play bad cop this time. I guess it will be cool sharing a calling with Suzanne. It’s been a long time since we did that.

I haven’t done much for Tim this week in the way of HR action because he put me in hurry up and wait mode while he went to Vegas for the NASCAR race. So he’s been gone for half of the week and said he’d get back to me on the homework I gave him when he gets back. Which is fine because work has been keeping me busy this week. I also had a request from a dude who graduated from the Law School at the U of U with his Juris Doctorate and has been working on political campaigns, law firms, and the State mediation division of the courts, to come interview me on my mediation and negotiation skills. Apparently my reputation precedes me out there. I accepted and he came yesterday to meet with me. It was quite the intellectual conversation. Not so much interview to pick my brain, I kept it on more of a conversational level since I could tell he had a lot of experience and he could formulate some of his own strategies in his head based on his own knowledge with a little facilitation by my questions. I recommended some good books to read, half of which he’d already read, so I told him he’s already got a good head start. He was a respectful dude.

Cool, I just got the letter you sent to Mom as I was typing here. That was good to hear a little sum’m sum’m. I don’t get why you are so into the short tie thing. I guess Missionaries get kind of goofy with ties though. It’s funny how it’s against mission rules to have tie tacs, but not against the rules to wear ugly, polyester, old school retro 70’s belly warmers that are way more distracting and wild than a simple tie tack. But I don’t make the rules, I just mock them. For you who has to live those rules though, you have a good attitude about it. For you: “It is not for you to question why, it is but for you to DO or DIE”. There’s a little Marine Corps quote for you.

I’ve been blogging up a storm this week. Dave Alexander started one up on fishing in Corpus Christi. He made a nice one. Everyone in the family is getting in on it. Pretty much everyone I know now either has one or is starting one up. Even Stosh is going to get in on the act soon.

Tim said that he was not interested in your boy Alex. Thought it might be more trouble than it was worth to come out here for a machinist job when he was probably more into engineering anyway. So I will try to see what I can find in the engineering field for him, but that’s an area I’ve never touched before. So it might be kind of a challenge. I’ll shoot him off an e-mail to update him.

Well, I’m going to put this off till tomorrow and hope for an e-mail or something from you. We gotta go hit some stores and get some Saturday activities done while we have some daylight anyway. Talk to you soon.

Hi Mike, this is Brinlee. It’s Sunday, I went to church and saw my friends, You know what? It’s my birthday today. Blow out the candles.

Dad: but that’s not true

Brin: uh huh dad.

Dad: No it’s not

Brin: why?

Dad: because it’s Carlie’s Birthday today, not yours.

Brin: Dad, can I type too?

Dad: here you go

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There you go. I guess that’s about it for me. I’m still sans letter. But you’ll get to me when you get to me. Here are a couple of quotes of the week for you…

“When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

This is certainly a mission as well. I hope that you work with that prospective that you are always in a fight with the adversary to win the souls of your brothers and sisters back from the ignorance he likes to keep them in. It’s a contest that MUST NOT be lost.

“A true leader is constantly providing tools that enable independence. The timing and the selection of the presented tools is the exercise of leadership or wisdom.”

- Sylvia Bushell

It sounds like you guys are developing new tools and methods to use in the work that will make things much easier to track the metrics of what is being accomplished out there. Continue to develop whatever means, methods, motivations that you can to pass down to all those that follow your example. Help them by whatever means possible to be successful in their own individual stewardships.

Keep up the good work Mike.

Write when you can.

Love you,

Trav