6/08/08

It’s another week and another letter. They just keep ticking by. You only have 2 months left as of today. I don’t mean for that to make you trunky, I mean for that to make you even more urgent. So what’s new this week? I’m going to see if I can crank this out and get it to you before you check and send e-mails today. You seem to be doing it on Sunday mornings now. I can never remember what is news worthy on my end from week to week. But let me rack my brain here a little.

Yesterday was cool. It was our annual golf tournament at the Homestead up in Midway. It was fun as usual. It was snowing on our way up the canyon. I mean, c’mon, it’s June 7^th. What’s up with the snow. It rained on us the rest of the morning as we got checked in up there and had our bagel and got ready to get in our carts and head off. I was thinking this is going to stink if it’s raining the whole time. I had my rain jacket, and another light jacket, but I was also in my shorts. Ha ha. Well, as we teed off, it was just sprinkling and as we went to put on that first hole it stopped. And it was nice the rest of the time. It was great. It was just a little cool in fact as we went along and it was perfect. I’d much rather golf in my light jacket for 12 of the 18 holes than be hot. I took it off at 13 and it was perfect weather. We had a good lunch, had the prize drawing, which I didn’t win anything again for the 2^nd year in a row. And then we headed home. I know you haven’t accepted the sport of golf yet, but as you age and your wisdom grows, you will learn to accept that it is a good time and necessary to be decent at if you want to succeed in your future career. They should just teach it as a mandatory college course. You will need to know golf better than most other principles they teach in college. Kind of stupid, but true. Here’s something else you do not approve of, but So You Think You Can Dance is back on and all of my minions of converts to that show and I are all geeked out on it. They had a tryout in SLC and there were a lot of Utah representation in this season. We are already down to the top 10 guys and top 10 girls, so they will get paired up this week and compete. So good. Ha ha. It’s funny how much you don’t like that show just like it’s funny how much you don’t like Brett Favre. Both unfounded in nature. No reasonable explanation for it. In fact, I dare say, that of all of the people I have tried to convince that it’s a good show, 99% of them have accepted the truth. You are the only stubborn hold out. I have easily converted about 50 people to that show and from those converts stem many others. The branches of converts coming from the root of Travis will go out like a massive globe willow by the time I’m happy. It will still be on when you return, so maybe then you can watch, ponder, and pray. If you will do these things, I know that you will receive a testimony of the coolness of this show. Will you make a commitment to watch and seek after the truth of what I’m telling you? I will follow up with you from week to week after you have returned and started watching.

I also realized that I have not told you that story I was going to tell you about on the phone since it was so long. Let me recap it here. It will be easier if I copy and paste it out of an e-mail I sent to Ryan Sims after it happened…

On Tuesday, I’m sitting in my office (which has a window right over our front porch that overlooks the street in front of our house. It’s right by the front door. Well, I hear this car hauling bawls around the corner and comes screeching to a stop in the road in front of my house. It was a blue, lame, new style VW beetle with its bass bumping hard and loud. Dude hops out, leaves his door open (making his music exponentially louder), runs up to my neighbor’s house across the street and rings the doorbell repeatedly until the mom comes to the door. I’m watching this like what is wrong with this dude? Normally, this would have been a common occurrence when we lived in West Jordan on the street we lived on, but I take great pride in the quiet top of the circle we live on. I don’t like cars driving fast in front of my house, and I don’t like red headed white kids wearing gangsta wear laying a 5 foot patch of rubber from screeching to a halt in front of my house, and worst of all, I don’t like bass bumping for more than 10 minutes while he stands in their door way talking. I was getting grumpier by the minute. Than after about that 10 minutes, Aynslee wakes up and she is hard to put down at night. She feels like she’s missing something and cries until we come get her out of her crib. So when that woke her up and Suzanne yells down to me, who’s playing that music, I put on my shoes, went outside, whistled loud enough to get a jet pilot’s attention during take off and yelled across the street for him to “turn that S*** down!” He stood there like he no speaka the ingles. I started walking back toward my door and turned back around and he still wasn’t moving, but puffing up his chest and posturing like he was going to come discuss the finer artistic merits of the “insane clown posse” at 2,050 decibels. I turned and started walking back toward the street but he neighbor lady over there broke away, ran for the car and turned it down for him. I started walking back in my house while still looking back and him and said “punk A**” and went back inside. It wasn’t the most Christlike conversation I could have had and the lady across the street is in my ward, so I’m sure she has a new understanding of her new neighbors now. I still don’t know many people in the ward. Well, anyway, that was that. I had my peace and quiet again, Aynslee went back to sleep in about 20 minutes after that and all was well.

Yesterday, I went to a guy’s house from the ward to watch the Jazz game on his home theater system. I apparently home teach this guy, so I’m getting to know him a little bit before the game. I was telling him I still don’t know too many people in the ward since they put us right in the primary after we moved in. Well, in walks dude from the previous day and the host says, Oh, Travis, this is so and so, he’s your home teaching companion. I thought I recognized him and we started shaking hands and I said, nice to meet you and he said, yeah, you yelled at me yesterday. Then I said, Oh, that was you?! He walked over to the opposing couch and sat down and the whole room went quiet. All the guys were looking at me and him like why did he yell at him? The tension was pretty thick. Needless to say, that was THE most awkward introduction to anyone I have ever had. At the end of the 1^st quarter he went upstairs for some snacks and I went up a minute later and gave him a proper introduction and apologized for my behavior and language the night before and said I get a little grumpy when someone wakes up my baby with a lot of noise. He apologized for the music and what not and we had a better introduction to each other at that point. But yeah, it’s still just a little awkward. Hmmmm. Oh well. What can you do? He’s 19, came home from the MTC recently and I guess is in a “gentle state” of his testimony or something. So he’s kind of coddled in the ward because of that. Maybe I have something to learn from this experience. We’ll see.

There you go. Pretty awkward intro to our home teaching companionship. But I’m comfortable with awkwardness. So I’m sure you have heard from or about Riley by now. Let me know your thoughts on that. Pretty cool! Actually, I just got your letter forwarded over from Ma, and now I know you know. So Melbourne is awesome! I love that city! Even in the winter, it’s not very cold. Very temperate. Traffic for a big city is not bad, they have a cool light rail system they just call the tram, kind of funny. And they set up their roads so that it’s reversible flow to accommodate rush hour traffic. Where it’s like 5 lanes for the whole road. Where it’s 3 lanes going into the city during morning rush hour and 2 lanes going out of the city and then it reverses for rush hour after business hours. 3 lanes going out of the city and 2 lanes going into the city. It keeps traffic from getting congested. We could learn a lot from these cities here in Utah now that we are growing up to a big city pretty fast.

Well, I didn’t get this off when I wanted to. Now it’s 6:00 PM on Sunday night. We went to church and I never finished and sent it off. But anyway, now I’ve gone and done my home teaching with my companion. It wasn’t awkward, and we even discussed it again, since his neighbor is a friend of mine in the ward and he told him that I was afraid that he still had bad feelings about it. I told him that’s not the case. I said that I’m usually not like that, but I wasn’t feeling like I was walking on eggshells around you or anything. So we had a decent discussion about it and I think it might be close to being totally behind us. Ha ha. It’s all good.

Let me go off of your letter to Ma and Pa and reply to that…

I guess you will get the DVD out soon then huh? Not to expect it anytime this week I guess. Just whenever you can send it. You should just have it in the mailer and address it to me and have it handy in your scriptures or something so that you can send it if you come across a post office in your travels. You have my mailing address right?

240 West Holland Drive

Stansbury Park, UT 84074

It’s good to hear your testimony in your letters. Keep it up. Well, nothing more to say I guess. We are heading to ma’s and pa’s now, so I guess I’ll catch up with you next week. Oh, I need to give you a quote of the week…

“The gospel breathes a new life and a new hope and a new and unknown holiness into a troubled world. This we see, and we see the work grow and increase and become more and more irresistible as it spreads like the gentleness of a sea that refreshes the shore upon which it flows.”

- David B. Haight

I know that you see how troubled the world is. Mostly through our letters I think since you are so detached from the world itself. What a great place to be for a couple of years. But being in your position, you also see how much the Gospel really does give the world a new hope, a new life, and actual holiness to a dark and dreary world. It really can be irresistible once a person who’s been lost in this world for so long to get a feel of the peace that it brings. It really does spread over a troubled soul like this quote says. Great and wise words from a former apostle of the Lord. David B. Haight happens to be the late father in law of John Huntsman. I’m reading his book right now called “Winners Never Cheat”. It’s been great so far. I’m almost half way through it and I just started it not quite a week ago. So I think I’ll probably take it down pretty quick.

Well, off to the natals house. Take care and work hard this week. I’ll talk to you next week. Get those pics sent off soon. Oh, speaking of sending stuff, I’ll check in with John to see if he’s done with that DVD that I can send you. Talk to you later on.

Love,

Trav