6/29/08

What’s happenin’ young Babby the Babs Babco? How was your week? Sounds like you are still rockin’ harder than ever and will leave it all on the field when it’s time to be called home. Keep that up. What happened with Transfers? Did those happen last week? I can’t really remember. Actually, I should turn to your e-mail and respond to that before I get into anything from my week.

It is crazy what has been going on in the health department around here. We added to that this week with Brinlee having a bike wreck and getting sick from bruising her intestine and getting some medical term that I can’t remember when you have trauma to your intestine or bowel and it rejects any food passage through it, so if you put anything in your digestive tract, it kicks it back up and out of there. My day actually started pretty bad when I woke up late since I had to take the girls to school and get to work after the commute downtown and then back to my work. So I’m haulin’ up I-80, going cruising speed of 80 like everyone else around that stretch of 75 MPH road. And I hear this weird noise like someone whacked my spare tire on the rear door with a stick or something. A second later the car started vibrating weird. Brinlee was saying what’s that noise dad? I look at my gauge and see that my RPMs are revving higher and my speedometer is falling. I’m like Oh crap, I have a flat. So I signal to get over to the right lane and start looking for a good place to pull over to check it out. I’m wondering if I can make it to the Salt Air exit coming up than all the sudden, BOOOM! Loud noise, the car starts fish tailing like mad, I’m swerving to get off the freeway and NOW. So I pull off as far as I can on the shoulder and get out. Sure enough, my rear drivers side tire is obliterated. I left black alligators on the road behind us. It wasn’t just a flat, it was a tire bomb. I get in the back area and look in the spare tire area and I’m sans jack. I have the spare tire mounted to the door, but I can’t get it off because not only is there no jack, there’s not lug wrench. So I call Suzanne and tell her to get in the truck and head out to meet us so I can use the lug wrench in there. I realize a while later that I could really use my floor jack in the garage that would make it way easier to lift the car, my mechanics gloves so I don’t break the first rule of management and get dirty, and my socket set so I can get the lugs off even easier than using the lug wrench. So she turned around, got those things and got there in about 20 minutes from my first call. Now came the fun part of changing the tire. I couldn’t get the jack on a good spot since I was so far off the shoulder. I thought I had a good support point under the car, but after going back to the truck when it was jacked up, the car fell and scared the girls because it was on a guard that protects the gas tank. It collapsed after a minute of being up on that. So I had to back the car up closer to the road so I could get the jack on cement and a good central point to heft it up. Now my butt is right on the white line of the freeway and I have truckers going past me at 80 MPH + and knocking me over with the gusts of wind. It was ridiculous! I was scared. I kept thinking about these images I see on the news of a trucker hitting a cop car and blowing it up because they drifted a little or snoozed off or something. I could only imagine me getting crushed at 80 plus with 140 tons of payload. Well, I got it changed and it’s all good, so Suzanne goes back home and I’m heading on downtown. I’m on 600 South in rush hour morning commute traffic and Brinlee says Dad, I’m sick. I’m like what kind of sick, throw up sick? She said yeah. I said can you wait till we get to school? All the sudden – gurgle, gurgle, spewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!! She blew chowder everywhere. So I took that for a no. Now she’s crying, I’m speeding to the school and calling Suzanne to come meet me at my work so we can make the switch. Since no way can I leave her at school. So I get to school, clean her up while Aynslee is in her class for a minute. After I get all the throw up off Brinlee, I went out and cleaned the car up. The smells tempting me to toss my frosted mini wheats. After I got it all cleaned up, I went back in, cleaned myself up, then went and got Aynslee who was just given a yellow popsicle. So now that’s dripping all over me and her car seat and herself while I’m loading her into the hot car. I’m a really happy fella right now. We make our way back to my work and Suzanne is there just before me. So we get out and start talking and Brinlee says, Mom, I’m sick. She says, I know, Dad told me, then all the sudden, she hucks again. So now we are concerned that it’s coming from her bike wreck the day before and the sharp pains in her tummy the night before (Wednesday night) and in the morning when we were getting her ready. So Suzanne takes her to the instacare who tell her to go to the ER since she might have internal bleeding. So she takes her up to Primary’s. They run all these tests on her and admit her to stay the night for observation. Aynslee was going stir crazy in the hospital, so I had to leave work again, go get her at Primary’s, take her to school and get back to work, which is already extremely busy just trying to replace myself with a good person, wrap up all my projects, etc. since I only have 5 days left. After work (Thursday night) I went and picked up Aynslee, then to Rubio’s Grill for some grub to take up to Suzanne but Brinlee can’t eat all day, so she’s starving and going crazy with the food smells. Suzanne stayed up there with her that night and I came home with Aynslee then took her to school and came up to meet Suzanne again to spell her and let her go home, get a shower and a few things to bring back to the hospital. When she came back, I headed in to work and got there around 2:00. So I worked till almost 8:00 PM. They were awesome at Primary’s. They treated Brinlee like a princess. Gave her gifts, room service for what she wanted to eat that next day once her eating restrictions were lifted. So she was discharged and put on activity restrictions. We were glad she didn’t need surgery which was at least 50/50 that first night. Ron and Patt came up with Austin that first night and Ron helped me give her a blessing, so that had a little something to do with it too, I’m sure. But now she can’t run, jump, tumble, etc. that’s all she knows how to do. I’m not sure how to keep her from doing all that stuff.

It looks like transfers were this week, so I’m excited to hear what happened.

I gave my talk in Church last week. Maybe I already wrote about that. Not sure. It was a good topic. I liked speaking on it actually. We had the fam over here yesterday. By fam, I mean Mom, Gramps, Shelli, Staci, A-Jax and Maddie. Mom stayed her usual 5 min. and wanted out of here. So that was short and sweet. Staci stayed while everyone else left. So we went out to eat at this Mexican Restaurant called El Paisa. They had a live Mexican band playing there which was kind of cool. Then I got the bill for $40 bills for just my family. I’m not sure how much Staci’s was. But $40?? Get out of here. It wasn’t that fancy. They charged us $3.50 for the entertainment. I think I should have been the judge of what I paid for that. Oye! Oh well. That’s the last time I’ll hit up that joint. After dinner, Staci went home and we went to Taylorsville Dayzzzzzzz. I’m not sure how many z’s are at the end of that, but it’s at least 2. So I always exaggerate it when I say it aloud. I think it annoys everyone as much as the double zz’s annoy me, so I call it even. We always like that because I bump into all kinds of peeps from back in the day and get to catch up with old friends. Plus the fireworks are better than anywhere in the valley on the 4^th of July. Sure, the music is the same every year, but the fireworks are awesome. I spent the rest of my day before the family coming over ripping apart pallets from my work for firewood in our fire pit when I finally get that set up in the back yard. That is hard work ripping down those pallets into chunks of firewood. I’m sore! I also stained half of my deck in the back yard. I’ll finish that up sometime soon, hopefully. I still have a ton of pallets to finish ripping down too, but Dad called after hearing what I was doing from Mom when she got home and said that he has a pallet taker aparter. He apparently invented it. But he said that it works like a champ and not to do any more pallets until I can get this bar from him. So I’m excited to see what this thing can do.

I’m still waiting the scores of our tests. I know you aren’t waiting till you get more scores, because I’ve been assured that they will NOT get done and sent in. So get those scores back to us and break down the answers for us. I’m sure there are some interesting answers in there.

I liked your testimony to close out your last letter. So here is a Quote of the Week that is similar to your desires…

“The question will arise, “what am I here for?” To sow the seeds of life in the hearts of the people of the world; and the prayer should arise in your heart, “O Lord, may it be so; may I have power through thy Spirit to touch the hearts of these thy people.” That very short prayer is all that a missionary needs to make. “may I say something to save these souls.”

- Lorenzo Snow

Well, I’ll get this sent. It’s 10:49 AM right now and I’m hoping that you haven’t checked e-mail yet, so you can get this fresh.

Write back and let me know about transfers and hook us up with scores on those tests.

Have a great week and bust some tail.

Love you,

Trav