Why my husband is fabulous

For those of you who don't know Bryan, it's not too late.  He is a marvelous husband for many reasons.  Let me list a few.

• He has a way with words... hence the journalist, but I get the benefit of that more than anyone :-)


• Bryan is a wonderful cook.  The banana bread he makes is better than any I've ever had.


• He has a wonderful love for everyone, and especially me


• He works hard at work, but also when he comes home: I love waking up to the smell of fresh pancakes.


• He comes up with wonderful ideas of things to do:
  - Just this week, when he saw the empty 2 gourd halves of a spaghetti squash I cooked, and decided it would be fun to paint masks and make a birthday video for his sister. It was a bunch of fun, and I wouldn't have ever thought to do it.
  - He knows the best places to hike and go for beautiful walks. I loved going for a walk in the rain with him here in Lynchburg last week when the weather finally started to cool things down.


• He is ticklish!


• When no piano player was available for a week at church in Primary, he told the kids that he would bring his guitar in... and he did!  The kids enjoyed it.


• We went on a jog yesterday morning, and he ran fast, but let me keep up with him.  We ran a little farther than we had planned.


• He makes sure we have FHE and time to strengthen our relationship with each other and our Creator.


• He is great at Scrabble, and is nice about winning.

This list could go on for a very long time, but this will have to do for now.  Suffice it to say, my husband is wonderful.

I made another funny (about OWS)

Today I made this comic to add my own humor to the Occupy Wall Street parodies out there.

(This is not a political statement about OWS or Ninja Turtles. I have no idea how Splinter really feels.)

A super busy October

October was one of the busiest months in my memory. I've been too busy doing things to blog about them! (That's the way it should be.)

But it's been a really good month. So here's a quick description, not in chronological order---

1. Halloween Weekend and Day

We are lucky to live just about an hour away from Becky's sister, brother-in-law, and their kids. The last weekend of the month, they invited a lot of family over for a day of festivities.

The day was pretty cool. It started when Becky hit a growth spurt and became much taller than I:



I've always looked up to her, but this helped.

Actually, she wasn't taller than me, but she was on drywall stilts:



 

Her dad brought them up from South Carolina so Travis (Becky's brother-in-law) could use them for his Uncle Sam



Halloween costume. Everyone trying them on. I don't have any pictures of me when I tried them (although I know pictures were taken, I don't have a copy) but you wouldn't want to see those pictures, anyway. Whereas Becky was walking confidently in a jiffy, I was wobbling around the whole time.

Becky's stepbrother, Cameron, put the stilts on at their highest length, three feet. He's tall enough before the stilts. But he did a pretty good job walking around in them.

After playing with the stilts for a while, we went to a corn maze. Unfortunately, it wasn't much of a corn maze. :-( It was basically a corn field with a path through it, but there weren't any side paths where you could get lost.

However, the pumpkin patch games at the end made the experience worth every dollar we spent and all the time we spent.

The pumpkin patch had a steep hill on the far end of it. The hill had these two slides---basically, long sheets of plastic heading down the hill---that were TONS of fun. Lots of us guys were diving onto them, spinning around as we slid down, etc. There was basically a mud pile at the bottom, so my clothes got pretty dirty. It was lots of fun and was great exercise.

Then, Halloween came. Becky, a science teacher, dressed up as Miss Frizzle (from Magic Schoolbus) and I dressed as Bill Nye the Science Guy. (I bet you didn't know that these two science peeps eventually fell in love and got married, did you?



In addition to going to work in our costumes (yes, we're lucky enough to work at the same place, just different offices) we went out to eat at Arby's and then walked around the mall as people enjoyed our costumes. It was a lot of fun!

2. Homecoming and Homecoming

The month opened with homecoming at the college where I work. It was the college's first homecoming. Since I work in the office that planned and organized the event, I worked 15 hours that day. I was dead tired when I got home. (Fortunately for me, my boss bought pizza.)

Two weekends later, Becky and I drove to Buena Vista for homecoming at my alma mater, Southern Virginia University. I LOVE that school, and I always love homecoming.

SVU's choirs and orchestra gave a remarkable concert. I'm always impressed by what those choirs can do. The highlight, for me, was hearing the beautiful song "How Can I Keep From Singing." (You can hear Enya sing it on YouTube.)

Saturday was filled with cornhole, a wonderful faculty lecture, volunteering at the alumni house,  food, and fun. All in all, it was a very wonderful day.

3. Conference and Conference.

October holds a special significance for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints because that is one month when we have General Conference, a worldwide event where we gather around TVs, computers, radios, and other devices to hear a broadcast where prophets and apostles testify of Jesus Christ and teach us how we can live better Christian lives. This was the other big activity the first weekend of the month.

I think my favorite talk in the whole conference was "Providing in the Lord's Way" by Dieter F. Uchtdorf. It was a powerful reminder that the Savior's gospel implores us to alleviate the suffering of other people. Elder Uchtdorf gave a good guide to help us know how we can go about using our own limited resources to help others.

The second weekend of the month, we had Stake Conference, which is like General Conference but on a local level, involving all the church members in a geographical region. This conference was held in Lexington, Virginia. The message that stuck out the most to me was the importance of honesty, which our Stake President touched on with great emphasis. He quoted Billy Joel ("Honesty is a lonely word") which I did not expect.

4. Work and Work

My day job kept me busy throughout the month and had me working a good number of extra hours. But I also had my side job (where I do some freelance writing and web design) take off a little. I went from zero projects to three very quickly. So my evenings have generally consisted of sitting down at my laptop and tap, tap, tapping on my keyboard.

That's just the beginning...

A lot of other things happened in October.

Becky helped prepare a "Family Values Award" dinner in Buena Vista. She seemed to do a really good job and was in charge of the decorations.

Becky started looking into the possibility of making curtains at home (and we'll probably buy a nice sewing machine soon.)

We spent three weeks suffering from a miserable cold.

All in all, October was a really fun month!

Another video about a faculty recital

I recently created another video about a recital... It looks like I'll get to continue making videos like this. Next up, I'll be creating a video to promote the traditional Christmas Vespers concert at the college.

In this video, I experimented a little with the sound recording by not attaching any external microphone to the digital camcorder. I think it turned out well, although there is one point in the video where you can hear a clicking sound as I raise the volume of the recording.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5EolxTq5E[/youtube]

I love the power of beautiful music.