Jesse's Unusual Grocery Story

I sent Jesse to the store the other night with a mile long list. Our fridge was getting bare, as was our pantry. It was time.

He prepared for such an event and went equipped with his fully charged phone and headphones so he could listen to comedy radio to help pass the time. He then told me he would see me in about 6 hours once he found everything on my seemingly endless list. 

Sorry, Honey... it had to be done.

When he got home, the first words out of his mouth were "Do I have a grocery story for you!" 

I of course listen because this man of mine cannot go to the grocery store without a grocery story. It is usually justification as to why there are three bags of oreos, brownies, and M&Ms, but this story was a little different. 

He said while he was minding his own business searching for things on the dreaded list he suddenly saw a guy's mouth moving but was only hearing "maaahha mdmfosffhdf sdflkjwfh." (don't quote me on that part.) So he took out his headphones and said, "I'm sorry, what did you say?" The guy then repeated, "I am new to this area and I was wondering if you get your hair cut locally?" Jesse then snickered internally and said, "Very locally. My wife cuts it in our front room! But I will pass along the compliment."

The funniest part of the story is that I had just cut his hair like two days before, and we cut it a little different than we usually do! It's very subtle, but I actually cut the sides shorter and left a little longer mohawk like strip down the front (which we then cut shorter and blended to be even more subtle). We had laughed as we were cutting it how much we liked it just a little different and apparently someone else does too! Haha! Too funny! 

Maybe I need to open up my front room to more people. 

I do offer a complimentary TV show or movie with every hair cut! 

The Man's Dilemma

Men have forever had a difficult, nigh-impossible decision to make. A Catch 22. A lose-lose. An inescapable enigma. A vicious circle of circumstance. I call it, The Dilemma.

Women may brush off The Dilemma as merely a superficial choice, like the hairstyle they choose or what shoes they wear. This is, putting it mildly, a felonious understatement. Rarely will your hairstyle, shoes, dress, or other raiment-related decision require weeks approaching months of a sunk time investment only to leave you with a more or less binary choice.

To beard, or not to beard?

I've only entered the ranks of the Blessedly Bearded within the last year. Less than one orbit of Spaceship Earth around our nearest star, and yet I've come to understand in the most intimate of ways the true depth and breadth of The Dilemma.

To Beard:

Manly. Gruff. Commanding. These are a few of the hundreds of wonderful adjectives associated with the Beard-havers among us. Unfortunately, along with endowing your head with its own testosterone-born facial fortress, you're also turning yourself into an unassailable citadel of abstinence and loneliness. The women-folk will be understandably mesmerized and enthralled by your astonishing display of manliness, only to realize that every rose has its thorn. A thorn we call BEARD.

Not To Beard:

"So," you may think. "I certainly don't want to repel those of the fairer sex. My proximity to females is important and I value it above my epic jaw warmer." So you shave, attributing to yourself a whole new set of descriptors. Approachable. Relatable. Sweet. Then, out of nowhere, a mirror. You burst into tears, the waves of guilt and anguish washing over you like a tsunami over a fishing boat. You sacrificed your manly visage and left it shorn clean in the interest of human contact considering it an even trade. But now you know. You see yourself for what you now are without that herculean chin cover: a pasty, lust-repulsing babyface.

Attractive but unattainable, or approachable but undesirable? Thus, the man suffers and has for centuries.

And now a collection of images for your consideration:

3:52 AM

You read that right. It's 3:52 AM right now. I just got a screaming baby back to sleep and for some reason I had to write about it. Oh, and surprise! This is the husband.

Danielle and I just had our 6th Anniversary date a few days early. Nothing too special... I think traditionally the 6th anniversary is the cardboard anniversary, or maybe it's plywood? I lose track. Not one for traditions, Danielle and I saw a movie and grabbed a gooey dessert from Chili's afterward while friends of ours were kind enough to watch our boys for us. Jesse & Leandra Call, you're a life saver!

We got home and laid the boys down late, maybe around 9pm, then tidied up. We watched some TV, then settled in for sleep. Danielle is doing what I like to call "Shifting" tonight, which means staying up late so she can nap tomorrow afternoon in preparation for starting a night shift tomorrow at 7pm. She stayed up later than I but eventually made her way upstairs. Once we were both completely asleep and loving our pillows the most one of the boys decides to pipe up and let us know what he thinks about all this silence.

Not much, it turns out.

Danielle hears and responds first (and better) by going down to check on him. Once the screams reach a certain pitch, volume, and frequency I'm forced to admit to myself that she might need a hand. I stumble downstairs and ask "What can I do to help?" She has clearly reached her wits' end due to lack of sleep and all the noise. She's tried the usual fixes like binkies, milk, snuggling, and threats to sell him to the circus (don't you judge us). No dice. I reach in and pick him up and to my horror he quiets right down.

Tag, I'm it.

I walk around with him a minute while Danielle tries to help by filling a sippy cup with water for us. He's not too interested in that, but he sure likes the fact that Daddy now has to walk around with him for a while. He pulls a lean-in move toward Danielle, but she tells him, "You need to stay with Daddy." VILE BETRAYER! What, the other 14,000 times she's gotten up with him suddenly means Daddy is on the hook for his, like, seventh?

I swallow my pride and trust the math. Yeah, it's probably my turn, so we walk around. I try my best to get him interested in something he can take to bed like water, a binky, or a blanket. All he wants is for Daddy to walk around and around with him, so I do. My body is bouncing, but my mind is racing. What can I do to shorten the distance between me and my mattress? Suddenly I spot a toy of his and I figure it's worth a shot. This toy is a teething ring we've had for them for I don't know how long. It's blue and made of rubber and has these five little things around the outside. I offer it to him, but he isn't impressed. I grip one of the little doodads in my teeth and suddenly it's a lot more interesting. He reaches for it and we start up a game of "Here-ya-go, no-ya-don't" as I alternately present and hide it by swinging my head around. I'm getting dizzy, but he's also got a tiny smile on his face which is a step up from the somber eye-rubbing he'd been doing up to that point.

We continue to play our little game when suddenly I get the strangest feeling of connection to this little toy. Like Richard Dreyfus with a pile of mashed potatoes, I keep feeling this means something. This is important. This squishy little ring has become the one thing he might be interested in besides keeping daddy up and, somehow, we're bonding over it.

He lets me sit down without too much fuss and we shift the game from "Here-ya-go, no-ya-don't" to "Gimme-that, now-take-it-back" as he quietly takes the toy from my hand, then replaces it over and over again. All the while I can feel him calming down. After a time we're just sitting on the couch. He's on my lap, pressing his snuggle blanket to his cheek and I'm whispering and singing to him and feeling confused at how he could tear me away from my bed in the middle of the night but still cause such deep and incredible stirrings in my heart. I feel overwhelmed that I can love him so much despite all the lost sleep and sacrifices on his behalf, but in all reality I realize that it's probably because of those sacrifices that I can love him so much. I'm starting to understand what love is.

Since I became a parent I've started to realize more and more what true love means and how truly and deeply our Heavenly Father must love us to have done so much for us. Danielle and I talk about this all the time and compare God's Plan of Salvation to parenthood. We make the most mundane and ordinary things our boys do into an allegory that reveals deeper principles about God's will for us. The stairs become the Law of Chastity. A bump on the head teaches us about adversity. Their cries as we take away a toy reveals an eternal perspective on death. God must know what he's doing because this all makes too much sense to be an accident.

Eventually the kid let me lay him down and he went back to sleep. Honestly I don't even know which one it was. What matters is he's asleep and I'm still up typing out my random thoughts when I have to be to work in... looks like four hours now.

Posting this will have to wait until I can do a quick proof-read in the morning, but for some reason I had to get this out tonight. I don't post very often (much to Danielle's chagrin), and I especially don't make a habit of staying up late to write about my feelings. Tonight, though, I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep again until I got this all down. If this helps someone out there, then I'll consider my work to be done. If not, then I just hope I can find time for a nap tomorrow.

If anyone reading this ever has questions about what Danielle and I believe, just ask us. There's not much in life I enjoy more than talking about my religion. If you'd rather not hear me ramble on and on you can visit mormon.org to learn more about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of course, if you talk to me there's a free book in it for ya!

Ok, time to sleep. Good night!

PS: And, for the record, I tried to find a picture of that teething ring we were playing with on the internet, but after all my searching I couldn't find a single one. It's kinda like that story you hear where a broke couple gets a merciful meal from the nice old lady in apartment 4A only to hear from the super, "No one has lived in 4A for 20 years." Maybe the toy was an angel in disguise or maybe I'm not so good with the Google Fu at four... check that, FIVE in the morning. Either way I'll call it a tender mercy that it worked. Now, for real, my pillow is missing me.

Tubby Hubby THursday

... a day late. My work has been occupying the bulk of my time recently, so other more enjoyable pursuits have fallen by the wayside. BUT, in order to not let a good idea go to waste (as is my wont) I've decided to share a tidbit I've picked up. Those of you with smartphones know the joy of predictive text. My keyboard of choice is Swiftkey. It provides three (usually excellent) guesses at what I'm trying to say. It not only predicts what word I'm currently typing, it will try to guess what word I'm likely to type next. Don't ask me how it does this because I'll probably guess magnets. My scientific ignorance aside, it's a VERY handy tool, but it does sometimes make some odd guesses. I'd never thought much about it until I came across this comic at XKCD.com (used and modified without any permission whatsoever):

If it doesn't seem very funny it's because it's not. I've truncated the final panel in hopes of keeping our blog mostly "G" rated, but it poses an interesting question: When given the opportunity and no real constraints, what does my go-to technological sidekick think I'm most likely to say? While typing the three guesses appear in a row directly above my keyboard. In general the middle guess is the primary; if I hit space my phone will insert whatever word appears there automatically. The one on the right seems to be the next most-accurate, followed by the one on the left.


I've run three tests, one each for the guesses on the left, right, and middle. All I'm doing is mashing the next predicted word that comes up in that slot until I hit a period or it continues into an infinite loop. 


Middle (main): "I am a beautiful person."


Right (secondary): "If you're a star, but the best of all time to meet your family and I have to say."


Left (tertiary): "The following item is in a bit more about it, and I am not a bigger club, or the information you have a look."


Well there you have it. Jesse's three "typical" sentences. I don't know that I've ever uttered or texted the phrase "I am a beautiful person," but my phone seems to think I need some self-affirmation from time to time. As for the others, I didn't say they'd make sense. I only said magnets.


NOW, comes the audience participation: If you have a smartphone with a predictive keyboard like this, please post a comment with what your phone thinks you'd like to tell the world. I'll be interested to see what comes up. Feel free to offer interpretations/explanations/excuses/apologies along with your sentences.


If you don't have a predictive keyboard, Swiftkey is the best one I've found and only costs a couple bucks. That's less than the cost of 30cc's of gasoline, so pony up. Click here to download it for Android. Sorry, no iOS/WP7/BB love, but go see what you can find and POST THOSE COMMENTS! Check back every so often. There could be some good stuff.


PS: If any of our MANY (i.e. 3) readers is wondering what happened to "The Retroactivity" post from last week, I got to doing it and realized I have almost nothing to say (and certainly nothing entertaining to say) about past events. For whatever reason it didn't seem worth pursuing. If you'd like me to do it, post that in the comments as well and I'll be happy to oblige. Otherwise onward and upward.

Happy Birthday!

Happy 27th Birthday to the man

Who makes me laugh

Who works hard so I can play
Who is my super hero

Who saved (most of) our kitchen from the dreaded fire

Who does things in the name of SCIENCE!

Who helps push me through school

And who loves unconditionally.

I am one lucky girl to be married to the most handsome, courteous, doting, funny, and loving man I know.

The Bi-Annual Husband Post

Well folks, it's that time of decade again; the time where birds hush their warbly tune, dogs and cats go out for drinks together, and planets align causing the Provo River to rise imperceptibly.

Yup. Time for a husband post.

I've been very blessed in my lifetime. Blessings of friends, family, opportunity, health. All the biggies. I've especially been blessed with an amazing wife. Why is she so amazing, you may ask? Well let me give you a few reasons.

1) She married me. That's not just fortunate for all parties involved, it also proves she has impeccable taste.

2) She looks beautiful all the time. No, seriously. I'm typing this in bed with her asleep next to me, and ya know what? She's freaking gorgeous. You know what's even cooler than a beautiful wife sleeping next to you? Knowing she's going to look JUST AS GORGEOUS in the morning. How does that even work? Physically, it shouldn't be possible. If you get a chance to listen to the Bruno Mars song "Just the Way You Are" it pretty much sums up what it's like being married to Danielle (plus it's pretty catchy).

3) She's going to be a fantastic mom. She just is. She loves kids and is great with them. They kind of flock to her during our calling in nursery. They might just be flocking away from me, but I like to think they're flocking to her. Flock flock flock. That's a weird word.

And number 4) She puts up with me. Here's where the REAL purpose of this post comes into play. I've been known to talk her ear off about this, that, or the other thing in which she has zero interest. Usually it's something technological like a new smartphone, laptop, router firmware, or something of that geeky sort. But this time....

This time....

Ok, it's still something technological. But I've worn out my "Wearying Husband Credits" for the month (That's the currency in which I measure my wife's patience for listening to a particular topic. I call them "Glazies" for the look she gets in her eyes). Now because I've worn out my Glazies for the month (and possibly the entire Q1 of 2011), you get to hear about my latest technological obsession.

The Nook Color

Da daaaaa...

Ok, I'm not a super "booky" person. I have to confess that in a given year I'll probably read 2-3 fiction books and 4-5 nonfiction on a GREAT year. This new obsession of mine is only marginally associated with reading books. It really has much more to do with the "Gee Whiz"-ical expression that creeps across my face at every new advancement in technology.

What it is: The Nook Color is the latest e-reader from Barnes & Noble. It's designed primarily to purchase and consume books, magazines, & newspapers, but has the added bonus of a full-color LCD screen, WiFi connectivity to the internet, a music/movie player, and expandable memory.

Why I want it: To hack it and make it more awesome.

It's simple: Everyone drools over the iPad, which is certainly a drool-worthy device, but it's completely and hopelessly out of my price-range at $499 for the most basic model. What the Nook Color offers is a slightly less polished experience for half that price. With a seemingly minor hack it can be unlocked into a full-fledged android tablet to compete with the Samsung Galaxy Tab which rings in at around the $500-600 mark.

To sum up some of the most important points:

- The screen is a 7" 1024x600 IPS Capacitive Touchscreen Display that displays 169 pixels per inch. That's a decent step above the pixel density of the iPad at 132 ppi.

- It's got the same 800 MHz processors as the Droid 2 & Droid X smartphones

- The 4000 mAh battery can provide up to 8 hours of constant use on a single charge.

- It can read & possibly even edit Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, & PowerPoint), and can play back an impressive array of video & audio formats.

But honestly, the biggest reason I want it is because I am honestly, obviously, notably, notoriously, and unapologetically a gigantic nerd who loves toys. There are hundreds of things it can do that would actually make life easier by streamlining things with school and work, but my biggest reason for wanting this thing is because it's awesome.

Well, I've started saving my pennies. One day she will be mine, but until that day comes I have to yearn from afar.

Thanks for listening.