miracle chip

Over the weekend following Christmas 2012 a small miracle occurred.  It took me these past two months to finally get around to taking this picture so I could post about it properly.

After a good day of skiing at Snow Basin, I sat with Maddeline at the bottom of the hill waiting for some of our other siblings to finish their last run.  We found some chairs and we sat down and relaxed a bit, loosened our boots, took of our gloves.  ....

Thirty minutes later we were in the car driving home when I realized that my wedding ring wasn't on my finger!!  Freaking out I soon realized that it must have come off when I took my gloves off there at the base.  There was zero chance of just looking around and finding it since I had taken my gloves on and off several times at the end of the day.  I resigned my self to just crying over it and telling myself that we'd check the lost and found the next day.

Well the next day we didn't actually go to Snow Basin, but to Powder Mountain, which was a really awesome ski day.  So the following day we were back at Snow Basin and as the day ended I went over the the lost and found and asked if they had my ring.  The conversation went something like this;

"Was there a men's wedding ring turned in here a couple days ago?"
"A silver one?"
"Well it's actually cobalt, but it looks like silver."
"When did you loose it"
"uh... 2 days ago"
"Yeah, I saw it here earlier today"

at this point I got really excited, but then he spent like 4 minutes rummaging through boxes and lost items saying, "I thought I saw it here...."

Finally they found the piece of paper they had taped it to, told me that someone found it on the ground near the base lodge.  The base there at Snow Basin is not just snow like many other resorts, but paved with bricks, so my ring picked up a souvenir of being kicked around on bricks, and I call that souvenir my miracle chip.  You can see it on the rim at about the 8 o'clock position in this picture.

On a slightly related note, my ring is made out of Cobalt, not as ridiculously hard as tungsten or as strong as titanium, but still hard and very strong, and it has a more silvery color that matches white gold well.  On the inside is lightly etched 'Cobalt 24" which you can partially see here:

I love my ring.

work

It has been quite some time since I blogged. I have found more useful things to fill my time, mostly I got a job and they pay me to sit at a computer, so I don't do as much here at home.

I work at Anderson Engineering, it is a civil engineering firm that specializes in environmental remediation, but also does all general civil/survey stuff.  By 'general civil/survey' I mean road design, site layout and design, parcel surveys, and so on and so forth.  I however do not really work with anything general civil-ly or survy-ey, I am part of the Kennecott team and I just do environmental analysis, remediation, sampling, and reporting.  I really love my job.  I get to learn all kinds of things about Kennecott and their copper mining operation here in Salt Lake Valley.  I also do a lot of computer work, database management, map making/editing, and again, report writing.

Out side of working everyday I play StarCraft, I watch TV shows (Bones, Eureka, Doctor Who) with Stephanie.  We obviously expecting a baby in a month, which is a big deal.  Perhaps when he is born I'll actually update this blog from time to time with stuff about being a dad... but perhaps I won't.

That's not all my life, but that's all for now.

Sunday Edition : Hymns

Today in church we sang four hymns that have strange but significant meaning to me personally. I thought it was pretty amazing that ALL of them I have a special (if not strange) connection to so I decided to write about it.

Three of the hymns have connections to my mission, first God Speed the Right. A line in this song, "If we fail we fail with glory" meant something to my MTC companion and he mentioned it a few times, in a testimony once I believe, so it always reminds me of him. Next was We Sing All Hail, which has a particular line, "... and bruised the serpent's head" which is in reference to God's promise to Satan given at the fall of Adam, "and he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Moses 4:21) Meaning that Christ will have power over Satan. This line was brought to my attention by one of my favorite people in the MTC, and when I sing this song I always think of him. Finally, Gently Raise the Sacred Strain, became one of my favorite hymns in the middle of my mission when it mysteriously became stuck in my head, and I studied the words and learned so much about the importance of the sabbath day. I used the hymn as the basis for a wonderful talk I gave a few months later.

The fourth song we sang wasn't a mission related song, but has even more meaning.  #166, Abide with Me was sung as the closing hymn at my grandpa's funeral in January, 2006.  Since then I has been one of the most special hymns in my life, and I will never forget it's importance since I almost cry any time I sing it.

I'm a Mormon

The Church published this today.  I'm mormon and I'm proud of it, more than just proud of it, I love being mormon!  I really liked this info-graphic and I think it's worth sharing, so here it is.  

Some of the things I love the most about being mormong is counting myself among those who pray daily, attend church weekly, and know more than most people about the Bible and religion in general.  Also I love how much I get to learn about Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.

photography

Sometime I just like to post pictures.  For more details about our trip to Moab and Arches National Park, see our family blog post.

Delicate Arch

Alex is in the picture if you look carefully.

Fly

The Balancing Rock

The background is really amazing in this photo... as is my beautiful wife.

a shoe print we followed for almost 6 miles

... talk about blue.

learning

I had a great weekend watching General Conference.  It was truly wonderful.  I may have more to say later, but for now I just wanted to make a small confession:  I don't usually listen to women speakers.  Not that I think they're completely boring or anything, but their talks are usually centered on young women or women in general and I don't feel it really applies to me at all.

However, this conference perhaps the single most meaningful talk to me what this one from Sister Elaine S. Dalton.  And since I loved it so much, here it is.



Isn't lds.org great?  one day after conference and you can embed videos.

A new Blog

So we have a new blog.  I will still use this one to voice random opinions, mostly relating to football and other random things.  But the Murray Family Blog, posted on by myself and by beautiful wife.  If you'd like to check it out:

http://smmurray.blogspot.com/

Go there to see about our new house and our recent trip to washington.

Cruising

Not our boat.  but this is.

Serenity Bay on Disney's private island... notice how serene.

Queen's Staircase, an escape route from the Fort/Palace on Nassau (the capital of the Bahamas)

Goofy's Mini-Golf around the stern

Serious game of billiards

Sailing

Basketball

I was just standing there in the water and these guys came swimming up to me!

Swimming (snorkeling) with the fishes

and finally...
Disney World

and if that wasn't enough for you here's some more pictures and descriptions
Stephanie's blog
Photobook
Kacy's blog
Coleen's blog

Graduation

April 22, 2011 aprox. 12:15 pm:

Stephanie and I graduated from Brigham Young University.  The weekend was filled with fun, family, and celebrations.  Both of our families were in town, a party was held for the graduates (including Erin), and we began the strange goodbyes to 'college life,' the only life we've know outside of home.

It really was an exciting weekend, but the full force of it didn't come until the next week when we slept in as long as we wanted, then did nothing all day except apply to jobs.  We now enter quite the strange unknown world of 'real life.'

Wii

For Christmas Stephanie and I were blessed to get the curse of a Wii from her parents.  I say curse because all of our spare time is now spent not on catching up in classes, but playing Mario!!  (it's not quite that bad, but I am wary of the entrapment that it represents).

For the last couple weeks we've been involving ourselves in playing Super Mario Bros Wii, and I just realized that we did a pretty good job of beating the game in just a few weeks (we started Sunday Jan. 1) considering: we did it together, we never played by ourselves (we each had our own games for when we were home alone).  We went through every world, although we did earn the trip to some world-skipping cannons, we went back and beat every castle the levels.  We even spent some time playing finding missed star coins and earning extra lives in World 1.  

And for the visual enjoyment of all.  This is how you beat Bowser.  You avoid one half of the screen while not falling into the lava.

And how do you do it?  (notice the mario in the above pic?  yeah, you pretty much have to fly.)

and now you're older still....

I often have made fun of old people.  In my mind there are endless jests toward students who have children, and those who show obvious signs of having a wife watching over them.  I know several engineering students who often mention, my wife made me do this, I need to do that for my wife....  

Living my own life, making my own decisions, that is a symbol of my youth and independence.  Old people are made old by losing their independence, first by marriage, then by the baby in the baby carriage.  

So often have I scorned the student eating the sandwich his wife made, pulling it out of a plastic tupperware, along with a yogurt and spoon.  All carefully packaged with the care only a woman could possibly have for lunch.

......

Such were my thoughts today as I put my plastic tupperware back into my backpack and thought, I'M OLD!!!    though I don't wish anything else, since being married is so much better than single life, and the 'loss of independence' really isn't bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQd4tAQJT_M

if you like it...

So I haven't posted in a long time. I've been pretty busy with life lately. Primarily school has been consuming my time. I have 8am classes everyday, so I try to get to bed early, and I get up and go and go go go all day long trying to finish everything. I've been doing pretty good thus far keeping up with all of my homework and understanding all of the material in my classes... except maybe Geology (which is where I sit now) I just asume that it's easy stuff, which it ends up being not so easy, hmm oh well.

Other than school I have had the exciting adventure of dating a beautiful girl in my ward, Stephanie. As you might have guessed by the included picture, we are now engaged, as of last tuesday. It has surely been a time investment dating her, spending many late nights talking and getting to know each other. One week ago I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. Some people say getting engaged is scary, some people say it can be stressful or hard... I think it's the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

School is now coming to an end, we only have 2 full weeks of school left and then it's on to spring, a wedding, and a summer (where Steph and I will just be working) and to me it sounds like one big adventure. "To live would be an awfully big adventure"

I can't help...

I'm posting today about nothing in particular. I wish I had more time to do everything. Yeah I'm sitting on campus wasting the next ten minutes writing this post, but I really don't have much else I could be doing right now. Some things take large blocks of time, like structural analysis work for example. One problem takes me about 30 min to complete, and half of that is just understanding the question. Therefore for me to start working on my structures homework right now, I'd get started and in 20 minutes I'd have to go to class and then later tonight I'd practically be starting over again thinking about what the problem is asking me to solve and how to do it. I could study for my stats test, but pretty much this first chapter has been so super easy that I'm not sure what there is to study. Finding averages is something I think I learned in like 5th grade. And so I will continue to sit here.

As of late I've been spending an extraordinarily large amount of time with a certain person, Stephanie. Pretty much if I'm not in class or sleeping (or when she's in class or sleeping) we're together. Its nice to have a constant companion like that, not one of force, but one I've chosen myself. In fact, to be honest, she's my girlfriend, and having not dated much it doesn't mean much when I say that I've never enjoyed being with someone as much as I do her, but I still say it. An interesting thought I had the other day was about some advice from my dad. He doesn't give me advice everyday, but the things he tells me are often very precise, measured, and direct advice for struggles I'm facing (and they're often accompanied by a general conference talk or BYU devotional that deals with the same subject). His dating advice has come to me in chunks over the years, and one of the most memorable sparked not by a talk or experience of his own, but by an Adam Sandler movie, '50 First Dates.' He has told me the message of making your [significant other] fall in love with you everyday is one of the best he has ever seen in a movie. As I pondered on that thought I realized that giving Steph a reason to fall in love with me every day is not something I've worked at yet... but that's because it's come naturally. Again, the limited time (two weeks of dating) may present a less than adequate knowledge, but I feel pretty optimistic for the future.

emo day!

There comes a day in every young man's life that he just has to sit down and listen to some Dashboard Confessional... Today is that day (okay, so maybe one of the many of mine, but still). There's not one particular reason for my emo-ness today, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

I keep meaning to write in here, but nothing I think about stays in my mind long enough to be transferred to type. Some of my thoughts recently though include:

-Fair-weather fans whom I hate. Not just those who leave a game with 5 minutes to go, but those who only cheer for winning teams in general, sure we have a national recognized football team, but what about our women's volleyball team or cross country, they rock too and deserve to be cheered for just as much.

-Hearing really awkward clips of conversations of random passerbys. Things like, "...pills and it's like drug use..." or "... buy a new baseball bat, come over to your house and beat you with it!"

-Dating... yes girls and their ever complex minds still intrigue me, as do my own reactions to them.

-Surprised at how much I didn't really miss my friends over the thanksgiving break, not that I don't love them, but I just enjoyed being with my family so much that I kinda forgot to think about my super awesome friends (who I believe were equally absorbed into their family activities).

and I've been thinking about myself a lot lately too. Thinking about how cool I am, about the cool stuff I've done lately, about the cool classes I'm taking or will be taking, about how arrogant I am and how obnoxious I must seem to others, how much I talk when I shouldn't and keep silent when I should talk, how I'm dirt poor, how life's quickly escalating complicatedness is by far a much larger foe than I could ever hope to defeat.... hence the emo. w00t.

yes, this is me playing frisbee on the beach ^_^

And this is an 'A' for Ako (tagalog for 'me') Awesome, Ace, and an all around nice guy ;-)

The Best Bad Day

Today could have been the worst day ever... it's 12:07 am, I just got home from campus, and I'm making Western Family Macaroni and Cheese for dinner. I recently spent 5.5 hours in one chair, staring at a computer screen, editing a horribly filmed movie.
Earlier in the day I had spent 2 other hours in the same chair, editing the same movie.
A girl of my dreams canceled our noon-date to the MOA (I love the MOA...)
I got a 69% on my religion test (that puts my testimony at about a C-)
I have a huge and rather hard test for my Electrical & Computer Engineering class tomorrow. Today I had no time to study for it.
I hate the library, not that it's a bad place, I just avoid going there to study. Today I spent half of my waking hours there... I think I want to cry, not even kidding.

Why wasn't today the worst day of my life?
I talked to the girl of my dreams (I know, call me a sap, but those ten minutes did make my day that much better)
I wasted an hour talking with an old friend... a good hour.
I got to talk about sailing for half an hour :-) I love sailing.
I got to iChat with my little sister K.com (she gave me some instructions on video editing)
I used Final Cut Pro on a MacPro ^_^
I am currently listening to the new Dashboard CD, eating Mac&Cheese, and talking with the ever beautiful Katherine Alice Affeltranger. w00t

I ended up with a 75% on that ECEn test, and our movie won 3 awards at our ward Oscar's night; best visual effects, best costume design, best actress, w00t

Photons

I didn't cry when my I found out my grandpa died (though I did at the funeral).
I didn't cry when my first 'love' broke up with me (though I wanted to).
I didn't cry when I got fired from the best job ever.
I didn't cry when my girlfriend of five months broke up with me.

I did cry after seeing my best friend for the first time in a year.

Over this past year he's led a life that I don't agree with, a lifestyle that he actually begun about four years ago. He turned 23 this week, making it four years since he turned 19 and decided not to go on a mission, about a year later he turned 20, and turned gay. A bounce house of events moved him from SUU to UVU, back home to Elk Ridge, and finally up to UofU. I saw him a year ago when I first came back down to Utah for school, and hadn't seen him since though we have continued to acknowledge each others existence through facebook, commenting on statuses and pictures and the like.

Yesterday, I went up to Salt Lake (Sugarhouse to be exact) and visited him at his work (Olive Garden). I went at a slow hour so he has plenty of time to talk with me, we talked about school, classes, majors, how different life is now than in high school. We didn't really talk about anything super important, but we talked, and that is what I feel was important. Another old friend of ours works there at the same place, she gave me dinner and cheese cake for free (I will forever love you Loni for that), and I left. I got in the car, started driving home, thinking about how much I fun I'd just had and within six blocks I was crying. I honestly don't know why. I suppose it was partly because I was so happy to have seen them, partly because I was again remembering my great love for them, and perhaps partly I was sad that we weren't better friends.

I want to let it be know that I do not find fault in him, I do not feel betrayed or that he is a bad person. Simply stated, my own beliefs in the gospel of Jesus Christ tell me that the decisions he has made are not the ones that will bring greatest happiness, but I do not expect anyone else to live their life by what I believe, they would then be living my life, and that would just be weird, I believe in agency .... more on that subject: next post.

thoughts on the meaning of: Love

About a month ago I had a long (17hr) drive to entertain myself through, and I choose to listen to the book on CD, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (that's the seventh and final book, fyi). Sadly that book is much longer than 17 hours, and I didn't get a chance to read the rest of it until about a week ago. As I finished the book one evening I took interest in the attitude of Harry towards death, pain, and torture. For Mr. Potter it was not a bad thing to die, it was not hard to endure painful attacks and physical torture. It really hardly affected him at all. What did have a profound effect on him was the suffering and torture of his close friends and loved ones. An interesting theme in our modern media. Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 3 does all he can to avoid allowing his enemies to learn his true identity, preserving (he hopes) his wife's safety. I think that most people, despite their outward appearance or showing of selfishness, would act similarly valuing the safety of those they love above themselves, for that I believe is the definition of love. If there is a person that you are pained to see suffer, it's quite clear that your affections for them high, high enough to the point of being called love. It was later that night, after I had finished the book (don't worry everyone, Harry wins, in case you were wondering) that I talked with a friend that was suffering, having a bad day, and in need of a friend. Being aware of this friend's suffering and knowing there was simply nothing I could do one way or another to help alleviate it in anyway caused me to feel quite sad indeed. I began to realize the truthfulness that J. K. Rowling had endeavored to capture in what seems to be one of the central themes of Harry Potter, true friendship, and perhaps the true meaning of love.

I have had an interesting experience myself with the word love. Growing up I had the greatest friends a boy could ask for. I kid you not in any way, I would guess that the cumulative amount of true friendship that I had (the quality and the quantity) surpasses that of anyone reading this blog. Not that I'm bragging, I didn't have anything to do with it, the Lord gave them too me. I was forced away from those friends at the height of our friendship, and it was only then that I realized my love for them. Having know them for ~13 years, I realized that I had never once told any of them that I love them. After that I signed all my letters, "Love, Michael" and I began to let them know that I did in fact love them as much as possible. When I finally gained the opportunities to be with them again, I found that the phrase "I love you" became a common line in my vocabulary. Since then I have continued to use that phrase, and although sometimes with less or more meaning, I do not say it lightly, and those I say it to are those I would risk my life for.

I feel like I have more to say, however I cannot think of just what more to add here... friends, I love you.

Day 7

Sunday:Boeing
My family was invited to attend Boeing Family days from my Sisters in-laws, the Grahams. We left after church and went to the Everett Boeing Factory, the larges building (by volume) in the world! Where they have production lines for their 747, 777, and 787 among others. We got a little glimpse of the new, up and coming 747-8 a new aircraft to be released within the next year as well as the new 787 the first plane built with a carbon fiber fuselage. They told us that taking pictures was not allowed, but we all know how good I am at following rules so:

That green thing is the 747-8 in final inspection-->


and here's a 777 being sold to EVA air. EVA is a Taiwanese company that I actually rode to and from the Philippines \/

Day 6

Saturday: Movie Making
This actually only took about 2 hours to film all we needed and a couple hours on Sunday to clip it all together. ENJOY (click here to go to the YouTube file of this video)

Other than that I went shopping on Saturday, got some new white shirts for work, a black belt, and a new wallet. This time I didn't get a big thick, fill with junk wallet, but a small, simple, hold-your-ID-and-some-cash wallet. I'm really excited to start using it, it's just so nice and small and makes me happy ^_^

Day 4

Thursday: not camping
So today my mom wanted to go camping. There's a really nice state park nearby that she loves to visit and she wanted to go there, stay the night and come back Friday. Great plan except she didn't make reservations at the relatively small campground and we ended up going there, visiting the visitors center (a great place for visitors to visit... really), walking in the tidelands a bit and having a picnic lunch. Not bad for an afternoon. When Kacy got off work her and I went on a quick kayaking trip. We ran into a rather swelly ocean... at is an ocean with large swells, large for the Puget Sound at least, I think we saw some that were nearly three feet! something I've never really seen much of before hear since the area is so bay-y... or rather, has many bays. :-D