Friend wheel

Years ago I played around with a facebook app called "Friend Wheel" which generates a rainbow colored circle arrangement of your friends and shows the links between each of them (if they're friends or not).  When you mouse over someone's name it highlight's their connections and displays a number of how many connections they have within the circle.  When I first discovered this I found that I had the most number of common friends with one, Melanie Tess Hansen, a girl who had been in my high school, and also in my freshman ward at BYU.  My roommate had also been a high school friend, but he wasn't' a big user of facebook, so he ranked some 40 or 50 common friends less.  The runner up to Melanie (if I remember correctly) was Steffanie Meyer, also a friend from high school and was dating one of my freshman roommates.

Then I went on a mission and made lots of friends there, but facebook wasn't used much in the philippines at the time.  When I came home I became fb friends with lots of my american companions and mission buddies, and over the course of about a year, many of the filipinos I knew also got on facebook and extended my friend connections there.

For the next two years I roomed with one of my original roommates from my freshman year, and to my surprise of of my next door neighbors was a friend from my mission.  A girl from my post-mission ward became my girlfriend and then my fianceé and now my wife.  This is how all those people stack up now:

Melanie Hansen - 120
Chris Taney - 154
Steffanie Meyer Reece - 105
Cameron Reece - 140
Austin Lund - 169
Stephanie Ashby Murray - 104
Erin Murray Herd - 106
David Hyde - 125

(The significance of these last two is one is my sister, Davis is a friend from the mission and I'm sure we only have mission/filipino friends in common.)

Just interesting food for though.

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

Wed

I'm married!!!

For those of you missing the meaning of the post about the milk, I got married on June 18th to the most beautiful girl ever! After our wedding we went to Brian Head, UT and spent the weekend there. We hiked around a bit durring the day and sat down on the ski lift to take this picture.

One of the highlights of our thip was having the restaurant staff guess that we were newlyweds and giving us free dessert! That's not all though, the free dessert we got was an amazing churro covered cheesecake!! whick was, needless to say, delicious.

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Brigham

It is reported that President Brigham Young once said that he who takes offense when no offense was intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense was intended is usually a fool.

Face it with a smile

This is a somewhat exaggerated view-point, and just a compilation of thoughts I once had (written Feb. 7).  I am re-posting it now (June 8), because I don't believe in surpression of the press.


Today I had some deep thoughts about a friend of mine. This friend has a problem, a problem not commonly seen as a problem, but over the past several months I have grown to know this friend, and even more so in recent weeks, and I have grown painfully aware of this problem of hers. She has a problem with sarcasm. Do not think I am criticizing anyone for being sarcastic, I am a strong advocate of sarcasm and its many uses in our life (I think that life has a way of being sarcastic itself), I have just seen that for this friend of mine sarcasm has become somewhat of a problem and hinderance in her life.

I watched her today struggle slightly in relating some of her feelings, her true thoughts and emotions that she was trying to express were still masked behind her consistent sarcastic stream. It was not only today that I began to see this problem. Recently in her life she has been experiencing some very important growing experiences, times requiring a serious face and a mature attitude, and while she has continued to laughingly postpone some of these there have been those where she has forcefully swallowed her habits and become a serious person for the moment. Today she again fightingly got through a serious situation and was reasonably serious, though her sarcastic slips are what opened my mind to her problem and the struggle she faces.

I applaud her for her effort, I hope that she will be able to have the experiences necessary to help her overcome this problem, not to rid herself entirely of sarcasm, but perhaps some slightly better control over it :-)

13 days

At work on saturday I was dutifully stocking the milk when I noticed this 'best if used by date' and took a picture. I said outloud, "19 June, I'll be married by the time this milk expires!"

it's that close.

The Cs

I haven't blogged for ages, and I wish I had more time to do so. Quite honestly I spend more time with Steph, and I don't really care that I don't blog so much. Anyhow, after this evenings game I wanted to stick my neck out with a prediction: there will be no three-peat for Kobe and the Lakers. Yeah, that's right the defending champs are surely going to be taken down this year. By who? you might ask, well clearly not the Magic since Superman can't seem to manage his team enough to stop the Celtics. So yes it is the Celtics who I pick in 6 games over the Magic and then in 7 games over the Lakers.
I chose this for several reasons. 1) Green is a much better color than Yellow. 2) When your team all-star has an off night you struggle, if Kobe is ever not on top of his game the other Lakers struggle, but can often pull through. When Paul Pierce struggles you've got KG. When Garnett is having a tough night, you've got Ray Allen (who happens to be #3 having come from Seattle, my hometown-team). Lets say the defense is really hammering them all that night, up steps Rasheed Wallace and Rajon Rondo, all wonderful players, all of them all-stars (or soon to be), and that is why the Celtics will win.