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.

Gray

So in titling this post I had to pause and decide if I should use 'grey' or 'gray'.  For some reason I'm much more partial to 'grey' but the "traditional american spelling" is 'gray' so we'll stick with that.

So in (approximately) 10 days and 22 hrs BYU will host (presumably) nationally ranked Oregon State in BYU's annual homecoming game.  This is a special game because BYU head coach Bronco Mendenhall is a graduate and former assistant coach of Oregon St.  Also it will be the cougars first real test since barely loosing to Boise St. and the first of three huge and difficult games that make up the meat of BYU's schedule this year.

Finally, it is also the first time that BYU will not wear white, or blue as their primary color.  I'd like to say that BYU has been a uni-staple, but between 1999 and 2004 they went a little crazy with uniform ideas, but in 2005 settled back down into the tradition.  This month all that tradition gets a little tweaking with a (jumping on the bandwagon) black out.

In the uni-watching world we call this BFBS, and black for black's sake is generally frowned upon, as is grey for grey's sake, or pretty much using any color that isn't one of your team's official colors.  But I don't care, these uniforms are gonna rock.  Why? because I said so.  While this comes as a surprise, it's not quite as jaw-dropping since the idea was leaked back in April.

All this thought of BYU uniforms makes me want to compile an awesome database of their uniforms... but for now I'll leave you with the beautiful pictures of BFBS.

You're probably wondering why I called this post Gray, well it's because of this beauty.  That grey with the blue!  ohh it is soooo good!!! I LOVE IT!  if they did one thing right here, it's the use of grey.  boom.

Oil

For some reason I love this logo, like a lot.

For those of you who don't know about former NFL teams, this is the logo of the (since moved to Tennessee,) Houston Oilers (and being in Tennessee where there's no oil, the became the Titans... go figure).

The logo is just simple, nicely colored, and it says a lot about Houston, Texas, the oil industry, and the history of all those.  It's just cool, and you never see it around anymore because the new Houston football team chose worse colors and an ugly logo.  So I decided to memorial-ize the Houston oil derrick as a 3D sketch, 'cause I do that.

BOOM

I know, it's pretty cool, right?  I worked pretty  hard on that... ok, like 3 hours maybe.  It's actually a REALLY complicated structure to model without proper structural design software (I use a free google product).



On a completely unrelated note:  I was at wal*mart a couple weeks ago when I saw huge boxes of cereal on sale (huge as in almost 2 lbs).  I bought some not knowing that my wife wouldn't eat Reece's Puffs, and I didn't really think I'd get sick of them.... but 2 lbs of cereal last like a month!

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.

Po-po-police-ece-ece

So today the BYU Police Beat intern from the Daily Universe must have gotten back from summer vacation because they just tweeted a million and two police beat lines, dating way back to last year even.  Anyhow, if you don't follow them on twitter do so (if you don't have twitter do so first, and follow me while you're at it) it's quite funny to hear about the mischievous deeds committed on BYU campus.  

Today though as I watched the many, many tweets roll in I began thinking... why do they have a police beat?  So many of them are so ridiculous, and stupid, and pointless.  I remember while I was a student making fun of the campus police due to the stupid calls they had to respond to.  Today however I began to see that it's not the police that are stupid, it's the people calling in these things that are the idiots, and perhaps the police beat is being published to let people know that not every suspicious looking person is a rapist.

If you think about it, there are kids attending BYU who have just come from very dangerous places.  People who grew up in inner cities and/or downtowns of pretty much any large city will have been close to murders, rapes, gang fights, and all sorts of cray stuff.  Coming directly to happy valley, you might not realize that those things only happen once every few years in Provo.  A lot of people are paranoid and worried about these horrible things happening to them, but the BYU police beat is there reminding students every week, that those kids hiding under windows are probably playing hide & seek.  Here are some tweets from today that I think might be a hint to those paranoid people that you don't have to call everything into campus police.

• There was a call reporting two suspicious people sleeping on a sidewalk. Officers arrived and discovered they were not sleeping and were not on the sidewalk. They were lying on the grass talking to each other.
• A middle-aged man was reported laying in the grass with his shirt off outside Helaman Halls. The man was not breaking any laws so officers let him be.
• A person was reported to be lurking in the shadows at 67th and Wymount at 12am. It was a lost parent of a tenant.
• A female tenant looked out her kitchen window and saw a guy dressed in dark clothing staring back at her. Officers were called to the scene, but couldn’t locate anyone matching the description.

It seems to me that the police beat (while containing some useful information) is used primarily to try to get less pointless calls made to campus police, and also to get people to lock up their bikes (maybe double lock, and maybe take the front tire into your house).

Vacationeering

I've largely neglected writing on this blog over the summer, but that's only because everything I've done has been more of a family affair, and so Steph and I posted about our vacations on our family blog, http://smmurray.blogspot.com/

So check that out to see some of our amazing vacation photos.  :-)

Also I am getting really excited for college football season, just 16 more days... AHH!!