Blogging and me

Family a few years ago. Since this picture was taken, two more nephews have been added to the family and one brother-in-law. Also, two sisters have been sold off, causing great gain to family morale and finances.

I'm kinda new at this blogging thing. In fact, until recently, I considered blogging for older, married people (these two go together, being single means you're young, married: old, and married with kids: really old - Sorry Kip and Katie, but congrats again on becoming really old). Recently, however, I stumbled upon an underground movement of hip, young, cool people who have blogs. So I thought, I'm hip, young and cool, I like underground things, maybe I could blog. Then, after talking with some of these bloggers, I decided I'd give it a try. So that's the basic story of my starting a blog.


It turns out, starting a blog means lots of decisions...some of which I wasn't really ready to make-this includes naming your blog and choosing a template. I'm told I can change these later, so that made it less stressful. I picked a random template, and called the blog "This blog was made for reading", mainly so I wouldn't make two mistakes. One, so I would remember I should probably try and make it at least somewhat interesting since people will (possibly) be reading it, and two, to remind myself that this is not a private journal, if I write it, people may actually read it, so be careful self, don't write too much of what you don't want known.

My plan for this blog will probably change pretty often. Secretly, I'm not much for talking about myself, which is what I think you're supposed to do on a blog, so I decided I would ramble about nothing instead. Then I remembered this blog was made for reading, and random ramblings might get old. Since I recently started a new phase in my life (graduate school at Michigan), I decided maybe I could use the blog to keep old friends and family (old refers to friends, not family, I still hang out with the same family as I did when I was younger) up to date, and also, it could be used to help people in Michigan get to know me better (which may be a bad idea, if people start avoiding me, I may stop blogging, or just start telling outlandish lies to trick them into thinking that I am cool to hang out with, and should not be avoided).

Again, family, couple years old. The main reason for this picture is that there was a lot of text without any picture, so I threw this in to break it up a bit. It's in San Antonio, my family moved to Texas about 5 years ago.

I believe there is an "about me" or something like that on the side bar, haven't really looked at anything on the blog yet before writing this post, so I figured I'd summarize my life in this first post. There are 7 kids in my family, I have two older brothers, an older sister, then three younger sisters. Despite being surrounded by sisters, don't worry, I grew up very manly and tough. My mom is a musician, my dad an engineer, so I guess I got a bit of both...making me a poor musician and a bad engineer. I spent most my life growing up in Ohio, just east of Cleveland. I was a distance runner in high school, and did many other very important and wonderful things I'm sure. Really I was somewhat quite (somewhat may or may not mean really) and possibly even somewhat nerdy (somewhat here should give the impression that this is not very likely, but there is a small, very small, possibility that it is true). I did my undergraduate studies at BYU-Utah in Chemical engineering. It was a pretty fun time for me, freshman year I lived in the dorms and got to know the guys on my floor pretty well...after spending about a month only doing things with my roommate. The original plan was not to get to know anyone and eventually move to the mountains and become a hermit, but eventually we got to know everyone else on the floor and decided they were cool enough that we could hang out with them.



"Family" picture of roommates - this caption is above the picture because I am somewhat struggling to get the captions to do what I want...
I would be roommates with some of the guys I met freshman year for my entire time at BYU, and stay pretty well in contact with most of the rest. I went to Argentina for two years after my first year at college as a missionary for my church. Then I came back and finished my degree in April 2008. It seems like a lot of time at school was spent trying to figure out a get rich quick scheme with my roommates so that we could drop out of college and be rich. A few were really good ideas, but we always ran into snags. One of my favorites to talk about was a very simple idea, we only needed the use of our apartment complex's pool, and a killer whale. And, as luck would have it, one
of my roommates was going to Alaska that summer, a prime place for capturing killer whales, or so I believed. Basically the idea was to keep the whale in the pool and charge people admission to swim with a killer whale (a good date idea if I've ever heard one, but also fun to do with a group of friends). I'm pretty sure we could have made a lot, I
know it's one of my dreams to swim with a killer whale, and if it were in a swimming pool that was small enough that the whale would have trouble eating me, all the better. We even realized we could start up a collection for people to donate money to get a larger aquarium for the whale, thus making us look humane and caring. We would then promptly pocket the donations. Sadly, my roommate failed to bring back a killer whale, thus wasting his trip to Alaska. He has still not been completely forgiven. Since none of these get rich quick schemes took off, I am still going to school, studying Nuclear Engineering at the University of Michigan, waiting for the day when I can drop out and get rich quickly, with minimal work. If all else fails, I may eventually take my own trip to Alaska, and show my roommate how whale capturing is meant to be done.

I've liked Michigan so far. I moved here in the middle of the summer (July 9th) so that I could start working in my advisor's lab before classes started. This worked out well for two reasons. One, I got to know my way around the lab a little bit before getting bogged down with classwork, and two, I got to know a good amount of people out here during the summer when people tend to do more (good weather, less school for those in school, and...I don't know, people just do more in the summer, it's true, so I don't have to justify it with reasons). That second point was important, since there are no mountains in this area of Michigan, I couldn't fall back on my original plan to become a hermit living in the mountains, shunning all human contact. Luckily, there were a lot of activities I could go to with people from my church, so all I had to do was pretend I was social, and I got to know a good amount of people pretty quickly.

My first apartment in Michigan. I lived here by myself for two months...this is at the end of the two months after I furnished the apartment with an air mattress a stool (technically, my mom came and visited, and had pity and went out and bought the stool).


Well, that does a decent job summing up my life...well, at least as well a job as I'm willing to type right now, and probably more than most people are willing to read. The plan is now to go back and figure out how to put pictures in this thing so that it at least looks interesting. I will try and put pictures of family, Utah and Michigan. I will probably not put any of Argentina, because I have no pictures on my computer. They are all stored in a man book. For those that don't know, a man book is similar to a scrap book, but much more manly. Where a scrap book looks nice, has colorful pages, cutely written captions, and cleverly cut pictures, a man book has white pages, messy, short captions written with a black sharpy, pictures crudely cut so that they would fit on the page, sometimes cutting people in the picture off so you can cram more in, and it just has a general manly feel to it. It is a very tough thing to have, and portrays a strong sense of manliness about the person who is skilled (and manly) enough to make one. Well, that's it for now, until next time (probably next week, the plan is to be a weekly updater).

I took this picture from someones facebook album. It's a picture of me in Michigan, conveniently the one that has the most other people in it that I could find. I am sure I picked this picture so that others could see some of the people I hang out with in Michigan, not because I think it makes me look well-liked and popular. But, by all means, please note how many people are in the picture and come to any obvious conclusions. There are at least dozens of people, and that's not counting the third table of people that is outside the picture. Nor is it counting the picture taker...who may or may not have been the waitress, I'm not sure. Either way, we were good friends.