When did Country become cool???

So Last night I went country dancing with a girl that I like. It wasn't my first experience with country dancing. Last summer my buddy John and I would go each week in an effort to meet girls. It was mostly a futile effort as the girls were there to dance and we were there to meet them, but didnt dance particularly well. I still dont dance particularly well, but I go and try to break out of my comfort zone and try to learn a new trick. But last night was different... I wish I could tell you that instantly I could country swing a girl until she was dizzy, but I cant.

No last night I was amazed at the mass of humanity that goes country dancing. Aparently country dancing isnt just for cowboys. A few people in particular stood out to me. There was the kid who was obviously cooler than every one in the room because the sun shone on him day and night even indoors. At least that must be what he thought in order to wear HUGE California Highway Patrol(CHiPs) style sunglasses, inside for the whole night. Then there was a huge contingent of California wann-be guys with t-shirts 3 sizes to small emblazoned with "Hollister" or polo shirts with the collars popped up. The girls who go country dancing are divided into two groups. Those that are there to have fun and are beautiful but dont treat it as a fashion show, and the fishionistas who are there to show off thier Prada belt buckles, Coach handbags, and designer jeans that cost more than my car payment. Needless to say you can tell which type of girl I was there with. The beautiful non designer jeans wearing type.

In all the people watching, I wondered when country became cool. When did country dancing change from a check you Stetson at the door, Honkey Tonk to the social mainstream? its a perplexing question but until I figure it out I will countinue to practice...

Being a student is hard...

So I found this picture and whole heartly agree. It was good for a great laugh.

School has consumed me at the outset of this week. A couple of exams and a nasty paper to write will do that. I just have to say that I cannot wait for this all to be over. worrying about one less major responsibility will be so nice. Never again will school rob me of a good powder day. Never again will I have to try and explain to my boss why I have just too much homework to come to work. NEVER AGAIN!!! :)

Maybe if I WAS a ninja I'd be a little more adept at the juggling act. Unitil I improve my nunchuck skills I will have to stick to Smash Brothers on the Wii.

Senioritis vs. Trunkiness

As I was sitting today trying to consume a massive amount of information about such enthralling subjects as Heteroskedasticity, Autocorrelation, and statistical hypothesis testing, the following though occurred to me: In a month I am never going to have to do this (cramming for an exam) again. That got me thinking do I have senioritis or am I trunky.

As a missionary we get trunky. Meaning we are sitting on our bags (trunks) packed and ready to go home. This is not hard to do as you live out of 2 suitcases for most of the 2 years (or 18 months for my female friends) you spend away from home. This is because in essence you are done being a missionary and living the lifestyle of one. The rules, the lack of sleep, the extreme yet awesome spiritual exhaustion. All these factors can make you trunky. Trunkiness is a general need to move to the next facet of life.

Senioritis is desperately wanting to not have to deal with the travails of student life. Exams, quizzes, papers you never plan to publish or have read again, and generally what I refer to as academic bulimia. that's the gorging on facts, figures and data to only regurgitate and brain dump after the need to know it for an exam has passed.

I decidedly have some of both. I am ready to move on in my life. I am sick of the exams (especially sick of those) and I am ready to not be a student any longer. It is time to move on to the next phase. Granted I have been to the next phase so I hope that this time the yo-yo ride moves in a different direction. but lets be honest I am the epitome of a SUPER-Senior. I'll be 29 in a couple months. Seriously "lots of people go to school for 7 years..." too bad I am not getting an MD behind my name, but a well deserved BS. but that's a gripe for another day.

So bottom line I am suffering from trunky-senioritis in a very acute form... thankfully it has a timed life that is due to expire in about a month.

Socks and Academic Mediocrity

So this morning as I put on my socks to go to work I realized that the were 10 years old. 10 YEARS!!!! My mom bought them for me as I was preparing to leave for a mission. They are still very comfortable and proof positive that you get what you pay for. As I recall they were some rediculous proce like $10/pair, yet obviosuly worth every penny. I had 10 pairs of the same socks for my entire mission. Thorlo Business socks. check em out.

I have said that when I am rich I will put on a brand new pair of socks every day. there is nothing quite like a new pair of socks. so soft and comfy. Every day should be a new pair of socks day. What will I do with them after I wear them?? donate them to charity of course!

I just got some very good news as I stress out over the coming end of the semester. I have it direct from my academic advisor that I need to only pass my Financial Econ class (something D- or better) and that a C- or better in my Price theory class and my econometrics class will ensure my graduation in 34 days. C's get degrees and in this case one D too. :)

Now generally I dont support mediocrity. Excellence in all I do is what I strive for, but come on folks. I was a freshman a decade ago. I recieved my mission call 10 years ago last week. I have been at the Lords University for far too long and its simply time for me to pay my dues to the Cougar Club and my Alumni association and move on with life. Now I just have to be minutely above the margin and I am home free!

T minus 35 days

in 35 days I will graduate from BYU. provided of course that I can survive the next month including finals. This coming week I have 2 exams and one major research paper to write a first draft of. Needless to say my life has a bit of educationally induced stress. If I can simply get through these exams i will be doing OK. They will be brutal but I feel like if I can get through them with a reasonable grade then I will be OK. but the next few weeks its going to be time to buckle down and plow through to the end. That has to start now.

I love the sense or urgency mixed with an unhealthy dose of gut wrench and anxiety that comes at semesters end. I just hope and pray it all comes out well in the end.

Nice guys finish last Part II

So last night i had it brought to my attention that it is not such a bad thing that nice guys finish last. The reasoning was that the nice guys end up with the last girl. And where I can see this line of thinking, i see it as somewhat flawed. my main argument before was that girls prefer jerks, and I still think that this holds true, but where the idea has merit is that I really dont want the sorts of girls who choose jerks. So I will finish with the last and the best. I think in scripture it says something about "The first shall be last and the last shall be first" so maybe I just need to hurry up and find that last girl. :)

Guys are jerks

Its true. Guys can be jerks from time to time. I myself am not exempt. I mean lets be honest, its pretty much impossible to get to be the jaded divorced guy without having caused at least a few female shed tears. I've repented, moved on and hope those I've wronged can forgive me.
I have a friend who had a bad weekend. she ran into a buzzsaw of a jerk masquerading as a friend. This is the worst thing a guy can be. When good clean fun becomes down right uncomfortable for one party, or they fear for thier safety, the guy has moved to a new class of jerk that there are words for, but this is a family blog. I asked her if I could take him out, break his legs (I have sicilian friends) much to her credit she is not such a vengful person. I'm sure we could take care of him properly ( think torture scene from Casino Royale). But again much to this friends credit she declined. this brings me to a funny experience yesterday...

So I attend a singles ward, and where I am increasingly in the older crowd I still derive utility (geez i sound like an economist) from talking with the younger crowd. Call it the kid in me. But I found myself in a Dating and Courtship class. Boy was I a fish out of water. It occured to me that the sheer number of analogies regarding dating and relationships is staggering. Our ward is broken into 3 groups. The syrupy engaged couples (or engagged as my roommate Matt puts it), the young and desireables, and the jaded and looking/praying for a miracle crowd. In our ward there are a handfull of the sappy engagged, and a near even split between the young and beautiful and the miracle seekers. I myself am a tweener as I am young at heart but clearly somewhat jaded. I digress... the analogy party was absurd. we had one guy talking about how with love its like math (I know I know) that we dont multiply we use exponents... I nearly jumped out of my skin. My favorite by far was mine. "its not a matter of if we have baggage, its a matter of if all our baggage can get into the same vehicle" genius I know :)

The moral of the story is Guys are jerks and if you're a jerk you shouldnt use stupid analogies to explain why you aren't marreid yet. I know its deep...

Picture archive

hey go see my new blog full of pictures of Makayla and I. the link is on the right. Here is a sample.

March Madness

This is a Glorious time of year. This weekend is Selection sunday, meaning the Field of 64 for the NCAA tournament will be chosen. Now my team, BYU, is likely to, as always, get absolutely screwed by the selection commitee. This is not new to BYU, but this year while assuming the shaft on a first round opponent we need to rise up and win. BYU has not had a win in the NCAA tourney since 1993. WAYYYY TOOO LONG! However the difference this year is that we have already seen better opponents and we know we can play. We took North Carolina (currently #1) to the brink of an upset, and we played Michigan State the same way. If there is the year for a run into the Sweet 16 this is it.

but apart from march madness there are two days even more important to me. Easter Sunday is next week, and is truly the most important day of the year. Because without Easter there wouldn't be a Chirstmas. Any of you who know me well know the Hell I have endured over the past few years, which makes easter all the more important.

But the Second most important day of this year happens on March 31st. That is Opening day at Safeco Field. The Mariners '08 home opener. They went out big this year and have possibly the best 1-2 starting pitching combination in baseball. As online source put it the "Ace-King" combination (Eric Bedard and Felix "The King" Hernandez) I kinda like that...

Now if I could only figure out how to time warp past finals (while acing them) and just get to graduation I will be a happy camper. but really I couldn't be doing much better from a sports point of view unless the M's were in the World Series and BYU football was on its way to a national championship. But lets remain in the realm of reality. :)

My Job aint that bad...

THOUGHT WE COULD USE A LITTLE LAUGH TO LIGHTEN UP THE DAY!
If you don't laugh out loud after you read this you are in a coma! This is even funnier when you realize it's real! Next time you have a bad day at work think of this guy. Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana . He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne,Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won. Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.
I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. Now repeat to yourself, '! I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.' Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!

...On Marches Life

So yesterday was a lousy, no good, very bad day. With one lone exception, an awesome lunch with a amazing girl and a great Root Beer. Otherwise you could pretty much sum up the day as garbage. so for the saving grace of my day I thank you Michelle.

Thats it I'm over it. if I dwell on past lousy days I am destined to be a horribly poorly adjusted human being. So I'm done! Now will someone please pass me a large helping of sunshine?

Nice guys finish last...

Its a sad truth, but nice guys really do finish last. Why is it that when I try so hard to be such a good guy, that I am just a nice guy, but thats where attraction stops. I think I've earned a little happiness in my life... yet here I sit waiting for it to happen. Crap happens but why does that crap always seem to land on my head lately???

...Maybe I should try being a selfish jerk. They always seem to have a following.

Dating and the Theory of Relativity

I used to have a funny t-shirt when I was in High School. it had a caricature of Albert Einstein in a Hawaiian shirt the saying read, "Sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour, sit by a pretty girl for an hour and it feel like a minute. That's relativity" I've often thought of how true that statement can be. As I have previously ranted about how much I dislike being back in the dating pool this statement can carry even heavier weight.

Here are a few things that I have learned that are relatively important (in no particular order):
1) Girls like to be flattered even if they will try and dodge a compliment
2) It really is a big deal to be treated as well as you treat.
3) Dates that take place in your own house don't count as dates.
4) When venturing to blind or Internet dates use a 30 min date such as Starbucks or Ice cream. That way if you aren't interested you can bail with few hurt feelings
5) Honesty really is the best policy, if you aren't into her/him just say so. doesn't waste your time or theirs, but be prepared as rejection is never cool.
6) You reap what you sow, in other words if your are an insufferable person you are likely to attract insufferable people.
7) Girls really don't prefer jerks but they will settle for them
...

There are of course a bunch more but lets be honest it gets a bit tedious and depressing. On the bright side I have been feeling very wanted of late. Some really great friends and I have had a blast in getting to know each other better. It has gone part way towards restoring my faith in my ability to, at some point in the future, leave the single ranks.

but lets not get ahead of ourselves...

Sleep vs. School

so the last few nights I have not slept as much as I would usually prefer. I find myself tired at work and school. Some days I simply choose to not attend school. I find that at times its more beneficial for me to stay home and rest than to attend a class.
Now I am an economist by eduaction and I think that it might prove an interesting study to see if my earning potential is better when I dont sleep but go to work vs when I do get enough sleep and attend class... of course its likely to show that I am better off when I attend, but come on... sometimes that pillow is just so alluring.
Maybe if I get more sleep my blog posts will actually carry some literary merit. :)

Gerbera Daisies

So many of you who know me know that I like to spoil the women in my life. Flowers are generally a fan favorite. My little girl got a dozen roses from daddy on Valentines Day. Now much like flowers, not all girls are the same. Some think that flowers are a waste of money because they just die (what's up with this line of thinking??) while others love getting roses. But the new flower of choice seems to be Gerbera Daisies. They are pretty and colorful and girls seem to love them so who am I not to oblige?

Many times I get asked, "Why do you give flowers so much?" now first I wouldn't say that I give them "SO MUCH" but the answer is easy. why not? They make girls feel special, and I think flowers are great for reminding her how beautiful she is.

Now this is getting cheesy and I really am a guys guy, but seriously I would argue that real men buy thier women flowers so that they always remember how important they are to us macho guys.

The Single Life...

So nearly two years ago i got divorced. Sad day. I re-entered the single scene. Frankly not my favorite place to hang out.
Along the way I have met some incredible people both male and female. I have had life changing experiences and learned a lot about who JR really is. All in all it has been an adventure, but seriously... I am not a fan of this whole having to date business. There are some beautiful women in my life, and I am a lucky guy to have met them, but lets be honest folks as Tom Hanks put it "Trying other people on to see how they fit" is really getting old. I thought I was done here, now I'm back. I just really hope that Princess Charming is out there...

First post

So after looking at a friends blog I decided that I needed to also post one. It is a great way to remember life as it happens and for others to get to know inside my head. and since I generally have an incredible amount of spare time while I am at work, this will be a great way to spend it.

A longer post will be forthcoming as I am headed to class. I LOVE (sarcasm added) my Mondays and Wednesdays. I get to work at 8:30 go to class from noon to 4 then back to work til 9. makes for a long day.