Our New Arrival

So, I have some pretty exciting news. We will have a little bundle of joy to join our family. We've actually known for a little while that we were going to have a new arrival, but now that things are just a little farther along we feel like we can tell people about it. Our new DVR is totally amazing. (Sorry if you thought I was talking about something else.)

We've been shopping around for quite sometime. We have been with Comcast but we felt like we were paying too much. They were doing our internet as well as our TV, so we thought about switching to DirecTV for TV and possibly Qwest for our internet. With that bundle we would be able to pay less and get a DVR but our internet would be significantly slower. Then I found Digis for internet. It would still be a little slower but not signifiantly, so I thought we could switch to that. But then, the real magic happened, with the confidence of knowing I could get a good deal somewhere else, I called Comcast and told them I was switching unless they lowered my rates, so they dropped about 30 dollars off our monthly bill and gave us a DVR. I was quite proud of myself, for my excellent negotiating skills.

Oh, and for those of you who thought that I was saying Robyn is pregnant: Well, she isn't, but the good news is that I found a website that lets you put two pictures in and it shows you what your child might look like. This will have to suffice.



The child quite literally has my eyes and mouth, and Robyn's nose and chin. I know it looks like a bit of a mutant, we'll do better when the real thing comes along. My apologies to those who are reading this who are eagerly desiring us to give you grandchildren or great grand children.

Beware the Madness of March

Do you remember in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when the soothsayer says, "Beware the ides of March"? In the Julian Calendar, the ides of March was March 15th. It turned out to be a pretty rough day for Caesar, because he was assassinated. On our modern calendar there is a period right after the ides of March that many people call March Madness. I think it began right around that period. There was a big tournament, and they would throw a lion in an arena with a bear, then they would have a gladiator fight the winner and so on. People would fill out brackets to predict the ultimate winner of the tournament, they would have betting pools with all the people at their primitive offices, and they would even go online and fill out brackets on Yahoo! (It was rough, they had to use Netscape and AOL back then.)

Well, today there is a very similiar tradition. Only instead of having man and beast fight to the death, they have basketball teams stand in proxy of the various men and beasts. People still try to pick the winners, they even still go on Yahoo! and fill out brackets. The main difference now is that no one uses AOL and there are a number of browsers available such as IE, Firefox and Chrome.

At my office, everyone fills out a bracket according to who they think will win, then when your bracket scores the highest you earn bragging rights and you get to know in your heart that you are the coolest. Well, I, of course, participate in this tradition. But, since I don't follow basketball I have a few options A)Just predict that the highest ranked team will win B)Pick entirely randomly C)Come up with some other system that is awesome. Since A and B are both boring and I believe strongly in the doctrine of awesome, I chose C. I felt the best system would be to bring the madness of March back to its routes, and imagine the various mascots in the coliseum in a fight to the death.

I want you to know, not all of them were easy, but I personally played out each battle in my mind and I feel that my bracket is the most correct. If you must know, the Memphis Tigers will win it all. Some of the battles were obvious, for example the Oklahoma Sooners. Do you know what a sooner is? It's a guy who, back in the early days of the US, was too afraid to legally participate in the race to claim a homestead so he would sneak out before it began and claim his land so when the race got there they would think he had just run faster. Ya, they were clearly eaten by the bears. (Pay no attention to the actual outcome of the game, since it happened earlier today.) Another one was the fighting illini, their name comes from Chief Illiniwek. I'm sure that the Chief was really tough back in the day, but he's been doing his war dance at half time since October 30, 1926. I was sure he would be easily defeated, but when he went up against the Hilltoppers, who are a musical group, well, they didn't stand a chance, they had microphones, he had a tomahawk. There were some battles that were really close. The zigs took on the zags, and it was anyone's battle, but the zags came out on top. The Spartans and the Trojans had been to battle before, but the Trojans still fell for that same old horse trick.

After all this, I'm actually somewhat interested to see if real life matches with the most correct way, which is what I have placed on my bracket. Watch those Memphis Tigers. Tigers are fierce animals.

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Pi Day - A Day of Happiness
As you all know, yesterday was pi day. It was a fabulous day. I woke up in the middle of the night and I looked at my watch to see what time it was and it was 3:14. Before I rolled over and went back to sleep I pondered for a moment that this was a sign that the day was going to be great. I mean, it was π AM on π 2009. The only thing that would have been cooler was if it was 1:59 AM and 26 seconds (3/14 1:59:26)

For those of you who don't know about pi day or have never celebrated it before, you should know that if you live in the United States it is now nationally recognized. I was amused by this quote from my representative, Jason Chaffetz: "I cannot support Pi Day as just one day. It should go on forever. I voted 'Nay.' It passed 391-10." Apparently now schools are supposed to celebrate it with math games and math awareness. (Because apparently schools were not making children aware of math before.)

I know in my math classes they said all sorts of erroneous things about pie. For example, they tried to teach me that "Pie are squared." I knew in my heart that I may not know everything, but I know my pies. I know that pies are round, and you get round by eating them, there is nothing squared about them. Later on in math I heard them say that "Four thirds pie are cubed." Well, that doesn't even make any sense. Four thirds of pies? You mean 133% of all pies are in cube shapes? This is when I knew someone had gone crazy.

At any rate, my pi day turned out to be quite fabulous. When I was at the grocery store and wished the checker a Happy Pi Day he seemed quite elated, and the bagger girl told him they should eat pie together to celebrate. (Ahhh, young love) That night we had a celebration that included several of my most favorite things. Pi, pie, good friends, my amazing wife, what more could I ask for? We ate pie, we listened to music, we visited, and all around had a great time.

Fifth Moniversary

Tomorrow is our fifth Moniversary. (Yes, I'm writing a day early. It's my blog, I can do what I want.) As I was pondering what to write I realized that there haven't been as many humorous things that happened this month. So, I apologize beforehand for those who came looking for tons of humor. We did have some fun events this month, though, so don't be too greatly disheartened. The biggest event this month was Valentine's Day. Also, I can give an update on the toothbrush fears. I am now used to it and no longer fearing brain damage. A few of the other events were:

Repairing the Holes in My Life
Remember the Jeff sized hole in my basement? Well, Robyn's parents came in to town. While they were here, my father-in-law helped us out with all sorts of things in the house. It was quite a blessing. But one of the things he did was to vanquish the hole! He first had to cut it to a uniform shape, and then put in the sheetrock. We still need to put some texture on it to make it look like the rest of the wall, but it looks way better already.

Getting to Show Off My Gadgets
Another fun thing while the in-laws were in town was that we did a movie night with all of Robyn's family that lives in Utah, as well as her parents, who we imported from California. We did it at my brother-in-law's house; Robyn and I brought over our projector and speakers and a screen to project onto. The projected image was the equivalent of about a 110" screen. I was very excited and it was alot of fun.

Draper LDS Temple Open House
It is a beautiful temple. It has the largest sealing room of any temple in the world. The celestial room was surprisingly small though. Megan and Kayli both wrote some of their thoughts about it on their blogs.

Percieved Fat Day
Occasionally Robyn claims she has a "fat day". These are the days that in her mind she is suddenly fatter than the previous day. Most of the time I tell her she's not allowed to say that, for 2 reasons. 1. People's weight fluctuates every day but I refuse to believe that she can actually tell if she's slightly higher than the day before. 2. I think she's beautiful and I don't like anyone putting her down, even if it is herself. Well, on this particular day, she was having one of her days and she actually ripped her pants. She claimed it was because she was so instantly fat. I explained that she wears those pants alot, therefore washes them alot, therefore they are just worn out. She would hear none of it. She proclaimed with a voice of thunder: "Today I am fat! You cannot take that from me! I get to say that I am fat today!!" I still disagreed with her, but I have to admit she dominated me. I figured I would just have to live to fight another day.

Statistically Significant Other

I discovered the above comic recently and found it quite humorous due to its correlation with my life. You see, Robyn and I have been a couple for 1 year and 4 days. (We decided that we were going to date exclusively on March 2nd of last year.) So, she has been my significant other for that long. However, I had taken her on a number of dates before that, but she remained unaware that I was pursuing her. When I told her that I wanted to become exclusive she was actually a little surprised. I only wish that I had used my white board at that time to prove to her that she was already my statistically significant other.