Would You Rather…

“I’d rather fall on a cupcake than a knife.” ~Colin

Being Brutally Honest Because It’s MY Blog

I feel like making some confessions.

I love hot dogs with cheese in the middle. I know. It’s processed cheese. It’s so fake. And it’s so good. I love eating them on warm April afternoons when the weather is nice enough to sit out on the porch letting the ketchup and mayonnaise drip all down my napkin.

I watch the Bachelor. And while I do, I think I know how to date better than these women. That’s funny.

I’m a Utahn born and raised and I’ve never been skiing or snowboarding. Yet.

I love my bed in the mornings, but not at nights. And yet, every single morning, as I manage to force myself out of bed I tell myself how great it will be to crawl back under the covers later that night. However, when the night rolls around, I just can’t make myself climb in.

I try to convince myself I like foreign films. But I hate reading subtitles. I own House of Flying Daggers, but I’ve never seen it. I’ve owned it for years.

I went to NYC in the winter and didn’t ice skate in Central Park. It was the ONE thing I wanted to do, but the person I was there with kept me from going. Boo.

I love going to the gym. It makes me happy. As happy as eucalyptus-scented hot tubs, cheeseburgers, piano, dodgeball, soccer, rollerblading down dangerously steep hills, and playing high speed magnetic darts*.

I wrote a random list because I felt like it. Apparently this is what I do when I can’t sleep. Who knew?

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*There were dents in the door of my apartment where this happened frequently. The good times continued in the next apartment as well and left dents in the wall. But they were little dents so not really vandalism, right? Right.

Episode 60: Larrie’s Home Office

With the new job, there is more flexibility to work from home. This is a great thing, especially on the days when I don’t feel like actually brushing my hair (most days) or putting on shoes and socks (all days). What this usually means is that I wake up later than a typical day (since I don’t HAVE to shower before getting online), lean out of bed to grab the heavy laptop backpack, pull the laptop out of it and turn it on. I type in my password about ten times (to turn the laptop on, to unlock it, to connect to VPN, to connect to applications, etc, etc) and wa la, I’m at work.

As I’m sitting here, currently in the office, typing this, I’m noticing the “distractions” in the office environment that are attempting to steal away my focus.

One: constant chit chat.

First off, on the other side of my wall, almost all day long are two coworkers that share a larger cube and talk and talk and talk. I’d say about 60% of the time they’re talking about work, but I’ve also heard all about the weekend where one of them slept almost the whole time (seriously) and even fell asleep in Sherlock Holmes.

Two: obnoxious cell phone ring tones.

Next, there are the cell phones. I always have mine on vibrate at work, but plenty of people don’t and I’m pretty sure that those are the people who get ALL of their calls when they’re not at their desk, but their phone is.

Three: dinging computers.

Continuing on, we have computer sounds up next. I have a neighbor whose laptop speakers are turned up and so I know every time he gets an email. You wouldn’t think that would be annoying except for the fact that it sounds just like my laptop does (through my headphones) when I get an email so I keep checking Outlook when there isn’t a new message.

Four: people that walk around.

After that, there are people that walk by. I sit with my back to my cubicle door and so you’d think I wouldn’t notice them, but no, those eyes of mine in the back of my head have great vision, no correction necessary and let me know when somebody walks by so that I can turn around and check who it is.

Five: face-to-face needs.

Last, there are those people who don’t just walk by, but they stop by. In the new job, they mostly just stop by to talk about work, but it does mean that I have to stop whatever project I was working on to discuss the needs of the person standing in front of me.

So back to working from home. I have none of these distractions so I get quite a lot done, but there is one minor problem: I don’t have a home office. This means that I end up working in bed, sitting on the couch, or at the kitchen table. This isn’t too bad because, as you can tell, I get to move around a lot. However, those locations aren’t quite as comfortable as the fancy-dancy chair I have at my desk at work.

I thought about setting up a home office.

Then I remembered that I don’t have any room anymore.

So I might just get me a wireless keyboard/mouse and hook my laptop up to the TV in the front room. Now THAT’s some working real estate. Course then my roommate, if she’s home, too, can’t watch TV.

Longing for a Sold-Back Textbook

Technically, this post isn’t a journal entry. AT ALL. But, it is a little trip down memory lane. So let’s pretend it’s like posting one of my old journal entries. Sure, that sounds like it qualifies to me.

I was reading a blog entry written by one of my heroes, Louise*. She purchased a used chemistry text book at a sale at BYU that was marked up throughout by some past student. The margin scribblings, smiley faces, asterisks and even a portrait of Paco on page 217, intrigued her.

This got me thinking.

Who bought my Physical Science textbook from my freshman year?

It was almost Christmas break, 1999, and I needed money to buy Christmas gifts. I wasn’t working while in school so for the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to get money from**. So I turned to my textbooks.

My accounting book would fetch me nearly $100. I was happy to part with that one.

I can’t remember now how much I got for returning the physical science book. It was a large paperback with a black cover, but it was what was INSIDE that was really worth more than the bookstore was offering me.

I sold it back anyway, pocketed the cash, and went about buying gifts for family and friends.

So what do you think was inside?

I remember one night, trying to read through the first nine chapters of the book in a few hours, which the average student in the class had been reading THROUGHOUT the first several weeks of the semester, in preparation for the test the next day. At one point, I was reading on my bed in my room. Then I moved to a couch out in the common area and eventually pulled one of the cushioned chairs out onto the small balcony area. My roommates peered out at me from our door, looking through the tall glass windows. So I wanted to let them know how I felt about preparing for this test. I found a blank page at the end of one of the chapters and spent a good thirty minutes carefully drawing a message, in beautiful block printing with shadows and little characters base jumping from the tops of the letters. The messages said something like: I ABHOR TESTS.

Once I finished, I knocked on the window to get their attention, then held it up to show them how I felt. They mostly agreed. One of them didn’t because she was really looking forward to how I scored on the test as she had already taken it and had prepared all week instead of a few hours to earn her B. (I eventually got an A-.)

I had a hard time paying attention in that class. We met in a small lecture hall, but the class size didn’t even fill up half of the seats. I climbed to the higher seats with a little walkway in front of them. The teacher followed the exact same structure every day. Take roll. Remind people what to read for the test. Outline any possible extra credit assignments available in a lab somewhere in some science building on campus. Then, she turned out the light and went through some sort of slideshow for the day’s lesson. At this point, I did one of three things: 1) move from my chair to the floor/walkway and take a nap; 2) attempt to follow along with my textbook, but mostly just doodled in the margins; 3) ate my Granny B’s Pink Frosted Sugar Cookie I’d purchased at the vending machine on the way to class.

My favorite doodle involved Einstein and Newton getting together on a nice lawn under a tree with NO apples one afternoon and having a chat. I think I even included a little squirrel sitting in on the conversation.

And that is the book that I sold back to the BYU bookstore for a handful of bills in order to buy Christmas gifts.

I hope whoever purchased the used book added some remarks that the squirrel could contribute to the conversation. That would be appropriate.

Today, I wish I wouldn’t have sold that book back. I wish I still had my doodles.

What have you given up or lost or sold that you miss?

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*I am quite certain that this lovely lady is a hero to many, many people, who she may not even know, but she is MY hero thanks to her help to get me back on track academically and today, I am now a Master. Thanks in part to Louise’s counseling, humor and even letter of recommendation.

**Most of my life, I’d had some way to earn spending money, from the paper route back in fourth grade where I crashed my bike weekly because I wasn’t strong enough to steer it with all the papers hanging in my delivery bag wrapped around the handles, to the six seasons of being a soccer referee—rain or shine, or even to the babysitting jobs that kept me from sitting at home being uncool on weekends.

Go Ahead, February, Do Your Worst

It’s the first day of February. Do you realize what that means? You made it through January.

Congratulations.

Now, how are you going to make it through February?

I’m planning on doing it the same way I got through January: by being excessively busy. Sometimes a girl just needs reasons to get out of bed during dreary winter months. Also, she needs reasons not to fall asleep on the couch when she gets home from work.

I want to tell you, internet, that I have been consistent with going to the gym. This definitely helped me get through the last month and I have no plans to change that for February. Other things I did last month: played lots of soccer, played ward basketball, went to the temple several times, spent plenty of time in the eucalyptus-scented hot tub at my parents, ate crepes, joined a dinner group, shopped (gasp), went to movies (I heart Fantastic Mr. Fox), worked, thought about things I should write, visited girls in my ward, and watched prices on flights to London drop slightly.

There was one day that I didn’t quite resist the desire to curl up and hibernate when the morning rolled around. Luckily, though, it was a Sunday morning so all I had to miss was choir practice. Totally fine by me.

Bring on February. It’s a short month.

Thinking About Dogs and Their Noses

I wrote this when I was 20. I even remember, a little, that I was sitting in the tiny bedroom at my parents’. It was the school year where I took time off from Utah County to stay with my parents, attend the community college for a few classes and earn some money to pay for the next year down at BYU. It was also a year of excessively random journal entries. Like this one. This is ALL I wrote for the day. Who comes up with these things?

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9/4/01

What is it about riding in cars for dogs? Why do they absolutely love it? Why do they always want to stick their head out the window? (You’d think their nose would freeze on cold days.)

It was one of those days – when a dog’s wet nose freezes on a car ride.

Larrie, Larrie, Let Down Your Long Hair

“You’re going to be Rapunzel but you’re not going to trip over your long hair.” ~4-yr old niece drawing my picture

Episode 59: Some People Call Me Tim… or Scrum Master

Remember how we decided that I could now go by Master Larrie? I earned the title and all: wrote the papers, virtually attended the classes, read loads of boring textbooks, read one interesting novel, had meetings in Second Life, and had professors hood me in a ceremony.

Now I’m here to tell you to add another word to that title.

Ready for the new title?

Okay, here it is.

Call me Scrum Master Larrie.

That’s my new job.

Technically it’s the unofficial title, but I AM THE SCRUM MASTER for our new costing application we’re developing at work.

Isn’t that HOT?!

I know, right?

And now you might be wondering what in the world a scrum master is. Clearly, I am not manly enough to play rugby nor do I even understand the rules enough to follow the game particularly well despite the numbers of BYU rugby games I attended back in the day.

It’s funny to be called the Master of a word that basically means Hubbub.

I kind of like that title better anyway: Hubbub Master.

Or maybe Hubbub Guru. Lots of U’s makes for a great title.

Obviously, if you know much about me, you know that I live in the IT work world where we have no rugby players and very few athletes all around. Despite how talented I am at getting tripped up in soccer, the new job title has nothing to do with sports.

Instead, it’s my new project management title.

But doesn’t it sound cooler than IT project manager? We have those here, too. I’m not sure what they do other than send me invites to meetings I’m not sure I want to attend and have really detailed agendas for those meetings.

As for me, I make my little team meet every morning to talk about how our day went and how we feel about our next tasks and whether or not we feel like accomplishing those. And then I crack the whip and say, work work work, people. They love it.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the title of this post, nobody actually calls me Tim. It’s just a quote from a movie, if you know it…

What Would You Want on Your Gravestone?

Tuesday, the family pet cat died and we had a lunch at Chuck-a-Rama to lament her passing (of course). It seemed appropriate then that I would find a poem in my Jr. High English book where the assignment was to write what we might find on our own gravestone. Here’s what I came up with:

R.I.P. LAUREN CAMPBELL B: [Birthday Edited Out for HIPAA Compliance] D: TOO SOON
Watch where you’re stepping my friend.
Alive and well she is still.
Lauren fainted while taking a walk.
They thought she had been killed.
They dug a hole six feet deep
Then put on a lid made of beams.
Her eyes opened up the next hour
And night and day, she still screams!
A sad victim of premature burial.

Getting Out of the Valley to Escape the Smog

Enter the caption contest now! It’s so exciting isn’t it? If you need the rules for this supposed-to-be-weekly contest, click here: Caption Contest Rules Shmules.

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Last Contest’s Winner: Hooray, Mom! I avoid the big pile of stuff when I eat Cheesecake Factory cheesecake as well, since they must use an entire can of whip cream for each slice. Sadly that day, we left some of our cheesecake uneaten because we filled our stomachs with the delicious, sweet corn cake appetizer.