NKOTB...and what it means to me

For those of you who actually know what that acronym means, I welcome you fellow generationer. So what do you do when you get 10 free tickets to see the original boy band of all boy bands perform in their mid 40’s. You say yes, grab some friends and camera and watch middle ages housewives relive their teenage years. It still amazes me that after 20 years, they can still hit those high pitched, ear splitting screams…and no I am not talking about the band.

I was hilarious to see these old guys relive their glory years. After they had dusted off their patented dance moves and upgraded their wardrobes to something even more pathetic, NKOTB was ready to perform. Here are some life lessons I have learned from that concert:

1) The older you get, the less rhythmic dancer you become.
2) Dressing 45 year old guys in hip and trendy teen clothes does not make them look trendy, just creepy.
3) If you were once a singer, practice, practice, practice or else you will lose your singing ability (yes Mr. Wahlberg, I’m speaking to you).
4) There is an uncanny resemblance to middle aged women reliving their younger years and the crowd that attends a Hanna Montana concert (not that I have ever been).
5) The person who bought the KNOTB t-shirt in ’89 for $30 and called it a collectors item will still be the same person who buys a $45 NKOTB t-shirt in ’08 and will justify it by calling it a collectors item.

All in all, a fun and hilarious time had by all.

Hurray for Mustache May!

Ahh May. Month of spring, flowers, love and Mustaches! A few years ago I was invited to participate in an annual ritual celebrating masculinity. The idea is that in April we grow our beards out and come May 1st we cut them to a handsome mustache which we sport the entire month. At the end of the month, we have a Mustache May-hem party and at midnight, the ladies in our lives (or the one that hopefully will be for the next year's celebraton) shave it off for us. It's a great time and instant comradierie with other guys gutsy enough to wear the stache.

Now ladies, I know you are thinking a few things right now.
Q) If you guys get Mustache May, what do we get?!
A) May I suggest Armpit April

Q) He looks so handsome with a mustache. Can he keep it longer?
A) Yes of course. May MM participants have opted to keep the stache.

Q) Since this is a celebration of masculinity, how do I get to participate?
A) Where would the men and their mustaches be without support of the woman in our lives. I suggest the ladies should be invilved in choosing the mustache style their men will sport and even help them shave the beard down to that beautiful stache.

You are invited of course to join the Mustache May group we have on Facebook. It includes great articles, videos and pictures. But best of all, a support group. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11723593391

Here are some of the "Commandments" and tips for MM participants:

"Celebrating Masculinity". Men, this is the one month of the year that we become empowered by the hair of our upper lip. For 11 months of the year we do everything for the ladies that we love in this world. But May, glorious May, is our month gentlemen. Some may sheepishly say, "I can never pull that off" or "My boss will never let me" or "No way, the girls think that is lame". Well buddy, if that's you, you probably wouldn't fit in here anyway.

The Man Laws of Official Mustache May:
1- The grandeur of the mustache must be worshipped in truth and singularity. Therefore, no mustache can be accompanied by any other form of facial hair. In other words, don’t hide behind the beard.
2. May 1st = Mustache.
3- No complaining due to lack of affection. It ruins the spirit of the stache. We are all in this together and nobody said it would be easy. Be creative with it, like "Ladies, it tickles when we kiss. Wanna try?"
4- Handlebars are discouraged. Acceptable only if you really have a Harley Davidson, or you really can kick anybody’s trash, just like Hulk Hogan or Paul Senior, from American Choppers.
5- Be proud of your stache. Don’t avoid public or mingling with the opposite sex because you are ashamed of your facial hair. The hairy upper lip is empowering!
6- It's not what's on the upper lip, it's what's in your heart. Don’t shirk participation because you think your stache is weak or pathetic. Not everybody can grow a stache like Tom Selleck. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team.
7- Hook up your fellow Mustache May participants. If you wait tables, free drinks would be an appropriate gesture.
8-Encourage others to grow the stache. It’s liberating, spread the love.

Some of you men may face severe pressure from the ladies in your life to not participate. Here is the secret in helping her become a Mustache enthusiast:

Invite her to choose the mustache style for the month. After that, have her shave you down to that mustache she chose. Then it now becomes "our" mustache and not "your" mustache. She will love it and stand by her man the whole month long.

Tacos and Testimony

A decade! A decade! That's how long it's been since I have returned back from a mission for my church in Mexico City. Technically it been 10 years and 4 months, but let's just round down. This last weekend I attended my mission reunion. Years ago we would have these twice a year. Then as time marched on, we moved to once a year. The last one we had was about 5 years ago. At this pace the next one should be in about 20 years.

I was expecting just a really small group of us, like 10 or so. But to my surprise the chapel was halfway filled with old missionaries and mostly the 3 or 4 kids each one had. My mission president, Elder Craig Christensen, is now a Seventy and gave a great little talk. After came the truly great part of the night...tacos! Now if I were to die today and be granted one last thing to eat, it would be street corner tacos, particularly tacos-al-pastor. This is marinated pork cooked on a rotating skewer and they put hot pineapple in the taco. Top it off with a little salsa and you have a little piece of Mexican heaven.

I brought Abby to the reunion (I'll explain all that in a later post). She was a good sport about it. I warned her that Sister Christensen would probably grab her hand (for a slightly uncomfortably long time), stare penetratingly long in her eyes and say something to the effect of how the Lord lead Abby and I together, maybe mentioning the kids we would have and how much she knew Abby and I were right for each other. True to form, she did just that. AKWARD! Luckily Abby took it well when Sister Christensen said, while grabbing her hand and deeply gazing in her eyes at close proximity, "I have been praying for you two to be together. I have been praying for this day." To which Abby replied, "Well, I'll let you know if we make any important announcements."

All in all, a good time.

I also began scanning old mission pictures into my computer, just in case the house burns down, I only really have to worry about grabbing one thing. doing this I remembered how great an experience that was and how much of an effect serving a mission had on my life and shaping the person I have become. Reminiscing on these photos, I felt how much I miss those days and those people. I hope my sons, nephews, grandchildren, etc. are able to have the opportunity to experience what it is like to forget yourself for 2 years and be fixated on something bigger as you can watch the effect and joy it brings to those around you. Here are a few great gems from 1996 to 1998 in Mexico City.

Steel, Fuel and Fire

I love motorcycles. When I was 11, my scoutmaster took me around town on his Harley (to this date I still have no idea how I convinced mom to let me) and ever since then I was hooked. I really like old motorcycles. I find them raw and powerful yet artistic and beautiful.

Well, this year I turned 31 and since I had wanted a motorcycle for 20 years, I figured it was about time. I didn't have any female authority figures in my life telling me couldn't, so that made it easier. Call it a mid-midlife crisis. I know what I wanted; something mid 70's or older, something I could tinker with so I could learn about bikes, something that I could fix up and restore and something for the amount of my tax return. I couldn't really financially justify buying a moto, so I made a deal with myself that I could spend whatever I got back on my tax return on the moto. But, the tax return had to cover the cost of the bike, insurance and any fixing up it needed. Needless to say, I looked hard for what I was going to get. Finally I found it in a small town on the Idaho/Utah border. My friend Keith and I drove up in his truck, talked the guy down $150 bucks and drove off in a new/old bike, a 1975 Honda CB Four 750.

Since then I have tinkered with it a bit and have rode it a lot. In just a few months I have already put in about 2,500 miles. Runs like a champ and the best thing is that people who know bikes always compliment me on mine. It’s an instant bond. I love it.

So I am going to strip the whole thing down during the winter and repaint and chrome the thing. My goal is to take it on a trip next summer, so feel free to invite me to your place ;) Here are a few good pics of the bike and some of the fun places and people I have been riding with. And yes, I have a gold 70's glitter helmet and am wearing Grndpa's old leather jacket.

Summer Sports

I'm always looking for things to do to distract me. I think that's why a few years ago I picked up triathlons. This is the 6th season I have been doing Tri's if you don't count the 4 years before that I just did swim and run races in college. I love Tri's. In an odd way they remind me that I'm mortal (mostly from the soreness and pain) but they also give me a feeling of immortality (like my body is a well oiled, high performance, high octane machine. Like a jet fighter plane, Ferrari...or in my case, a Datsun.).

When I started racing 6 years ago, I would do it alone. When I would cross the finish line people would cheer, "Good job #143!". Seemed pretty impersonal, so I decided I needed "Tri friends" and began recruiting anyone of my friends who would listen (Come on Rachelle, let's do one in 2009!). They would think of the Ironman and say, "No way! You are crazy for doing those. I could never do them." It kind of made me feel superhuman, which I liked. Since the sport has become popular through the years, races that were once just me and 250 other people are now sold out with over 1,000 people racing. Those same friends say, "Yeah, my uncle does those. He was morbidly obese and 62." Needless to say, comments like those took the edge off my superhuman image.

Luckily I was able to convince a good group of friends to do them with me. We train together and race together. It's a lot more fun when people cheer your name and not just number.

Swimming is my favorite part of it and I'm a pretty good swimmer. I usually finish in the top 5% of the swimmers and have even finished in the top 5 of one big race. Possibly feeling a little overly confident of this, I decided that this year I would do a 10k swim race.

I will just go ahead and do the metric-to-standard conversion for you. A 10k race is 6.2 miles of swimming or about 199 laps in a 25 meter pool. The race was an open water race so it was held in Deer Creek Reservoir where you had to have a person follow you in a paddleboat the entire time (Thank you Christy). So in my Tri races I do a mile in about 22 minutes. Simple math meant I should have been able to finish this race in about 2 hours 16 minutes add a few minutes of buffer, and lets just say about 2.5 hours.

Before the race I didn't have much time to train for the longer distance besides my twice a week swim workout which never totaled to more than 2 miles. A week before the race I headed up to the lake one early morning to try a longer distance and swam across the length of the lake and back. When I got back to my stuff on the shore, there was a fisherman who had been fishing there since I left. He said (G rated version applied here) "Heck-uv-a long swim!" I replied, "Heck-uv-a morning."

To make a long story short, here is what I learned about doing a 10k swim race:
1) 10k is a really, really, really long distance to swim.
2) Ski boat wakes can nearly drown a tired swimmer.
3) Training for a 10k race is preferred and possibly even essential.

The race took me 3 hours and 28 minutes to finish and I got tendonitis in my shoulder from it. It's like running a marathon...with your arms. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Impressive enough, I took 3rd place...overall...out of 5 people. I'm looking forward to next year and doing a bigger race.

Stinkin' Summit!

On August 8-10th, I helped plan and pull off the 2008 YSA Summit. For those members of my family that are not Mormon and are unfamiliar with the endless lexicon of Mormon terminology and abbreviations, YSA stands for Young Single Adults, of which I am one. I believe the unofficial definition of a YSA in the Mormon church is someone who is too old to sit at the kids table during Thanksgiving dinner, but not married or having fathered/mothered children so as to be allowed to sit at the adult table. That's about the best way I can describe it, kind of like adolescent/marital limbo.

Anyhow...in the Mormon church there is no paid clergy, so everyone gets "callings" or assignments to participate in various ways. It's like volunteering but without volunteering. (ask a Mormon to explain it). So my "calling" is to work with YSA's and plan events and activities. Each year they do a conference for YSA's for half of Salt Lake to the Wyoming border. They get together for a few days for concerts, food, dancing, carnivals (check out the Mechanical bull riding), workshops, service projects and spiritual addresses...aka "firesides" This year we had about 3,500 people attend, so needless to say, there was a lot of work to do which consumed my life for a few months.

My job in all this was to do finances, marketing and the website. The site turned out well with some help from my friends (http://www.ysasummit.com/ ) and we streamlined a very difficult registration process. To be honest it was a big pain in the butt, and I was just looking forward to getting it done. We had 26 workshop speakers to accommodate, from famous authors and motivational speakers to CEO's of huge companies and the fireside speaker was Steve Young (the NFL Hall of Fame Quarterback). So it became a big deal and we got a lot of local attention from it. Actually I think they did an article on it in the upcoming Ensign. Keep me posted of you see it at the back.

My point of this was that it was really taxing and I just wanted to get it done and didn't care much else about it. To me it was just another task to get checked off on my endless task list. But then it started and I attended the Keynote speaker, Dr. Anne Osborne Poelman, and was powerfully moved when she spoke about how in our lives we come to crossroads where although we may be unaware, they may be a critical divergence that can lead us to alternate situations, some negative, some positive. She also spoke of her conversion story to Mormonism as a scientist and medical student at Stanford.

One of the highlights was the final event, a fireside in the Salt Lake Tabernacle with Steve Young. The whole time I thought our little conference was just an nuisance to him, expecting that he got initiations to speak every week. Before the address, we met with him and he mentioned that when he played in the NFL he would get those invitations weekly, but once he got married and had kids, he almost never was asked to speak and he loved to speak. He shared how grateful and honored he was to be able to come and speak. I was surprised. Since I was introducing him at the pulpit, I asked if there was anything in the introduction he didn’t want me to say. Steve said, “Say anything but the introduction my mom always gives.” That was a problem, because that was the introduction I was given…by his mom. He looked at me right before we went out and said, “Cut it down man! Cut it down.”

His talk was incredibly moving, spiritual and eloquent. He spoke of faith in the Gospel and Christ. I was sitting right next to him and was impressed that the talk was not some rehashed talk he gave years ago, but one he put considerable time into writing since we asked him to speak. Then, part way through the talk in front of 3,000+ people in the Tabernacle, he stopped, looked off to the side and commented while choked up “There is nothing stranger than a 35 year old man who is temple worthy. We are a strange people.” After a little silence to regain his composure, he went on with his talk.

Now that may seem odd to you (especially if you are not Mormon, so you can ask me about it) but it was a powerful and very emotionally real moment. Since I was sitting next to him I will not forget his face in that moment. Here was someone who was tops in the NFL at the time he was 35, living in the Bay Area, very wealthy and yet tried his best to be temple worthy. In his face I saw the memory of someone who would enter the Temple alone, be there alone and exit alone with families and couples all around him, a happy sight but a painful reminder of his solitude. In that moment I connected with him. It gave me a deep respect for all YSA’s who are doing what they know is right and living how they know they should. It’s hard and yes, we are a strange people, different from most of those around us for how we have chosen to live our lives. The conference that was a huge pain in my butt all along became a spiritual highlight of my year.

Wet and Wild at Westwater

Since I have been living in Salt Lake, every year my friends and I go on a rafting trip down the Colorado River. We hit an area called Westwater Canyon. It's on the Colorado border and right before Moab and Lake Powell. Pretty much the entire river gets squished in a small canyon with 300ft high walls. Depending on the water level, there is some really fun rapids.

So each year I go through the ritual of calling into the forest service to try and get 1 of 5 permits issued for any given day. For those of you who can remember pre-internet days, it's much like calling in to get tickets to a U2 concert in Utah. Or for those of the younger genereation, it's about as hard as scoring some tickets to go see Mylie Cyrus, not that I have ever tried...I swear!

Anyway, I finally got some tickets and we headed off. We had a fun group of about 17 of us in 3 boats with our faithful guides. The day started out a little cold, but quickly warmed up. The water level was almost perfect and gave us a great run. My highlight (besides when my friend Riley surprised us with his European Speedo) was when as we headed into the biggest rapid, my friend and guide Tito was launched out from the back of the boat into the water and as he sailed through the air said "Do your best!"

I can't wait until next year's run.