Update

And the update is . . . not much.  But I will go over some of the highlights since the school year started.

First thing, I moved into PineView Apartments, which are just a few blocks away from Utah State University.  It is a nice change to be back in a very social atmosphere.

And then back towards the end of August, I went with my older brother and the sister just younger than me to Snow Basin.  We took the tram up to the top of the mountain, and then rode our bicycles down to the bottom.  Part way down, I took a switchback too sharply and ended up on the ground.  I scratched my leg pretty bad, but I did not notice it until later. When I looked at it, it was completely covered with big

gooey patches of black congealed blood that had little pebbles and plant fibers in it.  It really did not hurt much until the trail narrowed and my legs were whipped by long plants.  It took a long time to get to the bottom of the mountain, but it was fun.  I love mountain biking, but in all reality, I am only a beginner.  The trail was really fun and I had a blast, but it was almost too much.  But I made it, and it was great.  The picture is of my leg is after it was cleaned off and it was also like a day or two after.

A few things happened during the beginning of October.  On the Friday before General conference, I had my second mission reunion with my mission president.  It was interesting.  The first one was so meaningful.  It was so neat to see everyone again.  This one was good, and it was definitely worth it, but the feelings were not as deep as the first one.  My mission president gave a wonderful talk that was very inspiring, and echoed many things said in General Conference the next day.  The Saturday sessions of conference were very good, as were the ones on Sunday.  There was a nice rainstorm on Sunday morning which caused a leak in the roof of out apartment complex.  We woke up to a section of the wall between the kitchen and the living room bulging with water.  We alerted the manager and he came over and poked a pin in it to drain the water.  Not much actually came out, what little water there was just warped the paint.

Less than a week before halloween, my roommate and I went to Desert Industries to look for some halloween costumes or at least ideas for costumes.  While I was there I saw some old man sweaters which gave me the idea to become Mr. Rogers.  After work on Halloween, I went back to D.I. and found an awesome Mr. Rogersesque sweater.  I found pretty much everything I needed and actually pulled together a pretty sweet costume, at least by what everyone told me.  I went around to different apartments in the complex as well as friend's places randomly asking if they "would be my neighbor."  It was pretty fun.

2007 was not the best year for me.  2008 has been fairly great, at least comparatively.  I didn't date much in '07 or that much in '08, but this semester has been a lot better.  I have gone on more dates in the last 4 months than I have in the entire last year.  The day after halloween, some of the guys from my apartment did a group date where we did a scavenger hunt.  Not any scavenger hunt, mind you, but a photo scavenger hunt.  It was really fun and we took a lot of cool pictures.

In other news, I found the campaign really interesting.  I'll start off to say that I am not a Republican.  Or a Democrat.  I am somewhat of a moderate, and I am unaffiliated with any party.  In my estimation, the two party system we have is too polarizing.  I agree with certain platforms of the Republican Party, and others of the Democratic Party.  I am opposed to others of both parties.  I don't fit neatly in either party, and I doubt most people do.  I live in Utah where votes do not count for the presidential race since Utah generally votes straight Republican. I might have voted for McCain, I might have voted for Obama.  I sure as anything didn't vote for Chuck Baldwin.  And I won't tell you who I voted for, but I did vote.

If my technical skills work right, there should be a fun little video posted at the below about the campaign.

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So, that is my update so far.  I can't think of anything else noteworthy to say other than I am just working through the end of the semester and hoping I will pass all my classes with decent grades.

The Pumpkin of Scooby Doo

This is my Subaru. It is a 2001 Subaru (Impreza) Outback Sport which I bought just last month. It's a nice car, and I really like it.

We took this car on our trip to Oregon, all 1500 miles of it. We didn't have a problem on our way to Portland, but we did on the way home.

About halfway between Pendleton and La Grande in Oregon, an odd sort of flapping noise started coming from the back of the car. We pulled over at the next exit, got out, and inspected the car. We didn't see anything amiss. One of my sisters suggested that it might be one of the little mud-flaps on the bottom of my car.

We were satisfied by that explanation, so we continued on with our journey. For a long time, it seemed that that was right, when the road curved a different direction, the noise seemed to lessen or cease, which further confirmed our theory. However, sometime past La Grande the noise started sounding different, or worse. I thought maybe the car was starting to backfire or something, but it wasn't. The grinding, flapping noise was much worse by the time we reached my cousin's house in Boise.

I was really worried about the noise when we stopped but my cousin told me not to worry, that we couldn't do anything about it that night and then we could take a look at it in the morning. When the morning came, my cousin crawled under my car and looked around. He noticed what it was and then had me crawl under it. Part of the axel was messed up. The following picture is of the undamaged part on the passenger side of the car:

So, the picture above is of the good one. These next two pictures are of the broken one. You can tell in the pictures of the broken one that the green part is not attached to the other surface.

At the risk of overkill, the next item is a video of the good side. The piece stays still, but unfortunately the camera moves.

The second video is of the broken one, you can really tell by how much it moves and how much the other didn't move.


I am not the most mechanically inclined, but the rods in the videos and pictures are my car's rear axles. The green colored part is also part of the axle, apparently it is the part that attaches to the rear differential. So my rear driver's side axle was busted. We stayed at my cousin's house on Sunday, and then Monday morning we had a very nervous, harrowing ride/drive to the mechanics.
The mechanic crawled under my car and took a look. When he came up he was swearing in surprise. He seemed amazed that we even were able to drive on it (I didn't tell him that we must have driven about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles on it). The mechanic got on his phone to get some estimates on parts and much to our amusement he used a lot of entertaining lingo. He asked the person on the other end of the line how much it would be for a 'pumpkin' for an '01 "Scooby Doo." His use of the word pumpkin was for the differential or whatever the thing is called that the two axels go into in the middle.
Anyway, to make a much too long story a tad shorter, we ended up being in Boise for three days longer than we planned, and I ended up missing two days of work. We originally planned to be in Boise for a night, catch a sacrament meeting in the morning and then be in Logan sometime in the afternoon. But, we left Boise late on Tuesday and arrived in Logan early Wednesday morning, but I did make it to work that day for a full shift.
As much as I liked by vacation to the Oregon coast, being back is, well, never mind, I'd still rather be by the ocean! Anyway, after three extra days and $450 later, here is my new axle and differential:

Fun in Oregon and stuck in Boise

Right now I am sitting in my cousin's house in Boise, Idaho.  It is one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, and I am not going to buy a baker's dozen of cupcakes or go see the Chronicles of Narnia, so I thought I'd update my blog for once in my life.

On Friday, the first of August, two of my younger sisters and I loaded up my car and took off on our way to Oregon to visit our oldest sister.  We drove on Friday until we came to Boise and stayed at my cousin's house that night.

The next day we traveled through the remaining part of Idaho and then into Oregon.  Anyone who has ever traveled through eastern Oregon knows that it is not the lush green of western Oregon and it is really nothing more than a continuation of Idaho.  We reached Pendleton around one and wondered around until two-thirty.  At two-thirty we went on the Underground Tour.  It was quite interesting.  The guide led us down a flight of stair and into the bowels of the town.  We saw where the Chinese lived in the eighteen hundreds, we saw different workrooms of the city.  We were even led into an old brothel, which was, well, interesting with a very unsettling feel.  After the brothel we headed back under the town where we toured an old Speakeasy from the prohibition period.  I think the tour was worth the fifteen bucks that it cost, but I've now seen it once, so I don't feel like I'll probably ever really want to see it again.

That night we drove most of the rest of the way towards Portland, but we decided to stay the night at a campground in the Columbia Gorge.  There was a railway that ran by the campground, and apparently a train came by every twenty minutes blowing its horn.  It took a bit for one of my sisters to fall asleep because of the trains, but I was so tired, it seemed like I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. 

The next morning we hung around the campsite for a while, then we took off for Portland.  We bypassed my oldest sister's place and went straight to church where we enjoyed the Sacrament and Sunday School meetings.  Rather than go to Priesthood/Relief Society, we went to the Portland Temple and walked around the grounds and ate lunch on a bench outside the grounds.

We arrived at my sister's place around five and hung out for a while and then walked around Elk Rock Island.  The next day we went to Powell's City of Books, which is a massive bookstore in downtown Portland.  Later we went on the Willamette Jetboat Tours which is a tour of the Portland area on these sweet Jetboats.  It seemed better last time, but the driver was more crazy then, it was still incredibly fun.

On Tuesday, we took off and travelled through central Oregon until we arrived on the coast in the Newport area.  The closer we got to the coast, the greener everything became.  The skies were overcast and it frequently misted.  The younger of the two sisters who came with me had never seen the ocean before, so it was fun to have her see it for the first time.

For the next two days we camped in Beachside State Park, which is a campground just next to the beach, and spent time in Waldport and Newport, and wandered around the different beaches looking around the tide-pools.

I found out that I absolutely love tide-pooling.  I am like a kid in a candy store when it comes to wandering around the beach and sticking my hands in the water to pet an anemone or receive an urchin hug.  I also love to search among the rocks to see if I could uncover some little crabs.  I caught a couple, and one I nicknamed 'Barnacle Head' because he had a barnacle on his shell just above one of his eyes.

Thursday we left Beachside and travelled through Tillamook, where we got some cheese, and stopped at Cannon Beach, where we got some good clam chowder at Mo's, and then stopped at Seaside where we bought some salt water taffy.

We started for Portland on Friday, via Astoria and some beach that had the remains of a ship that crashed in 1906.  After the beach and Astoria, we traveled over the bridge to Washington where we ate lunch at Fort Columbia, an old military base, and then traveled back to Portland.  We watched the Goonies that night because it was filmed in Astoria, then around mid-day the next day we left Portland and headed home.

Unfortunately the adventure didn't stop there.  Sometime between Pendleton and La Grande, a weird noise started in the rear of my car, we stopped to check it out and didn't see anything out of place, so we were thinking it must have been my little mudflap type things flapping in the wind.  It got worse as we went along, but we did make it to Boise alright.  This morning we crawled under the car and saw that something was wrong with one of the axles/cv joint things attached to my back driver-side wheel.  So, I'm stuck in Boise today, but it hasn't been bad since we have been able to stay at my cousin's house.  Hopefully we will be able to get my car fixed tomorrow morning so we can make it back home.