Happenings
Long time, no bloggy. I guess it is time for another update.

I only worked Tuesday and Wednesday of last week on account of the 4th of July being on Monday and my trip to Las Vegas commencing Thursday. Nothing exciting happened at work it was kind of busy, I had a number of things to catch up on since I had been gone for a while.

Lettie and I drove to Las Vegas on Thursday morning to meet my mom, Melissa (my sister-in-law), and my two nephews. The real reason for meeting the in LV was because my Great-Aunt Lettie lives in there and her health has been declining recently. It turns out that she has been having 'mini-strokes' which weren't very noticeable but they had gotten so bad that it was obvious something was wrong. As a result of the strokes she has had a hard time getting around because she has lost a great deal of strength in her limbs. We are kind of afraid that she is only going to get worse so we wanted to go visit with her before it was too late. Aunt Lettie is my grandmother's sister and I hadn't seen her in a number of years but I remembered her much better than I remember my grandma who died when I was young, so I was excited to go see her. The drive to Las Vegas from Pocatello is like 9 hours so we left around 10 a.m. and didn't get to LV until 7 or 8 p.m. LV time. My mom and Melissa were already there, along with my nephews. I had not seen my newest nephew, Garret, yet and I hadn't seen my other nephew, Ethan Marcos, in a while so I was excited to see them. On Thursday night Lettie and I went to In & Out Burger for a midnight snack/dinner and then stayed at my cousin Blair's house. He is a dentist there in LV so he makes pretty good money and has a nice big house. On Friday we woke up and went to my Aunt Lettie's house where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In fact I got to her house at 10 a.m. and didn't leave until after midnight. For the majority of the day I was the only male in the house over the age of 3 so I had to put up with a lot of giggling. All in all it was a nice day, although not very exciting, but it was nice to get to spend so much time with my Aunt. On Saturday we woke up and headed out of town. Well before we left we had to stop at In & Out one more time.

[Funny note here: while we were in In & Out there was a girl that kept staring at me and I kind of ignored it, just assuming she was admiring my good looks. I have gotten used to this over the years. Well by the time we were ordering she was staring at all of us so I wasn't so flattered. Lettie walked toward where this girl and her two friends were sitting and she asked Lettie if she was from NC. Lettie told her that she was and then the she asked where we were from. Well it turns out that these people in the booth next to us were from Greensboro also. Kind of crazy. Oh and by the way she was staring at me because I had an NC State T-shirt on.]

Once we finally left Vegas we drove to Layton, UT where Adam and Melissa's new house his. We took a little tour and then pretty much called it a night. On Sunday we went to church where Melissa and Adam will be going. Everyone thought Ethan and Garret were my kids. I had to tell atleast 4 people that they were my nephews. I guess Mormons are used to seeing 23 year olds with two kids running around. On Sunday afternoon we went down to Provo, UT to eat with a bunch of kids that we know from NC and then we drove back to Poky. All in all I think I was in the car for atleast 20 hours. Didn't feel much like a weekend.

Work so far this week has been pretty busy. Nothing really interesting to note. I took some pictures of my nephews and I will post them on here soon.


Cerebration

While I was gone this weekend I finished "Angels & Demons" (It was an OK book. I don't think I really like fiction. I haven't decided if I am going to waste my time reading "The Da Vinci Code" when I didn't really like A&D) and I read another book called "Tuesdays with Morrie" (If you haven't read it I would strongly recommend it. Mer says it is sappy, which it kind of is, but it is a really good book with some interesting insights). Reading Morrie's story and visiting with my Aunt had me thinking about death a little bit while I was gone. What my Aunt and Morrie have in common is how at peace they seem to be with themselves. I'm not saying my Aunt is about to die but she is 85+ and she has had some health problems recently so it doesn't seem far off. Anyway, I was just thinking that I hope once I am about to die I will feel so at peace. I don't feel like that would be the case if I found out I was going to die anytime soon. It just made me wonder, for example, if law school is what I really want to be doing. I have thought about this before but quickly dismissed the thought because it seems to late at this point. The larger point though is, what would you do different if you knew you had a very limited amount of time left on Earth? Would you be so concerend about your education or making money? Would you spend more time with your family and less at work/school? Anyway, for most of us we would do things very differently. So why don't we live this way all the time? Why don't we make these changes now. I mean we KNOW we have a limited amount of time here so why not live the way we would if we had 5 years of life left. Or 1 year, or 6 months?

Going to see my aunt was really important this weekend because I feel like I may not get to see her alive again but I should have been that eager to visit her 6 months ago when I had no idea she was doing so bad.

Anyway all of these thoughts about death just had me thinking about the priorities that we set for ourselves and I just wanted everyone else to think about it too. I'm sure you will do like I did, think about it for a few minutes and then quickly remove it from your thoughts because it is simpler to not consider such deeo and important issues. We are so reluctant to change important things about our lives even though we should. Must be human nature.