It was Sunday night January 27th at about 7:00 PM and I was on the computer in the office checking into my flight when Nicole, who was in the kitchen, got a call from her sister Kristy telling her to turn on the TV, President Hinckley had died.
For some reason it is always shocking to get news like this even when it concerns someone who is 97 years old. I started to pay attention to Nicole's conversation when I sensed the shock and surprise in her voice. It was Nicole that told me and everyone else in that part of the house and I walked in and we watched a news report for a minute or two. I can honestly say that I was not really sad when I heard the news, I would say that I was simply reflective, thinking about the wonderful person the prophet was and what a great example he was. The next thing I remember thinking about were the kids and what they thought. For all of our children this was the only prophet they ever knew. I can remember when Spencer W. Kimball died. It was November, 1985, I would have been just a few years older then Zach, about to turn 15. He was the only prophet I had ever known (He was ordained when I was 3 yrs old). I do not really remember being sad, I only remember thinking that is was going to be strange to have a new prophet. When Ezra Taft Benson was called I do not think I really knew who he was. One thing I do remember was that it was difficult to change my prayers and remember to say the name of the new prophet and not the old one I had prayed for my entire life.
I don't think the kids were sad, I asked them and they did not seem sad, it is hard to say what they were thinking, there was really no major reaction. Even Nicole was not what I would consider sad, she was more interested in watching the news coverage then I was but she was not sad. She did mention how great it must have been for the prophet to see his wife again in heaven. That is a nice thought.
Nicole and I put the kids to bed a little later and then we watched the news together. It was kind of silly how the news covered the story that night, they interviewed people who came down to temple square to sing and lay flowers. I didn't really like that whole scene and how they were covering it. After the news there was an hour long special on President Hinckley that was fantastic. This program was something that was probably put together for one of his birthdays and I do not remember having seen all of it before but I really did enjoy watching it. I do not know what else to say other then how much I admire Gordon B. Hinckley and the man and servant of the Lord that he was. If only we all could be more like he was.
I actually did not finish watching the tribute program, I had to go back and get ready to go to Nashville. My flight to Atlanta was scheduled to leave at 12:30 AM, I left the house at some time around 11:20 PM.
This was the headline in the Deseret News the next day:
LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley dies at age 97
LDS president met call with humility, vigor
President Gordon B. Hinckley, who led The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through explosive growth during his more than 12 years as president, died 7 p.m. Sunday at home of causes incident to age, surrounded by family. He was 97.
There was a tremendous amount of coverage of the Prophet's passing in the Utah papers and media. There was also a good amount of national and international coverage. It was one of the headline stories on Yahoo on Monday which in some ways surprised me. When I got back to my hotel later in the evening it was being reported in some way or another on most news stations. It turned up in a place I never expected, on the Stephen Cobert show which is a comedy show that mocks and parodies real news talk shows. He did quite a lengthy bit on the story and all though he was playing parts of it off for laughs he was not disrespectful in any way to me.
The next thing I saw on the television that night was very surprising to me. Glen Beck was talking about the prophet and his personal feelings on his show and was visibly emotional and weeping. It was very strange to see a big time show on CNN, the biggest news channel in the world, and a well known personality like Glen Beck paying tribute. I have known that Glen Beck was LDS for quite some time now but I had never seen him speak so candidly about it on his show. He expressed his sincere gratitude and love for the Prophet. He spoke of what a great example he was and tearfully expressed his love and admiration on CNN! It really struck me as quite amazing that I was watching this on CNN.
It is a very different time for LDS people right now in this country when you look at things from the standpoint of the media and what people in general are interested in and talking about. With Mitt Romney in the running for the Republican presidential nomination and high profile people like Glen Beck openly discussing the LDS faith on such large stages as CNN it really is a unique time. I personally enjoy it. I have always been asked about my faith by the people I work with and now there is much more to talk about in that conversation besides the same old stuff like polygamy and the word of wisdom.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
My kids have better toys then I did
It is Saturday morning and here is the scene at the house. I got up at around 10:00 AM and took a shower and then came down for some breakfast. Nicole is all cheerful (because I have gotten out of bed before noon) and greets me with "what can I make you for breakfast?" my response "how about love, can we make love for breakfast?" She say OK lets go, I say no, I am tired (up till 2:30 AM playing webkinz) make me some eggs and toast. This is not the first time webkinz has kept me from enjoying my favorite thing in life but more on that later this post is about toys not sex. I am sitting there eating my eggs and toast when I hear Mississippi Queen blasting away on the TV downstairs. Next I hear some Wheezer, then Red Hot Chilli Peppers, some Stones, some Clash, and then Tom Sawyer by Rush to finish the set. Like most Saturday mornings since Christmas the kids are down stairs playing Rock Band.
It all started some time before Thanksgiving when I was out shopping with Nicole and we see this drum set and guitar leaning against a display with a large plasma TV with the words Rock Band emblazoned on it in all black letters (anyone who knows anything about rock knows that black is the only cool color). Our oldest son Zach (13) had been playing a game called Guitar Hero with his Friends now and then and I had seen him play it a few times at our house and I thought it looked fun. He looked like he really could rock when he played that game. Then I am at this store standing in front of this demo for this new game Rock Band and it is beckoning me to come forth and do just that...Rock like I am in a band.
Right there in the isle of the store I fire this thing up. Nicole is doing her best to pretend she does not know me but soon the Rock Gods call to her and she cannot look away. I am sitting at the small four pad drum set with sticks in hand and the song starts up. Instinctively I click the wooden sticks together three times as if to signal to the game that I am ready (at this point Nicole looks away in shame and I swear I hear her mutter the word 'idiot' under her breath). Out of nowhere the little colored jewels start floating down what looks like the fingerboard of a guitar suspended in space over the avatars of the band in the background. This is my cue that it is time to Rock. I start hitting the drum pad that is a color match with the jewel on the screen at the precise moment it aligns with the last fret of the fingerboard in space. When I hit the correct color at the correct moment the song sounds perfect, if I mess up there is no drum track in the song and it sounds bad. If you miss a few jewels the crowd starts to boo you, hit a few notes in a row and they cheer, miss too many in a row and the game is over and you are booed off the stage. I am very proud to say that after a rough start I picked up the rhythm and I started to Rock. A feeling of coolness and joy came out of nowhere and washed over me and I briefly looked over to Nicole and yelled over the din of the music, "WE ARE BUYING THIS GAME...FOR THE KIDS." She looked back as if to say "OK but you're still an idiot."
Now you have to understand that at this point I am a 36 yr old father of five and feelings of coolness are few and far between. In my mind I am still as cool as I have ever been. In my mind I am still 20 years old, this is how old I have always been in my mind. However, even though I 'know' that I am cool I am not a total fool, I know that to any person that actually is 20 years old or younger I am just some old guy and by definition cannot possibly be cool. Every one knows the only cool people over the age of 20 are in Rock Bands. Do you see where I am going with this, this game gave me coolness, even if it was just the slightest amount, for the briefest of moments, I felt it, the coolness was there. I will not elaborate any further on this feeling other then to ask the reader to actually go play this game and if you are over the age of 20 you tell me if this exact same thing does not happen to you...it will...I promise.
So right there and then we decide to buy Rock Band for the kids at Christmas, I played the game for a total of two minutes and I knew that I...I mean we had to have it. At this point we do not even own the game system you need to play the game on, either an xbox 360 or a Play Station 3. I quickly decide that the Play Station 3 is the console we will need, we have always been a Play Station Shop, for at least ten years now, ever since I played Tomb Raider with my brother-in-law Kenny back in 1995 on his PlayStation I knew that my 2 year old son needed this game system. I am also not much of a fan of Microsoft and only give them my money when I have no other choice.
I know that I can get a PS3 so I start looking for my very own slice of coolness...Rock Band. We summon the clerk at the store where I had my first out of body rock experience and he quickly informs us that they are completely sold out. Today is the release day for this new game and they sold out in 20 minutes early this morning. Just a half hour earlier I had seen a stack of these games at Costco and not knowing how special these little rock star morphing machines were I just walked right by them thinking very little about it. Problem was that now I knew that I must have this game at all costs. So what do you think I did? We left that store immediately and went back to Costco.
I storm into Costco and go immediately to the display where I had seen a stack of these games as tall as I was not more then a half hour ago. I grab a large flat cart and when I round the corner I see the spot where the game should be but there is no longer a tower of these games sitting on the pallet there is just a small stack, only four games left. So what do I do? I load up all four games and head to the checkout. For some strange reason this whole thing has whipped me into a mini Christmas toy frenzy and I have all of these visions of this game being the next Cabbage Patch or Elmo, that very scarce 'must have' toy at Christmas time that people are willing to do anything to get.
So now I spend over $600.00 ($170.00 x 4) on a game that I did not even know existed when I left the house this morning. There is only one problem, all four games I get are for the xbox 360 game system and I have no plans to own that system. For some reason (that I am sure is linked to some greedy underhanded Microsoft marketing strategy) of the few remaining game systems we find that day almost all of them are for the xbox, almost all.
Now a funny thing happened when I got back to the car where Nicole was waiting and I show her the four games I just spent a fortune on and tell her how they are all useless to us but that it was still a good idea to buy them. She actually agreed with me, she was not as enthusiastic about it as I was but she did in fact see the possible wisdom in what I had done. She too was just as caught up in this silly frenzy as I was.
So off we go with the four separate bundles of coolness in a box loaded in the car to look for a fifth box of coolness for the PS3, the one we want, the one we need (once we actually get a PS3). It turned out to be more difficult then we had imagined. As I drove away from Costco Nicole hit the phones first calling all of the other Costco's in the valley. The Murray store claimed to have a few, they even went so far as to claim they had the version we needed (PS3) and so that is where we went. It is about a 25 mile drive out to the Murray Costco and so I am racking my brain trying to think of all of the other places we can go that are "on our way". We stop at every place in South Davis County that we think might have it, Game Stop, Kmart, Walmart, Target and we strike out, not a single one, "all sold out" we hear over and over again. Things start to get a little more urgent and we decide we had better hurry to Murray where we "know" they have some.
We are soon at the Murray Costco and sure enough they are sold out by the time we get there (they have a no 'hold' first come first serve policy). There is a Best Buy near by but they are out too, they have a few xbox 360 versions that raised our hopes when we first saw them but those hopes were soon dashed when we saw nothing for the PS3. It was really starting to get irritating to call a store and be told they have a few and then drive all the way there to go in and feverishly scan the boxes for the little PS3 logo only to never see one. We had been on the hunt now for over 3 hours. We had bought 4 and seen about 8 more but all we saw were the xbox version of the game. Just when I was really starting to doubt that we would find one we pulled up to the Fort Union shopping center way out on 20th East and 70th South. There was a Target and a Circuit City so we split up, the plan was to call each other if we found something.
I went to the Circuit City and Nicole went to Target. Just as I was realizing I had failed yet again my phone rang, Nicole had found one. I could hardly believe it, I think I asked her at least ten times if she was sure it was a PS3 version. She kept saying "yes, yes, it has the blue PS3 logo" (the xbox logo is green). I cannot overstate how happy I was at this moment, it was like she had found hidden treasure or something. When she came out of the store the game was still in the plain brown cardboard box it was shipped in. Apparently when she walked up to the electronics department they had just brought it out from the warehouse in the back and had not even taken it out of the shipping box yet. She literally grabbed it off of the dolly when the guy mentioned he had one but had not unpacked it yet. It was meant to be, we finally had it and it felt good. This is probably the first and only time in my life I had experienced a feeling like this, looking for a specific hard to get Christmas gift and then finally finding it. I have to say it felt a little nutty but it felt good. It was fun, that is if it is possible to have fun while driving 100 miles and going to 15 different stores in 3 hours to buy something you or your kids really don't need. It was in fact fun and it would get much more fun when we finally got to play the game.
So now we had Rock Band but no PS3. The upgraded (80 vs. 40 GB) version of the PS3 was selling for $499.00 (down from the price of $599.00 when it first came out last Christmas). That is a lot of money and they help you rationalize it by telling you how it is also a Blue Ray (next generation DVD player) player and that a new Blue Ray player alone would run you at least $400 if you bought it separately so it is actually a bargain. No matter what they say it is still $500 and we do not even have any Blue Ray DVD's nor do we watch many movies at home. Buying the PS3 was not about movies and blue ray, at this point it was all about Rock Band.
I still didn't feel good about just throwing down $500 on the new system, I wanted to get something more for that kind of money and so I did what I always do when I want to buy something but for a better price, I went to the classified adds. I have been a huge fan of classified adds ever since I was first married and buying all kinds of Old Toyota LandCruisers. Now that the classifieds were online it just made it that much easier. KSL.com has the best online classified adds in Utah and that is where I found our PS3. I found a guy willing to sell us what he claimed was valued at over $1200 for $500 even. It was a great deal, there was a lot of good stuff and it was all in very good shape, I love the classifieds.
Now it was mid-November when all of this transpired and Zach's birthday was a week away. We were planning on going to a cabin Mom and Dad had rented in Midway for the Thanksgiving Holiday for 4 days and I wanted to get Zach something that would help him and Drew (and me) have a good time. It is difficult for them to be with that side of the family (especially for that long) because there are not any cousins their age, they get bored. Nicole and I decided to get Guitar Hero III (Legends of Rock) to give Zach for his birthday. This was a good decision, not only because Zach was really into this game at the time but it really did help things at the Cabin go much smoother. I'll bet between Zach, Drew, and myself and some of the others we played that game for over 30 hours in a four day span. It really is a fun game and you really do feel like you are rocking out when you play it. Zach was very happy to get it and play it, it was the perfect gift for his 13th birthday. My best joke that day was to say to all that were there, "If you need to know anything just ask Zach, he is a teenager now, and so he now knows EVERYTHING". I will have to write a separate post about Zach becoming a teenager and starting junior high and all of the changes he is going through. It really does amaze me.
That is it, I was just sitting here on a Saturday morning thinking about how cool the toys that my kids have are and how different it is for them then for me when I was a kid. It is so strange and yet there is something so fun about watching your five year old rock out to Metallica on a small electric guitar just his size. Jake loves Guitar Hero and Rock Band and plays them all the time. It was Jake that I heard playing that morning.
It all started some time before Thanksgiving when I was out shopping with Nicole and we see this drum set and guitar leaning against a display with a large plasma TV with the words Rock Band emblazoned on it in all black letters (anyone who knows anything about rock knows that black is the only cool color). Our oldest son Zach (13) had been playing a game called Guitar Hero with his Friends now and then and I had seen him play it a few times at our house and I thought it looked fun. He looked like he really could rock when he played that game. Then I am at this store standing in front of this demo for this new game Rock Band and it is beckoning me to come forth and do just that...Rock like I am in a band.
Right there in the isle of the store I fire this thing up. Nicole is doing her best to pretend she does not know me but soon the Rock Gods call to her and she cannot look away. I am sitting at the small four pad drum set with sticks in hand and the song starts up. Instinctively I click the wooden sticks together three times as if to signal to the game that I am ready (at this point Nicole looks away in shame and I swear I hear her mutter the word 'idiot' under her breath). Out of nowhere the little colored jewels start floating down what looks like the fingerboard of a guitar suspended in space over the avatars of the band in the background. This is my cue that it is time to Rock. I start hitting the drum pad that is a color match with the jewel on the screen at the precise moment it aligns with the last fret of the fingerboard in space. When I hit the correct color at the correct moment the song sounds perfect, if I mess up there is no drum track in the song and it sounds bad. If you miss a few jewels the crowd starts to boo you, hit a few notes in a row and they cheer, miss too many in a row and the game is over and you are booed off the stage. I am very proud to say that after a rough start I picked up the rhythm and I started to Rock. A feeling of coolness and joy came out of nowhere and washed over me and I briefly looked over to Nicole and yelled over the din of the music, "WE ARE BUYING THIS GAME...FOR THE KIDS." She looked back as if to say "OK but you're still an idiot."
Now you have to understand that at this point I am a 36 yr old father of five and feelings of coolness are few and far between. In my mind I am still as cool as I have ever been. In my mind I am still 20 years old, this is how old I have always been in my mind. However, even though I 'know' that I am cool I am not a total fool, I know that to any person that actually is 20 years old or younger I am just some old guy and by definition cannot possibly be cool. Every one knows the only cool people over the age of 20 are in Rock Bands. Do you see where I am going with this, this game gave me coolness, even if it was just the slightest amount, for the briefest of moments, I felt it, the coolness was there. I will not elaborate any further on this feeling other then to ask the reader to actually go play this game and if you are over the age of 20 you tell me if this exact same thing does not happen to you...it will...I promise.
So right there and then we decide to buy Rock Band for the kids at Christmas, I played the game for a total of two minutes and I knew that I...I mean we had to have it. At this point we do not even own the game system you need to play the game on, either an xbox 360 or a Play Station 3. I quickly decide that the Play Station 3 is the console we will need, we have always been a Play Station Shop, for at least ten years now, ever since I played Tomb Raider with my brother-in-law Kenny back in 1995 on his PlayStation I knew that my 2 year old son needed this game system. I am also not much of a fan of Microsoft and only give them my money when I have no other choice.
I know that I can get a PS3 so I start looking for my very own slice of coolness...Rock Band. We summon the clerk at the store where I had my first out of body rock experience and he quickly informs us that they are completely sold out. Today is the release day for this new game and they sold out in 20 minutes early this morning. Just a half hour earlier I had seen a stack of these games at Costco and not knowing how special these little rock star morphing machines were I just walked right by them thinking very little about it. Problem was that now I knew that I must have this game at all costs. So what do you think I did? We left that store immediately and went back to Costco.
I storm into Costco and go immediately to the display where I had seen a stack of these games as tall as I was not more then a half hour ago. I grab a large flat cart and when I round the corner I see the spot where the game should be but there is no longer a tower of these games sitting on the pallet there is just a small stack, only four games left. So what do I do? I load up all four games and head to the checkout. For some strange reason this whole thing has whipped me into a mini Christmas toy frenzy and I have all of these visions of this game being the next Cabbage Patch or Elmo, that very scarce 'must have' toy at Christmas time that people are willing to do anything to get.
So now I spend over $600.00 ($170.00 x 4) on a game that I did not even know existed when I left the house this morning. There is only one problem, all four games I get are for the xbox 360 game system and I have no plans to own that system. For some reason (that I am sure is linked to some greedy underhanded Microsoft marketing strategy) of the few remaining game systems we find that day almost all of them are for the xbox, almost all.
Now a funny thing happened when I got back to the car where Nicole was waiting and I show her the four games I just spent a fortune on and tell her how they are all useless to us but that it was still a good idea to buy them. She actually agreed with me, she was not as enthusiastic about it as I was but she did in fact see the possible wisdom in what I had done. She too was just as caught up in this silly frenzy as I was.
So off we go with the four separate bundles of coolness in a box loaded in the car to look for a fifth box of coolness for the PS3, the one we want, the one we need (once we actually get a PS3). It turned out to be more difficult then we had imagined. As I drove away from Costco Nicole hit the phones first calling all of the other Costco's in the valley. The Murray store claimed to have a few, they even went so far as to claim they had the version we needed (PS3) and so that is where we went. It is about a 25 mile drive out to the Murray Costco and so I am racking my brain trying to think of all of the other places we can go that are "on our way". We stop at every place in South Davis County that we think might have it, Game Stop, Kmart, Walmart, Target and we strike out, not a single one, "all sold out" we hear over and over again. Things start to get a little more urgent and we decide we had better hurry to Murray where we "know" they have some.
We are soon at the Murray Costco and sure enough they are sold out by the time we get there (they have a no 'hold' first come first serve policy). There is a Best Buy near by but they are out too, they have a few xbox 360 versions that raised our hopes when we first saw them but those hopes were soon dashed when we saw nothing for the PS3. It was really starting to get irritating to call a store and be told they have a few and then drive all the way there to go in and feverishly scan the boxes for the little PS3 logo only to never see one. We had been on the hunt now for over 3 hours. We had bought 4 and seen about 8 more but all we saw were the xbox version of the game. Just when I was really starting to doubt that we would find one we pulled up to the Fort Union shopping center way out on 20th East and 70th South. There was a Target and a Circuit City so we split up, the plan was to call each other if we found something.
I went to the Circuit City and Nicole went to Target. Just as I was realizing I had failed yet again my phone rang, Nicole had found one. I could hardly believe it, I think I asked her at least ten times if she was sure it was a PS3 version. She kept saying "yes, yes, it has the blue PS3 logo" (the xbox logo is green). I cannot overstate how happy I was at this moment, it was like she had found hidden treasure or something. When she came out of the store the game was still in the plain brown cardboard box it was shipped in. Apparently when she walked up to the electronics department they had just brought it out from the warehouse in the back and had not even taken it out of the shipping box yet. She literally grabbed it off of the dolly when the guy mentioned he had one but had not unpacked it yet. It was meant to be, we finally had it and it felt good. This is probably the first and only time in my life I had experienced a feeling like this, looking for a specific hard to get Christmas gift and then finally finding it. I have to say it felt a little nutty but it felt good. It was fun, that is if it is possible to have fun while driving 100 miles and going to 15 different stores in 3 hours to buy something you or your kids really don't need. It was in fact fun and it would get much more fun when we finally got to play the game.
So now we had Rock Band but no PS3. The upgraded (80 vs. 40 GB) version of the PS3 was selling for $499.00 (down from the price of $599.00 when it first came out last Christmas). That is a lot of money and they help you rationalize it by telling you how it is also a Blue Ray (next generation DVD player) player and that a new Blue Ray player alone would run you at least $400 if you bought it separately so it is actually a bargain. No matter what they say it is still $500 and we do not even have any Blue Ray DVD's nor do we watch many movies at home. Buying the PS3 was not about movies and blue ray, at this point it was all about Rock Band.
I still didn't feel good about just throwing down $500 on the new system, I wanted to get something more for that kind of money and so I did what I always do when I want to buy something but for a better price, I went to the classified adds. I have been a huge fan of classified adds ever since I was first married and buying all kinds of Old Toyota LandCruisers. Now that the classifieds were online it just made it that much easier. KSL.com has the best online classified adds in Utah and that is where I found our PS3. I found a guy willing to sell us what he claimed was valued at over $1200 for $500 even. It was a great deal, there was a lot of good stuff and it was all in very good shape, I love the classifieds.
Now it was mid-November when all of this transpired and Zach's birthday was a week away. We were planning on going to a cabin Mom and Dad had rented in Midway for the Thanksgiving Holiday for 4 days and I wanted to get Zach something that would help him and Drew (and me) have a good time. It is difficult for them to be with that side of the family (especially for that long) because there are not any cousins their age, they get bored. Nicole and I decided to get Guitar Hero III (Legends of Rock) to give Zach for his birthday. This was a good decision, not only because Zach was really into this game at the time but it really did help things at the Cabin go much smoother. I'll bet between Zach, Drew, and myself and some of the others we played that game for over 30 hours in a four day span. It really is a fun game and you really do feel like you are rocking out when you play it. Zach was very happy to get it and play it, it was the perfect gift for his 13th birthday. My best joke that day was to say to all that were there, "If you need to know anything just ask Zach, he is a teenager now, and so he now knows EVERYTHING". I will have to write a separate post about Zach becoming a teenager and starting junior high and all of the changes he is going through. It really does amaze me.
That is it, I was just sitting here on a Saturday morning thinking about how cool the toys that my kids have are and how different it is for them then for me when I was a kid. It is so strange and yet there is something so fun about watching your five year old rock out to Metallica on a small electric guitar just his size. Jake loves Guitar Hero and Rock Band and plays them all the time. It was Jake that I heard playing that morning.
Friday, January 11, 2008
From the beginning
I have started many blogs in my life up to this point and none have lasted or have really been any good for that matter. This time I am going to do things a little differently in the hope that this blog will last longer and be somewhat better then its predecessors. For this blog I am going to go back and start from the beginning and just write stuff down. Any stuff that I can remember. Like the title says this is simply a place to put it all down. There are other blogs that I can go to be topical or funny this blog will just be stuff, a journal blog, nothing that any one should really care to read except for maybe my kids one day. I would love to have journals to read from my Dads life.
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