Back to School, Back to School!

Well, our short vacation is finally over. BJ and I have class and work today. I worked at the Bean Museum. I compile statistical reports and make/ give the employee of the month award. It has been a good job; I have been there longer than any of the other students working there now! I will only be working there a little longer, though.
Lately, we have been working on a new website. We had an old one that BJ made shortly after we were married, but we decided to buy a real domain name and get a site started that we could do more with. Well, BJ has wanted to do it for a long time, but was always too busy with classes. Now, with him graduating soon, he finally convinced me it was a good ideal, and we decided to have a go at it. It has been a lot of fun. It is not fully functional yet, but it has a few pictures up. We hope to have a bunch of cool stuff on it, like a family birthday calendar, more pictures, family recipes, games, BJ's photography portfolio, and other stuff as we come across it. It was fun to come up with the design for the main page. We made kind of a scrap-booky look by scanning things in that I made, and digitally altering them.
Something that I am pretty excited about is that my sister Marissa got in to BYU and will be attending in the fall. I am trying to help her find a good apartment; let me know if you have any good suggestions. We hope to have her contract all done with pretty soon.

Happy Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day, and therefore a day off from school and work. Rochelle and I will be using it to wash cars, work on our web page, and study. Holidays are never as much fun as they should be when you are in school. But all the same, we slept in and have enjoyed the day thus far. I recently read the talk by President Hinckley from the Priesthood session of last conference. It is a sad thing that racism is still as prevalent as it is. There are many differing opinions on it at the time. Some people think it is all but gone, others think that it has improved but little since the 60's when there were riots and legal discrimination. I think I fall somewhere in-between. But I know it is definitely still there. In our previous ward, there was a couple who I met with for one of my classes. The guy was white, and the girl was black. The guy said that he was amazed at how differently they were treated when he was doing something and when his wife was doing something. They felt like people often looked at them as they were holding hands walking down the street. For that same class, we watched a video of a white guy and a black guy that were similar in almost ever respect besides for their skin. The white guy didn't always have an advantage, but he often did. As they sought for places to live, the white guy was given applications, and the black guy was told that the apartment had just been taken. If they went to get a car, the white guy got a better percentage rate, and a lower price. Jobs were open to him, and filled to the black guy in many cases. Racism is definitely still alive. Right now President Bush is trying to secure the Mexican border because of "terrorists." I doubt it has much to do with terrorists. Terrorists often are educated and well-off; they are probably more likely to come through normal routes than try to jump a fence with the National Guard right there. And yet we don't worry about the Canadian border. But these are all complicated problems, and don't have easy solutions. But one thing is for sure. President Hinckley is right. We need to treat all of our neighbors with love and respect, and though he didn't say it, I might add especially those who are discriminated against for any reason.

Stuff

As BJ wrote, we are attending school at BYU this spring. It is great weather- sunny almost everyday. A lot of people don't like how hot it is already, but I find that I don't mind very much, as long as it isn't cloudy. Sunshine= happy Rochelle. I am finishing up my general ed classes this spring. I am taking Humanities and Geology. I am planning to continue working at the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum until the end of the term. When the summer term starts, I will start my new job as a research/ teaching assistant in the college of nursing (for one of my previous professors). I really enjoyed my classes last semester. It was great to finally be able to start putting all the things I have learned about medicine and nursing into practice. I did a clinical rotation at Orem Nursing and Rehab, along with 7 other girls. I had such a great clinical group; we all became good friends. I was sad to see the semester end.
This fall I will be up at American Fork Hospital. I am very excited. BJ is working on one of his last classes before he graduates in August, and he is keeping very busy working at Novell. We are taking one class together- Dance 280 (The Social Dance class we met in 2 1/2 years ago). We are mostly just taking it for old time's sake, as we have already taken several higher level dance classes together. It is a blast! BJ is such a good dancer, and this class is one of the highlights of my week.

Hi all you blogging bloggers

So, Rochelle decided that she wanted to become a blogger for some unknown reason to me, and guess who she assigns to write the first post, ... ME! Well so be it.

Today has been a busy day. This spring has nice because we get to sleep in fairly late every morning. We don't have to be anywhere until 10 am. That's unusual for us. And we make the most of those morning hours. We don't let a single one of them go to waste! We sleep until we absolutely have to get up, and then we get up. Rochelle will note that I'm worse than she is because I sleep longer than she does. Well, I can get ready in half the time, and so I sleep the other half. If our roles were swapped, I'm sure she'd do the same. Well anyways, Rochelle and I both went to work around 10 am. From here on it gets quite boring. I program. And I program some more. And I program some more. Once in a while, I'll talk to a fellow Homo Sapian, but for the most part, it is me and "Wasp", my computer. Programming can be fairly addicting though. I love doing web pages. I don't know why either. I try to get into other aspects of programming, but they just don't excite me much. I've even tried games that are for programmers where you program little bots to do battle with other programmed bots... nerdy I know, but I thought it might be good practice. But, alas, it was of no avail. I'm just not interested in programming unless it has to do with the internet. But I think internet programming is facinating for some reason. Don't ask me why. I don't know. But right now I'm programming a web page for work, and I have a hard time putting it down long enough to do anything else. I just learned a new protocol called XMLHTTP Request. It allows the web page to actively get more information to display and makes it much faster to use. For some odd reason, I thought it was one of the coolest things ever. Other people I showed it to were like... "uh, whatever..." but that's my life. People rarely understand the computer things that I am facinated by. Oh well. Well, Rochelle is now wanting me off the computer. My moment on the computer is over I suppose. Now I get to try and distract her while she is working... he he he. :-D
Hasta.
BJ