Christmas Season is Here!

I love Christmas.  I love the charity, joy, love and all those good feelings that come with the Christmas season.  However, the last few years, I feel like I haven't embraced the season soon enough.  It seems like the last few years I have been so determined to not start celebrating Christmas too early that I end up realizing on Christmas Eve that I wish I had done more in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  So, this year, I'm determined to not let that happen.  My first step has been to make sure that I'm listening to Christmas music.  So, the day after American Thanksgiving I started making a Spotify playlist full of some of my favorite Christmas songs.

When I think of Christmas music, one of the first albums that comes rushing to my mind is John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together.  Every Christmas at home, for as long as I can remember, this was one of the albums that was in constant rotation.  It's a classic and will always be a part of Christmas for me. It also includes one of the few bearable versions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that exist.  As many times as I've heard these songs, however, it wasn't until last Christmas that I really paid attention to the song "The Christmas Wish," sung by Kermit, and it has since become one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs.

When asked what my favorite Christmas carol is, I have pretty much always said "O Holy Night." Okay, maybe I haven't always said that, but it's what I've said ever since I've been an adult and somewhat mature.  I learned a couple of years ago that I love Celtic Woman's performance of this carol and it is now my go to version.

Another song that will always have a place on my Christmas playlist is "Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song)" by Amy Grant.  I've always enjoyed this song, but it took on much greater significance for me after an experience I had last year.  It happened the morning that I left Provo to drive home for the Christmas break.  I was leaving quite early that morning and I had agreed to give a friend a ride to the Provo airport.  His flight didn't leave until a few hours later, but he was okay leaving that early.  Well, we drove to the airport only to find a car full of people parked outside the main entrance because the airport didn't open for another couple of hours.  This other carload of people had been planning on dropping off one of their passengers and then starting their trip down to Texas.  Well, when we drove up they started asking us if we could possibly wait there at the airport with their friend until the airport opened because it was too cold to wait outside but they really needed to get on the road.  All I could think was, "well, I need to get on the road as well.  What makes you think that I want to delay my plans a couple of hours" and I started getting annoyed that they acted like it wouldn't be any kind of problem for me. Anyway, we finally decided that I would take both my friend and this random girl back to our apartment complex where they could wait in the lounge until the airport opened and somebody else could take them, allowing myself to get on the road as well.  As the girl was loading her luggage into my car, her and her group kept thanking me and saying that I was an answer to prayer.  While this was all very kind stuff that they were saying, I had gotten into a really bad mood for being delayed (which is silly, because I would have been delayed anyway whether this other group was a part of it or not) and was just grumpy about everything.  I talked to my friend about this later on and he said that it didn't really show that I was as put out as I was, but I definitely felt it.

After dropping them off at Alta and arranging a new ride for them, I hit the road again very grumpy and stewing over the events of the morning.  I had a CD of Christmas music playing in my car and the very next song that started playing was "Breath of Heaven."  As I listened to the song, I started thinking about how the Christmas season is all about Christ - His birth, life, example, sacrifice, love...everything.  Well, this made me realize how very un-Christlike I had behaved during this experience.  It was the Christmas season and instead of caring about how I could help out and be charitable, I was only thinking about myself and my precious hour of time.  I felt very ashamed about how I had reacted and was very humbled by this message of Christ.  Now I think of that morning every time that I hear "Breath of Heaven."  It is a lesson that I will always cherish.

So, this Christmas season, let's be sure to fit in some great Christmas music as we celebrate and keep our thoughts turned toward Christ.

Books in 2011

Just like I did last year for books in 2010, here's a list of books that I read in 2011.

1. The Electrical Field - Kerri Sakamoto

2. Hugh Laycock: Legacy - Compiled by various cousins

3. How to do Everything - Red Green

4. Gideon's Sword - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

5. Odd Thomas - Dean Koontz

6. Forever Odd - Dean Koontz

7. Brother Odd - Dean Koontz

8. Odd Hours - Dean Koontz

9. Behold the Fire - Steven D. Salinger

10. Jennie - Douglas Preston

11. Along Came a Spider - James Patterson

12. Kiss the Girls - James Patterson

13. Don Quixote: Part 1 - Miguel de Cervantes

14. Velocity - Dean Koontz

15. Cold Vengeance - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

16. A Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin

For anyone who may be wondering, I would say that my favorite books on this list are Hugh Laycock: Legacy, Odd Thomas, Cold Vengeance, and A Game of Thrones. It's hard to limit it to just those 4, though, because I really liked a lot of these books. I can definitely say, however, that my least favorite were The Electrical Field and Behold the Fire. The former was boring, the latter was pointless, and both were full of characters I just didn't care about.

Vancouver

Wow, so, this post was supposed to go up a long time ago. I decided that I needed to do a better job keeping up with my blog and realized I had started this post and never finished it. Pretty much it's just pictures of my trip to Vancouver, B.C. last June. I went up there to present a paper at the 2011 ASME Turbo Expo. An updated version of the paper I presented at this conference is now being published in the ASME Journal of Turbomachinery.

This is the hotel that Dr. Fletcher and I stayed at while in Vancouver

These are a couple of churches that I could see from my hotel window. I thought that they looked kind of neat.

These are some boats in Coal Harbor. The building across the water, with the sloped roof, is the Vancouver Convention Center. This is where the Turbo Expo took place.

These are the walls inside the Vancouver Convention Center. I thought it was pretty neat how they made the walls look like piles of lumber.

The Olympic Torch. It doesn't look like it's lit, but it is. You could see the ripples in the air caused by the heat of the flames.

I thought this was pretty funny. The Stanley Cup Finals (Vancouver vs. Boston) were also going on while I was in Vancouver, but the Canucks were playing in Boston that week. This is a statue of Lord Stanley in Stanley Park that somebody has had some fun with. There is also a sign at the bottom of the statue that says something to the effect of "Canucks, bring my cup home." Well, they didn't.

Stanley Park was beautiful, by the way.

These sea planes were constantly taking of and landing in Coal Harbor. The outer walls of the convention center was made up of huge windows, so people were constantly stopping and watching the planes land and take off.

The session that I gave my presentation in ended just on time to catch Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Dr. Fletcher and I joined the group of people watching the game on the outdoor screen at Canada Place. We stayed there for the first period then walked up to our hotel and finished the game there.

This is my badge from the conference. I only wore the "Speaker" ribbon while I was there because I thought I would have looked pretty silly with all 4 ribbons hanging underneath.

Good for a Chuckle

Here's a video of a friend of mine. She's in the background. Apparently things were a little slow at work. If you're looking for a quick chuckle, it's worth a gander.

I'm Thankful Today

Today has been a great day. Today was Thanksgiving in Canada and I think it was one of the best Thanksgivings that I have celebrated while living in Utah. It actually started out as a pretty dull day. I slept in a lot later than I meant to and then wasn't very motivated to do much at work. Also, I tend to get kind of homesick at times like these (ie. Thanksgiving, Canada Day, etc.) However, everything changed once I got home.

I have a roommate who served his mission in Toronto. He also is part of a dinner group with some good friends of ours and tonight was his night to cook dinner. He decided to cook a turkey and do Thanksgiving dinner and he invited me to join them for dinner tonight. So, I decided to skip out on my own dinner group and join theirs for tonight. It was wonderful and it really meant a lot to me. I thanked him a couple of times for including me, but I still don't think that I've been able to express exactly how much it meant to me. It really was the closest I've felt to being home for Thanksgiving since I've been down here.

Well, as if that wasn't enough, the night just got better from there. Another one of my roommates came into the room a little later on and informed me that he had a Canadian friend who was going to be having poutine at her apartment. He invited me to come along and, well, I couldn't turn that down even though I was stuffed at it was going to result in me breaking my self imposed no-food-after-9:00pm rule. Well, we showed up at this girl's apartment and, as I'm bent over taking my shoes off, I hear "Robert!" Here, at this poutine party, was my friend Nikki who I went to school with in Raymond but hadn't seen in about 6 years or so. So that was a great reunion and we had the chance to catch up a bit while enjoying conversations about Canadian culture and memories with other fellow Canadians and people who served missions in various parts of Canada.

Anyway, I can't very well finish a post about Thanksgiving without expressing my gratitude for the many blessings I have received. I am thankful for having a family that loves me and that I love. I am thankful for the great friends that I have and the great examples that they are to me. I definitely do a lot of looking up to the people around me. I'm thankful for that opportunity that I have to receive a great education and for all of the opportunities of growth that I am presented with. And, while there's so much more that I could list off, I'll finish by saying that I am thankful to know that I am a child of God and I am thankful for my Savior, Jesus Christ, and for the chance I have to follow His teachings and guidance in order to receive the blessings of exaltation.

No matter how hard or frustrating or just plain annoying things might seem at times, I really am extraordinarily blessed and have a wonderful life.

How to Do Everything

I recently read a book by a very well known handyman. Give him a roll of duct tape and he can accomplish just about anything. This man, of course, is the great Canadian hero Red Green. I first saw the Red Green Show in the early '90s and have been a fan ever since. This last Christmas, my parents gave me his most recent book How to Do Everything. This book claims to be a completely exhaustive guide to do-it-yourself AND self help. Red Green guides the reader through docking a power boat, how to apologize, how to turn bad gifts into a weather station, reducing your carbon footprint, subjects you should not bring up with your wife, how to measure your hat size with a 2x4 and many other semi-useful topics. It was a fun read, and some of his advice was surprisingly good (on rare occasion).

Before reading How to Do Everything, however, I finished another book about another man who can do just about anything with anything. This would be my Grandpa Laycock. A few years ago a couple of my cousins interviewed Grandpa Laycock and these interviews were edited and compiled by my uncle and then printed as the book Hugh Laycock: Legacy. Everyone in the family received a copy. It is one of the most valuable books that I own. Since I grew up on the farm, I saw my grandpa a lot as he would come out to either do some work on the farm or on his ultra-lights. I've always known that he is a great man and a hard worker, but I learned so much more about him as I read his book. And I'm not kidding when I say that it seems like he can do just about anything. The following is a list, from page 99 of the book, of activities that Grandpa Laycock pursued:

Actor, airplane builder, boat builder, businessman, carpenter, church leader, drummer (he made some of the drums himself as well), electrician, explosives expert, farmer, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, hunter, husband, inventor, mechanic, photographer, pilot, plumber, public speaker, realtor, singer, tourist, violinist, welder.

And I'm sure the list could go on. Reading about my grandpa, and learning some new stories about him, simply reinforced something that I already knew: Grandpa Laycock is a wonderful, kind, hard working man who loves his family and the gospel. I am so thankful that I can call him my grandpa.

Being Canadian

I'm proud to be Canadian. I like to believe that I don't normally go around being obnoxious about it, but I am proud of it. I usually make it back up to Canada to visit a couple times each year, but it's still nice to have an experience down in the US once in a while to help feel connected with the Great White North. Here are a few of the things that have happened since I've been back in Provo after Christmas.

1. I went to a BYU hockey game. I had only ever been to one other hockey game down here (back when the BYU team was still the Provo Ice Cats), and I had forgotten how fun it was. I'm pretty sure you could have described me as giddy when the teams took the ice.

2. I used the word "dandy." This probably sounds silly, but some

body asked me how my day was the other day and I told them it had been dandy. At this instant I felt a certain connection with home. I think part of it is connected to hearing that word used a lot on Hockey Night in Canada. Another part of it is due to an episode of the Simpsons where the Simpson family ends up in Toronto. At one point Bart and Milhouse end up crashing through a curling match and the announcer says "What's this? Two young Yankee Doodles have turned this matched into a dandy."

3. I listened to O Canada. I was walking home one day, listening to some of my music on my mp3 player, when O Canada, performed by Big Sugar, came on. I was very happy to hear this.

4. I made Nanaimo Bars. For our grad seminar this week we had a cultural and culinary exchange. We were asked to bring food related to our home country or another country/culture with which we are familiar. I decided to represent Canada by bringing Nanaimo Bars. They are always a huge hit anytime I make them. This has nothing to do with my cooking, Nanaimo Bars are just plain delicious. Anyway, it was fun to make them and share them for the seminar, but I think my Canadian pride was affected the most when I got home. There were some bars left over, so I decided to take them to share with my dinner group for dessert. When I uncovered them, one of the girls there said they looked like "fudge cream brownies," or something along those lines. I replied and told her that they are called Nanaimo Bars because they originated in Nanaimo, B.C. This was followed by a short discussion about them possibly being the same thing, just called something different. We're friends, and this was all very friendly conversation, but inside I felt myself getting very defensive, with my thoughts being something along the line of "they are Nanaimo Bars, not fudge cream brownies. Nanaimo Bars are Nanaimo Bars, and they are Canadian. These are not fudge cream brownies. Even if you call them fudge cream brownies, that's not what they are. They are Nanaimo Bars" It's not as if this was going to be a source of contention or anything, but I was very happy when she ate one and informed me that they were not the same thing as fudge cream brownies.

Delicious Nanaimo Bars

Picture taken from www.eclecticcook.com