Category: General

I can't remember when I last visited a singles ward. All I know is that it's been a long, long time. I was last IN a singles ward back in the spring of 1991. That's 16 years that I've been away from singles wards.

Since I last was a member of a singles ward, I've gone to married student wards, family wards that greatly resembled married student wards, a highly-transient family ward, and most recently, a more stable family ward. Each ward has had its own unique blend of challenges and strengths.

A week ago Sunday, I visited a singles ward in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Maybe my memories have faded. Maybe I was too young and self-absorbed to notice some things. Maybe my current view is tainted by my own life experience. Maybe I've just been married for too long. But this singles ward wasn't like the singles wards I remember. Actually, the movie is a lot LOT more funny to me now that I've recently visited a singles ward.

I'd forgotten how quiet meetings can be. During the time that the sacrament was administered, I sneezed, and I felt like a bomb had gone off. I had interrupted a nearly perfect silence. The noises from outside the building were louder than any noises in that chapel. It was an almost eerie silence. It was absolutely TOO quiet. I started to wish for the sound of a toddler crying or some pre-teens giggling and poking each other.

Yet immediately following the meeting and again after the block of meetings, the noise of the socializing was relatively deafening. Silent hour turned WAY too quickly into social hour. I'm probably exaggerating, but the juxtaposition of the solemn silence and the explosion of highly-charged socialization made it really seem to be deafeningly noisy.

Sad but true: The underlying level of sexual tension in this singles ward was painful. That's probably a good thing, because it probably means that, more often than not, the people in the ward are living the values they SHOULD be living. It just gave me a very different, kind of strange feeling as I watched the ward members interact with each other.

Even the people that stood in front of the congregation to share their feelings--a regular monthly occurrence in LDS wards--seemed to feel pressure to say just the right things in just the right way so that they would appear to be that perfect partner; marriage material.

It's a good thing that in Sunday School, we didn't quite get to the scripture in Ephesians 5:25 - "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;" I wonder where that conversation might have gone. *crickets*

Interestingly enough, I ended up sitting in front of Laylabean's sister during the first meeting. How crazy is that? I just happen to go to church in a singles ward in Chevy Chase, Maryland and I just happen to sit in front of a very good friend's sister? That IS crazy!

I'll make sure and get it right next time before I post.

In the future, I'll not succumb to pressure to post something quickly.

In the future, I'll try not to write part of a post one day and complete the post another day.

In the mean time, I have a couple of much more interesting topics to post about...

Finally, the basement people seem to have fixed my subwoofer.  It's nice to not have a rattle or a squeak when the bass starts thumping.

But there's still one small problem.

The subwoofer hums.

I've looked online at several things and it appears that I have a ground loop problem.  I tried a ground loop arrestor between the receiver and the amplifier for the subwoofer, but that didn't seem to fix anything at all.  I went through the steps to troubleshoot the problem and I found the source of the problem.   Any time I plug HDMI cables into my receiver (either input or output) I get a hummmmmmmmmm.

I'm kind of at a loss here.  I don't know what to do about it just yet.  I could TRY component video cable instead, but that would be expensive.  It's a 40-foot run from my projector to my receiver.  I'm going to run component video to the front (down by the projector) already, but this longer run would cost around $125 or so.  And there's no guarantee that it would even make the hum go away.

A neighbor builds and installs home theater systems for a living.  I'll have to ask him what to try next.

In the meantime, I'll just have to put up with the humming, but only during the quiet parts of movies.

All told, I had a fun Halloween.

It didn't start so well. This is the first year since... Well... The first year I EVER remember (other than when I was a missionary and had a pretty strict dress code) that I didn't even attempt to dress up for Halloween. Sure, I wore my Jack Skellington glow-in-the-dark hat from Disneyland, but I wear that hat year-round.

My boys came Trick-Or-Treating at my workplace. In about an hour, my younger son's candy was too heavy for him to carry. Because of that, we didn't have to go Trick-Or-Treating door to door. (Which would have been another flashback to my missionary days.)

We spent the rest of the night enjoying each other's company. The boys had carved jack-o-lanterns the night before. We had an Oogie Boogie from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, and a Trogdor from homestarrunner.com. I had printed out a pattern of an evil jester that I wanted to carve, but unfortunately it didn't fit the pumpkin that was left, so I resorted to carving The Cheat from homestarrunner.com. I took pictures of them and hopefully, I'll post them here soon.

We made homemade root beer, homemade pizza, and sat around and watched a movie between groups of kids coming to the door. Honestly, it was nice to just be able to be home for the night.

Next year, I'm going to dress up though. They had GOOD prizes for the costumes at work. Several runner-up costumed people got $25 iTunes gift certificates... And to think I could have gotten a cast discount at the Hale Center Theater in Orem! Definately a missed opportunity.

It was a fun day though. Now I have to try to restrain myself from snitching the good candy from my boys' stashes.

I'm planning on mailing my absentee ballot today.  It has to be postmarked by Monday.

On the outside of the envelope provided with my ballot, up near where one would put a stamp, I saw the following logo:

So...  Do I put a stamp on it or do I NOT put a stamp on it?  It is, after  all, Official Election Mail, Authorized by the U.S. Postal Service.   Yet there's nothing that says that postage is prepaid or anything like that.

I decided to call the Elections Office and they told me that I have to put a stamp on it.

It's kind of confusing.  I'll bet a lot of absentee ballots get returned to sender for this very reason.

My boys and I went to a movie last night. Because most of the stuff that Hollywood churns out is mostly crap, the opportunities to take my boys to a movie are few and far between.

Movies are getting EXPENSIVE! It cost $8 for an adult ticket and $5.50 for a child's ticket. Since my older child is no longer a child according to theaters, I had to pay the $8 for him. And since the movie we went to see was in 3-D, we had to pay $2 each for the 3-D glasses. For the three of us to see a movie, without any refreshments, it cost $27.50.

We enjoyed every minute of it! It's fun to do something fun together. It's fun to do something out of the ordinary. It's fun to see their excitement--to feel the anticipation build. It's fun to laugh with them and react together and just enjoy being together. It's a small memory, but is that memory worth $27.50?

It was worth every penny.

I voted last night.

It was the first time I can say that I voted BEFORE election day.   I'm not going to be around on election day this year, so I arranged for an absentee ballot.  It was SO nice!  I didn't have to wait in lines or worry about getting away from work for an hour to cast my vote.  I could also research information about the issues on the ballot with my ballot right in front of me.

It's not a big election.  There are only two issues in my particular precinct:  the issue of school vouchers and three vacancies in my local city council.  Yet I feel that it is still important to be part of the process regardless of the number or the importance of the issues on the ballot.

Now it's your turn.  Vote on November 6th!

Last night, I received a phone call that turned out to be rather enjoyable for me.

The caller identified himself as a representative of our current mortgage company.  They're calling people and making sure that their mortgage(s) are meeting their needs.  They want to make sure that we're in the "best position possible."

Translation:  "Are there any other services that we can sell you."

The phone call was pretty short.  He first asked if I was still comfortable with my mortgage payment.  I told him to look through my payment history and that would be self-evident.  He saw that we're paying extra principal each month and spontaneously reacted with "Whoa!  You're really trying to knock this one out, aren't you?"  After a rather long pause (where he was probably reading telemarketing scripts and looking at our information), he finally said, "Well, unless you're going to do major renovations or need us to increase your Home Equity Line of Credit, I don't think there's anything else we can really do for you."

I suggested that he might lower our interest rate, but he couldn't do that.

It really seemed to surprise him that there really wasn't anything for him to sell to us.  He said it was very rare that he had such a short phone call with absolutely no options.  I like being in that position.

Oy...

My site is set up on a VPS: a Virtual Private Server.  It basically looks like it's own separate, private machine with nobody else in the world using it.  It's not, because that's a lot more than I can afford, but nonetheless, it's better than the normal run-of-the-mill shared hosting that I used to use.  I can install software and I can do pretty much whatever I want... within reason.  I like the VPS idea and it's affordable.

Lately, if you've read my blog (or anything else hosted on my VPS), you've probably noticed a considerable lag.  It's been getting progressively worse.

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I don't believe that it's due to the site being overloaded.  Few people regularly visit anything hosted here.

Last night, the whole thing came to a screeching halt.  It was so bad that I couldn't even log into the server to reboot it.  I put in a help ticket with the host and they were able to get the site back up and running.  But this is ridiculous.

I looked up some information on streamlining memory usage, especially with the database server that this site uses.  I tweaked some configuration settings and hopefully, I won't have the same problem with the ever-slowing-to-a-grinding-halt problem that I've been seeing lately.

If so, I guess I'll have to look into the issue more closely and more carefully.  The main problem is that when the site gets really bad, it has to be rebooted, which nukes all of the information that might tell me who the memory hog really is.   Maybe I can write a script that would regularly log such information to a file I can retrieve later.

But hopefully, it's fixed and you can waste less time waiting for my pages to load.

To the person that followed me most of the way to work this morning...:

Thank you for following me so closely. If you'd just call me and tell me the results, I'll tell my physician that he can forego certain unpleasant parts of my next physical examination.

<expletive deleted>