cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts.
"So here is a brief note for the 35th week of 2001, the August 26th Thoughtlet. Like the last Thoughtlet ( 0135.html), it is appropriate to start this one with what I left out of the last one. Saturday night, the 18th of August, was a reception for Reynolds Cahoon's daughter. Melanie and Jared came to town for this, and Marti came to the reception at the Stake Center. I found myself in a very awkward situation after the reception as we were standing outside and Melanie and Jared came up to talk to us and Marti was with them. If I asked how Rob is doing, I was afraid Marti would feel attacked and say something to make me look bad in front of Melanie and Jared. I have asked for a status on the college Trust for 4 years now, and if I would have asked anything about this, I was afraid I would appear aggressive, and would create problems. Etc. Etc. Etc. So I didn't say anything, and I still felt awkward, like I was doing something disappointing to Melanie. I still care about Marti, and always will, and it is so hard for me to see the impact of her choices and my mistakes on you kids. Oh well! I have done the best I could with the tools I had available, and hopefully someday you will all recognize this and forgive me for my weaknesses.
So Melanie and Jared came and stayed with us on Sunday, Monday, and left Tuesday. It was so nice to have the two of you with us at Sacrament meeting on Sunday. I had forgotten to make a flyer for the Young Men's activity on Wednesday, and so I came home during Sunday School and made the flyer and ran off 50 copies. This meant I was not able to sit with Melanie and Jared in Sunday School. Brother Brent Peterson was out of town, and Greg Stine gave the Priest's Priesthood lesson. He had missed the previous week because he was at National's gymnastic competition. He slipped and ended in coming in 12th of the top 12 male gymnasts in the nation. He seemed OK with the setback. We weren't sure if we would see Melanie and Jared again when the two of you went to Marti's and took a nap, and it was nice to have you show up later in the afternoon. Because the Internet and the e-mail was down I didn't try to write a Thoughtlet last Sunday. It gave some time to just sit around and talk. It was nice, and I hope there are many more opportunities for this type of activity with each of you.
My week was very busy in convention preparation. It seems that since we started Landmark back in the fall of 1982 my life has always been built around conventions, specifically the SEG and the AAPG conventions (Society of Exploration Geophysicists and American Association of Petroleum Geologists). With my major career change this year, namely using software tools to find oil and gas rather than designing and building software tools, the conventions I will be supporting have changed. The two key conventions I now will be showing at are NAPE and AAPEX (The North American Prospect Expo in Feburary and the AAPG Prospect and Property Expo in August). With Melanie almost graduated in corporate communications, it would be nice to have her doing all of the leg work on these conventions and pulling the booth and the show together for me. However, I don't have any money to pay her right now, and so I spent my week preparing for the convention so we would look like a 50 person company, even though I am the only one on salary, and what little salary we are taking out is coming entirely from consulting work at Chroma. Hopefully the story will change considerably by NAPE in February.
Monday morning was preparation for a meeting with Texaco for a final review on their project. It went better than I expected, and it looks like Chroma will have a lot of follow-up work. I worked at Chroma until late in the evening. Tuesday morning I went by Marc Edward's house to pick up a CD describing the work he has been doing onshore Texas in the Wilcox and Frio (two different geologic formations). I went from there to Chroma and spent the afternon working on the Fairfield data examples. On Wednesday I went to Sam LeRoy's about 9:00, and we cut a CD for Les Denham to print large scale plots for me. I took it downtown, and gave it to Les. He was never able to plot any of the images. I went back to Chroma in the afternoon, reviewed the comments on the final Texaco report, and borrowed the small computer projector. Continuum had cancelled hosting the Court of Honor and giving a demonstration to the Priests and Laurels. It did upset me. I find it interesting that once you let people take advantage of you they seem to get used to doing this and tend to repeat breaking their word and taking advantage of you again and again and again. Projection of images off of Roger Anderson's portable Macintosh did not work well at all. I did sing the song I wrote about our High Adventure (0131.html), and John Sneidman brought brownies, which we gave to Steve Salt for his 50th birthday celebration. It probably wasn't as bad of an evening as I built it up in my mind to be.
One of the reasons the evening was hard was because Brother Schultz called me as I was leaving Chroma and asked if he could meet with me. He came in as I was setting up the projector for the Court of Honor and issued an honorable release and a calling to be the new Ward Activities Committee Chairman. I felt like I was being fired from a calling, the same as I felt when I was released as the Elder's Quorum President in Dallas and when I was released as a member of the Bishopric when I was in Saudi Arabia and in this ward. Oh well! Callings come and callings go and sometimes the transisition between callings is smooth and sometimes it is not.
Thursday morning started with a demonstration to Marc Lawrence of Fairfield Industry. He understood exactly what I was doing with the old stereoscope with stereo pictures from Chroma Energy. The juxtaposition of the antique with the modern caught his marketing imagination, and he gave permission to show all of the examples I have been working on. I finally got a written note giving permission to show the examples at AAPEX this last Monday morning, as I was picking up the computer at Chroma and making my way to the convention. I was really pleased with his reaction to the work we have been doing, specifically because he has spent his entire career marketing to the oil and gas industry.
I spent the rest of the day at Chroma. At about 6:00 there was a call from Les Denham on my cell phone saying he had not solved the issue of printing the large scale prints I was looking for. I went in on the Unix machine at Chroma, called up the systems guy at home twice, and figured out how to print the pictures I wanted on their system. By midnight I had printed about 50 feet x 3 feet of posters for the booth. The ink got low and there was some streaking, yet the exercise was more than satisfactory. On Friday morning I took the prints to Key Maps on Alabama and left them all to be laminated. It had cost $550 for the booth, and it cost $350 to get the posters laminated. Also, I decided earier in the week to get a 51" x 30" plasma flat panel display for the booth. This cost alomst $2,000 to rent, although Richard Nehring volunteered to pay $500 and John Dorrier agreed to pay us $500 to show his Columbia Prospect at AAPEX, so the net cost to Dynamic was $1,000, or $1,900 total out of pocket markeing costs and all of my time and Andrea's time and Sam LeRoy's time and Richard Nehring's time and Dick Coons' time, etc. I got back to Chroma in time for the introduction by Denver of the new CPAT software release (Chroma Patterns Software). It is a significant step up from the release of the software I have been using on my projects so far. I worked late on building the new stereo images for the show, and got home about 1:30 AM. Kinko's was closed, and so I wasn't able to leave my color printing job.
Saturday morning I ended up working at the house until about noon. Andrea printed cards for 23 different members of the NetWork, plus there were brochures to print, and other things. I also bought a new paper cutter, and went to Kinko's and printed new stereo pictures. The afternoon and evening were spent making new movies to show across the four prospects I derived from the Fairfield data. The movies turned out really good. There was some computer issues, and it took longer than expected, and I didn't make it home until about 1:00 AM. Needless to say I was quite tired when it came time for Stake Priesthood meeting at 7:00 AM on Sunday. It was also my last Sunday to be with the Priests, and Brent was being sustained as the new High Priest Quorum Leader, which I didn't know, so I was asked to teach. My last lesson was on the Word of Wisdom. I cry as I think about how important the Word of Wisdom has been to me, and how much it has been ignored by those whom I love the most. I can not help but feel like a failure as a teacher and specifically as a Father. Oh well! Maybe a lot of those feelings were tied to being so tired as I was teaching the lesson this Sunday. I was better by the afternoon when Matt and I went to the Steve Riches family to home teach them with cupcakes Andrea had made in hand. And when we went by Hayden Hudson's place Bo was there and we had a good discussion. He is continuing to talk a mission, and I expect it will be a very hard road for him to travel to have this opportunity. I will continue to encourage him, just as I would love to be able to encourage Rob, or any of the rest of you who might still consider going on a mission (note I didn't say any names because I know you know who you are).
It was a long week. It is always that way when there is convention preparation to take on. I hope you each find your own way to stretch yourselves, and that you take advantage of this stretching as you do your convention preparation."