cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"I spent all week looking forward to Colby's second birthday. Maybe I was looking forward to the cake, or maybe just to be out of Houston and in the country. I got a call early in the week from Rob saying he would like to ride over with me, and then Roice and Sarah said they would like to ride over with me. So when all is said and done, I was mostly looking forward to spending time with some of those I love whom I do not have much communication with. I was not disappointed.
I've started to enjoy the time listening to the Audio-Tech books on tape as I commute into work. For instance, on Monday I was listening to a tape and it included a challenge to make a list of things that make us happy and unhappy, as well as things we consider successes and failures in our life. Most of the things that really matter in each of these four categories are tied to you kids and family. It makes me very happy to be invited to and to anticipate attending Colby's second birthday party. It makes me sad that Sara and Heather and Audrey and Rachel and Matt and Ben and Sarah and Ethan and Paul and Kate and Grant and Sara and Bridget and Justin could not be there with us. I consider it a success that I have a reasonable relationship with each of my kids. I write too much about what I consider my failures, and I need to not focus on this aspect.
Tuesday morning I called Sara and talked to her from 6:00 until 6:28 She has moved into a new place. It does not have mold on the walls, and the roof doesn't leak during the rainy season. She has a shower and a toilet that works, which she really likes. It is a gated group of houses with a guardian who watches out for the houses all night, each night, which I really like. She was getting ready for a house warming party on Saturday, and said she will be buying a chicken, killing it, plucking it, cleaning it, cooking it, and serving it to her friends. When I told Andrea she said she remembers her Mom talking about doing all of this, and that it is only one generation away from when this was common practice. On the way to work I wrote a possible stanza for Prime Words, based on an Audio Tech tape, I think it was `Agile Business for Fragile Times' (a):
Then at lunch I was reading from State of the World 2004 and
wrote a couple of possible stanzas based on quotes from (a)
Lao Tzu (page 178, a) and Stephen Jay Gould (page 179, b):
Tuesday evening I went by St. Luke's Hospital to visit
Adam and Matt Salt. The kidney transplant from Adam to
Matt went very well, and both are doing fine. In fact,
they had left the hospital earlier in the day, and so I
did not get to see them. Oh well!
Wednesday we had meetings with INT, a software development group that is being considered for development of GDC's next software package. At first I thought this was going to be competitive with the Spotfire stuff I have been doing. However, it turns out it complements what I have been working on very well. Time will tell how it turns out.
Thursday I wrote a couple of possible stanzas based on an Audio Tech tape titled `If your life were a business would you invest in it' (c):
Andrea went to Salt Lake Thursday afternoon, the first
discounted plane fare as a result of Audrey working as
a stewardess. Audrey and she visited the Staheli kids
and also Paul and Kate and Grant. She painted Audrey's
new room, helped move all of her stuff up from Uncle
Randy and Aunt Kathryn's, and seemed to have thoroughly
enjoyed her time with Audrey. Much better than a year
ago. I look forward to when this type of relationship
and weekend is part of our normal interaction with each
of you. Thursday I left work at 5:00 and was able to
get back to the house, pick up the Armageddon painting
Ken had loaned Andrea for seminary and Sara's painting,
drive out to New Ulm, talk briefly with Ken and Nell,
and get back to Katy in time to pick up Matt from Driver's
Training at 7:45. This was the first time I have pointed
out the get trail in Sara's painting goes right through
the World Trade Center Towers to Ken. I intended to
capture his reaction as a digital video clip. However
I forgot the digital camera. Ken didn't have much of a
reaction. Nell had much more of a reaction. The annual
New Ulm Art Festival was on Saturday, and so I left Sara's
painting with them to show off, and it would have been
nice to have been able to capture what they said about
the painting now that the see how it foretold the temporary
nature of man's creations like The Word Trade Center
Towers. I do believe there are folks who can see across
time and predict the future, and this was a little boost
to my testimony of this. Also, Ken let me borrow a
g-clee of his latest painting of the US flag with several
hundred ghost portraits. It is a powerful painting. It
took him 8 months to paint.
Friday morning I substituted for Andrea at Seminary. I enjoyed it. Hopefully the kids got something out of it. It was interesting watching Matt interact. Ajay Kelsey called and one of the things he wanted to talk about was how Matt is doing. I told him he is very social and can talk to anyone, and he struggles in school. Ajay said you have to be able to do both in life. I said, I know, and it is sometimes a hard lesson for kids to learn. He said, `That's the difference between here and India. In India the father forces the children to do what he thinks they need to do, making everyone unhappy, and here you let them suffer the consequences of their choices.' I smiled to myself, because I'm certainly guilty of attempting to push kids too hard to do what I think is important for them to do. Oh well! I am sorry to those of you who feel like I pushed you too hard. For what it is worth, it was not out of an effort to better myself, rather it was because I love you and want the best for you in everything you choose to do.
Friday was really frustrating at work. I could not get some coordinates I had been working with to work out. It turns out that the program creating the coordinates is not working. Then there was problems building a spread-sheet, as it was too big for the computer I have. It took all day to do what should have taken a couple of hours. Oh well.' I actually worked on it until 6:30, and solved most of the problems. Should be able to finish up within an hour of getting in on Monday morning. I did not bring the computer home because I knew there would be no time to work on it, between Colby's second birthday party and going to the temple on Friday night, and because I did not want Matt playing `The Devil' (Diablo) on it every spare minute all weekend.
Matt called and when I asked if he wanted to do something with me and he said `No,' I decided to attend the Ward Temple Night. Matt ended up going to the Katy Mall with his friend Andrew. I got to the temple at 7:10, just as the Pickerd's arrived. Then I realized our Ward session was suppose to be at 7:00. Oh well! The Pickerd's just did sealings, as they had to pick up kids. I was the only member of the Nottingham Country Ward in the 8:00 session. It did give me about an hour to read in the chapel. The Pickerd's had gone to Nauvoo for Spring Break, and I'd asked Mike to look at the property across the river, based on D&C Section 125:1-4, but not telling him about my Thoughtlet on Zarahemla (../0249.html):
Mike said they did not make it across the river from Nauvoo.
So while I was waiting in the chapel I reread Section 45,
which was important to me when I was serving my mission.
Especially verses 62-75 where it talks about `the New
Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of
safety for the saints of the Most High God.' Then I
remembered in China when Dave Johnson talking to me about
the New Jerusalem as recorded in Revelations 21. Looking
this up it was specifically verses 16-17:
The footnote says that a furlong is the same as a Greek
stadia, and a Greek stadium is 607 English feet. This
means the city is a cube with 1,398.5 miles on a side
([12,000 x 607]/5,280). Note that the International
Space Station flies at an altitude of between 212.5 and
262.5 miles, which is about 1/6th the height of the city
as described in Revelations. However, if there are
a space-elevator at each corner of the city, then it could
meet these criteria (although there would not be much
living above 10 miles without habitation units). Uncle
Des' calculations (http://www.walden3d.com/space_elevator,
../0249.html and ../0250.html) show that by locating a
satellite at 44,000 miles elevation `the cable would float
around with the earth, hanging vertically, every part of
the cable and the satellite would be in geosynchronous
orbit!' So I wonder what happens if the satellite is at
1,398.5 miles elevation? For your reference, according
to the encyclopedia we have the troposphere is the first
10 miles, then the stratosphere is the next 20 miles,
then the mesosphere is the next 20 miles, then the
thermosphere is the next 250 miles, then the exosphere is
the next 2,000 miles, which takes us out to about 2,250
miles, which includes the 1,398.5 mile high top of The
New Jerusalem. For your reference, Mount Everest is
29,040 feet in elevation (5.5 miles high).
The bottom line is that John the Revelator's description of the vertical axis of the New Jerusalem seems hard to mesh with known science unless it is a space elevator or a space mirror (like I told Todd Staheli he and I were going to build some day, as recorded in Thoughtlet ../0249.html and ../0349.html). Even his description of the height of the wall around the city is hard to understand, but it certainly is feasible. After all 144 cubits is 210 feet at 17 1/2 inches per cubit or 222 feet at 18 1/2 inches per cubit. With all of the concerns about border control into the United States, I can imagine a 14 story (15 feet per story) fence around the United States.
The horizontal axes are something else. There are not
many places on the face of the planet where there can be
a 1,398.5 mile by 1,398.5 mile entity, call it a city or
a place. However, Joseph Smith taught that the New
Jerusalem would be built at Independence, Jackson County,
Missouri. It is interesting to take a map, which I did
and attached, and show what area is covered by a square
centered at Independence Missouri. It goes from Saskatoon,
Canada to the southern tip of Texas and from Salt Lake City
to Washington D.C. It includes all of the major oil
reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, but does not include
Las Vegas nor New York City. I expect some of you will
find this a very weird line of thinking, and for what it
is worth, I think it is exciting. After all, it will be
Colby Cade Wright, and his descendants who will most likely
build the New Jerusalem, it's walls, it's buildings, it's
temples, and it's sacred places. Despite all of the
negative news of our times, there are some very positive
things that will come through after the prophesied trials
and tribulations occur. I hope each of you will always
find some way to look at the glass as being half full.
Saturday I woke up early, showered and got ready for Colby's second birthday party. It was raining. I took Matt to his football scrimmage, but it was called off because of the rain. He went with me to Walmart, where we got Colby some presents. Rob, Roice, and Sarah rode with me over to Vidor. Rob had a bag of trail mix, and I ate too many swallows. It was a very nice day. I did forget to put in an extra mini-cd for the digital camera, and so there were not that many pictures of Colby's second birthday party. Oh well!
What a party. It was raining outside, and so it was in the Wright's living room. There was crape paper and balloons and lots of people. There was pin the nose on Elmo, and then there was an Elmo piņata. Rob kind of stole the show with both of these. It was fun. Colby did a good job of opening presents, and he also did a good job of sharing with the other kids. He got 3 bubble blowing guns and about 12 bottles of bubbles. I've never seen so many bubbles in one room as when they were all shooting them out. Reminded me of the old Doris Day movie where a box of detergent is dumped in a swimming pool. There was a big Elmo cake with two candles on, which Colby blew out with a little help. There was pizza, pop, and apple slices to go with the cake. Everyone had a lot of fun. Brother Wright was working, and he came in for a few minutes and then went back to work.
Melanie and Jared took us to see their new house. I'm impressed, even if they did cut down all of the trees. I've been assigned to build Colby a fort. Roice and Rob did not realize the fort in Missouri City was based on Buckminster Fuller ideas. I did not realize you kids used to bury each other in the sand pile and make it look like it was just sand under the fort. I guess there were secret tunnels and everything. Just like when I was growing up. When Melanie showed me where her painting will go I asked her if she would be willing to do Mom's temple work for her. We both teared up. I was going to wait and do it in St. George, and we will just do it at the Houston Temple, once Taylor can be left for a few hours without needing to nurse.
Rob, Roice, Sarah, and I stopped at Wright's bar-b-que and ate dinner. I really enjoy the food. It rained pretty hard on the way back. We got back about 8:00, and Rob was supposed to be at work about the time we got back. I got the mail, and picked up Matt from work at 9:45.
Today seemed quiet at church without Andrea. A visitor named Alan Graff attended. We had a nice discussion. Alice Beckstrom was substituting for Greg Branning in Gospel Doctrine. I wrote a possible Prime Word's stanza based on her comments about Jarom 1:3 (a):
I cooked spaghetti for lunch. Andrea got back home about
3:30. She sat next to a Seminary Teacher from Victoria,
and said there was another LDS couple from Midland she met.
However, she had strong words about the possibility of Matt
having a make-up soccer game because of all of the rain on
the Sabbath. Interesting. Scott Whitrock and I did our
Home Teaching this afternoon. Tim Gebauer and Andrew Salt
came by to Home Teach us this evening. And I spent the
rest of the day writing about my reactions and thoughts
about Colby's second birthday."