"Monday was Memorial Day. We stayed home. I worked on projects on the computer all day. As I recall it was nice weather, and I didn't even go outside all day. Oh well!
Tuesday I was back at GDC. Terry Quinn in the London office is putting together a big proposal for Sonotach in Algeria. Luis and I helped him put together several components. I was very pleased to receive this e-mail from Midland Valley's President, Alan Gibbs, one of the groups Terry brought into the proposal from Glasgow, Scotland:
It's nice to know it is not just me with a long memory. And it also felt good, as the tone was so positive, and along the line of how I always saw myself, prior to the divorce. I guess I could stop writing about the divorce. However, I have not reconciled to myself it would be right, especially since several of you have not accepted the fact your mother divorced me, or your father divorced Andrea. So it is not just me still struggling with the selfish actions of another person. Tuesday evening Andrea and I went to the temple. It is so nice to have someone who wants to go to the temple with me, and someone who would never confront, verbally attack, and then walk out of a discussion with the temple president. But maybe I bring up this wound as self-justification for my mistakes. Certainly it is not in the positive tone of Alan Gibbs.
I think Rachel came in on Wednesday, and I do not have any notes to tell me. It would be on a credit card receipt, or a plane ticket, which is probably still around someplace.
Thursday I sent a note to Albert Boulanger and told him we were going to have about a six hour layover at Newark Airport, and that Andrea wanted to bring Rachel into New York City. Albert suggested I would really enjoy the American History Museum at 79th and Central Park West 5th, or maybe the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or maybe the Smithsonian American Indian Museum down by the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Albert knows me. He is a good friend. What he didn't tell me was about New York rainstorms this time of the year. Oh well. I have a note that at 11:00 PM we had a call from Joshua. I do not remember the specifics, and it seems like it was related to building bridges someplace.
Friday morning early we headed to the airport for our trip to Europe. We got on the Continental flight to Newark, picked up the June 2006 magazine, and on page 65 there was a photo of Mike Bahorich inside a box with the caption: "Breaking Out: Apache Corp.'s Mike Bahorich can't be contained." The article isn't that long, and since Mike was at Amoco in the group that reviewed HyperEdge, told me they were going to buy it, and then did an internal development, which hastened the financial failure of HyperMedia Corporation, from which I have never recovered financially, I think it is appropriate to quote the article:
I remember meeting a member of the church from Washington D.C. once who was a personal publicist. He would make sure someone had articles about themselves in the Continental Airlines Magazine, and that the right people heard about things of relevance. His comment to me, after spending about an hour with me, was that I am the kind of person the church needed to put in as a Stake President. It absolutely turned me off to think of lobbying for a church position, especially one requiring so much work. Then he told me he had been divorced, and I completely wrote him off. Hadn't thought of that discussion for over 20 years, and as I write this I find myself wondering if I was right. I still think so. After all, I'm not comfortable being as famous as I am in my profession. Why would I want to be more uncomfortable? And I did not get a PhD or even an Masters in Geophysics, nor have I applied for and received 8 patents, nor have I played the guitar at a Public Company birthday party, so it is irrelevant to think about it anyway. It's better to be ready for the unexpected New York rainstorm. than to spend any time worrying about being famous.
So we arrived in Newark, having checked our bags through to Zurich, Switzerland. We went downstairs to baggage claim and found some transportation people who told us we could catch a bus into Times Square and back out and make our next flight . . . barely. Andrea really wanted to see Times Square, and Rachel was also interested. It was their party, so I went along. It took almost an hour to get to where we got off the bus, and we realized we did not have much time to tour. So we walked up towards Times Square, and we found a New York rainstorm. It was not misting. It was not sprinkling. It was not raining. It was dumping buckets of water between extremely tall skyscrapers. We stepped out of the way, and hoped the New York rainstorm would go away. It didn't. There was a guy selling umbrellas. I bought two. It was still coming down, we were all hungry, and so we went into a Chinese noodles place. I had a very good shrimp bowl. As we ate we kept looking outside. The New York rainstorm did not let up. Finally we decided to chance it, and worked our way up to the awning under a hotel entrance, then Andrea and I shared an umbrella and followed Rachel to Times Square. Andrea and Rachel seemed so excited to be there. I thought it was just a whole bunch of people with nothing better to do than stand around in or run through a New York rainstorm. There was a guy that hit on Rachel several times. Kind of scared me, as it seemed to me there was a chemistry, and he was not a viable son-in-law in my book. And it wasn't just the tattoos. It was the cocky spirit emanating from him. Oh well! It isn't my choice. It isn't my choice. It isn't my choice. And I do trust Rachel to choose wisely. Even with the umbrellas we were soaked by the time we got back on the bus to ride back to Newark airport. And to top it off, I still don't understand why we didn't sit in the airport and work on the computer or read for six hours instead of go through the hassle of going to Times Square where the only thing really experienced was a New York Rainstorm. Oh well!
Turns out this was about the day we received an e-mail from Sara, which I wasn't able to read until we got back to Houston. It read:
We flew all night Friday and arrived in Zurich Saturday morning. When awake, I was reading "The Worlds of Joseph Smith, a Bicentennial Conference at The Library of Congress," Edited by John W. Welch, BYU Studies, V44, No. 4, 2005. I highly recommend this as good reading for each of you. And please remember, our extensive library is not just for us, it is for you kids. I know I need to get the index on-line, and I will. In the meantime, if there is a book I write about or you remember and didn't read, let me know and we will send it to you, with the only requirement being you send it back when you are finished, or after a couple of months, whichever comes first. I wrote the following possible stanza for Prime Words from this reading, where the a reference is from page 111 of this book, and the b reference was written at my missionary companion Bruno Steinle's house in Interlaken, Switzerland on Sunday, 04 June 2006:
I will talk about what happened on Saturday and Sunday in Switzerland in the next Thoughtlet (0624.html. My main point of this Thoughtlet is that it is important to always be prepared for an unexpected New York rainstorm."