"This was really a very quiet week. The biggest news for me is I almost completed posting a Thoughtlet for the first time in 67 weeks. Hopefully I will finish it this week. Surprising how busy one can get when laid off, and things are not as comfortable as they were with a paycheck. The idea is to keep up with Thoughtlets for 2009, and to go back and to catch up with the latest missing year of my life as time allows. There was one interesting thing I noticed tonight as I created a new directory for e-mail's which I call "Current Week." Back in August I created an e-mail directory which I called "To File." A year ago I had got in the habit of including key e-mail's in these Thoughtlets, and one of the changes which happened as I got so far behind on keeping up with the Thoughtlets was I started to receive more and more e-mails. Surprised me to learn that over the time from the 5th to the 11th of January, I received or sent 180 e-mails that are not considered spam. These were from my rnelson@walden3d.com, roicenelson@gmail.com, rnelson@laytonenergy.net, and RoiceNelson@tmo.blackberry.net accounts. No wonder I can't seem to get anything done, like keep up with thoughtlets.
Now to be fair, there were 34 notifications of chess moves by Roice, 4 chess moves by Colby, and 2 chess moves by Rob. In addition there were 14 e-mails from the Oil & Gas Journal and Offshore, 12 from Randy Bruner at Layton, 5 from Aura at Object Reservoir, 4 from Jialin Yan in China, 8 from Wulf Massell at DML, 3 from Jim Siebert at DML, 3 from Joe Klutts in Lafayette, 2 from John Gillooley, 2 from Les Denham, 2 e-mails from my sister, I sent out 29 e-mails, and there was one e-mail from about Paul and Kate's new house (see image below and to the right and click on image for full view), all of which total up to 125 e-mails. The others were from professional societies and various individuals. Think about it for a second: 180 e-mails in a week is 25.7 e-mails per day, or over one per hour for every hour the entire week. We are connected.
I think it was Saturday night last week when we were watching something on Television Paul called to talk about a house they were considering making an offer on. Then there was the e-mail this week with the description of the house. Andrea says Paul talked to her at some lenght, and afterwards he said she gave better advise than I did. Oh well! I recall there were floods of memory that poured over my mind as he talked about the options regarding finding a new place to live. I only really knew one house all the time I was growing up. I was old enough to remember when we moved out to the farm, and Mom always pointed out the house we lived in for the first few years of my life across from the North Elementary. But for all practical purposes, I only remember living in one house growing up. I wanted to provide you kids with a similar stability, and so as Paul described considering to purchase an expensive house, my mind went back to our houses.
Marti and I started out in a basement apartment on the corner of 13th East and 5th South in Salt Lake. Turns out the apartment was designed by Robert Gardner, Ray Gardner's Dad, when he was going to school at the University of Utah. When we moved to Dallas we lived in some apartments with the name Nottingham in them, and with little castle looking things on the corner apartments north of Love Field. Marti's Mom Robbye helped us purchase our first house, which was on Hanover Lane, just off of Lover's Lane in Dallas. It only had 2 bedrooms. But it had a converted garage, a neat greenhouse, and I really liked that house. We were offered more than we thought the house was worth, and there was a house for sale across the street from our good friends who followed us to Mobil from the University of Utah, Ed and Carole Gray. So we sold the house, pocketed several thousand dollars profit, and bought a house on Lockmore Lane, just north of where our first apartment had been.
I struggled with the big company and the bureaucracy at Mobil Oil, and when an opportunity came to follow the advice of one of my MBA teachers at SMU and work in a University at the interface between industry and academia, I grabbed it. We moved ourselves from Dallas to Houston, and took a significant cut in pay. We rented a house in Sugar Land. Marti was depressed, and did not even get out of bed those days. The Relief Society tried to help her. I thought everything would be OK once we had our own house. So we built a house on Blue Quail Lane in Missouri City, and were the last white family to move into Quail Run, our new subdivision. Roice and Ben became quite good friends with many of the black kids in the neighborhood. However, blacks broke into a policeman's house a block away, spray painted black slang all over his walls, and the neighborhood was no longer safe. Landmark had been formed about a year and a half before, and I was tired of commuting from Missouri City up Highway 6 to I-10 and Buffalo Bayou. So Marti and I decided it was time to settle down, and we wanted to buy a house big enough to raise our young family. The new school year was starting, Landmark looked like it was going to take off, we had no money, and somehow we qualified for a loan. So we went to the closing and paid the closing fees with a credit card I used for company travel. I remember we looked at each other and Marti asked for reassurance it was the right thing to do. I said yes, and did not look back. However, it was hard. We always were able to make our house payments. However, at one point the bank threatened to take the Landmark stock we had used as collateral away. Eventually Landmark went public and we paid off the house. Then there was the divorce, and I ended up mortgaging the house to pay a big tax bill and costs associated with the divorce. These days the mortgage is a big cloud hanging over Andrea, and I look forward to when we will have the house paid off again.
I remember Paul carefully talking through all of their options regarding the house, as all of the above memories were flooding through my mind. I wish I could remember forward, so I could give good advice regarding whether they should purchase the house or not. I did point out how kids who live in exclusive neighborhoods tend to be snobs, and they tend to let those who run around with them get them in trouble. Paul said his kids are a lot like him, and they are would probably be the leaders in these kinds of problems. I thought it best not to take responsibility for how the kids act, because examples impacting the kids interactions might be related to how Kate and Paul individually or jointly provide discipline, and are more likely fact like the Grandparents (meaning me) are not around enough to provide examples from our experience, or numerous other examples too vast to attempt to catalog. Oh well! Paul and Kate are buying a new house, and the future will tell all of us whether this was a wise decision or not.
In addition to e-mails, my week included my television addiction. Andrea and I watch a lot of "NCIS." Sunday night Andrea and I watched the two hour "24" introduction called "Redemption," and "The Unit." Pretty bloody stuff to watch. When you write these words, it comes to mind this type of show certainly does not fit my idea of keeping the Sabbath. Koyaanisqatsi, or "Crazy Life" as the Hopi's say.
Most of my daylight hours were spent at Layton Energy: 9:30-5:30 Monday, 9:00-11:15 1:30-5:45 with lunch with Les Denham and Dave Agarwal to talk about commercializing Les' program to calculate lineaments and rose diagrams from seismic time-slices and horizon-slices on Tuesday; 9:30-11 and 12:30-6:00 on Wednesday with a lunch with Dennis McMullin at the Uptown Park Cafe Express to catch up and for Dennis to give me a Christmas present of a neat little notebook; 9:00-2:00 on Thursday with a lunch with Joe Klutts at the Greek Restaurant at San Felipe and 610 to thank him for driving over from Lafayette to talk about his prospect; and 12:30-4:30 on Friday. Friday morning I went and visited Kjell Finstad and Tom Holloway in the morning, came back and worked with Jim Siebert on Dynamic Measurement stuff, ate lunch at home, and was in the office by 12:30 for the formal review of the reprocessing by Tom Holloway on the East Whitepoint prospect, which was the first project I started working on for Dan Layton. When I got home in the evenings I usually vegged in front of the TV from 7-8:00 and then did a few things on the computer before going to bed.
Saturday morning I got up about 8:00 and did my exercises. After Andrea's quilting program on BYU TV we went for our Saturday morning walk. On the way we stopped by one of the members of my new Sunday School class and woke members of her family up. Her Dad answered the door, and we gave the material to him. When we got back I worked on DML stuff in front of the TV, whatching Monk and some Army shows Matt would like while Andrea dis some things in the kitchen. Then while she used my PC for getting material ready for our 2008 taxes, I visited 4 others members of my Sunday School Class who were not there the first Sunday I taught. Good visits, and I'm glad I went to see them. Good kids. They just need someone to tell them they are cared about and missed.
Sunday morning I was up and ready by 8:00. My friend did not come by, as expected, so I worked on my Sunday School lesson until it was time to go to church. There were a lot of scriptures to cover, and since it is a good reference regarding our Savior, I copy the list I put together for your use:
| Behold I am Jesus Christ the Savior of the World The Doctrine and Covenants testifies of Jesus Christ: D&C 50:41-44 D&C 76:22-24 The Savior describes His atoning sacrifice: D&C 19:16-19 D&C 18:10-11 D&C 19:19,24 D&C 34:3 Through the Atonement, we will all be resurrected: D&C 88:14-18 D&C 93:33 Alma 11:42-44 Through the Atonement, we can be forgiven of our sins and inherit celestial: glory: D&C 18:11-12 D&C 19:16-17, 20 D&C 58:42 D&C 76:62-70 Through the Atonement, the Savior gained perfect empathy for us in all our sorrows, pains, and afflictions: D&C 122:8 Alma 7:11-12 D&C 62:1 D&C 133:53 |
The Doctrine and Covenants helps us understand the Savior's roles and attributes: D&C 6:20-21 D&C 6:32-37 D&C 19:1-3 D&C 29:1-2 D&C 38:1-3 D&C 43:34 D&C 45:3-5 D&C 50:44 D&C 75:5 D&C 93:5-19 D&C 133:42-52 D&C 136:22 Conclusion: D&C 19:23 D&C 59:23 I Stand All Amazed34:3 D&C 19:16-19 D&C 88:6, 122:8 D&C 6:36-37 D&C 20:77 Our "advocate with the Father" D&C 29:5 D&C 45:3 D&C 62:1 D&C 110:4 Bearing witness of Jesus Christ through His titles: Index triple combination page 174-185 The Light of Christ: Bible Dictionary page 725 2nd & 3rd paragraphs D&C 88:6-13 D&C 93:2 Moroni 7:13, 16-19 |
Sacrament Meeting was on the Young Women and the Young Men Programs, and I wrote two possible Stanzas for Prime Words, which incidentally were both from the Young Women side:
Sister Linda Peterson was not feeling well, she called me about an hour before church, and so her class came in with mine. I had 6 of my 9 class members and 6 of Sister Peterson's 14 class members in attendance. I thought it was a good class. I was kind of wiped out by the time we got into High Priest Quorum. Chris Schmidt taught, and he called on me to talk about how it feels when kids don't follow our positive example. It was hard. Reed Peterson brought sanity to the room after my comments with, "My experience is you just need to give them time, and they usually will come back to what they were taught in their youth." And of course, you all were taught in this big old house, and in our neighborhood, and in the local schools, and at The Nottingham Country Ward. It all adds together and makes me wonder what the future holds in Paul and Kate's new house."