National Night Out

When I walk home from the Metro I walk through a little park next to the library and fitness center.  I have come to view this as a place that brings the community together as it has been a happening place this summer. When we first got here we discovered there is a free open air family movie once a month. A few weeks ago they had the “Del Ray Music Festival”, which was a whole Saturday of live bands. On Tuesday I noticed them setting up for another event, as it happens it was ‘National Night Out’.

I had never heard of this, but I did some research today and found out it happens all over the country. It was started in the mid-80’s by the National Association of Town Watch (NATW), a “nonprofit crime prevention organization… which works in cooperation with thousands of crime watch groups and law enforcement agencies”. The purpose is to:

• Heighten crime and drug prevention awareness;
• Generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs;
• Strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships; and
• Send a message to criminals letting them know that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.

It sounds like there are about 12,000 communities in all 50 states that participate. They all have the event on the same evening. If you haven’t heard of it you can organize one for you community in 2010. (more)

So, for our walk Tuesday we went down and checked it out. It was basically like a huge block party sponsored by local businesses and law enforcement. They had a fire truck out for all the kids to play in, a local band playing for the crowd, and free food:) We got a little bite to eat and sat and listened to the band for a song or two. Then they took a break and had the ‘Adult’ water balloon tossing contest. Sharon and I made it to 3rd place and won $50.00 worth of coupons to some of the local shops! We are excited to use them for dates our last few weeks before we go. One was also to a baby store.

Hurray for community events.

4th of July

Sharon’s sister and brother-in-law came down with their family the morning of the 4th to visit. We enjoyed having them here. We took them including our cute nieces and nephews out to ice-cream at our favorite local shop, ‘The Dairy Godmother’. It is a really fun little shop that has two flavors of frozen custard, Vanilla & Chocolate, with a mystery flavor every day. They also have a handful of Sorbet flavors that are fun and creative. We discovered that since our last trip there President Obama had paid a visit to the shop and we were the lucky ones to sit in the chair he had used. We felt pretty special.

We decided to brave the crowds in Washington DC to have the experience of celebrating Independence Day in the Capital. It was hard not to feel patriotic watching the fireworks going off behind the Washington Monument and cheering with the hundreds of thousands of people sprawled all over the Mall.

Our Metro ride home was almost as much fun, just more personal with the millions of people trying to get home. I think I might have to add it to the top three of my ‘most crowded public transportation moments’. I never expected one of them to happen in the U.S. Every stop one person got off, three or more people tried to squeeze in. Sharon didn’t even have to hold on to anything for balance. In the end, we made it home safe and sound.

My conclusion is I prefer the small town 4th of July experience. I was reminiscing with Sharon about the 4th of July in Park City. I would sleep out on the trampoline, wake up and do the city fun run, eat\help at the city breakfast in the quaint city park, then watch the parade on Main Street. That would be followed by an afternoon BBQ or Dutch oven cooking in the back yard with family and friends; concluding the day watching the fireworks against the majestic mountains from our deck. It sounds like we might get that experience next year.

Introduction

This is my first blog attempt, which is sad considering the fact that I am planning on going into a semi-technical/computer based job market. I have multiple motivations for starting a blog they are:

1. Keep the world posted on Sharon, my wife, and my life without writing huge mass emails that fill up the inboxes of to tons of people that may or may not want to know what is going on in our life.
2. Start getting some experience in the blogging world. My goal is to setup my own blog and not rely on Google's predefined settings and templates.
3. So I can sound cool and tell people that I blog and hand out a nifty blogger address
4. Everyone else in the family already has one
   

With the reasons why I'm starting this blog out of the way let me bring readers of the blog up to speed on the essentials of the Quinn life so far.
My name is Anthony Quinn, like the actor for those who are old enough to remember him. I was lucky to find an amazing girl that gave me a chance and after dating for awhile we found ourselves not wanting to go on without each other, or in other words we were madly in love and we decided to get married. And so, Sharon Ellsworth and I were married about one year ago at the end of a long school year on a beautiful April morning.
We should have started a blog much earlier because this first year of being married would have been worth reading about everyweek, we'll see if it continues. Two weeks after being married and honeymooning in New York, Boston, and the stylish 'Nottingham Village' we found ourselves on a plane to Mozambique for the remaining of the summer.
Mozambique was a fun experience. We were with an NGO working on multiple projects helping them establish themselves in Beira a port city in the central part of Mozambique in the Sofala province. We ended up teaching a micro-enterprise class to entrepreneurs with small business and women who were seeking help from the government and had had some experience with business. As part of the class Sharon and I started a little brownie making business to put into practice the principles we were teaching. The proceeds went to help one of our students who's husband had left her with six children and a house that was falling over. Our other projects were helping develop a well/pump system to be built in villages without clean water.
Besides digging lots of test wells and shopping around for materials in the local markets we found ourselves in many meeting with the government as they liked to know what was going on. Our time there came to a peak when a group of Americans came over for an expedition, which we, mostly Sharon, had also been planning and organizing. We stayed out in a village for a week working on installing some prototype wells to be monitored for their effectiveness for the next year.

We returned at the end of August to our last year of school.
Our next grand adventure was taking a trip to Santiago, Chile to see Sharon's Parents. We had a wonderful trip over the Thanksgiving break. The week we were there we were able to relax and see and experience some of the wonderful parts of the Chilean culture. We took a day trip out to Pamaire, a old pottery village and looked at the art work and had a great traditional meal. We also saw the old fortress (right) and and visited a lot of cool places around the city. Almost every evening we went for a stroll through the city and played in the parks and checked out the cool architecture.

In December Sharon finished with her double major in Psychology and Socio-cultural Anthropology from the School of Social Science.

For Christmas we had the good fortune to be included in the families trip to Brazil. After being kicked off of our Delta flight in Atlanta because our seats weren't assigned when we checked in in Salt Lake we had two days to kill, which were spent in hotels and in the airport playing card games. After a couple day we finally got on a flight and made it to Rio de Janeiro. Instead of being able to spend the time we had planned there, we only had a few hours, but it was enough to drive through the city and see the famous beaches. It was cloudy and we were afraid we might not see the Christ statue, but right as we were about to head back it appeared from out of the clouds. Unfortunately we had to cut Iguassu Falls out of the itinerary, so we went strait to Curitiba. We had an enjoyable train ride through the hills down to the beach and then drove back to the city. The next day we traveled to Manaus in the Amazon and spend a couple of fun filled days hiking in the rain forest and floating around in the Amazon. After that we spent some time in Maceio where my younger brother served his mission, and then drove the four hours up to Recife where I served my mission. I loved seeing all the people that I had worked with again. We finished the trip off with a few days in Sao Paulo.

Right now I am finishing my major in Information Systems at the Marriott School Of Management at BYU. This summer we are looking forward to spending a couple months in Seattle, WA doing an internship, and then heading off to graduate school. The final decision has not been made yet as to where we will be going. The two main choices are between the Master of Information Systems Management (MISM) at BYU or Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA.
I also applied and was accepted to Willamette University in Salem, OR; Idaho State University in Pocatello; and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. We're open to your knowledge and opinion about any of these schools, but we have all but made up our minds on where we want to go, and that will be posted as soon as the final decision is made.

That wraps up most of our first year being married. Hopefully we can more fully document the coming year and keep everyone posted on how life is. Thanks for reading all of this.