DC here we come!

Finals are over! And there was much rejoicing.
So I will give the quick update.
Westing Game:
Sharon works with a girl, Tara, who has a second job helping put productions together for a small theater downtown. When the shows open Tara invites us and gets us a discount or gets us in for free. We went to 12 Angry Men a few months ago and it was good. This month they started showing a play version of 'The Westing Game'. I guess it has been a fairly difficult production for Tara and she had been really stressed about it so we went to watch it opening night. I personally feel that it was a good and entertaining, maybe not as good as 12 Angry Men, but it was still good.
Phish Tickets:
So....we're going! I'm excited, August 15th at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia Maryland. It will be one of our last weekends in DC. It will be a fun way to celebrate the end of the summer and a good way to enter the final semester of school. For those of you not aware, phish is one of my all time favorite bands.

Musuem of Natural History:
We finally made it to the Museum of Natural History. We went late afternoon one Saturday and they let Sharon in for free ( I already get in for free as a student) since we only had about an hour before it closed. We were able to make it through most of the exhibits in that time too. We really liked the geology part of the museum. They had some beautiful rocks and minerals. I was surprised to find that they had an actual crystal skull, like in Indiana Jones, just not as alien looking. I guess real crystal skull have really been found before, I had no idea. I think the one at the Museum was a remake, but it was still pretty cool to see.




Trips to DC:
We have been making a few trips to DC the past month or so. Some have been to go to the temple, others have been looking for housing. We are moving to Alexandria, VA this week and I start an internship next week. We will be staying in a room in a house owned by some friends Sharon grew up with. We are excited and grateful we found somewhere to live. Sharon has also had some interviews for some summer jobs, although nothing official has come from any of them yet. It will be fun living in the Nation’s Capital. We have a long list of things we want to do and friends to see, which hopefully translates to some good blog updates:)
Internship
The search for an internship this year was difficult given the state of the economy and I count myself blessed and lucky for the mere fact that I have an internship this summer. The fact that the internship is a required part of the program made looking a little more stressful too. However, the exciting thing is that the internship offer I accepted is one that I was really excited for and wanted to get. I will be working for...

They are a consulting firm. Their primary client is the government, they have some work with private firms, but a majority of that work is handled by a spinoff of them called Booz & Company.
I will be working as part of the Diplomacy & International Development team. My specific focus with this group will be technology related. It is looking like my responsibilities will primarily consist of research. My understanding of it at this point is as follows. Work with governments of other countries, primarily developing countries has been on the rise and this group gets to do all those projects. I will be researching and trying to understand what technologies will work in what countries, what kind of diplomacy issues need to be taken in to consideration, etc... They also want us to look into how new technology, methodologies, and ideas can be used to help governments and organization like the World Bank or the UN.

I'm excited because I have always been looking for a way to bring my interest in international affairs, specifically development together with my interest in technology and management. This should be a good opportunity to bring those interests together.

So that is the update. I guess I would only add that my first spring in the East has been enjoyable. It has been really pretty. The rain can really come down, which is great and everything is turning super green after the winter. Spring is just a good time of year anywhere.

Stay posted for our summer adventures :)

Phish

I'm really excited. I found out this week that my favorite band, Phish, will be doing a reunion tour this summer! I've always been told that their concerts are the best, but I've never had the chance to go to one before. Now we are on the east coast, where a majority of their concerts are, I am determined to get tickets to one of the concerts. They are making a stop right outside of Pittsburgh, Maryland, Philadelphia, and a few in New York that are looking like possibilities.

Interviews

Sunday Afternoon
So the last few weeks have been busy. We just finished our mid-semester finals. All of my classes but one is a half semester class. Now that they are over we are officially on to our spring break!!

This is a short update. I'm in the Pittsburgh airport (they offer free wifi!) waiting to board my flight to Philadelphia. It feels like I've been on the road a lot lately, but it's really just been the last week. Thursday I was in Washington D.C. interviewing for an internship and attending a networking event for Carnegie Mellon. I was surprised how fruitful the event was after the reports from past networking events. I talked with the C.I.A. and they showed interested and encouraged me to apply. Tomorrow I have an interview in Valley Forge, PA, we'll see how that goes.

Internships have been on everyone’s minds lately. Most of the students in the program are required to do a summer internship and few have one so far. The word in the halls is that so far it is normal. People don't usually get squared away until closer to the summer. I've been feeling nervous though. If all works out, I'll have an offer by the end of Spring Break.

Sharon has been great and very supportive while I've been interviewing. The preschool she works at has been really busy. They keep getting more kids in their classroom. They recently got a new boy that has been learning the routine and that has its challenges.

That's the update. Hope all is well with everyone else.

Monday Afternoon
Well, the free wifi went out right as I was sending the last bit above, luckily I had saved a version of it before so I still have it. It is now Monday afternoon and I am in the Philadelphia airport using the free wifi for University students. We get so many perks, no wonder people like being students their whole lives. I think my interview went well. I got picked up at the airport in a nice Lincoln SUV and with nice leather seats and Mission Impossible III to the hotel. Very nice. Once I got to the hotel things went downhill for me. I got my clothes out and started ironing, but started getting dizzy and sea sick feeling. After a few trips to the bathroom I resumed my ironing. A second later I found myself kneeling over the toilet bowl. Wow, nothing like being sick the night before an interview at the hotel. Needless to say I was feeling a little better after the first incident. Once more and I said a quick prayer and lay down. I woke up a couple of hours later at mid-night feeling better. I cleaned up and went back to bed. The rest of the day has been great. Hopefully there will be no surprises on the airplane; I haven’t noticed the puke bags lately….

Feijoada

Over the holiday break I attempted making a brazilian dish, called Feijoada. It's a heavy bean and meat stew that you eat with rice and farinha( dried and ground up mandioc). The last time I tried this I was unsuccessful, however, my older sister had a friend that had experienced some success by mixing and matching two recipes from the Food Network webpage. They were the recipes of Tyler Florence and Jamie Oliver. I told her I would post the way I did it online. So, a month and a half later I'm getting around to it, I hope I remember all the details.

Feijoada de Antonio
1lb Black Beans or more. ( I like more beans)
12 or 16 oz package of browned sausage (it can be whatever flavor you want, you should probably stick to something fraily simple though)
1lb Ham, with bone (I used a pre-cooked honeyham)
2 big pork chops (chopped up into small cubes)
2 onions, peeled and finely chopped
6 cloves garlic, peeled, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
beef bouillon

Start soaking the black beans the night before.
The day you plan on eating the feijoada; Saute the onion and garlic in the pot you will cook in. Add the meats, and bay leaves.
Drain the water the beans soaked in and add the beans to the meat, onion, and garlic. Add water until the beans are completely covered. Add the bouillon.
Bring it all to a boil.

Once it is boiling, turn the heat down. Let it cook for 2-3 hours or until the beans get soft. You can usually tell by trying to pinch them between your fingers and they just mush out. Or you can taste them.

Serve it with rice.

November in Pictures

Life has been busy, but that is no excuse for why I haven't been updating the blog. I guess sometimes I loose the will to sit down and type  something up. It would be easier to do quick updates instead of these huge updates. 

Finals are this week! Yeah, and no at the same time. 3 days to take 5 tests, not what I call the most exciting and fun thing in the world, but I have 4 weeks of vacation to look forward to after that.

Here is the month in pictures.

First, some pictures of Pittsburgh in Fall. It was wonderful.

Novembet 11th, I had my 25th birthday. A quarter of a century and I'm still going strong ;)

We then had a wonderful weekend in Marietta, PA with family. It was a good time. We went and hiked to the highest point around, a hill called Governor Dick. They had a big cement tower we climbed to the top of.  We made graham cracker houses with the kids, and went on a walk down to where Sharon grew up and saw the forest and ruins she used to play in and skipped rocks in the Susquehanna River. Sharon is such a cutie!

Last but not least I've spent some time this last semester, mostly this month, working on a group project for my Telecom class. We built a simple 'prototype' application for the new Google Android phone. Here are some screen shots of it running on the emulator. It was fun, but I didn't have enough time to make it do anything really cool.

October Days

There are so many subtle things that make this funnier every time I watch it, some unintended, like the canon advertisements.

I’ve been remembering to laugh and enjoy life lately. I think I have a tendency to get so involved in things that I forget to stop and enjoy the present moment.

Life has been going well for us. We had one of our friends, Gabe, in town last weekend. He was interviewing at Dental schools. He was with us while he was interviewing at PITT. We had fun introducing him to Pittsburgh. I realized Pittsburgh has been growing on me as we talked about how it was living here. The fall has been beautiful! and it wasn’t a ‘good’ year compared to others from what I hear. On our way home from church today, we took a little detour through a park. We listened to classical music as we drove through the bright, warm, and glowing fall colors of orange, red, and yellow. Sounds kind of romantic…it was:)

This week was eventful. The ‘school’ at Carnegie Mellon that my program is a part of, the ‘Heinz’ school is now the ‘Heinz College’. It has the school of Public Policy and Management and the ‘School of Information Systems’. They even put up a whole new website for us. It’s pretty exciting. A group of 3 Indians approached me and asked me to be on their team for a 24 hour ‘Code Challenge’ put on my Morgan Stanley. I thought it would be fun so I agreed. We started out strong and optimistic as we had some good ideas and made some quick progress on the problem. The problem was fun and we came up with good ideas, we just couldn’t get our code to work, so after about 14 hours the team decided it wasn’t worth continuing and our time would be better spent getting sleep and finishing assignments that were due. It was a fun experience though and I now understand more how to work with my Indian friends and what all their mannerisms mean.

After getting some sleep, Sharon and I went to the Carnegie Art museum for a fun Saturday date. They have a 'Life on Mars' exhibit showing right now. The objective of the art pieces were to show life on earth from a different perspective and light. Nothing really struck us as amazing. Some of it was out there...like alien to us. The coolest piece was a room with a lot of glass balls on the floor, like giant marbles. We enjoyed getting out. We didn't have time for the Natural History Museum so we'll have to go there next time. I want to see the T-Rex vs. T-Rex exhibit.

Sharon is still having fun at work. This Friday they took a field trip to a pumpkin patch, which was not only fun, but helped the kids take a nice long nap afterwards.

I’m entering a stage of searching and interviewing for internships. I’ve had a couple good leads so far and I we will see what opportunities come up.

It's just frugality

Quick update.

The past week was fun. We are seeing evidence of the beautiful Northeast fall. We went to the DC Temple over the weekend and saw the organe, red, and yellow colors of fall revealing themselves. 

It was spectacular. We also saw a funny cow trailer at the gas station, as you can see in the picture below.

 

To Sharon's delight we came home to find this sign in our yard. She has been trying to figure out how to get one for the last few weeks.

Midterms are this week. I hope they go well.

As I was reading around today online I found this interesting article called, 'The New Age of Frugality'. It talks about Americans learning how to be frugal again. I had to smile to myself as I was reminded of the many messages I've heard from church leaders about living frugal and within our means. I went to the church website and did a quick search on 'living within your means'. A good list of talks and articles came up with dates like 1981, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2008. That is just a small sample. I would like to post the links to a few of these as they were intersting to me.

1. First to note was President Ezra Taft Benson's artilce in the June 1987 Ensign. The article was entitled, Pay thy Debt, and live. 
   
2. The second one I liked was President Hinkley in a talk in conference published in the Nov ensign. The talk is entitled, 'To the Boys and To the Men' He said, "I repeat, I hope we will never again see such a depression. But I am troubled by the huge consumer installment debt which hangs over the people of the nation, including our own people. In March 1997 that debt totaled $1.2 trillion, which represented a 7 percent increase over the previous year."
3. Another ensign artilce I found that references the talk above was in 2002 called, 'Climbing out of Debt'. There was a good section on 'Choose an affordable home'.
4. And one in the January Ensign of 2008 less than one year ago, 'Happily living within our Means'. I like how it starts out talking about accountability and being accountable for our actions, especially when it comes to finances. 

As I've thought about the mess the world financial system is in, and other 'messes' in which we generally find ourselves, I've found myself relating it to something that is a little graphic, but it might get people's attention. It's like when you pee on the seat. I have become aware that this is a plague that both men and women face. It becomes a serious issue when using public restrooms. Some, nay most people just don't know how to be responsible and clean up after themselves. Too many people just leave it around for the next person to deal with. Clean up after yourself! I learned that when I was potty trained or thereabout.  And Sharon claims that no-one is really potty trained at all, until they learn this rule. 

In a political economics class I took last year when the dollar first began to fall we discussed what was happening, why it was happening, and what the implications would be. One of the consequences and ways to correct the problem was to do exactly what this article and the prophets, said tighen the belt and live within your means. It seems if anyone is to blame for the situation we're in its all of us.

Follow up on the last post.

I wanted to thank the people who put in a voice on the thoughts of the last post. My intent was not to offend, so if I did I apologize. I don't know why, but I always feel the need to question my own assumptions about the world. I find that doing so I either find my assumption was right, or that I was wrong. I hate to admit that I'm wrong, but I'm human and am usually wrong.

One point many have brought up with regards to health care is the idea of welfare. I think this will become an area of great study for me over the next while. While doing my search on the above topics I ran into an interesting talk by Elder Robert D. Hales back when he was the presiding Bishop. The talk, 'Welfare Principles to Guide Our Lives: An Eternal Plan for the Welfare of Men’s Souls'. 

My question is would it really be a 'hand out' or a way to 'entrap the poor in self deflating system that trampled initiative'? From my point of view right now is that people, even those who are wealthy and have health care, are in a real bind when they get sick with something serious, like cancer. You either get really lucky and the 'health insurance' you have works. In which case you would probably still pay a lot of money, or you are disqualified and spend an even larger proportion of money on the cure, or you can't afford it and you die sometimes in a way not very pleasant. What kind of a society thinks it's appropriate to let someone die because they can't afford care? Isn't that putting a price on life? 

If all have health care provided and all contribute through tax, is it really a hand out? It seems like people who need care would get it. Having received care they might be healthy enough to contribute to the economy by working and be able to afford to live somewhere, not to mention be able to pay taxes. Maybe that is too ideal. At least people won't have to go into debt to pay for medical procedures or die because of the unfortunate bad luck of getting sick. 

There was a good point given about quality of care. Social medicine would lead to a decline in the quality of health care we recienve. To which I would ask those who have lived abroad and experienced a 'social' health care system. Was the quality poor? If it was bad was it because it was a social program or was it due to something else? Was there evidence of corruption and degrading health conditions in the country? Last I checked the US was ranked 37th by the United Nations on the quality of its healthcare. The best healthcare was provided by France.

I think it is tempting for me to look at third world countries and think that the quality of their social health care is bad because it's socialized. But I've been thinking lately that it could be bad because the country is still developing. If some third world countries I have been to had only private health care a lot of people would be suffering more than they are right now and the people might be poorer if they had to seek help from private institutions. I think I'm really going against the grain on this line of thought, but I still feel like there is a lot to be explored, explained,  and discussed.