I have never been very involved with politics and have never made much effort to educate myself about political issues or candidates. I generally just voted Republican because my parents voted Republican or didn’t vote at all. Since I met Jodi she has helped me get a lot more involved and interested in politics than I ever have before. I haven’t done much to learn about the local candidates and issues but I have read and heard quite a bit about the presidential race. I would have to say that I am not very impressed with anyone running for president this year but I think both Democratic candidates are pretty lame, they just keep lying and going back and forth with stupid little fights about things that don’t matter.

Last night I went to my first caucus I have ever been to. There were only 11 people at the caucus and Jodi and I knew all but 2 of them from our ward. It is kind of sad that more people are not interested in being involved in our area, we estimated that there are probably around 800 – 1,000 adults in the precinct. The purpose of the caucus was to elect delegates from our precinct to represent us in the county and state conventions, we get 2 delegates for the county convention and 1 delegate for the state convention. I think it would be very interesting to be one of these delegates but Jodi and I did not nominate ourselves because we are not sure if we’ll live here for the next 2 years which is how long the position lasts. I hope to try to get involved next time I have the opportunity.

The group at the caucus talked quite a bit about the local political leaders and I realized I know very little about them. I hope before the elections I will have better idea of who the candidates are and what their positions are.

Last week I had my first meeting with my new company that I am working for now. The employees of the company are spread all over the country so the company gets together quarterly (but I hear it is usually only 3 times per year) in San Diego. The founders and the largest concentration of employees live there. Before last week I had never been to San Diego, I have been to other southern California areas before. It seems like a nice place, the weather was perfect! I didn’t get a chance to see anything, I was only there for about a 24 hour period. The meetings usually last a few days but this one was different because they did a user group meeting for a couple of days before the company meeting so they cut the company meeting a little short. Our next meeting should be in July and I will most likely be there for several days and hopefully have the opportunity to see some of the sights.

It has been a little different for me to be working for people that I had not met. I have talked to several people through email and over the phone but before this meeting I had only met my boss. It was good to meet some of the people that I work with now, it seems like a great group of people. Everyone was nice and seems like a valuable asset to the company. I am glad to be involved and look forward to a long future with the company.

Jodi and I are back in Utah now from California. We had a good time in California but it is always good to come home, the weather was perfect there, it was in the 70s and 80s and sunny every day. I even wore shorts one day! We didn’t pay attention to the Utah weather while we were there so we were not really sure what we were going to be coming back to but we didn’t expect it to be as nice as what we had in California.

We flew back to SLC on the 13th in the evening. Our plane was supposed to leave around 6:30pm but it didn’t leave till after 7pm because it was late arriving from SLC. We heard it was delayed leaving SLC because of weather but we were hoping it would be over with by the time we needed to land. When the time came to land, the pilot came over the intercom and told us that there were some weather conditions at the airport and we were going to have to circle around while they cleaned the runway off for us. At this point we noticed that there was a lot of snow rushing by the plane as we flew through it. After about 45 minutes of this we finally went in for the landing. I am amazed that we were able to land because it looked like the runway was covered in snow! We didn’t seem to have any problems stopping though but after we slowed down they came over the intercom and welcomed us to SLC and said they were impressed with the landing. We landed at a runway at the east end of the airport that was usually for corporate use but it was the only one open at the time because of the weather. Taxiing to the gate took some time because we landed so far away and because the taxi ways were very click, we could feel the plane sliding a little bit every once in a while. The pilot was careful and went slowly so we didn’t have any problems. They also played some Jack Johnson for us on the intercom while we taxied to the gate.

We had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to back in Utah. We had left our Accord parked in the long term parking at the airport so we did not need to contact anyone to come and pick us up but some people around us were making calls to people and found out that the roads were a complete mess. One girl by us said her husband had been stuck on the freeway by Lehi for over 2 hours! She also said some people had been stuck for over 6 hours by then! It sounded like most of the problems were in northern Utah County. We drove home without any problems but did go through some areas that we probably could not have started going again if we would have stopped because of the snow. When we arrived home I had a little trouble getting my car in to the driveway. My first attempt did not get us far enough up so I backed up and tried again, I still didn’t get up as far as I usually do but it was good enough. We probably had a good 4 inches of snow at that point. I shoveled our driveway when we got home at around midnight and then I had to shovel again in the morning because we had another 4 inches again!

We are glad to be back home again but being in the 70 and 80 degree weather was sure a lot nicer than this snow and 30 degree weather! According to the weather reports it may actually not snow again for the next week and the temperatures might get in to the 40s every day!

Jodi and I are in Anaheim, California now, we arrived here on Wednesday. Jodi had to come for CHA Winter 2008, a convention that her company has an exhibit at. I decided to come awhile ago before I was working at Essential Learning but because of the flexibility of my new job it works out well for me to be able to travel and still work. It doesn’t really matter where I am for me to be able to get my job done. Even though I am out of town I still will have plenty of time to work, Jodi always has full days with the convention.

The weather here has been beautiful! It has been in the upper 70s and sunny! It is a nice change from the constant snow and cold in Salt Lake that we have been getting for the past couple of months. We have been going to dinner at some nice places since we have been here, our first night we went to Ruth’s Chris and I had one of the best steaks I have ever had in my life. The next night we went to Bubba Gump which is almost just like Joe’s Crab Shack. On Saturday night we went to a local place called Anaheim White House. We found it online and it had some good ratings, but I guess we should have looked in to it more before we went. It was a much nicer place than we were expecting, we felt very under-dressed in our jeans and shirts. The food we decent but not great and the place had a really bad smell, but that may have been from all the old people that were eating there. Last night we had The Cheesecake Factory, I got a steak from there but it was nowhere near as good as the one I had from Ruth’s Chris last week.

Jodi works with some good people that are fun to travel with so that makes these things a lot more fun even though the days are not too exciting. I am glad that my new job allows me to come along.

I left my job at Zonder at the end of October for another company that I thought would give me a great opportunity and help me advance in my career. That did not really work out and I was quite unhappy so after about a month at this new company I decided it was time to leave. It was only about a week in to this new job that I started looking for a new position but things took a few weeks to pull together.

I interviewed with several companies. I had a few interviews through a couple of recruiters, a couple of interviews through friends, and the others came from Internet sites such as craigslist, Dice.com, and UtahHelpWanted.com. Craigslist seemed to be the most fruitful place. When I was interviewing this time I did a lot better job of interviewing the companies that were interviewing me than I had ever done before and I was more picky about positions that I would continue on in the process.

In the end I received 4 offers, the first from STG, second was from SolutionStream, third was from UCN and finally one from Essential Learning. I decided to take the job with Essential Learning, they are a fairly small company with about 30 employees spread all over the country. Essential Learning provides a web-based Learning Management System designed to meet the needs of organizations that provide behavioral health, developmental disability, substance abuse and child welfare services. There were several things about Essential Learning that attracted me to them, since they don’t have an office it allowed me to work 100% from home which gives me a lot of flexibility and it was also a high enough position that I would have a lot of decision making ability with how things were done with the systems I would be working on. It was an offer I could not pass up!

I have been working for Essential Learning on a contract basis for the past month to be able to test out what we each think of each other and things are going well, they gave me an official offer on January 16th for full-time employment and I will be an official employee on February 1st as the Director of Software Development. I am pretty excited about the opportunity and really see a long-term position with this company.

My wife’s older brother just had their first child yesterday, we are all pretty excited! It is our first nephew and the first grandchild in her family also. Jodi’s mom, Kathy, was pretty excited about it! We all arrived at the hospital a few minutes before he was born and when they finally let us in the room after his birth Kathy went running to go see her first grandson! It was sad that Jodi’s dad, Kelley, was out of town in Arkansas for work and it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to make it back till later this week. We did what we could to get pictures sent as quickly as we could to him, technology can do a little bit to make those long distances feel shorter.

Everything went well with the birth, both Harrison and his mom are doing well and the dad, Josh, was grinning from ear to ear all day. Harrison is going to get a lot of love from his parents and extended family, there have already been fights over holding him. I was just hoping he would wait another day to be born so he and I could share the same birthday!

Jodi and I have had a good Christmas this year. We spent Christmas day with her family and drove to Kansas to see my family a couple of days later. We are in Kansas still today and are enjoying our time here. We had a little drama getting here from Utah, the roads were snowpacked from Rawlins, Wyoming till a little past Sydney, Nebraska. We were grateful to have 4 wheel drive! It was only really useful when passing people and driving through towns off the freeway. We ended up spending the night in Hays, Kansas because the weather got worse for us, while going through northern Kansas before Hays we were barely able to see where we were going.

The weather forecasters claimed that Saturday would bring a small amount of snow to the valley and a couple of feet to the mountains but when Jodi and I woke up on Saturday morning there was already several inches of snow on the ground and it was still coming down hard! It continued to snow for the entire morning and didn’t finish until about 3:00 pm. It is nice to finally have some snow! We had to go and buy a snow shovel to help take care of it though, that wasn’t as nice. Our neighbor took care of the first round of snow on our driveways Saturday morning since he had a shovel and we didn’t but I cleaned off their driveway later in the day after we had purchased one. After I cleaned the driveway I cleaned off my car and then I had to shovel again because there had been so much snow on my car! We drove around quite a bit on Saturday and our 4Runner handled the roads great.

Jodi put up our Christmas decorations last night. We don’t have very much, just a small tree and a couple of stockings, but it is nice to have some Christmas spirit in our house now. There was also a lot more room for the tree since we mounted our TV too, so that is another benefit of having it on the wall.

After lots of drywalling, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, and painting Jodi and I finally got our TV mounted on the wall in our living room. It turned in to a lot bigger and lengthier process than we had ever expected it would be. We are glad we went through it because we really like having the TV where it is and it opened up some space in our living room too. We were able to put our chair where the TV use to be. We’re really glad we went through all the work with the wall too because now all of the wiring for the TV is running through the wall instead of along the wall. Running the wiring through the conduit ended up being more difficult than I had hoped, but we got everything in there.

I also ended up having to buy a new drill during this process, the drill I had was a fairly cheap Black and Decker drill that had a dying battery that would not hold a charge very long. This got to be very annoying but I had to replace the whole drill because I burned up the motor while putting in the bolts for the mount. I really like my new drill and it is a lot more powerful, now I have an 18V Makita that is nice and compact and lightweight.