Labor Day Weekend

This week has been a little calmer in comparison to the newness and busyness of the last few weeks. I’m settling in a little more to work and was assigned a project for a pharmaceutical company. It’s not a big project, but a relatively simple one for me to start on. It will be to create three web-based training (WBT) courses. The first course in 30 minutes and the other two are 20 minutes each. We had the kick-off meeting with the client and it went fairly well despite that it was a teleconference to San Francisco and we had technical difficulties for the first 20 minutes or so. I’ve starting learning the content and writing up the design documents. I’m working with one other full-time designer for the first course. She has been there about 5 months and her name is Julie also.

Jason had his first full week of teaching seminary. He likes it and is learning a lot about teaching and about 9^th grade motivations. He works long hours since it takes him a long time to prepare lessons for the next day. He was already observed once and he felt like the observation went well.

Both Jason and I had a couple of firsts this week. He volunteered at the church cannery on Wednesday and helped can corn for several hours. One sister working with him called him “lightning hands” but he wasn’t too flattered since most of the people volunteering at the time were twice his age. He said it was amazing what resources the church has to do projects like this on a regular basis.

My first happened to be walking a dog. Our landlords own a German Shepherd and since Jason grew up with a Golden Retriever Cali during his teen years, he volunteered to help walk their dog named Estrella (which means Star in English). Apparently Estrella wasn’t as excited to run with us as Cali is and we were running faster than she was for a lot of the time. At one point Jason couldn’t handle going so slow and wanted to run faster so I volunteered to take Estrella around the loop of the park while he lapped us. Having never walked a dog before, I was a little anxious since I didn’t know how she would react to other people and dogs, but she did pretty well.

Saturday we ate lunch at Jason’s parents house with his Grandpa and Grandma Richards and three of his cousins attending BYU, two of which just got home from their missions recently. The food was delicious! That night Jason and I volunteered at Thanksgiving Point for the Jon Schmidt piano concert. We had to be there a couple hours before it started to help direct people being seated. It was an outdoor amphitheater and it was fairly hot outside. Before the concert we got to walk around the gardens for about 15 minutes and they were beautiful. Then we sat down and watched most of the concert. I really enjoy listening to his music, so it was fun. However, at the end, both of us decided that the next time I want to go to a concert, we should just pay the money and not come 2 1/2 hours early. :)