Many Languages

I haven't written for awhile. Things are good but seemingly "normal" so I don't always know what to write about. Jason took his second Calculus test today. He said he felt really good about it so that probably means he aced it. After his test, he came home and made a yummy curry dinner for the missionaries. I got home 15 minutes after the missionaries left, but at least I still got to enjoy the yummy dinner.

Right now at work I'm in charge of incorporating the translations for a course I designed into 16 languages: Spanish, German, French, Portugese, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Russian. What a big job that is! We have run into all kinds of formatting issues just to get the languages imported, but then once they're imported they must all be uniquely adjusted to accommodate the new language.

Here are a few interesting facts about these languages that you might not know unless you've been working with them a lot like I have.

• Thai: Who would have known that this language only uses spaces between sentences and phrases. This has been an especially difficult challenge because some sentences are so long that they don't fit across the width of the screen but you can't wrap the sentence on to the next line without changing the meaning of the sentence. We've had to go back to the translator for this problem.
• Chinese and Taiwanese: These languages are really hard to tell what you've added or deleted in tracked changes because there are so many strokes in each character that you can't see the horizontal line through the middle to know if it's been deleted or added.
• German and French: These are some of the longest languages which means adjusting margins and shrinking graphics to accommodate it on almost every page.
• Arabic and Hebrew: These languages are read from right to left so we have to re-orient the page layouts so that the activities are balanced and make better sense.
• Russian: In Russian, "personal information" should be translated to be "personal data" because if it's not, and your whole course is about personal information you end up having to do a LOT of changes after the fact.
  

Hopefully I designed a good course, because if not, 65,000 people that speak any one of 17 languages will not be very happy. :)

I bet you can't guess which language all of these words belong to?

español, Deutsch, française, português, русский, 中国, Bahasa Indonesia, 日本, 한국의, ελληνικά, ไทย, עברית, العربية

A Day in the Life of my Husband

So five days a week while I'm away at work my husband sits at home all day. No, he's not eating bon bons and watching TV, he's working, or should I say learning. Learning is his full-time job right now and here is his table full of tools.







Jason's routine:
--Wake up around 6:00am
--Run 5K around the surrounding neighborhoods as fast as he can, usually in just over 20 min.
--Shower, eat breakfast, and make his amazing wife a lunch
--Read the scriptures
--Do math and then more math and then more math

A few interesting and amazing things about my husband you might never know unless you've lived with him.

He doesn't like to waste anything, including scraps of paper so he uses small pieces of paper, often used envelopes, to figure out his math problems. He's writes so small you'd need a magnifying glass to read it if you're over 40. :) See the sample to the left. You'll notice how small the writing is in comparison to the printed letter and how completely he covers all the white space. Isn't that cool?








Now to anyone else, especially me, this would look like garbage, meant to be thrown away. But not to my husband. This is his eraser. It broke off of his pencil several weeks ago and he doesn't want me to throw it away yet.








This last object is his new favorite tool-- it is a microphone and earpiece that plugs into his phone so that he can now do the dishes when I call to talk to him during my lunch break, when he talks to family members in the evenings, or any other time he's trying to multi-task. No point wasting time just talking when you could be doing something else at the same time. :)

Sometime you'll have to ask him about his determination to reuse all of our sandwich baggies. I've been accused more than once for throwing away stashes of used plastic baggies that I find in the drawer. We've compromised a little by making rules about which baggies can be used again and which ones have to be thrown away. I bet most of you have never had that conversation with your spouses. :)

As you can imagine with all of Jason's efficiencies we save a lot of time and money. His frugality has been both a blessing and occasionally a frustration in our marriage, but I wouldn't have it any other way! He is a great example of the pioneer motto: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without!

The Sound of Music

Well, things have been a little reversed lately, work is slow and weekends are busy. We’ve been up to a few fun things lately. Last Friday we went to a theatre production of The Sound of Music at the Sundance Resort as a late celebration of our 3^rd anniversary. It was so fun and a perfect setting for the play. The mountains are just gorgeous right now and so is the weather. Plus, Jason was such a great date planner and had all the details planned out and taken care. It was awesome!

We both totally enjoyed it. The Sound of Music is one of my favorite movies, one that I don’t get tired watching time and time again. In fact, right after we finished the play, it only made me want to go watch the movie even more.

Unfortunately we didn’t have a copy, so Sat. morning I started looking on the internet to see if I could get a good deal. Jason peaked over my shoulder and asked what I was doing. I told him I was going to buy The Sound of Music. He tried to persuade me to wait until Christmas or something, but I didn’t really want to wait. He disappeared down the hall and reappeared a few minutes later with a Christmas gift bag. He handed it to me and said, “Merry Christmas, or Happy Anniversary, or something.” I opened the bag and inside was a copy of The Sound of Music. It’s a good thing he saw what I was doing, otherwise we would have been the proud owners of TWO movies.

We actually watched the movie last night. It's been many, many years since I've watched it. It's amazing how well I remembered the lines and how much of the scenery I'd forgotten. It's pretty refreshing to watch something that portrays children and teenagers as sweet and innocent instead of little devils and miscreants. Not to mention it celebrates large families, the power of uplifting music, and the importance of marriage between a man and woman.

Hooray for New Babies

One very waited for event has been the birth of my two nieces, twins to be exact. They were born on August 15^th. They were called Baby A and Baby B for several hours until the names were finally decided—Lillian Dianne and Amelia Ann. They are tiny and adorable and so fun to hold. These adorable girls joined my sister and her husband and their twin 4 1/2 year-old boys. I’m so glad we live close to my sister so we can hold these babies often!

This picture shows us holding them at the hospital when they were about 16 hours old. Unfortunately I can't remember who is who in this picture. I'm not even going to try and guess. :)

Ward Campout

The end of Summer seems to be coming too quickly. I love the warm evenings, the late sunset, the family get-togethers, the fresh fruit, and the relaxed atmosphere. Jason and I have been burying ourselves in our work and the time just keeps slipping away.

This weekend we went to a ward campout in Wanship, a little place a little further East than Park City by Rockport Lake. We headed there directly from my work on Fri. and found ourselves in a complete traffic jam on I-80 for about 40 minutes. At least 15-20 of those minutes we were at a complete stand still. Our experience got even better when we arrived 15 min. before dinner and tried to set up our tent only to discover that the tent only had one pole. Fortunately the night did get better. We had an amazing steak dinner prepared by some professional camp cooks and some friends of ours offered to let us stay with them for the night at their nearby family cabin. We took them up on the offer and stayed up late eating my favorite junk food and playing Phase 10. The comfortable bed was much better than the tent would have been, but now I'm left feeling that I having filled my camping craving for the summer.

The rest of the weekend we spent hanging out with my family since my sister Katrina and her family are in town as they drive through on their way to their new home in Idaho. They're actually renting for 6 mo. as they build a home of their own. We're excited for this new change for their family, but moving across the country in such a short time under short notice is a difficult and overwhelming task to say the least.

Work Blessings

I've had some important work deadlines in the last couple of weeks. I'm so glad that I was able to make all my deadlines and be proud of the courses delivered to our clients. So far, the clients have been really pleased too. I enjoy the challenges of my work, but it's a tricky balance between good stress and bad stress. I feel like one of the greatest blessings to me at work is one of my co-workers and friends. She used to be in my ward 8 mo. ago and I heard she was looking for a job. I told her we were hiring at my work. She applied, interviewed, and got herself hired. She was assigned to a very big parenting curriculum project that I was leading and I helped trained her. Although I hardly knew her when I told her about the job, she has since become a trusted and valued friend and co-worker. Her creative and thorough work has helped lift my work burdens on more than one occasion. I'm so grateful for her help and friendship.

Vacation/Reunion Highlights

Sat. July 16th

• Flew to Houston, TX at 6:00am and finished some last minute work assignments in the Denver Airport in between flights
• Greeted by a humid heat wave at the airport doors in Texas followed by a niece and two nephews who were totally excited to see us and mostly importantly, show us their bedrooms. 3-yr-old Will talked non-stop on our hour-long car ride home. :)
• Played front room basketball, Piggie and the Cookie (a type of tag), and swam in Tim and Lisa's pool

Sun. July 17th (Happy 3rd Anniversary to us!)

• Attended Tim and Lisa's ward in Kingwood
• Drove 3 1/2 hrs to New Branfels to meet the rest of the Burninghams at the T Bar M Resort. We needed two cars, so Jason drove Tim's Corola and we took Cali with us. She enjoyed looking at pictures and playing with my new iPad
• All the Burninghams stayed in a two 3-bedroom condos. Jason and I had our own room with a connected bathroom which was really nice--others weren't as lucky. Despite the tight quarters, we had a good time in the condos

Mon. July 18th

• Rented a boat at Canyons Lake 30 min. away. It was really, really hot! Jason and I went tubing one time. Lake Temp. was probably 72 degrees. We had Drew and Grant with us on the boat and poor Drew was scared to death we were going to sink, run out of gas, crash, drown, etc. He was worried the entire time and kept asking to go back after the first 2 minutes!
• Played some on the beach after the boat, washed off the sunscreen and accidentally got fried in the sun
  
• Met up with many of the Richards family for dinner at the Resort. After dinner we talked and lots of us watched Tangled outdoors on a big screen and ate popcorn provided by the resort.
• Stayed up late talking and playing Scum and Bananagrams with Mom and Dad B., Steve and Kirsten, and Andy and Kimra.

Tues. July 19th

• Floated down 1 mile of the Guadalupe River with the Richards. It was going so slowly that we had to paddle ourselves with our arms. We all enjoyed the three short sections of "rapids" where is was so shallow we were almost dragging on the ground. I was glad to see that even 84-year-old Grandpa Richards floated down the river with us.
• Stayed up late and played Habla Chancho and the Signs game

Wed. July 20th

• Went to Schlitterbaun with some of the Richards cousins--mainly Nate and Andrea and Whitney and Cody. It's the world's largest water park and likely also the world's most crowded water park. We went on three rides in 6 1/2 hours and spent about 4 1/2 hours waiting in lines. I would not recommend it to anyone else. We did like the lazy river attraction and flowed 10 times faster than the Guadalupe River.
• Enjoyed a nice BBQ beef and chicken dinner with the Richards family and watched a cool slideshow of all the families. Afterwards we took pictures and played games in the game room.

Thurs. July 21st

• Drove an hour to Sea World in San Antonio. It was really hot but not as crowded as Schlitterbaun. We went to all the main shows and the 5 main rides there. We didn't wait more than 30 minutes for a ride, and most of the lines were fairly short. No one thought the shows were as cool as they used to be. With some recent animal/trainer accidents, the trainers didn't even get into the water with the Killer Whales or Dolphins and the animals didn't do anything super cool in the water.
• I like the Journey to Atlantis ride. We got 12 of us into one of the rafts and went down the big hill into the water and it was a lot of fun with all of us there. The other rides were pretty fun too.
• Both children and adults were hot, tired, and hungry and we all left by 6:30pm to go eat dinner outside the park and go to our hotel room.

Fri. July 22nd

• Toured San Antonio by visiting the Alamo, Tower of the Americas, and the Riverwalk. We ate dinner along the Riverwalk and then watched a Latino dance/singing show called Fiesta Noche del Rio. It was well done although I'm not a big fan of Mariachi music
• It was so hot that I thought I was going to die at certain times. I felt bad for the parents that were constantly having to carry their hot children around as well.

Sat. July 23rd

• Attended a temple session at the San Antonio Temple with half of the adults
• Ate lunch afterward at a nearby park before splitting up to head home via car or airplane
• Arrived at the SLC airport about 9:20pm only to find they lost Jason's luggage. We didn't get home to our apartment until close to 11:00pm.

Overall we had a great time. We're grateful to everyone who came and helped out and especially to Tim and Lisa B. and Susan W. for planning all of the activities, food, and accommodations. I don't know if it's bigger and better in Texas, but it's definitely hotter!