New Tradition

November was such a fun month. I went to the Bay Area twice that month with only paying for one ticket. How does that work? I had to be in Orlando for work the first week and had a brilliant idea before I bought my ticket. What was the cost difference for flying from SLC > Bay Area > Orlando and back home again. Answer: $5. So off I went. I flew to Oakland and spent the weekend playing with friends, headed to Orlando for work, and then went home again for the total cost of $5 and a weekend rental car. Not too shabby. Oh, and I colored my hair a shade darker than my natural color. Much better. More like me.

All I could hear when I saw this sign was don't go to Oakland

Hotel in Orlando

Once home, I spent some time enjoying the snow, playing with work friends, and listening to Jeff Bezos and my CEO Josh James speaking at the UTC Hall of Fame dinner.

No longer a blonde. My "true" color.

With my parents being gone, I needed to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving and decided to head to California again. I met up with friends the Saturday before the holidays to watch BYU play San Jose State. Awful game. Yes, a year later I still remember that we played horribly. On the bright side, I joined up with my sister and her family in Monterey for a few days before heading to the Sacramento area for Thanksgiving. I had a great time playing cards, being with family, and participating in the family Turkey Trot. My aunt Ann also joined us and I'm glad we got to spend some time with her. I think I need to continue swapping time with siblings for the holidays.

BYU vs. San Jose State

17-mile Drive

17-mile Drive

18th hole at Pebble Beach

Roasting marshmellows at Carmel

Carmel

Took some time but I finally won her over (with my electronics)

Family 5K Turkey Trot

One If By Land, Two If By Sea

I'm really enjoying looking back on all that has happened recently. It's helped me to see how much I've changed and how far I've come. Now, I recognize the value of documenting important events in life while they are occurring, but sometimes when life feels overwhelming, like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, it's nice to take step back to catch your breath. October symbolizes when I started to breathe again.

Work allowed me to do one more event before focusing solely on one element of our marketing strategy, so off to New York and Boston I went. In New York, I caught up with a couple of friends from MBA school and my team quickly stopped at the 9/11 Memorial for a visit before our event that night. Then I went to Boston. I love Boston. I'd never been to Boston. I made arrangements to take that Thursday off and spend the day exploring. I need to go back. Too much to see and so little time. The reason for the short time is Friday I traveled to Rhode Island to see one of my dearest friends and spend some time at the beach. I love this family! They bring such joy into my life.

Boston Common

Freedom Trail

State House

North Church

Harvard Gates

John Adam's House

Ball Family

T and Mel

I caught an early flight home so I could meet up with my siblings for general conference at our family's cabin. On the flight back to Utah, I found a way to connect to General Conference and heard President Monson's announcement about the lowering of missionary ages. I wanted to jump up and tell the whole plane figuring some of those people HAD to be LDS. That weekend was exactly what I had hoped. Spiritual nourishment from the leaders of our church and emotional fulfillment from being with family.

Miracle at 35, 000 feet

Birthday celebrations between conference

This month also started my monthly trips to the Bay Area. My new friend let me stay at her place and arranged fun activities to help me meet other people. Sunday was spent trudging along the highway to Half Moon Bay. But these two made the trip entirely worth it. I look back on this October with fondness. Good things were beginning to happen.

Perry Family

New game. Chris lost.

Something's Changed

September 2012 marked changes in my life. First, I decided I wanted to try something different with my hair and had highlights put in. I spent the next two months trying to decide if I liked it. My hair was much lighter and reminiscent of life in high school, but I felt it wasn't me anymore. Debatable topic. Even now, I still go back and forth on whether I like it or not.

Blonde highlights and new friends at Lake Tahoe

A second change is I finally succumbed to attending another mid-singles event. I went to one last May and though it was held in one of my favorite places in the world, the CA beach, other events occurred that marred my experience. A friend of mine convinced me to stay with his group this time and I felt comfortable enough to attend knowing I had a couple of friends I could rely on when I got overwhelmed with the large masses of people surrounding me. I ended up having a great time at Lake Tahoe and enjoyed meeting new people. A group of us ended up going on a 10-mile hike to this lake and it was absolutely worth the hours spent trudging up the mountain. Stunning! Needless to say, I'm glad I found the courage to escape to Tahoe that weekend.

Hiking

Lake Tahoe

New friends at Lake Tahoe

My first interview flyback also happened in September. McAfee (in San Jose area) first contacted me while I was at Tahoe and I had a phone interview with the hiring manager there. A had another round of interviews, which began the trend of me ducking out to my car or to my sister's place to take these types of calls. When they wanted me to come out and meet the team, I was thrilled hoping this may be my next opportunity. I was able to swing this with my current job because the entire team was out of the office in San Francisco for Dreamforce. My boss promised I could attend this event but backed out of that stating I needed to be in the office. Not true. Just another excuse. So off to California I went and worked it out so I could stay the weekend. The interview was interesting. Though it was a good company and a great opportunity, I didn't want it. It was not the job for me, yet it would get me out of a situation I didn't want to be in. Additionally, I spent the weekend with friends at their ward campout and met an entirely new group of people that would change my life. The result of that weekend was I decided I didn't want the job, but I did want to spend time with my California friends. Thus began my monthly trips to the Bay Area for my social life.

My favorite Bay Area couple

One thing did remain constant during this: trips to the mountains and spending time with my family. I am very grateful for the love and support of my family during the next eighteen months. Not only because my parents were out of the country, but because I had many difficult decisions ahead of me and they provided the insight I needed to choose between the paths in front of me. The most worthwhile advice came from my 12-year-old nephew. Love the simple understanding of the youth.

Mayfield Canyon

Cheesing it up for the camera

Cabin time

Brigham City Temple open house

My nephew Max and me

Leaving on a Jet Plane

It's interesting to be writing about August 2012 now because that was the month my parents left on their 19-month mission to Mexico City. They were initially called as the Area Medical Advisor and Assistant for the entire area of Mexico, which meant all the missions in Mexico. Half way through their mission, they were re-assigned to the new Mexico City MTC as the medical director. My dad helped build the clinic at that site and my mom took care of the materials for the 200+ Latin and Anglo missionaries that arrived each week. Reflecting back to when they left reminds me how busy we were as we prepared for them to leave, how much my sister and I did to take care of their house and finances, and how much I missed them. We had also few going away gatherings and family fun before they left.

Leaving for Mexico City

At my nephew's baptism

Max and Me

I've Always Loved the Idea of Summer

July 2012 stands out in my mind as the month I decided to start looking for a new job. I dusted off the resume (i.e. found the folder where I'd saved it), updated it with the latest and greatest, and started sending it out to random companies with random openings. Not very strategic. I know. It was my lame attempt at saying I was looking for a new job while still not sure exactly what I wanted. The rest of the month was spent traveling.

• 4th of July feels incomplete without a trip down to G-town and watching the hometown parade in the same place we've watched it the last 30+ years.
  
  
  
  
• Traveled to Minneapolis and Milwaukee for work. We made it out of Wisconsin right before this fierce storm overtook our plane.
  
• Sometimes you get stuck in a construction zone on an early Sunday morning in the middle of nowhere Utah.
  
• Spent the end of July with my brother and his family in Newport Beach. The beach feels like my second home. So many great memories with family there and more made this week. My only regret is I didn't take the entire week off and join his family at Disneyland. Lesson learned = family is more important than work.

Great way to start the morning

Searching for tide pools

Walks along the beach

Not a bad way to spend the day

My happy place

Good Form

I've been organizing the last few years of pictures into folders. Forgot about this. Excited to do more of this at our family reunion this summer.

Let Me Explain. No Let Me Summarize

Tonight I was looking at the last time I wrote on a consistent nature. June 2012. Interestingly, that's right when life got turned upside down. I decided that the next few posts will be recapping what I've been up to the past 1.5 years. Because as much as I love to make everyone think I've only been working that entire time, I did find a way to sneak in some fun.

June 2012

• Ran the Utah Valley Half Marathon with my brother (he actually ran the marathon) and sister-in-law. Finished under 2 hours! I actually hated the course. The asphalt was killer on my knees and I had a neuroma flair up in my foot so it was 13.1 miles of fighting through pain.

  

  Rich, Kaylene, Me, Lesa, Brent

• Spent the week in St. George with my family. Well, I spent most of the week. Half of it was working while everyone played. That didn't make for a happy me.

  

  Okay. I had some fun. :)

• Traveled to San Francisco for work and spent one day at LinkedIn. Now that's a cool company.
  
• Hiked Timp. Started at 5pm. Hiked fast. Got down at 1:30am. I would not recommend leaving that late or hike in June. I now understand why people wait until August. Walking on a frozen snow next to a cliff created quite the slippery situation. Grateful we all made it back safely. I was incredibly sore the next few days. More so than when I ran the half marathon the week before.

  

  Only 2 hours into the hike

Resolutions

I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions and what I should focus on this year. I remember years where I only had one goal the entire year. One year: to be nicer to others. I had quite the sarcastic, bitter streak in me that needed purging. Another year: to be more patient with others and myself. That required the Irish/Arabic/Viking in me to learn to control my temper and also to stop saying harmful things about myself. I'm still working on both those goals but being focused on one thing for the entire year helped spur the change that I needed. 2012's list rolled into 2013...and those propelled me into an adventure I could not even imagined!

After pondering a bit for this year, I realized my goal was to become more in tune with spiritual things. For that to happen, I need to spend less time with my tech gadgets and to have a list of alternatives so I don't default to playing games on my phone or watching TV. Here's what I came up with:

• Read more
• Write more
• Run more

Too generic? Good. I'm liking this non-specific resolution way of doing things.

Happy New Year!!

Family Vacation

Loved my family vacation this year. Beautiful scenery. Camping below Half Dome. Work couldn't get a hold of me for an entire week. Yep! Life is good.