When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Muddy!

Well, since Katie posted about her goals and mentioned my goals, I figured I'd finally tell everyone why I'm working out this summer.

I really do miss the days of swim team where I could run around the block without even getting winded. I never had a six-pack or anything (I had the physique of a pencil.) but I was fit. Now, I get winded getting up to change the channel on the TV... Yes, I'm out of shape, I know.

Well, I've been in and out of the habit of working out every week and I wanted to make a permanent habit change. I want to be in shape again.

Nathanael and Court and I have been wanting to train together and go on a giant hike (see post from last year) But we decided this just wasn't enough to get us all going. So, we upped the ante. We all decided to participate in the Tough Mudder.

Now, say what you will about marathon runners, dirty dashers, even spartan racers... NOTHING can compare to the challenge that is the Tough Mudder. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

The Tough Mudder is usually between 10-12 miles long. (this is just less than a half marathon.) However, it is filled with, on average, 27-30 military-style obstacles, all of which were designed by the British Special Forces. We're talking intense stuff here. No room for kidding around.

My "event", as it's called, is 10.1 miles with 28 obstacles. Here are some summaries: (All summaries taken from toughmudder.com)

Berlin Walls:
"Scale three 12′ wooden walls with the help of your teammates, strategically placed for when you are at your weakest during the event. While some Mudders have worked up the strength to ascend the walls alone, most need a boost from a fellow Mudder — they got your back, literally."

Boa Constrictor:
Crawl through a series of pipes that also force you into some freezing mud. Your legs will be useless in the narrow confines of the Boa, so use your arms to pull you down and out. There really is light at the end of the tunnel.

Electroshock Therapy:
Sprint through a field of live wires — some carrying as much as 10,000 volts of electric shock. Watch out for a hay bale or two or you will face-plant into some electrifying mud.

Fire Walker:
As the name implies, you’ll be running through a trench of blazing, kerosene soaked straw. You can expect about 4’ high flames. Build your lung capacity up before the event or you’ll be forced to inhale some nasty carcinogens.

Everest:
A quarter-pipe that you’ll have to sprint up and enlist the help of other Mudders to hurl you over this beastly mountain. Everest is coated in mud and grease, a combination which will likely send you right back from where you came. Call upon other Mudders to catch you as you run up the quarter-pipe or work together to form a human chain so that you can scale someone’s shoulders to finally summit Everest.  


Arctic Enema:
Many athletes use ice baths for recovery, but you’ll have a difficult time relaxing your muscles in this frigid dumpster. First you must bravely jump into Big Mudder’s floating iceberg abyss. Once submerged, find the mental and physical strength to swim through the ice, under a wooden plank and pull yourself out on the other end before you become hypothermic."

Keep in mind that this is a very abbreviated list.  There's 21 other unspeakable torture devices left on my course alone. (My "favorite" of which involves belly crawling through ice and mud under electroshock tendrils: The Electric Eel... *shudder*)

There are no showers on the course either, if you want to clean off, they meet you at the end of the course with a fire-hose. Yes, a real fire-hose, held by firefighters, hooked to a fire hydrant. Fun, eh?

Why am I doing this? He's crazy!! Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? Right? Right? Well, the TM website sums it up pretty well:

Tough Mudder has already challenged half a million inspiring participants worldwide and raised more than $3 million dollars for the Wounded Warrior Project. But Tough Mudder is more than an event, it’s a way of thinking. By running a Tough Mudder challenge, you’ll unlock a true sense of accomplishment, have a great time, and discover a camaraderie with your fellow participants that’s experienced all too rarely these days.

FACT #1 – Marathon running is boring.

And the only thing more boring than doing a marathon is watching a marathon. Road-running may give you a healthy set of lungs, but will leave you with as much upper body strength as Keira Knightley. At Tough Mudder, we want to test your all-around mettle, not just your ability to run in a straight line, on your own, for hours on end, getting bored out of your mind. Our obstacle courses are designed to test you in every way and are meant only for truly exceptional all-around people, not for people who have enough time and money to train their knees to run 26 miles.

FACT #2 – Mudders do not take themselves too seriously.

Triathlons, marathons, and other lame mud runs are more stressful than fun. Not Tough Mudder. As hardcore as our courses are, we meet you at the finish line with a beer (won't be partaking of that one, obviously), a laugh, and a rockin’ live band. It’s pretty hard to take yourself seriously when you’re covered in mud, so please don’t show up at a Tough Mudder without a sense of humor. 

FACT #3 – You cannot complete a Tough Mudder course alone.

To get through mud, fire, ice-water, and 10,000 volts of electricity you’ll need teammates to pick you up when your spirits dip. To get over 12 foot walls and through underground mud tunnels, you’ll need teammates to give you a boost and a push. Tough Mudders are team players who make sure no one gets left behind. To that end, all Mudders are expected to uphold our ideals and exhibit teamwork and camaraderie both on the course and off it. (This is one of my favorite things about it. They will not let you call it a "race". It is NOT. it is a challenge. Everyone is there to help each other and they don't even time you! It's all about EVERYONE finishing. Not about who can torture themselves the fastest.)

 
So that's why!  (Kudos if you read all of that.)
I don't know why I'm doing it. But I really feel I need to. I'm not out to prove anything to anyone except myself. I can do this, and I know once I do, I'll be able to do anything. I just feel like I need to do this. So, needless to say... There will be a LOT of training... Yeah, a lot...

Wanna see someone who is beyond serious about training? Nobody expects us to be this fit, but honestly... Check this guy out. (And keep watching, it gets better)  www.youtube.com/watch?v=YErZ5GjOyas

That's why I've been up three times a week weight lifting, running, swimming, and running stairs. Am I excited? Very much so. Am I nervous and scared out of my skull? See previous answer.

Wish me... not death...!

Home Improvement... Continued!

Okay, so I just wanted to re-post and add some pictures of our upcoming projects. I'm excited to get them started, but some may be a while off yet.

Nonetheless, here are a few pictures of what's to come!

This is our Berry Patch. Therein you may find raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and some mystery berry. We're not sure what it is yet. :) We'll be lining the edge with river rocks to make it more visually appealing.

Apparently there used to be a "not-to-code" little room here that was later torn down. I'll be planting grass here and leveling out the dirt.

This is our shed. In the coming months, this may be demolished and you will see a nice, new shed in the background in the back corner of our yard.

This, along with our back fence, will have a single walk-through gate installed. It has been a real pain to have to walk all the way around our house to get to the other side of this fence. After this summer, no more!

More to follow. :D

Home Improvement... Where's Tim?

We really do love our cute little home, but we knew when we bought it that there were lots of little changes we wanted to make to it. (That's one of the reasons we bought it.)

We've steadily been working on things and we thought we'd give you all an update, especially for those of you who don't live near by and haven't been able to see our progress. We're sorry for not taking better "before" pictures or sometimes completely forgetting to take pictures at all. And these might not be in chronological order. And even with the missing pictures, this will still be a long post! Fair warning!

Gutters:

One of the very first projects we did last year was to add some gutters to the back of the house. They were sorely needed. Even though this winter wasn't too wet compared to most, we already saw how helpful they were.  The ground around the house slopes toward the foundation (that's bad, FYI) because of the erosion.

 (This picture was taken about 6 months after the actual installation. Don't mind the open blinds and curtains...Whisper likes to peek out and watch the great outdoors.)

The Tree:

Here's what our house looked like when we moved in. 

No one would know that behind that beast of a tree, there's a great little porch, with porch planters and flowers, another window, and some roses. We really liked the actual tree itself, it was quite nice, but man was it placed terribly... It had to go.

In October, Katie's cousin Shawn assisted us in removing the tree.  

        

Funny story... as Shawn was swinging away with his chainsaw... he buzzed directly through this:

Yep. A wasp hive. They were NOT happy. Wasps everywhere. We're lucky no one got stung.  He just kept sawing while I sprayed bug killer everywhere (probably not the smartest, but we got lucky.) It was kind of gross, hundreds of larvae fell out along with the queen...we killed them as quick as we could. And eventually we ended up with this:

 Whoah, there IS a house back there!

Sod:

We were satisfied with that for a few months. But as you can maybe see from the pictures, the area around the juniper was kind of gross. The juniper droppings were fairly acidic and killed off the grass below it years ago. So basically we were left with a large circle full of pine needles, blah soil, and a fairly large stump. 

We didn't want to pay to rent a stump grinder, so we took Katie's Dad's advice instead. I dug around the stump so the stump was exposed a few inches. Then I chopped it down with an ax and made it much, much shorter; then I buried it. What's left of the stump will rot off eventually, but the surface was level and you'd never know the stump was still there. We then found someone giving away free sod (KSL just rocks) and laid it down on top. SO much better. It took root and now, a few weeks later, you can't even tell it's new sod, it blends in flawlessly. 

We ended up having enough sod left over to lay some in our patch back yard. If you look closely at the left side of this picture, you can see the holes and patches that were present in our back yard before.

We still have some more areas to sod and possibly seed, but it's a huge improvement from last summer when we were tromping through dirt.

The Log:

Katie saw a log on pinterest that someone had turned into a flower planter. We thought it was a really cool idea and figured we'd do it eventually. She mentioned it to her coworker and the next time he was over at BYU's motion picture lot, he used the tow truck to grab a log. He then used a fork lift to put it in one of their trucks and Katie brought it home on a lunch break. I spent literally at least 10 hours with a hammer and a chisel hollowing it out. There may have been other faster, easier ways to hollow it, but this gave me the most control. And honestly, even though it was exhausting, it was very satisfying and kind of fun. This is one we're really bummed we forgot to take a before picture.

 

We planted seeds for a variety of flowers, but we also put pansies in for now so people know what it is while the other seeds grow.

The Garden:

Speaking of grass seeding...that's another thing we did! The previous owners of our home had a dog. Part of the reason why our back yard was so patchy near the driveway is because that used to be in the dog-run section. The yard used to be split into 3 sections--to the very left, a garden on the left, in the back, the middle right section was the dog run, and the very right was a drive way with a patch of grass behind it. After removing the dog run, we didn't like where the garden was. Katie's Mom suggested we move it from the left side of the shed to the right side of the shed. We thought about it and realized that made much more sense. The grass areas would be more continuous and there'd be one big stretch of grass for the kids to play in rather then two smaller, broken up pieces. 

Previous garden to the left of the shed: 

When we did this at the end of last summer/early last fall, we didn't have the cash to lay sod (not sure if we thought to check KSL for free stuff, but at that time of year there probably wouldn't have been anything anyway) so we laid grass seed. It was a TON of work. It had to be watered 3 or 4 times a day for a few weeks, almost a few months... but what came in came up well! 

That same stretch of grass this year:

Sorry it's kind of blurry...we forgot to take it with the real camera so we just used a cell phone. It looks greener in real life. We'll still need to add seed to fill in the patches, but overall it came in great.

And the NEW garden plot:

I tilled it and planted it about a month ago. We like it on the right side of the shed much better. For one thing, it's easier to get a tiller to it because the driveway leads right to it. For another, this soil is really rich and hasn't been used before for a garden. As I tilled it, it came up quite dark and rich and "fluffy". Of course, as I mentioned, this flows much better. 

The edging came later. We found some free river rocks on KSL (another plug for them!) and they make it look much nicer. We nearly killed our shocks transporting them...we may have put more in our little Corolla then it could handle (as we went over bumps, the tires rubbed against the wheel wells...) but we're done now. Well, except for the berry patch...we'll probably get another 20 or so rocks to line that.

We also made ourselves a little herb garden. Katie found another pin on Pinterest (yes, we BOTH love Pinterest. There are so many fantastic ideas on there, get over it!) to make an herb garden using a rain gutter. It's super cheap and really effective. We had a gutter piece left over so I made some drain holes in the bottom of it and then attached it to our shed.

 

Flower Beds:

We've put a lot of work into fixing up the flower beds. We're not sure if the last owners don't have a green thumb or if they didn't work on it last year since they knew they were moving anyway, but it was kind of a wreck. There's some pretty, flowering ivy planted in there that spreads really quickly if you don't keep it under control, so we had to remove a bit of that. So we did a lot of thinning and weeding. We also moved a few tulip bulbs. We have a lot of tulips (most had already reached their peak by the time we took this picture) which we love. We might move them again more strategically next year... we're not sure if some of them are taller varieties or if they only got taller because they had more water, but for some reason all the tall ones are clumped together. We also added more mulch. And our BIG project was the funny hose. We wrapped it around where the plants were growing and then we buried it. The hose will still water everything nicely, but you can't see anything but the few inches that hook up to the faucet.

Windows:

We replaced the majority of our windows a few months ago. Almost all of them had an outer window pane and then an interior window pane, but they were still old and some of them had cracks in the outer pane. Oh, and one of the windows was an original-- wood frame and single pane of glass--...from the 40s...and really, really drafty. So we got new ones. We figured if we were spending that much money on utilities during a comparatively warm, dry winter, we didn't want to know how much a cold, wet winter would cost us. We've already seen a difference in our bills and they look really good. Plus that's a great re-sale value to the house. We're being careful to not go over board on fixing and changing things. There's only so much added value you can put on a 2 bedroom house before it'll end up costing you more then what you can make up when you sell it. But new windows will definitely help when we're ready to sell.

We still need to paint the frames, but if you look at the second picture in this post, you can see the old windows. This is MUCH nicer. :)

Miscellaneous:

I chopped down 3 small trees. One in the front yard that was too close to our neighbors fence, one in the back yard that was so close to the fence that it ended up weaving in and out of the fence as it grew. 

                                                 

Oh, and  we removed a nasty ELM tree in the back yard. If you know me, you know I HATE elms. They are ugly, sappy, and they destroy foundations, lawns, etc. I've dealt with them before, and they're a PAIN. I didn't want to deal with that, so it had to go.

We moved a few flowers from the backyard to the flower beds in front. I also moved a small tree and a lilac bush.

I built screens for our crawl space vents, so now there's air flow but stray animals can't come in. 

I trimmed and shaped our bushes out front.

What's next?
We're not done yet! We have a list of things we plan on doing either this summer or in the next few years. Hopefully we'll be better at documenting and sharing them so they won't be in one ginormous post again! Here are the big projects coming up in the near future:

• Adding a chain link fence to the back of our yard. The left and right side of our yard is lined with fences (they technically belong to neighbors, but it gets the job done!) but the back is just barb wire and wood posts. Not good enough for when we have kids. Katie's Dad happens to have about 100 ft of chain link fencing he doesn't need anymore and he generously offered it to us. I have a friend who's going to install it for us. Hopefully that'll be in the next month or so.
• Planting privacy bushes. Once the fence is installed, we're going to add lilacs and some other plants that will hide our yard from the park in the back. Hardly anyone goes to that park since it's not well known, but when there ARE people there, it's kind of awkward... Plus maybe bushes will keep them from hopping our fence to retrieve their frisbees and balls...the barbed wire isn't keeping them out, as my poor smashed cucumbers can testify to :( (Really made me angry...)
• Removing the bushes out front. We don't like them but we don't have a way to remove them on our own. My friend who'll be installing our fence also offered to use his truck to rip out the bushes.
• Demolishing our chicken coop/shed. Our shed is half chicken coop (original to the house, from the 40's) and half shed. The shed side is decent and had recently been re-roofed, but the chicken coop side is a disaster, lots of water damage from the leaky roof and part of it is rotting away. We originally thought about just removing the chicken coop part and leaving the shed, but the same friend who's installing the fence and taking out the bushes builds sheds and offered to build us one pretty much for cost. He would also tear down the current one. He's a great guy with lots of skill. :) It's working out nicely for us. We still may wait to do the shed, but since we're saving a lot of money by not having to buy the fencing materials like we originally thought, we might have enough to do that this summer too. 
• Painting the kitchen, living room, and hallway. Oh, and the notorious pink room. Probably not til we're pregnant and know if we want it pink or not. But even if we DO have a girl, Katie doubts she'll want a pink nursery. She's thinking gray and yellow or maybe avocado and black. She wanted you to know.

So that's what we've been up to! And what we will be up to...volunteers for any projects are more than welcome ;)

SkillsUSA: Champions at... ZzZzZzZz

This last weekend, I participated in the state level competition for SkillsUSA. It's basically a nation-wide technical skills competition. They have a school contest, then a state contest, then a national level contest in Kansas City, MO.

The school level consisted of me receiving and replying to an email from Wiz, my professor. He received a last-minute reminder from SkillsUSA to make sure to get his school winner names in by noon that day! Well, considering he had no idea he was supposed to hold a school contest until they emailed him, he basically just said that the first six people to email him were in! Well, I was second, so I got silver.

Background done, on to the real story!

So, we got to SLCC at 8 AM on Friday. The first hour was spent taking an actual knowledge-based test, which accounted for about 10% of our final score. As soon as the text was taken, it was on to the actual competition. We were only up against two other teams from our school. Apparently no other post-secondary school in Utah cares enough to challenge their Audio students, so UVU was the only school there.

I'll be honest, I was way excited about this competition. Our goal was to create a 1-2 minute "Radio Documentary" about SkillsUSA. This was different from what I was expecting. Normally you create a 30-60 second "spot" or actual radio Ad. the difference was that we had to walk around SLCC campus and actually interview students, parents, advisors, and the like. We compiled it all into a 1:30 slot and threw it together.

Now, considering we only had 5-6 hours to complete it, I figure we did okay. We felt like we were working left-handed the entire time as we were using ProTools to edit our mix. Neither of us are really great at ProTools and it took us longer than it would have, had we been using Vegas or some other program. As it was, we forgot to put some volume automation in one part of it, so it was really quiet and boring for about 20 seconds. This is a huge problem when the judges are basing half your scored off of "levels" and "creativity". This was only made more problematic when the CD would not burn and we ended up submitting it a couple of minutes after the "bell". We got docked points for being late, but we also got docked points for it not being exactly 1:30. We were a second short because iTunes sucks at burning. This was our only option and we were already late, so we just did it and hoped for the best.

Well, the best was us getting third place. I will be honest in saying I think we deserved less than that. I felt horrible about our mix and was embarrassed to even hear it play for the judges. That being said, if I had 10 minutes, I could go in and fix everything and, if the contest were to be re-judged, produce a gold-winning spot. I am almost certain that if we had 10 more minutes to work, we would have won gold. That's not being cocky, I'm just saying that that's how close the competition was.

Of course, I am more than genuinely happy for the team that won. I'm so excited for them and they totally deserved it. The national competition is in June in Kansas City. It's all paid for by the school, so it's a win-win.

It was worth it though. I had a great time with my audio nerd friends and Wiz is always a blast. I also learned what it will take to blow them all out of the water next year!

I ended the weekend with an invitation to the FUN. concert in Salt Lake Saturday night. It was... well, fun. (Har har...)

Needless to say, this has been a draining week. I was so tired from it all that I slept through half of General Conference, went to bed at 8PM on Sunday night, and was still dog tired when I woke up at 6:45 this morning.

I guess it's a good thing school will be out in a couple weeks. I wonder if I can make it until then...

The Problem With Sundance

Here's the problem: Filmmakers and film-goers from around the world spend upwards of thousands of dollars to come and see maybe 7 or 8 films. Yet, we can't cough up 15 bucks to drive 30 miles and participate in the biggest, most incredible media event of the year!

As consumers of media, we should ALL be rushing in to the theaters demanding to be thrilled, delighted, and informed by these incredible films.

Some people might think that this festival is for people who like "artsy-fartsy" stuff, or that the films submitted are "low-budget". Both of these statements are false. While Sundance may include many films that are more enjoyed by those with a taste for the "art of film", that is NOT what it is there for.

These filmmakers spend a lot of time and a lot of their own hard-earned money to express themselves and to make a film that can enjoyed the way it was meant to be. In other words, before some production company gets a hold of it and rips it to shreds and sands it down and removes any edge so that it fits a standard, boring template for the "mass consumer". Why do so many movies suck right now? It's partly because the directors have no vision. Well Sundance is the unequivocal solution to that.

I went last night and participated in something extraordinary. Joseph Gorgon-Leavitt himself hosted an event, the likes of which I have not seen before. It was a live event, a film showcase, and a social digital media extravaganza. This... was... insane... (I'll admit, the pictures aren't great... They were taken with my cell phone. From the balcony.)

"Regular Joe", as he calls himself, came out on stage and encouraged everyone to tweet their answers to various questions so he could read them live and invite the person up to explain themselves. The opening sequence of the presentation included the following: "We encourage everyone to please turn... ON your electronic and recording devices! He invited hoards of people up to sing karaoke, to read passages from short story books, and even just to chat. He was such a sharp, amiable guy and had so much energy! He even played his guitar and sang some songs (which were not technically public domain songs, but he said... well, he said he was going to play them anyway because he wanted to.)

Joe's .org, HitRecord, is a social filmmaking website where everyone submits content and everyone particiaptes in making a film. Someone in Bangladesh may have written the script, but you can write the soundtrack so that someone in Topeka can do the animation or acting. Then he played them all at this event and encouraged us to film them and film him and post it all back onto his website so that other could make something out of it!

This idea of social filmmaking is just so very cool. It's like Youtube meets the public domain meets twitter meets Sundance. Oh, and the whole time we were watching it live? Guess what was being broadcast for free on Sundance.org? The very broadcast of what we were participating in. Go, see for yourself! There's already stuff being posted! I may even be in it! Check out hitrecord.org. Trust me, It's cool.

Anyway, my point in all this is that you don't go to Sundance to watch a movie. We have theaters for that. you go to Sundance to have an experience. Sometimes even a life-changing one. I met directors, actors, students, sound people, and good old fashioned movie-lovers. It was well worth the fifteen dollars and the drive up and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

So, consider this my tirade/ invitation for those of you who have never been. My eyes were opened to the awesomeness that is the Sundance Film Festival. My only regret is that I didn't participate in it more this year. At least there's next January, right?

Finally Fulfilling My Promises...

So, there's two things I haven't done yet that I said I would.

First off, there's the matter of the David Hasselhoff in a rainbow speedo picture. (June 7, 2011)

Explanation is as follows: Our department at work is fairly tight-knit and we all enjoy a good ribbing now and then. Sometimes, when we leave our computers to get a drink or use the restroom or whatever, we forget to lock our desktops. Well, the popular reaction to this is to "Hoff" them. Pull up an awkward picture of the Hoff and just leave it on their computer so that when they come back, everyone gets to make fun of them for "looking at the Hoff". Well, this tradition has continued for quite some time now. As for the rainbow picture I posted, I was commissioned by a member of our team to make the best Hoff picture yet. So I did some photoshop magic and made it truly extraordinary.

After that, it was hard to outdo ourselves... so now we just post pictures of the "unicorn man". Don't ask, I will not tell. If you want, here's a link or two, and you can gouge out your own eyes later. Don't say I didn't warn you. ;)
Link 1
Link 2


The second thing I neglected was to post was pictures of the Windgazer Hike of Legends. They will follow this week... maybe...

That Last Four Months of My Life... So Far...

Wow! I have been too busy for my own good. Just ask Katie, she'll vouch for that. She told me last Summer that I should do something extracurricular. Well, careful what you wish for. :)

I, of course, am working at SecurityMetrics. I've been working there for just over 3 years and I'm currently working full time. At the beginnning of the semester, I began to do some extra things as well.

Fortunately,I was enrolled in two fairly easy classes, as far as work load goes. However, the out-of-class time spent in these classes is what occupied my free time. This is how I spent my semester:

Every other Friday night, I go to KPCW in Park City as an unofficial intern. I help out around the station with voice-overs, reading copy, DJ-ing, etc. This has been a blast. This radio station is incredible! They are very advanced in technology because Park City is a wealthy town and KPCW is a non-profit. This means they get big donations. ;) It's been way fun and educational to learn how the software and hardware all works and how a radio station is run and maintained. This has been in conjunction with my Radio Production class. In class, we learned about radio history and what-not. But the coolest thing was the projects. We created commercials, Public Service Announcements, and I even created material for a station promo that will be played on air at KPCW!

Alongside the Radio class, we decided to create a Radio Club at UVU! I was elected as the Vice President for the club, so now I'm in charge of helping with meetings, programming, DJ-ing, etc. This is going to be way cool. We're going to start out streaming our broadcast online at first. But sometime next year, we'll be putting up a Low Power FM Transmitter on top of the Computer Science building. This will enable us to broadcast all over campus! Exciting things to come from the UVU Radio station. :)

Then we come to my Studio Recording class. This has been one of the coolest classes I've ever taken! I won't bore you with Audio geekness and terms only audio geeks would care about... but suffice it to say this class has been way too fun for my own good. It has required a lot of after class time because by the time we get studio equipment up and working, class was over. So in order to actually do some studio time and RECORD the bands that came, we'd end up staying late. It's been difficult to divvy my time between class and my other responsibilities, but the class is worth it. We've been recording a band called Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and helping them get a few tracks laid down for a music video and an album. They're quite good for a young, local band and have a lot of promise.

The gem of our class though, was recording Sam Payne. He is AWESOME! Such a fun guy and he and his brothers are incredibly talented. It was so fun working with them and watching them work. (Here's an okay video of him for those of you who don't know who he is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQchRRmu4H4)

Okay, so moving on... I also was hired on at the UVU Review, the school newspaper, as the "Assistant Digital Media Manager". What does this mean? Well, my current responsibilities included recording, producing, and posting a weekly podcast of to news stories on campus. Not only is this a huge boost to my resume, but it's been a lot of fun and has proven a great networking opportunity as well. In the near future, my boss, Parker, sees a lot of growth in the "digital media" department of the newspaper. I put thise in quotes, because it only just began when he hired me. Haha, but he and I are very excited and we can see this becoming a huge part of the newspaper. For now though, we'll just stick to a weekly podcast. Please! Check them out!!!:

Wolverine Minute - Dec. 7, 2011 by UVU Review

http://soundcloud.com/uvu-review/wolverine-minute-dec-7-2011

https://www.facebook.com/UVUreview

(Scroll down to find the others.)

So, these are just some of the things I've been up to this last semester. And next year? Well, it will only get busier from here. But the idea is that if I can get my resume built and my jobs lined up now, how much easier will it be for me to find a career I love and can support my family on, when I graduate?

Needless to say, I haven't posted in a while, but this is mostly the reason why. So forgive me, okay? :)