One month...

No, that's not my maturity level, (well, that's not the only thing one month represents, at least...), no it's not how long it would take me to eat 5 lbs of chocolate (um try a day? Easter proved that one...). No, that's the amount of time until my thesis is due, and real life begins... 33 days at least, on May 22nd, I defend my thesis, and finally graduate... after 23 years of being a student (technically, being a missionary is a spiritual internship, right? ). What will life be like? Renee will have a husband again, I'll have time to return more phone calls and blog more (theoretcially), and we'll be homeless! That's right, we STILL don't know what job we will take. Mostly because no concrete offers have come in, but what can you do, right?
On the brighter side, I'm a happy man. Why, you ask? 4 words... Deer Valley Turkey Chili. Wow. Yeah, I know... I'm revealing what dork I really am with this post, but what can I say... food is my passion, and this is some good food. We've had the mix for about 3 years, and I never could bring myself to make it, because then it would be gone. However, since we are moving in a little over a month, the eating through the food storage time has come, and we decided to make it. Can we say ecstasy? (yeah, the mix probably has some of that in there too...). Man is it good. See?

We had no idea how much soup it actually made, so we now have a pot of soup that looks like this: and I will be nice and portly by the time I graduate. Nothing like good food and 16 hours of sitting at a desk to help that butt look great, eh? So why don't I post about more interesting things? Sorry, we have no kids, and I'm writing a thesis... end of story. I could outline the details of what I'm writing about, since about 16 hours a day goes into that... but judging from the look on Renee's face when she reads through my dissertation, I've decided to spare you that torture... for now.

Car? What car?

We had an interesting experience while driving down to NJ to visit our friends Erin and Brett for conference weekend. We were stopped at a tollbooth, maybe 3 cars away from the toll, and were stopped while waiting for our turn. Renee turned to look at me, and suddenly looked past me with terror written all over her face, right about the same time that our car started vibrating, shaking, and then was lifted up a couple inches. Turned out a semi, not seeing us, ran right into the back left corner of our car. Dang. I turned just in time to see the truck grill stop inches from my face. Well, after a long wait, and the need to pull through the tolls, the cop came, and after trying to intimidate me into saying that I ran into the truck, decided it was a no fault accident. We were bummed, because our car looked something like this:

The estimate for a fix was around $1500 minimum, and that wasn't something we could pay. After our initial frustration, we decided it was for the best: this economy is NOT a time for a trucker to loose his job because he totaled private car (yes, sad as it is, our car would have been totaled at that price). We would be out some money this way, but that poor guy would be out of a job, possibly for a LONG time. Also, our car is only $1000 blue book, and there's no way we could have found a new car. So Heavenly Father really was looking out for us.
Turns out I got to practice my car mechanic skills. Renee found a new back door at a junkyard that matched for $157, and Thursday afternoon I went up to her parents place and I put the door back on with some help from the brother-in-law. Now, true, it doesn't look like a new car, and we had to miss our trip to Missouri because of this (sorry Josh and Kyra, but we WILL be coming later), but shoot, I'm pretty dang proud of my body work! Doesn't this look better?


I'm in the wrong line of business... who needs to build nuke plants when I can fix fiberglass siding, eh?