2wits

Greetings Family and Friends!

I finally had a chance to post the pictures Stephen sent me on a CD so everybody could see them (more pictures are posted below the text here). If you want to save them to your own computer you should be able to just right click on each picture and go to "Save Image As..."

He gave descriptions for some of them but not all of them. The one with all the people is the family he spent Christmas with and where he was when he called us. There are also some random pictures around his apartment. I think his room looks a little empty, maybe we should remedy this eh? :) Many of the other pictures are photos he took at a member's house who collects old or Book of Mormon related images and artifacts. One is a proposed map of one theory of Book of Mormon geography. It's quite interesting and I think Stephen likes that much of it corresponds with the Chris Heimerdinger books. Another is a mural of the Legend of Quetzalcoatl visiting the Lamanites (ie: Christ appearing in 3rd Nephi). The mural is painted on a Governor's Mansion wall in Mexico. The picture that I got a kick out of is the one of Stephen standing next to a kid he recently baptized--the kid is nearly as big as Stephen. I thought it would have been an interesting baptism to see.

As for Kaitlin and me, we have been busy, busy, busy. Kaitlin is more than halfway through her training with Wells Fargo and she seems to be doing quite well. She has moved on from the classroom to using the phones. Some days it seems like she is a natural. Other days she says she gets some pretty weird or rude calls. Most of the time she gets satisfaction from her work and that makes us happy. Also, Kaitlin's birthday is coming up soon and we're getting pretty excited for that. I have what I think are some pretty good ideas for stuff to get her, but if any of you have ideas please feel free to voice them. Kaitlin did such a wonderful job making my birthday fantastic back in November and I want to make sure I properly return the favor.

School and working at the library have been keeping me busy on my side of things, and for the most part I enjoy it. This has by far been my most demanding semester and I have upwards of 90 pages of papers due throughout my classes over the course of the semester. Trying to keep up with everything has been rather tedious but interesting, and hopefully it will get me all ready to write my undergraduate thesis in the fall. I'll share one funny anecdote from my Psychotherapy psychology class when we were talking about reinforcement and extinction:

There once was a retired pyschology professor who liked to relax in the peace and quiet of his retirement by reading, gardening, or playing his piano. He noticed a few months into his retirement that his front yard was a favorite gathering place of 7-10 kids from his neighborhood. They would gather on his lawn and play games or just talk and were often quite noisy. Finally, he couldn't handle it anymore and he decided to do something about it. He started going outside every day and giving each child a dollar. He told them that it gave him such satisfaction that they wanted to use his yard to gather and enjoy themselves. He kept this up for several weeks until the kids were expecting it; then he stopped. The kids were so upset and annoyed that he wouldn't pay them to play in his yard anymore that they decided they would show him by never giving him the satisfaction of playing in his yard again.

Haha...I thought the story was pretty clever and my professor swears it's a true story. Most of us in the class thought he was going out initially to pay them to stay out of his yard, but that would have been reinforcement for them to come back again so they could get paid more.

Anyway, when Kaitlin and I have free time we've been going down to the gym to play racquetball and pool or we watch movies using Netflix. Kaitlin is quite the pool shark and I was kind of surprised. She usually beats me in pool, but I can usually best her in racquetball. Last weekend we got to go to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City with the history club and that was lots of fun for us. We realized too late that we should have brought a camera so we could share it with everybody, but I guess we'll have to remember next time.

Well, I suppose there's plenty to look at and plenty to read on this post already. We hope that life is treating you all as well as it's treating us. We miss everybody and think of you often. Take care, we love you all!