Chicago, Here We Come!

Actually, it’s a suburb of Chicago, called Schaumburg, which is fun to say. Try it – “Schaumburg.” We’ll leave tomorrow morning, and take our computer with, so we’ll post in a couple days. Until then, get acquainted with… “Schaumburg” here.

Finals

I had already been finished with school mentally for about a week, but I still had finals to take today. Hard to do with the beautiful spring weather outside. I didn’t study much for them until yesterday and today. I took my two finals (97% and 88%) and now I finally feel like I can focus on packing. We’re going to try to leave for Chicago on Friday morning. The picture below is of the BYU Testing Center, the epicenter of student anxiety. It’s a funny place – you can eat, but you can’t leave to go to the bathroom. Once last semester, I had finished my test, but I had to poo so bad that I didn’t have time to check my answers. I still did okay, but you have to be careful what you eat and drink before you go in there.

Good Luck Tie

My neighbor Alec gave me this tie. It happened like this:

Me: I like your tie

Alec: Why’s that?

Me: Because it’s yellow. I’ve been looking for a yellow tie. I even went to the thrift store yesterday and didn’t find one.

Alec: Well, I’ll give you mine.

So he did. Then he said, “If you make less than the median salary in your sales job, you have to give it back to me. But if you make more, you can keep it.”

Alec is good at motivation like that. Before I left for my PhD program in linguistics (which I withdrew from a year later), and I was wavering about whether it was the right decision or not, Alec told me, “You’ve gotta go! If you don’t, you’ll always wonder, ‘What if?’”

I would have gone without Alec’s encouragement, but he made me feel better about my decision.

Gearing Up

To look around our apartment, you wouldn’t think we were really moving to Chicago this week. Nothing’s packed. The only effort anyone has made towards moving is that Roseli has created three piles of books and toys that she wants to take with us. Today, she finally talked to the manager of the Chicago office to ask him questions about the nearest library, grocery store, thrift store, hospital, and about ten other questions. I worked on getting phone and Internet service set up in our new apartment before we move, which, by the way, was a total pain.

I called AT&T to set up basic phone service, and the CSR tells me that she could put in the order for me, but it will cost $40, but if I put in the order online, it’s free. Great, I thought, so I go online to set up service. There are about 20 different pages that I have to navigate through, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I click on the “next” button, it doesn’t take me to the next page, but it takes me to the first page that I had already filled out at varying points along the process. So I, being ever persistent, keep trying, and each time I start the process over, I make it a little farther in the process. Finally, I make it to the second to last page. I click “next,” full of hope that I am almost done, and I see the message, “This page cannot be displayed.” So I call AT&T again to see if they have record of my request for service. They don’t. This time, the lady tells me that they are aware that their website has some bugs, and she advises me to start from the beginning! Two and a half hours after I started, I finally make it through all the pages, after seeing most of them about five times, and my new phone service is scheduled for installation on Friday.

Besides physical preparation for a summer of door-to-door selling, I’m trying to prepare mentally prepare. The first couple days will be rough, I know. I’ve learned in the past that I don’t like sales, but for some reason, I’m looking forward to this summer. What will make me successful more than anything else is confidence. Confidence is not something I naturally exude. I’m more the passive, agreeable type, but I think I’ve discovered a more confidant side to myself as I’ve taught over the past two semesters. And for me, the key to being confident is knowledge, knowledge about the subject in teaching, and about the product in sales.

Scripture Songs

When I was in Russia as a missionary, there would be times when people would ask me a question, and I knew that I could answer their question with a scripture. The problem was that I often did not remember exactly where the scripture was located.

Later, when I taught Russian at the Missionary Training Center, I would put Russian phrases that the missionaries needed to learn to a song, and the music would help them memorize the phrases, plus it made learning more fun. Meanwhile, I was trying to memorize scriptures when I was working at the MTC, but within a week or so, I would forget any scripture that I had learned. I eventually realized that I could put scriptures to music. Doing so has made memorizing the scriptures easier, more fun, and most importantly, permanent. I now have dozens of scriptures memorized, word perfect, because I put them to song. You can find my “scripture songs,” as I call them, here. I will be continually updating the collection as I learn new scriptures.

My hope is that these songs will help my children be more effective missionaries if they decide to serve missions, and that my wife and I will also be able to teach better from the scriptures as senior missionaries.