The Gifts that Keep on Giving

Have you ever heard the phrase, "its just a gift that keeps on giving"? Well I have and I actually have one of those 'gifts' in my life right now. We all know of such gifts, fruitcakes at Christmas time, nasty perfume or cologne a grandparent gave us, an 'ex' significant other, stalker, illnesses, etc.
Possibly my favorite is the Christmas fruitcake. Why do they even exist anymore? Nobody likes them and the same fruitcake can make it all around the community in one Christmas season! I've seen, in my own family, husband/wife conferences discussing some gift they are thinking of giving to someone else on a special occasion. The discussion usually goes with the husband saying, "Yeah, lets give them that. We don't use it and it looks new. They'll never know we didn't buy it specifically for them." The wife, who is usually more on the ball, replies something like, "No, honey (gag for the pet names also but that's for another day), I'm almost certain, now that i think about it, that they gave that gift to us!" And so the story always goes, we have these things that nobody wants but we give them away to people in vulnerable positions (such as having it be their birthday or being our neighbor around Christmas) and hope to never see them again. But just like those nasty exes, dramatic friends, and malaria, they always seem to find their way back to us!

So I guess what I'm getting at is if you have one of these gifts in your possession give it to the DI so someone else can be graced with it and charity can get some money from them. Nobody wants those gifts to make the rounds again. If you are one of those gifts then PLEASE for the sake of humanity STOP giving back, as your giving may be compared to the giving of The Bubonic Plague or AIDS.

Comments appreciated....

Geocaching

So I decided to add some music to my blog. You may notice there is a good bit of country on it.... actually ALL the songs but one are country.... I'm a country boy what can I say :).

So lately I have this problem that I never thought would be a problem. Today was day THREE of absolutely no homework and I am getting sooooo bored I cant even stand it! So I dug out my GPS (Global Positioning System unit) and added some geocaches to it from around Logan. I realized that there was one VERY close to my apartment that wasn't there last winter so I went to find it today and saved the rest for another day. I've found that I often have a hard time finding the caches when I am by myself so I enlisted the aid of one of the girls that lives here in Brooklane. Krista (said girl) found it as soon as we go close to it.... I think she thought I just wanted her to go with me. Not like she went very far with me since the cache was literally right outside her bedroom window :). Anyways I LOVE geocaching and will probably mention it many more times on the blog. HOOOORAAAAAAAAAAAY that I now have something to do since I don't have a lick of homework tomorrow either! Anyone that wants to go geocaching with me just needs to mention it and I'm all for it anytime!

What is geocaching you might ask.... Well very simply its a worldwide, hightec treasure hunt. Anyone can play that has a GPS unit and creates a free account at geocaching.com to get the coordinates. Once the unique coordinates of a 'cache' are inserted into the GPS unit you just simply follow the maps and arrows to where ever the cache is located. Depending on the weather, geographical location, and government, you can get within feet of it just by watching the GPS. Caches vary in size and contents but all in all its a really fun activity so if anyone is interested let me know! I'll take any excuse I can to go!

Deer Hunt

This past weekend I drove a total of 800 miles to go home for the deer hunt. Many of you might think, "what a crazy fool! He must be a redneck!" You're probably right I am a redneck! Frankly I'm quite proud of that fact. However, there is a huge difference between 'redneck' and 'hillbilly' but thats for another day and blogpost.

So anyways I love going home and I realized while I was down there this past weekend that I dont do it nearly enough so I'm planning to do it more frequently now. If anyone wants to join me on one of my trips let me know and I can guarentee it'll be the most fun you've ever had in the middle of nowhere!

So back to the deer hunt. I dont think any of you can understand how much I love the deer hunt. Its not really for the killing a deer part because honestly if I were to get skunked (not get a deer) I would be totally fine with it. I must add that NEVER happens but 'if' it did I wouldnt mind because the fun part is the time with the whole family, on the ranch, having fun together. To illustrate the importance of the deer hunt to my sanity I'll divulge that I was only homesick three days a year while on my mission. One of those was opening day of the deer hunt. Dead serious!

Well this year was a lot of fun. I was the first of my siblings to get home (the other two have jobs and families a.k.a. responsibilities). I got home Thursday night and went looking for deer. I find lots of does and fawns and a few little bucks but nothing that really got me excited. Friday I spent the day getting things ready for the hunt, taking fourwheelers to the ranch, hydrating the water line to our family park at the ranch, getting the orange clothes and guns and stuff out, etc. My brothers and their families got to Blanding that night and we just sat around and talked til 10:30 or 11 at night. Not all that late except we were getting up at 5:30 in the morning and wouldnt be in bed til midnight Saturday night but with my family, when we get together, nobody will go to bed first. If someone would go to bed the rest would follow but nobody does and we end up talking til the wee hours (usually) and never get any sleep when the family is together in Blanding.

4:45 Saturday morning I was wide awake! Its honestly worse than Christmas morning as a little kid (for me atleast but my oldest brother Klayton is still up every half hour Christmas morning begging his wife to wake up the little girls so they can go open presents :) he just loves seeing their faces i think). My spot was the first one on the road that morning so I got dumped off in the dark to go find a place I thought would be the best to see the deer moving when it got light. I sat down in the brush with a clear view of the pumpkin patch (deer love pumpkins and there was a nice buck eating them Thursday night and Friday morning), I had brush all around me and a big bush tree between me and the road. About 25 minutes before it was light enough to shoot there was a glow on the horizon and anything that moved between me and the Eastern sky was skylighted but otherwise it was pitch black. About then I heard 3 or 4 deer jump the fence and cross the gravel road towards me. I started breathing more quietly and turned just a bit to see their sillouettes against the glowing dawn light. Although it is completely illegal to shoot before daylight I decided if it was a big enough buck and shoot its sillouette and then wait til light to take care of it (i'm not perfect what can I say, I study politics). Well about 5 minutes later I hear something in the brush beside me and then I hear a deer loudly sniffing the air (for my scent of course)! It was worse than the loudest snore you've ever heard and, honestly, my stomach swallowed my heart! After about the third sniff this nice buck sticks his head through the brush and looks right at me! I dont know who was startled the most but he ran and I didnt so I'll chalk it up as a win for me. Daylight came and I didnt see a single deer in the patch (he must have told his friends about me watching them). Deciding my daylight suprise was a bust I called my oldest brother on the radio to see if he had seen anything. He had shot twice at a couple bucks 300 yds away but had missed (he wasn't 100% sure which two in the herd were bucks through his scope that had fogged up so its probably good he missed :) )

We went down to get my dad and middle brother and his wife and found that Kyle (my brother) had gotten a little buck. We took care of it and then went to see if anyone else in our hunting party got any shots or anything. One of our family friends had nailed a pretty good sized buck but it had gotten into the canyon on him and was still on the move. We spent the next two hours hunting that thing down! Then came the best part of Opening morning, my Mom's HUGE breakfast when we come in to eat! Anything you can imagine for breakfast is there! I'd say that I gained a few pounds but after going up and down that canyon for two hours after Kelvin's deer I still probably lost weight after all the food I ate.

All afternoon we rode around on the four wheelers just looking for deer and trying to stir them up for one another. We saw a LOT of deer but no bucks all day until evening. When evening came Klayton and I ended up in the same field looking at the same 150 does and fawns so he came over and we were just shooting the breeze when some people on the county road started shooting at some deer on our neighbor's land just across the road from us. It was totally illegal what the were doing but we just watched them and talked as we looked for deer in the canyon below. I looked up and saw two deer coming from the field the stupid road hunters were shooting into so we glassed them and one was a pretty nice buck. Well, with Klayton its always a race to beat him to the shot cause he HATES to get skunked but I beat him to it. One shot from 200 + yards and down he went in a heap. I was quite proud of the shot as the deer was moving, he was a long ways away, and i didn't ruin any meat! I'm pretty much an amazing shot.

While I was gutting my deer three guys from the lazy road hunters crossed the fence and started towards us.... Oh, GREAT they are gonna claim this is their deer even though it clearly had not been shot before I took it down. Sure enough the one guys says, "Did that deer have a spot on its back?" I said, rather sarcastically, "No I think he lost his spots a couple years ago when he left his mother." He says, "well I shot him in that field over there and he went down but must have gotten up and ran over here." I said, "well sir you clearly missed with your shot. Unless, of course, you were shooting with an air soft gun because he was not shot until I shot him." The guys says, "well I was just hoping to get a good buck this year before I have to go back to school." Not feeling the least bit sympathetic I said, "well my advice to you is that next year you actually get permission from landowners to hunt their land instead of just driving the county road. Its unethical and illegal to just shoot deer off people's private land without permission." With that they left. Yes, you are right I am a JERK but I feel very strongly about land owner rights. Stupid people deserve to be treated as such.

Anyways, this is my first monologue of a blog post and I'm afraid its really boring and not something I'm gonna do a lot of in my blog but I love the deer hunt. Its all about getting out into the great outdoors and enjoying some time to just relax and enjoy having NOBODY around. Its so good to just be able to enjoy your family and renew your friendships and spend time together making memories. I'm lucky that my family are my best friends.

The Results of the 'Game'

It has many names, 'the game', 'the scene', 'the meat market' just to name a few. We are all forced to participate albeit sometimes unwillingly. Why do we play? Its the natural thing to want to be loved, wanted, appreciated. As a result of this natural desire we all have infused into our DNA we subject ourselves to this 'game'. Quite frankly I hate the game. Even as I sit and write this blog I tell myself I'm through playing and ready to just sit it out on the sideline. Those of you who know me know that I am, by nature, an overly competitive human being so why would I accept defeat? I'll explain.

An analogy from the ranch comes to mind. When you are walking through the Corral you cant make it from one side to the other without getting some poop on your feet. That's how the dating game is. Every time you put yourself on the line and offer your heart or feelings to someone you are in essence walking through the Corral. For those of you that have never had the experience of then getting your heart taken from your shirt sleeve and broken (whether innocently or maliciously) you are very new to the game. For the rest of us we have experienced getting our 'feet covered in poop' so to speak. Each time we learn to walk a little more carefully and take care to maybe not offer our heart as easily. Sometimes you may even fall head over heels into a pile of crap and sometimes you get up only to fall in it again, and again. I must say that this is what the last 3 years of my life have been. Regardless of the persona I give to my peers, in reality I hate being alone. This has caused me to fall into the manure pile more than once and as a result I have changed my game plan.

The fact that I am admitting my battle wounds on my blog is very scary to me. However, I've screwed up enough recently (tonight even) to realize that I'm done pretending. I have developed a severe problem anytime I'm faced with putting my heart on my sleeve. It seems that whenever I give my emotions to anyone my self confidence goes away also. No matter how bad i want to hang out with the person or even take her out I refuse myself from doing it because I don't think she'll really want to. Girls have a habit of doing sometimes saying YES because they don't want to be mean. Its not mean to tell a guy NO if you don't want to do something with him. TRY IT! So to avoid putting her in the situation of doing something she may not want to do I just refuse myself the pleasure of spending time with her. Some of you may have even experienced this first hand from me. We are friends and we spend time together and everything is cool until we realize we may like each other.... then, i distance myself and do stupid things and assume things and presume things and put words in your mouth that you never thought of saying.... it then causes drama and things unravel before they can start to build.... as a result I've lost out on a fair number of amazing people in my life and continue to do so.... I dare guess I'm not the only one that has scars from the game.... So what do those of us need that have built significant barriers around us that set us up to fail in any relationship? We need someone (of the opposite sex) that has mutual feelings for us to help us out. I dare guess that anyone that has the same problem i do hates it just as much as I do. However, we cant overcome it alone. If we don't have someone that is patient, and understanding to help us through it we'll just continue to fall in the manure piles and building thicker and taller walls around our hearts. Its not fun. Its very lonely. So if you find yourself on one side of this or the other TALK ABOUT IT. Girls, guys don't want your sympathy. That is the LAST thing they want. They want to trust you and they want to open up to you. They want a friendship that can turn into more but they cant have that if you manipulate them or 'play mind games'.

As for me, I'm ready to work on my problem and get through it.... now if she'd just forgive me and realize I am the guy she knew when we wer just friends we could work through it and find something amazing. If not? Then hopefully someone someday will have what it takes to help me through the piles of manure I've accumulated around me from playing this STUPID GAME!