2nd Time's the Charm

I can now officially call myself an engaged man again. I must say it feels good to be able to say that I'm "taken" and that I know there is someone else out there who wants nothing more than to spend the rest of her life with me. This entry is dedicated to the love of my life, Katherine X Howell!

Lots of people (Allison) have been bugging me to get a blog posted about how the proposal happened, so this is here for those of you that just love to here this kind of mushy stuff. If you don't care for the "Awww..." moments, I suggest you leave now!

As some of you may know, my first date with X was to the Jon Schmidt concert last year. I took X again this year and was hoping to propose to her that evening. I wanted to propose to her under the stars out on the QUAD, and every day that week it had been clear skies and the stars were very bright. But lo and behold, the day of the concert it was overcast and rainy. Perfect. So I had to bail on my plans for that evening, but I kept a watchful eye on the weather.

It was a whole 2 weeks until another clear night up here in Logan! X and I had gone to the USU basketball game that evening and when we came out I noticed that the sky was clear. I was pretty excited. We hung out for the rest of the night until about midnight, and then I walked her home. On my way home I texted her and told her I had noticed that the stars were really bright that night, and asked if she wanted to go star-gazing. She gladly accepted and so we started getting all dressed up for the cold.

My first task at hand was finding out where I wanted to keep the ring. I didn't to put it in my pants pocket because it would really bulge out when I sat down, and I didn't want to put it in my coat pocket, because X likes to keep her hands warm in my coat pocket. I ended up deciding to put it in the hood of my hoodie. It was ingenious! It was a nice little pocket for it, it didn't bulge, and there was very little chance that she would reach in there for anything.

We left and drove up to the QUAD and laid out some blankets to look at the stars. We ended up getting to cold sitting on the ground so we decided to stand and do a sort of cuddle-dance as we looked up into the sky. It was at this point that I said my "back was itchy" and reached into my hood to grab the ring box. Of course I made it seem like I was scratching my back so she had no idea. I'm a sneaky one! Then I put my hand behind her back again and we continued to dance/cuddle for a little bit. I was really lucky though, because right after I took the ring box out X offered to put my hood on for me, so I got it out just in time!

After a while X was starting to get tired (I could tell because she was putting her head on my shoulder and I could feel her leaning a lot of her weight into me) so I knew I was going to have to act soon. I told her to look up into the sky and see if she could find any stars that she liked. (***MUSHY ALERT!***) As she was looking up into the sky I told her that I could see a beautiful star. She asked me where, and I told her right in front of me. Then she looked back up into the sky (and I secretly brought my hand out from behind her back) and I told her that I could see a sparkly star. She asked me where again and I directed her gaze down in-between us where I had the ring. She gasped and I got down on one knee and proposed.

The funny thing is that X was more interested in how I managed to do it all rather than answer my proposal. I told her I would tell her everything if she said yes. Now she knows. :)





A special thanks goes out to Andrew Hardman who came out and endured the cold night to take these awesome pictures. Thanks Andrew!

MasterControl

I know it seems like it was forever ago, but I thought I should post something about the internship I had this past summer. I was hired by MasterControl, Inc. as a software engineer to work on their document control software. Now I know what you are thinking... "What kind of a name is MasterControl?" I was thinking the same thing when I applied for a job. It just sounded like some big, robotic machine that would walk around and say "I am MasterControl" over and over again in a big robotic voice. I imagined that it would probably look something like this:


Anyways, it turned out that MasterControl was a lot more than just that, but unfortunately I am signed to secrecy about what exactly it was that we worked on while employed there. But we had a whole lot of fun and I learned that I never want to test software for bugs! They had us work in a couple of different departments and everyone's least favorite was verification. That department is in charge of making sure the fix that a programmer made actually fixed the problem and didn't make new problems. It was pretty boring those 2 weeks!

There were 5 interns that were hired on for the summer, but only 4 ended up showing up on the first day and we all made it through the entire summer. Here is a picture of us interns. My, don't we all look so happy?

From left to right we have Chris Derrick, Jonathan Mitchell, Brandon Johnson, and me!

INTERN BIOS
Chris Derrick: Chris is a student from the University of Utah. He and I didn't seem to get along very well from the start, but it probably had something to do with the fact that Brandon and I liked to pull pranks on him all the time. Some of my favorite ones include:
-Installing a program on his computer that allowed us to send custom error alerts to his computer and eventually ended up convincing him that his computer hated him.
-Causing his computer to shutdown anytime that he tried to open Internet Explorer.
Ahhh. Those were some good times.

Jonathan Mitchell: Jon (Yes its Jon, not John. Get it right!) is a student from Brigham Young University and is originally from Oregon. Jon liked to eat Hot & Spicy Cheez-Its and got me hooked on them over the summer. I didn't really get to know Jon very well over the summer as he spent most of his lunches playing video games, playing with his rubik's cube, or talking to his wife on the phone.

Brandon Johnson: Brandon is a fellow student from Utah State University and was probably the best part of MasterControl for me. Everyday I looked forward to hearing his sassy remarks and together we'd think of new ways to trick Chris into thinking his computer was possessed.

SUMMER ACTIVITIES
MasterControl had a lot of fun activities during the summer. Unfortunately (fortunately, really) I traveled a lot this summer so I ended up missing some of the events, but here are some highlights on what I was able to do this summer.


The MasterControl Summer Carnival - This was a family event where everyone from the company came and we had food and a water fight and such. My mom and X were the only family that wanted to come with me, but we still had fun (sorta). Probably the best part of the whole thing was the Christmas-colored t-shirts we now have and enjoy working out in. Thanks MasterControl! [Robotic Response: "You are welcome"]


Ping-Pong - MasterControl had a ping-pong table in their conference room, and us interns would take a break about once a week and go play ping-pong for 30 minutes or so to keep us sane. I won't lie and tell you that the occurence of these ping-pong breaks didn't increase as the end of summer neared.


"Dart-Man" - Whenever MasterControl hires a new employee they introduce them at the next company meeting and play a game where the employee can win some cash. Usually they play "2 truths and a lie" and for each person you fool you get $1, but for our meeting when we were introduced they decided to try a new game. Each intern was given 3 "Dart-man", which essentially are sticky darts shaped like little men, and we had to throw them at a wall with different prizes associated with different targets. Some of the prizes included Dinner for 2 at the steakhouse, an old company laptop, gift certificates, and such, but the big prize was a small target (about the size of a small sandwich plate) and it was worth $200! There was also a large picture of a $1 bill and if you hit that with your dart-man then all of the employees each received $1. Everyone who went before me all tried for the $200, and when it was my turn the boss said that he wanted to make things a little more tricky and decided to put the $200 target on top of the $1 target, so if you missed you would end up wasting your chance on the $1 prize. Here is a little diagram of what I am talking about:



<= This is what it looked like before my turn

This is what it looked like on my turn =>

Needless to say I wasn't thrilled that I suddenly felt like all chances for the $200 prize had gone down the drain. So my first two throws I tried in vain to get one of the other prizes, but on my third try I figured I had nothing to lose and so I might as well try for the $200, and if I miss everyone else gets a buck and they'll be happy. So I carefully took aim and made the throw. The dart-man went straight into the $200 target! I was thrilled and everyone was cheering for me. I ended up getting 200 $1 bills because they had so many of them just in case they needed to do a big payout. I thought that it would be funny to roll around in the money like Scrooge McDuck, but I decided not too cause I didn't want to smell like cash.

Overall, I enjoyed my experience at MasterControl. I had a lot of fun, I learned a lot, and felt like I added some value to myself as an employee. The major language I learned at MasterControl is called ColdFusion and having some experience in that helped me get a job up here in Logan so I am definitely happy about that. Look for a post in the future about my new job!

"TAG"

I was "tagged" by Allison and I'm supposed to upload the 6th picture in my picture folder. Usually I just out-right refuse doing stuff like this, but this time my curiosity got the better of me and I had to check what my 6th picture was. Well, I keep all my pictures pretty well-organized into different folders and such, so I went to the 6th folder and chose the 6th picture. And here it is:


This is Amanda after playing the "flour" game in which the loser has to dig their face around in the flour to try to find the hidden coin. Its great fun all around.

I tag anyone who reads this blog?