Mission Memoir, Ultimate Tourney, and Other Random Stuff

It’s been a while since I posted anything. I’ll explain that in a minute, but first a couple of significant events.

First, BCC Press has just released the ebook version of my mission memoir, Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary. It’s available on Amazon, and for a short time is priced at $0.99. If you’ve enjoyed this blog, you ought to check out the memoir. The print version will be released Tuesday. BCC will probably run a guest post this week with a few excerpts from the book.

Second, a shout out to the BYU ultimate frisbee team, CHI Ultimate. Our youngest son plays for this club team (meaning the university gives them no financial support), so we decided to follow them to Tampa for the big Florida Warm Up tournament. Most of the tournaments have a Sunday championship bracket, which BYU does not participate in, so they often accommodate CHI Ultimate by giving them a few extra preliminary games. In Florida, that meant the other teams played three games Friday and three Saturday to determine the seeding for the Sunday brackets. BYU was given four games each day. And they went 7-1, beating number 2, number 5, and a couple of other ranked opponents, and losing by one point to number 6, Wisconsin. BYU entered the tournament ranked 9th in the country and jumped to 4th afterward. So congratulations to BYU’s ultimate team. If you’ve never watched college-level ultimate, it’s pretty incredible. Lots of action, and the skill level in throwing and catching the disc is impressive. Much more fun than watching soccer (yawn). BYU plays next on March 1 and 2 at the Stanford Invite in California. It was fun to watch all eight games in Tampa, and especially nice to enjoy some 80-degree weather in the middle of February. We left a snowstorm in Utah.

Finally, an explanation for my infrequent posts of late. Life here at home has been rather chaotic lately. In June, our daughter and her family moved from Houston to Utah. Our son-in-law left Exxon after eight demanding years and took a job with an energy consulting firm in Utah County. The housing market here was crazy, though, so they finally decided to buy our nephew’s home. He’s a contractor and had decided to build himself a new house. This means that instead of having the grandkids in Houston, they’ve been living with us during construction. The nephew just finished his new house last week, though, so our daughter and family will be moving into his old house soon, after a little refurbishing. But it’s been fun having three grandkids running (around) the house for about eight months. They are seven, five, and two. Still, it has been crazy at times, and I’ve found that it’s much easier to write blog posts in a quiet house than in one ruled by a two-year-old. We’ll be sad to see them move—all the way to Lehi this time—but maybe I’ll have more time to blog.