Normal boring stuff

Just thought I would send you all a stream of consciousness from Georgia. Hopefully it will not be too boring.

Today was a normal Sunday, with bishopric meeting (I am the ward clerk) and then services. I did not have to do tithing today so I got to come home at the same time as the gang. Anne substituted for Rob's teacher, and Lisa's teacher didn't show, so her class joined in. I joined them just for crowd control. Probably 10 kiddos in the class. She gave a very nice lesson on the resurrection, having the kids read from the NT the different accounts.

We had a quick lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and now everyone is in quiet time. We are trying to get the kids back into a school groove, since they start on Tuesday. Lisa will be in middle school, at Oglethorpe Charter (http://oglethorpecharter.org/). Since her school is on the other side of town, but close to my work, she and I will ride together each morning. Her classes start at 7:30, so we are going to be up early! Rob, Emma, and Cody don't start until 9:00, so Anne will have some time to get them moving. We went to open house meetings this past week and met the kids teachers. All seem to be very good and we look forward to getting them started. Lisa will rotate teachers for every period this year. Turns out, her science teacher spent some time in Barrow, AK. We walked into his classroom and saw a big piece of baleen!

Our weather has been very rainy for the last few days. In fact, we have been under flash flood warnings for most of the weekend. We had several periods where we got 4-6 inches of rain per hour, so we are plenty soggy. I have had to go out twice already and run water out of the pool because it was full clear up to the top. We are hoping for better weather tomorrow, since I don't have to work and the kids are not in school yet. If it is nice, we will take a picnic to the beach.

Speaking of work, things are going along fine. I have been very busy but I don't think that will ever change in my line of work. For those who are not real clear what I do (don't feel bad, my kids don't know either so they just tell all their friends, teachers, etc, that their dad is a computer geek), I work for VeriSign. We are the guys who secure web transactions. We also own the .com and .net domains, so anytime anyone gets a new web address, my company gets money. Specifically, though, I work for the communications group. We do customer care and billing systems for cell phone companies. Some of our biggest clients are Metro PCS (coming big time into the LA market soon!), Cricket Wireless, and RCC. Just to give you some sense of the scale, Metro PCS currently has around 4 million subscribers. I am the senior manager for quality assurance, so that means that I have several teams of people who report to me and we make sure the software works before it goes into production for our clients. OK, enough geek speak.

Rob asked me the other day if I was ever going to take him hunting. I told him definitely yes, I just need to figure out where I can go around here. There are definitely more fishing opportunities than hunting so I will have to try to work something out. We are looking forward to the late season camping starting up again. We love to go out camping as a family but it is too hot through the summer to go. Even now, it is holding around 90 during the day but at least it cools off at night.

We are all getting busy again with the regular routine stuff. It seems like our lives never slow down. Lisa, Rob, and Cody are all in fall soccer. Rob has flag football as well. Emma and Lisa are in piano. Emma is also taking dance lessons. Emma and Lisa are in Girl Scouts (Anne leads both troops), Rob is in Cub Scouts, and Cody is in pre-school a few days a week. I am playing on the company softball team. Lisa just got new glasses and looks very cute. She is getting braces on a week from this coming Friday. Anne is busy enough getting everyone where they need to be, working on her books, and generally holding us all together.

I traveled a lot during the last 6 weeks or so - Bangalore, Montana, then back to San Diego. I am off the train now for a few weeks but in October I have a conference in Atlanta one week and one in Las Vegas the next week. We are trying to figure out a way for Anne to come with me to Vegas just to give us some time together. Any ideas?

My parents are doing well and will finish their mission in December of this year. This is also the year of my Fuller family reunion at Thanksgiving time, but we are not going to make it. It looks like our next trip west as a family might be Christmas '08. I assume that will be in LA and not Orlando or Paris?

I bought some extra sports packages on the cable this year, so it looks like I will get most of the BYU games. I was really glad to see them come out strong last night! Since Arizona was one of our two losses last years, we owed them some getcha!

Enough of this long post. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I am adding one of me riding an elephant in India. As you can see, I wore my best socks for the occasion!

Have a great week all!