Today was a busy day, which is typical of Fridays. Alana is with us Thursday afternoon through Sunday evening, so Friday morning is the one day of the week where I get to take her to school. We got to bed at a reasonable hour (around 11:30PM), and Corbin came in to wake us up at around 6:15AM as usual. I tried to stay in bed a bit longer, but by 6:30AM it was time to get up and make breakfast.
I did my usual oil pulling routine while cooking eggs, English muffins, and Canadian bacon -- well, mostly the usual; I recently switched to using coconut oil in place of olive oil, and I have to say I like the taste better. I'm doing one drop each of lemon, melaleuca, On Guard, and oregano in the oil, swishing around for 20 minutes or so. I also listened to the usual doTERRA Leadership and Sponsor calls while cooking (and later while driving back from dropping Alana off at school).
We didn't get out on our walk right away, but eventually went for a 2.5 mile walk around 10AM. I had to jog (actually more like a full out run) the last .5 miles in order to get back to our house before the girl Becky babysits on Fridays arrived -- I made it just in time! I also loaned Chris a book, Making the First Circle Work, which was the doTERRA book of the month last month. It's a good book about network marketing, and how the best way to lead is by making sure the "first circle" is working properly. The first circle of course is you: you can't expect others to do what you are unwilling to do. Anyway, Chris works with a juvenile detention center and reads plenty of self-help books, so hopefully he'll enjoy that one -- and maybe he'll be interested in doTERRA down the road. Naturally, Becky had her hands full with three children for the day, plus I had to take Alana to school and pick her up.
Work was another rough day for me; I'm having serious writer's block. I also got a new Dell XPS 12 Ultrabook for testing, which is in many ways superior to the Acer Aspire S7 -- just not as thin and sleek. One major advantage is that it can actually flip the display over so that it's a true tablet; the other big advantage: it's about $200 less than the S7 for otherwise similar specs. But, I still say the S7 is the nicer looking laptop, even if it costs more. Besides playing around with the XPS 12 a bit, I ran a few more tests on the S7 and continued typing out my review. At this point, it's about 80% done; I need to put together all the graphs, which is always a pain for me for some reason, and then just write up a bit more analysis and the conclusion. Spoiler: the S7 is an awesome looking laptop and perhaps the best feeling laptop Acer has ever shipped -- certainly it's one of their best offerings. The price is still higher than I'd like, but even some Apple lovers would be impressed by the profile and looks of the S7.
The real issue with getting work done today was other people calling me for help with computer issues. My mom, who doesn't know much about using a computer beyond basic email and web surfing, managed to get a nasty FBI Moneypak virus that tries to extort $200 from you for removal. It does it's best to lock everything up tight, to where a non-technical user will have to get help. Needless to say, trying to help my mom resolve the problem over the phone was a nightmare. Her laptop is about 90% clean right now, but I'm going to need to do something more than running Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware to fix the rootkit I think. Ugh.
After dinner, we had our first real Family Home Evening in a couple months. As noted in the "Manifesto", I'm going to make sure we do these every week, as it's really important for building our family unit. I taught the lesson, doing a blend of The Slight Edge tied into Elder Holland's talk from early 2009, The Best Is Yet to Be. After the part towards the end where it says, "Keep your eyes on your dreams, however distant and far away. Live to see the miracles of repentance and forgiveness, of trust and divine love that will transform your life today, tomorrow, and forever", I went into a section where we all discussed some of our dreams (i.e. "big goals") as a family. Here's what we came up with and our plan of action for getting there:
Becky:
1) See all of the children get married in the Temple. (Read scriptures daily, do family home evenings, continue going to church, sharing the gospel, practice love and patience, pray, etc.)
2) Take the whole family on vacation to Hawaii. (We're going to put aside at least $25 each month to go towards savings for this trip. Alana also committed to putting 20% of her money from gifts into her own Hawaii account.)
Alana:
1) Become an archaeologist. (We discussed the importance of schooling, taking responsibility for yourself, and doing the hard things even when they're not fun, e.g. homework and chores.)
2) Go to the Great Wolf Lodge. (I sort of gave her this one; as a challenge at the beginning of the year, I said that if we all as a family could read the whole Book of Mormon this year, we'd go spend two nights at the Great Wolf Lodge. Alana was doing great until around July, when we got off track and she fell way behind. I told her she can only read six pages per day, but if she does that every day for a month she'll finish before the end of the year and we can go.)
Jarred:
1) I want to do a triathlon with all of our children (at least those that are able). We discussed the need to go walking/jogging every day, as well as finding a place to practice swimming and going biking. Hopefully we can find a mini triathlon to do this some time in the next year. I personally want to find a sprint distance to compete in some time in the next nine months.
2) Buy a house. We're actually already looking (Shh! It's a secret!), and I hope we can find something in the next month or two. We discussed with the children what it takes to be able to buy a home -- all the money you need to save, getting a good credit score, etc. It's exciting to finally, at the ripe old age of 39, be in the position where I can actually buy a decent house. Wish us luck!
We wrapped up the night by getting the boys to bed, and then we played Star Trek Uno ("Space! The final UNO frontier!") with Alana for about a half hour before sending her off to bed. Overall, it was a good day, with some good family bonding time. Becky and I definitely feel that doing FHE needs to be a priority; Alana has so much fun being a part of things and that's going to be super important for her.
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