Lessons I Learned as a Boy

Until We Meet Again

Renegade by Styx

So, I know that most of you know that alot has happened, and a few people have told me that they've been checking here for updates. I haven't updated this blog, but I have been updating my parents. Thanks for checking in on us, everyone :) It means alot, and I know I've said that alot, but it's true every time.


This was one of my dad's favorite songs.



It's been really hard, not going to lie. But we're going to be all right. Like we've told and been told by so many people, thank goodness for the Plan of Salvation. There's a reason why it's also called the Plan of Happiness. :)

Love you Dad.

Phineas & Ferb in French!!!

I'm not sure why this makes me so happy...but it really, really does :) enjoy!!

I want to live in Seattle.

That is all.

-Dani

Hey everyone!

First off, thank you so so so much for all of the prayers and messages we've received. I know we've said this a million times, but it's true- your support means everything and really does make a difference.

Second, my dad is doing alot better. He thinks that he'll be able to come home either on Monday or Tuesday (most likely Tuesday), and things are looking up.

Thanks again for all of your help. We'll keep you updated. :)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(1807-1882)

A PSALM OF LIFE

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN
SAID TO THE PSALMIST

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Just tink happy tawts

Hello, this is Dani and Aunt Shauna saying hi from the University of Utah hospital in Salt Lake City, UT. We got here about an hour ago, and it's now 12:56 am.

Dad arrived at Huntsman yesterday for a nose bleed that just wouldn't stop, double vision and numbness on one side of his face. All of these symptoms are being caused by tumors that have developed in his sinuses and one on the back of his right eye. A cluster of tumors in a certain area is called a family..kind of ironic.

"Remember me?" responds Aunt Shauna when I ask her if she has any ideas for what we should say, "I hate to write."

But she can crochet at the speed of light.

Tell you what, I can't even crochet, let alone crochet at record-breaking speeds, but right now..I don't want to write either.

My dad's ENT is named Davy Crockett. No joke...but pretty funny anyways.

Tonight I left work to go home at 10:00 pm, and when I got back to my apartment I had three text messages from my mom, asking if I could come up to the hospital and that Shauna was on the way to pick me up. My mom has been at the hospital with my dad for the past two days, and neither one of them have gotten much sleep. Aunt Shauna and I are here to help 'em out :)

Anyway, for more updates you should probably check out my parent's blog. www.nhsavageblog.blogspot.com .

A Tale of Pookie and Fluffy

Okay, so I posted these before explaining...if you already read them, and were thoroughly confused, woops, sorry 'bout that. As my favorite villian Dr. Doofenschmirtz would say, "Backstory!!!"
Josh and I have this running joke about our "alter-egos," Fluffy and Pookie. He's Fluffy, I'm Pookie. If you're really good friends with us, you've probably met them. If not, you will probably (hopefully) neeeveeer meet them. It's nothing personal. We'd just rather not intentionally embarrass ourselves, thanks, we're pretty good at that without meaning to anyways..:)..ANYHOOT. Josh and I were bored one time last summer, and the following stories for Fluffy and Pookie were the result.

Josh not only graduated from high school this week, but he's leaving for Texas in the morning as well. For the entire summer. I'm gonna miss him.

Pookie

I was born in a dark hole in the bottom of the galaxy.

My mother tried to eat me as soon as I was born, but I escaped by encasing her in a wave of my own mucusy-spit, which naturally hardened while I quickly jumped into the nearest wormhole. It transported me to the next galaxy over, on the planet GRARrrrrooupyypooolingoOOnnnYish.
It was there that I lived for the next eight years of my life, surviving on bugs and little children of the local dominant species.

Unfortunately, they caught me at last, stupid enough though they were. Since they did not posses the knowledge or intelligence to dispose of me permanently, they flung me to the farthest galaxy they could, on a little planet called "Irth."

BLIIIINDED and furious from my flight, I instinctively went into survival mode as soon as my ship touched ground.

Without warning, I was assaulted!!! A scent reached my nose unlike that of any before it. A maddening, powerful scent I knew could only prove to my destruction. It penetrated me with full force, maddening my brain and curling my stomache into a writhing, Gregorian Knot.

It pulled me in! Without knowing what I did, I ran, crawled, begged my body to move faster towards the smell. Suddenly, I stopped, puzzlingly looking at the enemy that had so besotted me. It was not what I expected. Indeed, my tentacular, shrewd, gleaming, death-piercingly cold eyes could not not but wonder at the sight of the carbon-based morsel of food strewn before me. Flecks of dark brown embedded themselves into the mesh of doughy chunks.

I took a bite.

And for the first time, I knew love.

Fluffy

day 98765 stranded on planet earth, I'm beginning to think that they were fibbing when they said they'd come back. I hate fibbers. Maybe joining the evil intergalactic air force was a bad idea. My best friend Glorp always joked around about how much better his life would be if i was stranded somewhere...jokingly of course, but then he would assure me that that wasn't true. Haha i guess the joke's on him. Bet he didn't see that one coming, HA! To occupy my time on this bitter planet i have taken to forming evil plots. One time i tried to enslave the whole human race, it almost worked, i had to settle for a little less than what i wanted because of the circumstances. Instead of enslaving them i got this one kid to be my evil helper so i wouldn't eat his dog. But he quit a week later and when i tried to eat his dog the dog kind of...gave me a boo-boo. it bit me. It would have tasted bad anyway. So instead I ate his pet rat that hid in his wall and kept stealing his stuff...I showed him! I was planning to destroy france next week when an angel fell from the heavens, she had the most beautiful tentacles and such a charming demonic voice. I loved it, so I decided to kidnap her using chocolate chip cookies. If someone wanted to capture me that's how they should do it, or maybe cook that stupid dog. but i couldn't feed her the dog, it was to mean so instead i fed her cookies. I asked, "cookie?" and gave her a cookie. she thought i said pookie, stupid dog bites. Then she devoured the cookies.

fluffy

Wanna know something that tickles my funny bone?

Segways.

Whenever I'm having a bad day, I remember that in Belgium,

I saw a whole flock of 'em. :)

Healing the Sick

Today in Sunday School our lesson was on this talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks. It was impossible not to think of and apply my dad's situation to what Elder Oaks is teaching. Since my dad told our family the news that he isn't in remission anymore, I can't describe all of the different thoughts and feelings that have gone through my mind. This statement below summarizes alot.

As children of God, knowing of His great love and His ultimate knowledge of what is best for our eternal welfare, we trust in Him. The first principle of the gospel is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and faith means trust. I felt that trust in a talk my cousin gave at the funeral of a teenage girl who had died of a serious illness. He spoke these words, which first astonished me and then edified me: “I know it was the will of the Lord that she die. She had good medical care. She was given priesthood blessings. Her name was on the prayer roll in the temple. She was the subject of hundreds of prayers for her restoration to health. And I know that there is enough faith in this family that she would have been healed unless it was the will of the Lord to take her home at this time.” I felt that same trust in the words of the father of another choice girl whose life was taken by cancer in her teen years. He declared, “Our family’s faith is in Jesus Christ and is not dependent on outcomes.” Those teachings ring true to me. We do all that we can for the healing of a loved one, and then we trust in the Lord for the outcome.

~Elder Dallin H. Oaks

This doesn't mean that things are over. We still have alot of hope that my dad will be around for a long time yet. Miracles happen. I like the quote above though because I know that even if my dad does pass away sooner than we want, we still have faith and hope that we will be able to see him again. I know that is true. I know that it is though our Savior, Jesus Christ, and His atonement that someday I will be able to see all of my family and friends again after we've passed through the veil of this life and onto the next.

This is the entire talk, and even though it is super long, it's definitely worth hearing. If you've got the time (speaking of time, I've got NOTHING BUT TIME since finals are over! yeaaah!) I'd recommend that you listen to it.

Testimony of the Book of Mormon

Important update you should know about

http://nhsavageblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/ben-hur.html

I'll write more when I've thought about it a bit more and finals aren't kicking my butt.

Love y'all.

Dani

I am hungry

So, I was going to put up an embarrassing picture of Caitlin, but while browsing I came across THIS

beautiful piece of cuisine artistry. It was an artichoke, olive, eggplant (?), mushroom and ham pizza that I had in Rome. It was so beautiful.

I am so hungry. Someone please feed me.

Also, possibly some real embarrassing pictures of Caitlin to follow...

Sleep-talking

I might as well go crazy blogging for Dani. I'm on a roll.

Dani and I both talk in our sleep, although she does it much more often than I do. It always brings a sunshiny moment to my day when I remember hours after the fact something that Dani muttered to me during the night. I have a feeling, though, that there won't be much sleep-talking going on this week, mostly because there won't be much sleeping happening!

Let's all just be glad that neither of us sleep-walk.

This is Caitlin

Hello, dear readers of Dani's blog,

It's finals week here at BYU, and I have a case of insomnia. I suppose my inability to fall asleep tonight might have something to do with how I didn't go to bed until 4:30 a.m. last night or how I fell asleep for an hour and a half tonight around 8 p.m. (Ditto both of those for Dani, too.) Well, I have tried everything to fall asleep. I read for awhile (my favorite thing to do before bed), I listened to calming music, I lay in bed. And when none of those things worked, I opened my laptop back up. I was just lamenting to Dani how no one--including her--has been posting on blogs lately. What am I supposed to read in the wee hours of the morning if not new blog posts? Dani logged me into her gmail and told me to blog for her. Being the obedient roommate that I am, I readily obliged. And here we have it.

The question is: Will reading this new blog post help me fall asleep?

Ice Cream Woes

Houston, we have a problem. A major dilemma of sorts.

Let me start off with a little story:

Once upon a time there was a little freshman girl at Brigham Young University. Every week this girl would travel through Heritage Halls to the BYU Creamery on 9th to buy her weekly groceries. Included, each week, in her sack of nutritional goods was a 1/2 gallon of the Creamery's very best Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. Words cannot express how much this half gallon of happiness meant to this little girl. She would try each week to make it last until Friday, but let's face it, college is ROUGH and it would usually be gone the next day.

Well, then that little girl grew up and returned to BYU as an old, seasoned sophomore. As she was doing her Econ 110 homework in the Library (spending some quality time with Harold, of course), suddenly she realized that

IT HAD BEEN 9 MONTHS SINCE SHE'D HAD CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE DOUGH ICE CREAM FROM THE BYU CREAMERY.

Yeah.

You know what this means. She dropped what she was doing, quickly packed up and headed for the Creamery on 9th.

Ignoring the donuts which are strategically placed brilliantly next to the front doors, she headed straight to Frozen Foods section in the back.

That is when this girl was faced with a BIG problem.

THERE WERE SO MANY FLAVORS. BYU has reinstated all of it's old flavors, and holy smokes, there are some brilliant ones.
What then, is the problem you might ask?
Well, she'd gone in only craving Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, but had never before in her entire life seen any of these other flavors. They had:

Pistachio (a favorite after Paris)
Party Flavor (cake flavored with fudge marble)
Graham Canyon (graham flavored ice cream with honey comb bits and graham marble) Rocky Road (classic)
Fudge Moooose (chocolate ice cream with fudge marble and chocolate chips)
German Chocolate (chocolate with coconut, bits of english toffee)
Strawberry (with REAL strawberries!!)
Almonds and Pralines
Mint Chocolate Chip
Peppermint
Vanilla Bean/Vanilla Crunch
RASPBERRY
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip
Maple Fudge
...plus many, many others.

Needless to say, she was overwhelmed. SO many good flavors to choose from. This girl couldn't decide; she just couldn't decide. After gawking at all the flavors for 10 minutes, she finally just picked Cookies and Cream.

COOKIES AND CREAM. Seriously!?! Not even chocolate chip cookie dough. I mean, it's good, but it's no Fudge Moose with chocolate ice cream, fudge and chocolate chips. I must have had a brain aneurysm; toooo manny flaaavors! Would someone please call a doctor? I think I must be sick.

Have I done any good in the world today?

Have-I-Done-Any-Good-in-the-World-Today?
(^ it's a video)
I love this talk by President Monson. The first time I heard this talk, because of everything that has gone on in my family this past year, I thought of all the good that people have done for us and how our lives have been blessed by people who were reaching out and just being good. Sometimes I wonder how we can ever thank everyone enough, or give back, and I guess the simple answer is that we can't. We have been blessed so much that I think that it would be impossible to ever pay everyone back for all the good that you have done for us. I asked my aunt one time about how we could ever do it, and all she said was "Pay it forward." I guess that really is all that we can do, and I hope that someday I will be able to make a difference in someone else's life the way that so many people have had an impact on mine. Thanks :)

I Love College Rivalries

Just in case you didn't hear....

COUGARS STOMPED THE UTES TONIGHT! 82-69. Okay, so the second half wasn't really a beat-down, but we were ahead the entire game and held a lead in the double-digits throughout the first half. The Marriott center was PACKED with crazy BYU and Utah fans (for the record, there weren't that many Utah fans); we sat in the second to last row from the top, in the corner of the student section. For the pregame show they shut off all the lights, do a whole lighting show and play pump-up music, it was AWESOME! Caitlin, Mia and I were screaming like maniacs the whole time (okay, we were screaming the entire game, it was a blast).

Seriously, one of my favorite annual events at BYU. By far the best sporting event of the year!

Because let's face it- BASKETBALL STOMPS FOOTBALL ANY DAY.

Jimmer Fredette OWNS Max Hall. Just sayin'. Completely unrelated.
VS.

Photography, Parks, Playgrounds and People

This picture was taken in the Latin Quarter of Paris. In front, we can see a little kid playing on one of those bouncy chairs that you find on playgrounds. Indeed, this is at a playground.

In the background you can see an old, faded brick building. This building is actually the Cluny Museum, or Musée National du Moyen Âge (Middle Age Museum). It's built on the former site of Roman baths.

One of the reoccuring themes in Paris is the co-existence of old and new. Many churches in Paris have little gardens with pathways that you can walk around. Notre Dame has a really cute one.


Again, a little playground for kids to play at while their parents take a break from wearing the soles of their shoes out by walking from one famous monument to the next.


Chartres has one, too.


With an AMAZING view, I might add.


One of my favorites from the Champs de Mars, the park by the Eiffel Tower.


I guess I should explain why it's one of my favorites; I took this during one of our group meetings at the Champs de Mars (we met there a couple times because it's near where the professor stays). There are ALOT of dogs in Paris. Parisians love them, probably more than people (just kidding?). It seems like almost everyone owns a dog, with the rich old ladies carrying lap-dogs in their oversized purses, joggers and their jogging buddies, and homeless persons who depend on their canine friends for company, comfort, and I'm guessing safety. Dogs are one of the things that people really seem to bond over. This picture that I took was of a homeless man, his dog, a more well-off Parisian and his dog. The homeless man's dog and the Parisian's dog started playing, and as the dogs became friends, the two men started chatting and enjoyed watching their dogs have fun together. These two men probably never would have interacted if it their dogs hadn't both started chasing after the same ball.


This isn another one of my favorite feel-good pictures. One of the models used to make the Statue of Liberty is in the Jardin du Luxembourg. That in and of itself probably isn't significant (maybe it is, maybe I should wikipedia that ;)), but what is significant about this shot is the little oak tree sapling that is planted right next to it. It was planted there soon after September 11th, as a memorial.

The first time I saw this I ran into two American ladies who were debating (in English, phew, it was always a nice surprise to be able to completely understand someone that you just ran into) whether the statue was one of the original models. They thought I was French (something to do with my hairstyle?), so I got to surprise them by telling them that it was, in fact, one of the originals (I had luckily just looked up the same thing in one of my text/guide books). We then had a nice conversation on what a nice gesture the oak tree was, how long they were going to be in Paris, and what they were going to see. I just thought it was really cool that I got to run into some Americans at a sight in Paris that symbolizes French-American relationships. I knew that they would appreciate the gesture as much as I did.

The second time I saw this statue, there was a little group of French children who's teacher was trying to explain to them what it was and why the big one was important to the United States (les Etats-Unis). I wanted to run up to them and say "Yes! I am a real-life American! I love the Statue of Liberty!" but luckily I remembered that I would probably leave them all with a lasting impression that Americans are crazy.