Cougars vs. Cougars

I grew up in a family where we watch football and other sports together at times, and it has been a nice little bonding activity. I recall many times going to my siblings sporting events and cheering them on. It has always been a lot of fun. Thus, I quite enjoyed being at a sporting event with Brandon and Kelsey this weekend!

It turns out that Kelsey has become a pretty great football fan this season, and so she had the great idea to go see BYU play when they came out for a game against the University of Houston. The plan had originally been for she, Debbie, and myself to go (yes, the ladies are the football/sports fans down here) while Brandon and his dad went to do something else. There was a last minute change when Debbie decided to go spend a couple weeks with the grandkids in Oregon instead of going to the football game (can't say that I really blame her though, those are some cute grandkids she has there). Thus, Brandon agreed to come to the game with us! Now...on to the excitement...

Cougars vs. Cougars! That was the first fun part about this game. It turns out though, that the U of H's mascot looks more like a fox/weasel than a cougar. Luckily, Cosmo looks like a cougar mascot actually should. This game was INTENSE!!! The true blue cougs were able to pull off a win at the end, so we walked away happy, but with maybe a few hernias from all they'd put us through with that.


The game was pretty bizarre. BYU had an incredible start, and then U.H. started having some unnatural interceptions and runs. BYU played a solid game though, and won by a solid, single point! Thanks to Kelsey, we had awesome seats on the front row (though this may have actually just added to the herniated conditions of our innards). Oh, and the seats provided us with a moment of ESPN fame. It turns out that we were apparently on your home screen for your viewing pleasure if you weren't lucky enough to be watching the game in the stadium with us!

Well done Cougars!

High Fiving Cosmo and the team for pulling out the win!

Young Women's

So, I have been enjoying my calling to work with the Young Women in our ward. They are great! I have been thrown into the experience of early morning seminary when I volunteered to start taking one of our girls. Kudos to everyone who has done early morning seminary! I have realized how spoilt I was with released time. Waking up early to drive a fair distance to pick someone up for seminary, and then driving back to get her to the Church, and then driving to school provides for quite the start to the day, but I enjoyed it. I think I may also enjoy sleeping in a little tomorrow since someone else is driving this week :)

I have also been in charge of our past couple mutual activities, and have been quite pleased with how they turned out. Thus, y'all get to enjoy a post all about them since they are stretching me and allowing me to develop talents in new areas :)

Young Women's in Excellence

Another one of the leaders and myself got the assignment to make loads of high heel shaped sugar cookies since our theme is "Stand in Holy Places." Turns out, making sugar cookies was not one of my talents in life. Brandon was super patient with me last night when I was getting incredibly frustrated with the whole event. After many tries though, I started to get the hang of it. It takes some skill to get them to cook just right and not come out of the over to crispy.

After baking hundreds of cookies, we then got to frost them all! I spent over 3 hours with the other leader two days in a row just frosting, and then I would come home and spend a few more hours doing it on my own. Brandon again was really patient with all the cookie and frosting madness that became our kitchen. [A perk with all of this though, was that I got to get myself a nice set of frosting tips and supplies]!

The end result was great though, and our young women really enjoyed it. I was also able to accompany them for a great song they put together. Great Young Women!

We had a large balloon and shoe in the color of every value as part of the decor

LOADS of cookies!

                                                                 

The gumballs showed where the girls were at in Personal Progress last year (less than 10 value projects and few value experiences had been done), and then where they were now at (well over 100 experiences done, and more than tripled the amount of projects done). They are doing awesome things!

Each young woman put together a display of things they've been doing for personal progress

              
Missionary Night

Thanks to everyone who helped give me ideas for this. It turned out fabulous! The theme for our mutual activity was... missionary work, and I think I stressed over it more than I ought to have. I also had far more activities planned than we actually had time for. I had decided I would go with a topic of "A Day in the life of a missionary." We started with a game where they had to fill in the blanks that I left in in the missionary daily schedule. I had left some blank times, and activities. They did a pretty great job. Then, we did an exercise activity since that is how missionaries start their day. I had a list of six exercises (ie. jumping jacks, squats, running in place, push ups etc). The girls would roll one dice to determine what exercise they would all do, and then she would role two other dice, add up the numbers on them, and that is the number of reps they would do of each activity. They seemed to enjoy that a bit.

Following our exercise activity, the sister missionaries had arrived, and so they did a question and answer session with the young women. I had asked the young women to write down questions they had about missionary work prior to this mutual night, and so I had a list of questions that I was able to ask the missionaries when the girls were too shy to bring up their own. They were able to ask a lot of questions about what it is like to be a missionary, how to prepare to be a missionary etc.

I then bore my testimony of missionary work. I had also brought pictures from my mission, as well as some pictures from another sister in the ward who had served a mission. These were set up for the girls to look through. I had also made a 'sister missionary' cake and so I cut that up and served it. All in all, the activity seemed to go well despite all the stress and anxiety it produced for me leading up to it :)

My cake decorating tips are getting some good use these days-still have to work on frosting coloring though!

8-Cow Woman Night

I am a bit relieved that I won't be in charge of mutual again for some time after this last week because it tends to be a little stressful for me. I have enjoyed the past few activities though, and think the young women have also. This week was our "8 Cow Woman Night." Yes, that does indeed mean that we watched Johnny Lingo! After the movie we talked a little bit about the movie and how being offered 8 cows for her helped Mahana to feel better about herself etc. We then had 8 different stations where the girls had to go do things to earn a 'cow' and get the leader there to sign off that it was completed. At the end of the night, I gave them all an '8 cow lei' to demonstrate that they were all 8 cow women! And yes, we did eat cow pies for refreshments (no-bake cookies). The following are summaries of the stations we did:

1. Moo-chas Gracias!- Here they wrote a thank you note to someone that they appreciated. 
2. Cow-pliments- They drew out 3 names of young women from a baggy and then wrote them a little note to compliment them on things they appreciate about them 
3. Cow-belle- they did a quiz to answer etiquette questions-like a true Southern Belle! 
4. Holy Cow!- They had to memorize a short scripture about spiritual gifts and pass it off to a leader 
5. Cow-listhenics- had to answer a few short questions about recommended exercise/eat/sleep things for teenagers 
6. Cow-ell Awards (like Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge)-here they were to write down 8 talents/spiritual gifts that they have and show it to a leader before getting it signed off 
7. Cow-tipping- had to sort different activities according to most expensive and least expensive to learn a little more about budgeting 
8. Cow-pies- they had to fill in the blanks for a service quote about how many hours of service Mormons do compared to the rest of the U.S. population (and like I said, they then got a cow pie at the end of the evening). 

All in all, the activity was fun and we were able to combine it with a personal project value experience (individual worth #7).

One can seldom go wrong with Johnny Lingo!

Race for a Cure

JaLeen is a runner. She likes the marathons and half marathons and treadmills at the gym. I did long distance track in high school for a year. I thought it was fun. Running a mile or two. Running 26? That's insanity. If I'm going to run I want it to have a purpose, like playing soccer or Ultimate Frisbee. So when I saw that Murphy was sponsoring a Murphy team for the Susan G. Komen 'Race for a Cure' I forwarded the e-mail on. JaLeen got us signed up to go. Why? Because for the price of a 3 mile run I can see if all this stuff she says about the thrill of having people cheering you on, and being part of something bigger than yourself and getting free T-shirts is really all its cracked up to be.

The day before THE RACE, I got an e-mail from work asking everyone to wear Pink in support of breast cancer awareness. So I dutifully put on the blindingly pink shirt Murphy had given me the day before to wear on race day.

I almost didn't wear it. JaLeen was so humored by me wearing the shirt that I knew it was too much. I got to work to find that I was the only one in the entire office wearing pink. No one, I mean not a single other person wore pink. What about the HR person who sent the wear pink email? Yeah she wore white. Apparently the women working at Murphy got special white collared shirts for a photo-op and were supposed to wear those. So I got a lot of attention for my brilliant pink shirt. I happened to run into the VP and the Production/Ops manager on Friday. They smiled and laughed at my shirt. The VP (Brett) said he wouldn't be caught dead in a pink shirt. 
  Race day came along and it involved waking up way too early for a Saturday morning and heading down to the race. We met up with the Murphy team prior to starting the race. Apart from Sandra, the HR lady, it seemed like everyone else was about the same level of alertness as I was - which is to say not at all.

So off we went. The race itself wasn't bad, but I quickly found that Murphy's shirts were like the Trix cereal box spoons - they magically change colors! That's right my shirt was magically changing colors as we ran. I wish I could have better documented the awesome color change, all I have is this photo at the end:

See the difference? Its hard to tell at this point because the shirt has completely changed color. Trix cereal spoons change color by temperature. Murphy shirts change color by moisture content. And my shirt was soaked through. Gotta love Houston humidity... until it drips into your eyes!


Oh yeah, and I got two free T-shirts and had people cheer me on and was part of an event of over 25,000 people!

Opa!

Well, we officially got in touch with our inner Greek this past week! It turns out that Houston has quite a few festivals...one of which is a Greek Festival! Brandon and I figured that since we have a deep and abiding love for baklava, that this was a must-attend event for us (unfortunately we did not get any pictures of our delicious baklava-it entered our anxiously awaiting stomachs far too quickly for a photo opp).

A night filled with Greek food, Greek dancing, and a tour and video explanation of the Greek Orthodox Church made for a wonderful evening.

Babysitting

While this is really just a test of using the blogger app to post pictures from my phone, I am going to take the time to tell you about Baby Nora. We get to babysit her sometimes (her parents are friends from church) and she is just adorable. My favorite part is putting her to sleep by rubbing her belly. 

And sometimes she puts me to sleep too. Eating dinner was also an adventure. We had Mac and cheese just for her. 

Nora decided it tasted pretty good. 

But then again, she also thinks the tablespoon does too....

Work at Murphy

Cameron has asked for an update of what I have been doing at work, so I am going to spend more time on that this e-mail as well as sharing the rest of the things JaLeen and I have been up to. If you want to skip the work stuff... just scroll down to the part in all caps so you know where the other things start.

     Several months ago I was working on the engineering design for the Manka Facility. Unfortunately, before I could do any design I had to tell them what it cost. Counterintuitive, if you ask me, but that is what they wanted. I had used our current facility design as a basis and had then scaled it down to a 3000 barrel of oil per day facility. I had also removed a lot of the things that I had considered to be excessive in terms of the design (like a connex box for a control room, an elevated pipe rack and a single location for all PSVs) and simplified the design to be easier in construction and engineering (a single one size fits all and a skidded pipe rack for bolt-up in the field). I went through probably 5 iterations of 'cost-cutting' to get down to the number management wanted... and then the trouble started with each of the other group inside Murphy looking at the design and wanting additions (more tankage, an LP separator, a Fuel gas conditioner etc.) I had navigated through a lot of those problems and was just getting to detailed design when Jaimee reorganized our group and I was assigned to do Pipelines. Basically, of the three of us assigned to do it at the time (Meredith, the new hire came later) I was the only one that had succesfully completed a pipeline project to that point, and I had done five. This was easy for me. So I picked up additional projects and spent the next two months helping meredith and renee (the intern) through their projects. I had 6 pipeline I was working, and I was helping Meredith will the details for the 6 we had assigned her (at Murphy we just load up anybody who is willing with as much work as they can handle and then a little but more). Meredith is a trooper and has been doing a fantastic job.

   A little over a month ago, Jaimee made us aware that she would be resigning. We did not have a suitable candidate to take her place, so her responsibilities were divided up. Frank took over all things related to facilities. The pipelines group was a little different. It's not the best organization. I am responsible for assigning and prioritizing projects for the four of us engineers, reporting status on the projects, fixing any threats to the pipeline program, and hiring/firing our construction supervisors in the field. When I started we had 7 inspectors, we are now up to 15. We have let two of our inspectors go, one for poor performance, the other for unprofessional behavior. In addition to all of this, I have also been running my own projects.

   Duphil was selected as the contractor for the 6 miles of pipe we are building for 'Jambers South'. In pipeline projects, my job is to identify the need and the timing, determine a route, coordinate survey, procure the land for a ROW, do the engineering design, and build the pipeline. Sounds easy, but there are a lot of steps... Duphil was selected as the mechanical contractor, meaning they provide welders and pipe fitters and machine operators to trench the line and lift the pipe into the line. Construction was smooth for about the first week, then we started running into problems. Basically, Duphil ran into two main problems; their planner/scheduler had made an error on the planning of the work. They had underestimated the schedule by about a week. Second, their superintendent did not have the experience required for a job of this magnitude. This problem was exacerbated by the lack of strong individuals in the key positions reporting to him. The construction plan for the pipeline work was poor from the start. To make matters worse, one of the Murphy construction supervisors (my representative in the field) was derogatory to the super and became verbally abusive towards Duphil's superintendent. This led to a communication breakdown. When I was able to understand all of the details of what was occurring in the field, I was able to make the personnel changes required to remove that communication break-down and work began to progress more quickly. He new Murphy construction supervisor was able to come in and give additional direction in getting the work done, but the effects of the 'drama' had already had an impact of schedule and budget. Because it was a lump-sum contract (meaning Duphil is paid one set price, no matter how much it costs them to do the work) the relationship between companies became strained... lots of accusations and finger pointing... lots of frustration. Duphil' division manager and I had multiple conversations. I choose to support the Murphy field staff in their assessment of the work required and when. That led to two things, one, it established that you can't 'go around' the field staff if you don't like what they say (This is a crucial lesson I learned early with Murphy) and it led to more terse conversations with Duphil. In the end, money fixes everything... I will pay for a few of the legitimate setbacks that occurred as a result of the change in personnel and their different persepectives on the work that has to be performed and for one item that I mandated... in all probably around $30k in additional costs. Duphil will probably make a very small profit margin on this project - 2-5%... not the best investment for them, but remember - the problems of a poor supervisor and a bad estimate on the time/dollars to do the work are their responsibility.

   I have 4 other pipelines that, together, form the 'KBS project'. Its about 14 miles of pipe in all. Floore industrial contractors is the mechanical contractor. Apart from an injury (laceration to the left leg requiring 5 staples) and some personnel problems (some welder's quit to work for someone paying more, some crew fired for low productivity) they have been doing well. One of our best supervisors is on the project and that has been a definite blessing. The challenge with this project has been in working with utility companies to get the other infrastructure in place. ETC is supposed to provide a pipeline for a sales gas point. I have been riding herd on them and Murphy's marketing guys to keep that project moving... and its been a challenge. The oil sales line has been an even bigger problem. When I took over this project there was a clear plan and I was just executing that plan. In executing it, I needed to get our engineering contractor to design a pump skid to pump the oil through my pipeline to another site where it would be stored and then sold. I was asked to engaged the facilities engineers and make this happen. They raised some concerns about having multiple pumps in series and the technical problems that could pose. In evaluating their concerns, the entire plan we were following was questioned and torn apart. Long story short - projects 'mutate' and turn can turn into something that isn't the best option. 'Cold eyes' or someone who hasn't been involved in the planning of the project can be a reality check and question the assumptions. But just a note - your cold eyes reviewer needs to be someone that doesn't offend people... or you end up with a lot of mad individuals. Just FYI. The facilities guys made some people angry and I was trying to calm people down that whole week. Currently, the new plan is being worked through and it looks like Plains is going to buy one of the sections of pipe I installed - about 4 miles. They'll probably get it for $1. The reasoning is tied up in something called a Firk escalator (I think that's how you spell it) I really don't know what that is all about, but next month I am scheduled for a 3 day economics course, so I'll ask then.

IF YOU OPTED TO SKIP THE DIALOG ON WORK RESUME HERE.

Kristen and the kids came down about two weeks ago. We met them for dinner and I brought along some fruit snacks so that Maddoxwould warm up to me more quickly. Well.. he fell asleep in the car and slept through all of dinner. He didn't wake up until they were leaving. We spent several days with them since then and have had a blast. Maddox loves playing with my legos. I always laugh when he refers to himself as 'you' (ex 'you needs help') because I think he is referring to me! And I love that I can win his attention by saying 'I'm hungry, I'm going to get some fruit snacks' then I just sit down on the couch. He comes over and I ask him if he wants some too, pat the seat next to me and pretty soon he is happy as can be. Mom and Dad don't have high chairs for the kids, so when they came, Kristen put Natalya in a cardboard box and fastened a muffin tray over one end to serve as a food tray. Then she fastened the whole contraption to a chair. Maddox was jealous, so he wanted a contraption too. So we had two little monkeys sitting in some boxes eating their dinner.

JaLeen and I have been babysitting a little girl named Nora when her parents need to go somewhere. Nora is pretty cute, and she has JaLeen wrapped around her little finger. I kinda like her too ;). As 'compensation' for the last babysitting adventure (which we thoroughly enjoy in its own right) they invited us over for dinner last sunday. It was a good time. They made us pizza, which was incredible - a homemade wheat crust - they used BBQ sauce instead of tomato (Nicole, next time we do Pizzas we gotta try this) the only downside was they put broccoli on the pizza... it tasted amazing, it was the best broccoli ever, but still, it meant I had to eat broccoli. (Note, I don't really have anything against Broccoli, but JaLeen thinks I hate it, so I play along... its the same kind of thing where Mom thinks my favorite color is blue, so I play along...) They also fed us blue bell ice cream. Amy decided to let Nora try some and she loved it! Amy was chuckling as she watched Nora eat a tiny bit and then lick her lips and then enthusiastically reach for more. She explained to us that it was Nora's first time eating ice cream. We didn't have the heart to tell her that we had already fed Nora ice cream twice....

JaLeen played in her R-ball tournament and placed second in the women's division. In the men's she had a rougher time. She got walloped when an older guy whacked the ball into her leg. She ended up with a world class bruise. Imagine a target (three concentric circles). Each of these were a different color with the outermost circle being about 5 inches in diameter. Perfect red, blue and black outlines. Couldn't have painted it as perfectly round, or done such a good ob keeping the colors inside the lines. It was a sight to behold. We also tried making bacon wrapped peppers for national bacon day - beware when cleaning out a jalapeno pepper, don't skip the part about using gloves. Also, those guys were hot!! But tasted really good. We also had a BBQ and invited some friends - had a good time. This week we did the food truck meet-up. They had a hamburger stuffed with bacon and cheese - oh my word it was sooo good.

Hmm, JaLeen was offered a job this week with CLI! Which is a good piece of news. It's part-time and is a good place to start as she continues to look for her ideal position. We have both been excited about that. We had fun this saturday using legos to create a floor plan of one of the homes we really like - it was a great test of Geo-spacial memory. We then filled up the floor plan with beds, furniture etc. to start some dialog on how we want to decorate and furnish this house we have been talking about. A really fun activity. Then we made sweet rolls and italian sausage soup... it was a fun night.

Love you all and hope you are doing well!