Father's and Son's Campout

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Welcome to "the engines of my love," a regular review of why I love you, Martha Ellyn Sharp Nelson, and no other woman.

I love you because you encouraged Rob to go with me on the Father's and Son's Campout. I think he had a good time. It was nice to have Joe Amason with us. I was very disappointed to have Joe tell me his mom is encouraging him to keep learning a lot about computers so he can grow up and give her a lot of money. I explained how that is not a son's responsibility, and how I have never sent my mother any money. Rob had his typical tantrum when he couldn't get something he wanted. He wanted the keys to turn on the air conditioning in the car because he got hot and I wouldn't give them to him. He lived. Other than these two events I felt like it was a pretty perfect evening.

We found a convenience store and purchased the material to make Somemores. We found an Academy and bought Rob a skateboard. We got to the park before dark, even though I had driven in from Austin, we had picked up Joe, got a permission slip, stopped for dinner at Jack-In-The-Box, and ran the other two errands. We had a good time at the campfire, although I felt kind of isolated. It seemed like several of the brethern were avoiding me. Guess that is what happens when you are a bad guy who is getting divorced. But maybe it is just my paranoia flaring up. Anyway, my scouts, now Priests didn't care, and we sat around and played guitar until midnight. It was fun to see how far Aaron Daniels, Ryan Reed, Tyler Kamp, and others have progressed on the guitar. It was fulfilling knowing how many scout campouts I have played the guitar at, where these kids were kind of soaking it up from a distance.

Brother White was responsible for breakfast, and he really did it right. For example, there were 30 dozen eggs for 3 dozen people. He felt really bad about it, but I just reminded him to not get down and to try to learn from the experiences we are given. Pancakes, scrambled eggs, breakfast burritos, bacon, orange juice, milk, etc. The Father's & Son's campouts have changed since we first moved into the ward.

I had a blast talking to Jim Conners about some of the projects I am working on. We talked about the power of being able to find patterns in different composer's music, to derive an invariant polynomial that defines the style, and then being able to mix different invariant polynomials to generate whole new classes of music. We talked about the CAVE and the possibility of whole new classes of musical instruments. We also talked about PAIRS and some of the stuff I have been learning the last few weeks. It has been a couple of years, at a Father's and Son's campout, since Jim and I have had a discussion like this. When he came over he said something like, `Well Roice, I'm ready for my annual mind blowing.'

I wish we could have had discussions like this over the years. I realize I think differently, and I hope for the day when you say to yourself how neat it is I think differently. The day when you can grab hold of some of my out of the box thoughts and say to yourself `How could I ever have been bored with this person?' I realize this is just a hope, and I do not count on it happening. But I hope because I love you.

I'm interested in sharing why I love you. I know how important the written word is to you, and if you ever feel neglected, ignored, or unloved, and would like an up-to-date bound copy of these lovelets or any subset of these lovelets for any purpose you might have come to mind, please tell me or e-mail your request to rnelson@walden3d.com with the request 'lovelet update.'

With all my love,
Roice

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Copyright © 1997 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.