09 Sep 2001 #0137.html

Whirlwind Trip

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Dear Paul and Kate, Melanie and Jared, Bridget and Justin, Sara, Ben and Sarah, Heather, Audrey, Rachel, and Matt via hardcopy,

cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts.

Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea, belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail box at any time.

"When I stopped to see Des yesterday, he said 'Are you here for a few days, or is this another whirlwind trip.' I responded, 'Guess.' And he said, 'Whirlwind trip.' Mom had her stroke on April 1st, 1985. There have been years when I have visited her as often as once a month. And Texas is a long ways from Utah. When I was traveling to China, and there were 19 trips, I often stopped in Cedar City on the way there and on the way back.

When I have had conventions in California or meetings in Seattle or Calgary, I have arranged my travel so there was a weekend to make a whirlwind trip down to Cedar and/or St. George. I like to visit Mom. I miss visiting Grandma Hafen. I also like to stop and see Uncle Tony, Aunt Luana and Uncle Lloyd, Sara, Des, Bridget, and Brian, and now my relatively new in-laws, Maxine Shirts ('Mom'), Russell, Steve, and Randy, and, of course, Paul and Kate, now that you guys live in this part of the world. It was special after Grandma Hafen's funeral having a lady come up and say how much she wishes her kids would take the time to keep in contact with her. I remember a church movie called 'The Letter,' which helped me realize how much people like to hear from their kids. And I had sent weekly post cards to Grandma Hafen and weekly letters to Mom and Dad while I was on my mission, long before seeing that movie. I guess it confirmed what I knew in my heart. I'm sure this is part of the reason I am as diligent as I am about writing these weekly Thoughtlets. I also know that even a whirlwind trip is better than a letter.

As I get older, and, as I look in the mirror in Paul and Kate's bedroom, fatter, I appreciate those of you who make an extra effort to keep in contact. Paul calls most weekends. Last weekend both Heather and Audrey called Andrea, and I told her I felt jealous. I don't do phones very well, and so I end up not saying much to Heather nor Audrey, even when I answer the phone when you guys call. Ben and Sarah, and Melanie and Jared are often coming to visit us, and it is really nice. As I said above, a whirlwind trip is better than a letter, an e-mail, or a phone call. Bridget sends me nice note every couple of months, and I've had some nice e-mail correspondence with Sara this last year. My sister is always sending me nice notes, news clippings and other things. I don't do as good, other than the Thoughtlets, in responding. All in all, life is good, and it is nice to see the family web increase the strength of the strands. All of us need to make the effort to increase the strength of those strands which are weaker. For the rains and the winds will come into all of our lives, and when we have others to hold onto, we won't get caught up in the torrents that lead to misery, loneliness, bitterness, anger, and unhappiness.

Andrea's Mom is on-line, and so the need for whirlwind tours might be lessened in the virtual world. I forgot to put her name on the APPEX 2001 Thoughtlet, and so I used Paul's computer this morning to forward it to her. I was totally surprised, although I don't know why, at the number of misspelled words in that Thoughtlet. I figured with Andrea checking them, I could continue to get away with using the old Spark-2 e-mail editor, which does not have a spell checker. Now that it is in my face again, I will work over the next year to fix this. The goal is to get it so when I send a message out, the spelling and grammar has been checked (for instance, I had to use the spell checker to figure out grammar is not spelled grammer. Oh well!).

I do hope my efforts to keep everyone informed of stuff in my life rubs off, and we see more things like Ben's 'pseudo-thoughtlets,' as time goes on and more of you become more settled. I also got thinking about Ethan, and Paul and Kate's new son, and decided I need to come up with something like a 'Grandkidlet' to e-mail the grandkids every week from the time they are 3 until they turn 12, when they will be put on the Thoughtlet e-mail list. In fact, I can image giving Grandkids their own Domain Name for there 3rd birthday. Should it be EthanEvanNelson.com or een@walden3d.com or both or something else? (See ../2003/0331.html to see what gets/was implemented.) Isn't levity exciting? (Remember levity the opposite of entropy, and since I'm not at home, I can't do a search on previous Thoughtlets and give the references. However, if you look at this Thoughtlet on-line [http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets/2001/0137.html"], I will put the references into the online version (see ../2000/0029.html). Eventually I will have a search engine, and temporal and spatial and activity indices for all of the 'lets' in Thoughtlets. Then it will be easy to make a whirlwind trip in the virtual world of the Internet to any concept or story or experience that has been described in any of these notes.)

As far as my week, it was busy (for a change). I already wrote about Monday (Labor Day) last week, when I was catching up on the three Thoughtlets I was behind on. Tuesday I worked at the house starting to clean up the mess I created getting ready for APPEX (0136.html). Didn't get very far. Andrea is very patient with me. Thanks! Left at 10:50 for a lunch meeting at 11:00 at Dairy Ashford and I-10. I was only 5 minutes late, and they made me wait another 10 minutes. It is hard wanting to be on time, when so many other folks are so ambivalent. When Kate picked me up at the airport she said that Paul taught her my motto about time is: 'If you are 10 minutes early you are on time. If you are on time you are late. If you are 10 minutes late you are dead.' The bottom line of the lunch meeting was another 3-D survey and potential drilling Prospects to add to Dynamic's inventory. We also came up with the idea of purchasing some fields in the area, and will be presenting this to Swede Nelson as an alternative use of the $180 million he is raising. I went from e-seis to Chroma, to work on the Texaco report. I also worked on it all day Wednesday. I got home about 6:30 and ate dinner with the family for a change. They went to Young Men's and Young Women's, which was a joint activity. It didn't start until 7:30, as they are trying to provide some separation between the Katy 2nd and the Nottingham Country Ward youth programs. It didn't work, since the Katy boys interrupted the joint act ivity to close off the gym and play basketball. I vegged out, while going though piles of stuff and watched 'Lost' and 'The Amazing Race,' both of which were nothing more than exotic home movies. I never have seen the Survivor shows, and now I think I have had my fill of voyeurism television. Thursday I worked at home until 1:30, and then went downtown and met with Rick Zimmerman at Texas Independent. Sara, Steven, Rick, and others gave me a bad time because you have not come by to visit them and catch them up on your trip to France and what you have been doing. So I passed the words on. Since I haven't heard whether you have been getting these Thoughtlets since my Internet problems, I will also tell you when I talk to you. Rick seems interested in what we are doing. He plans to come by the house and spend a day reviewing all of the Prospects and Concepts we are pursuing. It will be interesting to see if it happens. I went from downtown out I-59 to Chroma Energy in Sugar Land. Peter had been tied up in a Board of Directors Meeting, and hadn't read the revised report. He read it and said it was fine with a couple of small changes. I made the changes and printed out a final copy, along with a copy I gave to Bob Wentland and Don Volter. I got home about 7:00 and spent the evening packing, writing an e-mail to Pioneer, moving files over to the Sun Workstation, and getting ready for the SEG.

Friday was very hectic. I didn't go running. I worked on the marketing e-mail to Pioneer and sent a copy to Rick Zimmerman. Jim Trimble of The Rudman Partnership called from Dallas about working up their 3-D survey in Washington County, Colorado. This was an exciting follow-up from APPEX. I also created some web pages (http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/intro and http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/APPEX) and printed 10 pamphlets to take to the SEG. I also made about 100 business cards to take with me to San Antonio. I was a half-hour late by the time all of this was done, had snapped at Andrea, and was trying to do too much in the time available. Oh well! I did apologize, and I apologize again here in this most public of family forums. Andrea, thanks for taking me down to Sam LeRoy's office. It was funny when we got there and I got out of the car with a blue sports coat and my brown striped suit pants on. Oh well! I just took off the coat and tie and put them in Sam's trunk. Sam, his colleague Eric, and I went to a seminar in The Woodlands at HARC (Houston Area Research Counsel) on 'Anomalously Pressured Natural Gas.' It was very good and relates directly to the Washington County 3-D survey Jim Trimble of The Rudman Partnership called me about earlier in the day. I also met his partner at Pitts Oil and Gas, who told me about the seminar.

Sam and Eric dropped me off at Terminal A of Intercontinental Airport to come to Utah for Paul's being set apart as second counselor in the Bishopric in the Freedom Second Ward of the Provo Utah South Stake. I was at the airport about two hours early. As I got to the gate and sat down I was surrounded by rude cell phone users. One guy had an ear piece and a little microphone and was talking very loud while shuffling papers. A lady was talking about when they would get to Denver. A couple of other men were giving sales reports. It made me want to hand each of them, and myself, a sound suppression system, so no one could hear anything they were saying. It is pretty straight forward to create a sound signal the opposite polarity as something you want to block, and to have the original sound blocked. Hopefully it will soon be available at Radio Shack. I was going to read when I got on the plane, and I just closed my eyes and dreamed. I got thinking about Mom's loss of use of her left arm, and started to redesign the typewriter keyboard. I have been using my left hand to drive the mouse on my computers for about a year now, and I figure anyone can learn a new keyboard if there is a reason. Since we have four fingers to type, it makes sense to make a three row keyboard with four keys on each row. The keyboard could be mounted like a watch on the non-dominant arm, and a glove, like we used for work in virtual reality, could be used on that hand to show when the thumb and the forefinger or the thumb and one of the other fingers are touching. This would give 4x12 or 48 combinations. By allowing the first and second fingers to touch the thumb at the same time, this could be expanded at least 7 to 11x12 or 121 combinations. With 26 letters in the alphabet, capitalization, ten numbers, and 33 other characters (#, $, %, etc.) there needs to be at least 95 combinations. So how do you decide how to best organize the 12 keys?

It makes sense to do a letter count in the Bible, and organize which letters are in which position based on which are most frequently used. Then my mind wandered to the guitar and starting with the base string I figured there were 12 notes (E, E#, F, F#, G, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, and D#). So these 12 keys could play the basic notes in the western music scale. Putting fingers against the thumb could allow the 4 octaves covered by guitar notes to be easily covered. Hooking this device to a midi interface, would result in a new kind of musical instrument, that could also be used as a keyboard replacing typewriters. Interesting stream of thought. When I get in one of these moods, it reminds me of the writings of David Devor and Project Mind and his words about accelerated thought. These words summarize 5% of the thoughts that raced through my mind as we flew from Houston to Denver to Salt Lake. We were an hour late leaving Houston, and a half-hour late arriving at Salt Lake. At least we made it.

Kate was waiting for me, and this is when she explained she didn't dare be late. I must really be a scary person. Paul had gone on the father's and son's campout with two 12 year old boys who didn't have Dad's who could go with them. It really made me feel good when I heard this. We got back to their house about 1:30 Houston time. I got up at 5:00 Houston time, showered shaved, and was on the road by 7:00 AM. It took 2 1/2 hours to drive to Cedar, and I went right to Audrey's apartment. She was just leaving for work. She pointed out Heather's house across the parking lot, I called, no one answered, and so I walked over and woke up four girls. Then I stopped to see Des and Brian (Sara was in Salt Lake and didn't know I was coming up). Brian was playing his guitar, and I told him and Des about my new user interface/musical instrument. Brian said he has too many projects of his own to take this on. Maybe one of you others kids will get excited about these ideas and help turn them into a prototype. I stopped and saw Andrea's Mom, and 'Mom' it was funny how surprised you were to see me. Guess that is part of the fall out of a whirlwind trip. I drove down to St. George and took Mom to J.J. Hunan's. It was good to spend some time with you, Mom. I'm sorry it has been so long. I was tired and since Ward Abbott was in Washington, I pulled over and took a nap for an hour in the car. Mom said the Cedar City Livestock Show and Auction was on, so I drove down by the old show barn. It is a storage shed now. Oh well! I went across the street to the cemetery and paid my best wishes to Dad and Uncle Bud, and went to Applebee's to find Audrey. She had got of work early, so I picked up Grandma Shirts and met Audrey and Heather at Des's. We had some fun. I mostly listened because I don't know anything about sports (like the U.S. Open is not played at Wimbledon was my biggest foopa). When we went outside, there were big black birds circling the back yard, and there were a lot of jokes, even though none of us were hit. Then Maxine, Heather, Audrey, Brian, and I went to Applebee's and ate. With Audrey's discount and Heather, Brian, and I sharing a meal, it cost Grandma $10 for the meal ($15 with a tip). It came up that Maxine would like to see Rat Race, and so I went with her after dinner. It is even funnier the second time. There are all kinds of subtle things I missed the first time. I stopped and talked to Des, and was back in Provo at 12:15 AM, closing out the one day whirlwind trip.

Today was very nice. Slept in. It was very touching to listen to the things said as Paul was sustained to be the new 2nd Counselor in the Bishopric. It was the first sacrament meeting in years where I wrote two stanzas for Prime Words:

On a mission you come to understand A testimony is found In the bearing of it (a) Where it becomes our ground

And:

If we look down the road We do not wish to go We will find we follow The path our eyes (a) know

(a) Steven Orozco the Sacrament Meeting speaker.

Paul is loved and is doing a good job. Melanie was here for one of Jared's roommates' wedding. We drove up to Heber and saw my cousin Josh and Uncle Glenn and Aunt Linda. It was good to see them. Their new address in Heber is 390 North 500 East, 801.657.1636 and cell 801.714.0433. Glenn volunteered to get passes for skiing for any of you who let him know you are coming to Salt Lake a week or two in advance. I think he was glad to see us also. I talked to Steve Joseph as we drove back down Provo Canyon, about vPatch and what the next steps are. We got back in time to help peel potatoes and make gravy. Kate made a feast for us. Rump roast, corn on the cob, salad, fresh rolls, and Bridget and Jason brought some chocolate eclair pan desert. Fun evening talking about new names for kids. I played the guitar a little, and also found time today to write this. All part of a whirlwind trip."

I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life. To download any of these thoughtlets go to http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets or e-mail me at rnelson@walden3d.com.

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 2001 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.