Tuesdays with Muerte

Image Source:  Wikipedia If you're an 18-year-old, LDS, male and you want to have a shot at serving a mission outside of Utah in the next 12 months, wait to put your papers in. I've been hearing from a number of sources that mission presidents in Utah are gearing up to take on 100 new companionships each.  The apparent goal is to have one set of missionaries for every stake. Elders originally from Logan will be sent down to St. George, and Elders from Cedar will be called to serve in Salt Lake South, etc.  This also means that members in Utah will actually be expected to help find and teach people along with missionaries in their stake. Get ready. Missionary work is about to get real!

Hoping to gain some insight into who I am compatible with, I decided to retake the free color code test . The past couple of times I've taken the test, I've been identified as a 40%-dominant blue, then white.  This time around, having work experience to influence my answers, I marked a 30%-dominant red, then yellow. Link to site results What is going on?!  Has my experience at work affected how I define the key words used in the text? Am I just being  more honest with myself now?  Has my personality dramatically changed? I know half of the questions are based on childhood reflection, so that shouldn't change much? Hartman Personality Profile

Bell Canyon, San Rafael Swell, UT The Great Gallery (Petroglyphs) San Rafael Swell, UT

Hiking Mount Olympus in Salt Lake Valley (approx. 39th South)

Once I find a girl with whom I can hold a conversation for more than 20 minutes, one of the next things I look for is if they are  flirtatious with me (or at least seem interested...or at least don't seem completely disgusted.) Alissa Goodwin Snell, Utah's iconic dating coach, offers these helps to ladies to answer whether or not they are showing their men the right, flirtatious signs .  She writes: To identify if you act like a pal instead of a gal , ask yourself the following: Do I occasionally tilt my head and smile at him from across the room, look away, and then look back again? Do I ever cross my legs and gently tap my foot in his direction or slowly play with my hair, jewelry, or a pen when he is near? Do I act feminine when I talk with him (i.e., soften and fluctuate my voice, talk with my hands, tilt my hips, cross my legs, or touch him briefly)? Do I let him open my door or accept his offers of help? Do I make him feel needed, trusted, and appreciated?...

Here is an excerpt from an online evaluation of a customer service call I made yesterday to inquire about the status of the internet outage at my house:  Based on this experience with CenturyLink's Customer Service, how likely is it that you would recommend CenturyLink to a family member, friend or colleague?  (required)   2 of 10 Please provide your reasons for your rating above.   My rep, RJ, was nice enough, but he was powerless to provide any real help.  The message communicated to me was, We're sorry. We're working on it.   (Which was probably true. Poor RJ probably didn't have any more information than that. However, if I wanted someone to comfort me, I would have called my mother.) At the time of the call, my apartment's internet service had been out for 72+ hours (that's over 3 days for those of you who are slow with arithmetic), which is ridiculous by any standard. The only information I could squeeze out the old RJ, my technical s...

Image Source Surprisingly, fatigue may boost creative powers. For most adults, problems that require open-ended thinking are often best tackled in the evening when they are tired, according to a 2011 study in the journal Thinking & Reasoning. When 428 students were asked to solve a series of two types of problems, requiring either analytical or novel thinking, their performance on the second type was best at non-peak times of day when they were tired, according to the study led by Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Albion College in Michigan. (Their performance on analytical problems didn't change over the course of the day.) Fatigue, Dr. Wieth says, may allow the mind to wander more freely to explore alternative solutions. Article Source