August 2, 2014

I am currently at the Capitola Beach. I am chilling out, watching the bags of two Japanese foreign students that my family are hosting. They are pretty cool. This past week has been my first week of the summer break. It has been pretty good. I got in a couple days of work. I started working on designing my cousin's house. My brother has the calling to organize service opportunities for the branch, and we served the grandma of Adrian.

     The Japanese students are fun. The two Japanese students are teenagers about to start high school, and their names are Tamoya and Keiji. Trevor downloaded the new Puella Magi Madoka Magica movie. We have been wanting to watch this movie for a while. It is a full length animated Japanese film. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is hailed as one of the greatest science fiction cartoons. It is super deep, and I don't understand it. It spoke about the Law of Cycle. We invited the two Japanese boys, and they were not into it because I don't think that they knew that it was in Japanese. They said that they were only interested in watching the opening scene. When we started watching the film, they wanted to watch the whole movie because it was in Japanese. The movie was a lot less comprehensible than the anime because it was based on different theories of science. No being able to read each subtitle makes it more confusing. On Saturday, I took Tamoya and Keiji to the beach. Keiji really enjoys the beach. When we arrived, I just let them go play and do whatever they wanted because they are very good friends just about to be freshman in high school. I sat with their bags. Sitting with the bags, I was left sitting next a big Polynesian family, and I did know if it was more embarrassing for me or them because they threw a Frisbee, hitting me in the head almost twice. They offered me a beer for compensation, but I resisted. I wanted to take a picture of Keiji and Tamoya. When I went looking for them, I ran into a BYUI alumni, recognizing me as a student from there because I was wearing a competitive sports champion shirt. He actually studied construction management like me, and he works at Swinerton. He asked me about looking for internships, and I said that I plan to intern with an architecture firm. The guy was named Sterling, and he graduated in 2004. Swinerton is a general contracting company, and they actually did a seminar at BYU Idaho. When I finally found Tamoya and Keiji, they were worried about their stuff, so I had to take a quick picture and go back to my sitting position, guarding the bags. We played monopoly in the evening with my Japanese brothers. We have had many foreign students stay with us, and I always have a brotherly relationship with them. Tamoya and Keiji barely understood what was going on, and I kind of took advantage of it. I like letting people think on their own while dad persuaded them not to trade me property. My family has developed the ability to complete both Monopoly and Risk games in one night. You may not believe this. Trevor and I had a similar value of property, and dad was being too conservative in playing as usual. My father really likes the orange properties. My family thinks that those properties give an unfair advantage, so we decided that the houses should cost 200 dollars each.  I out bid him for his last property needed to have the whole set of orange property, when it was up for auction. That limited the competition a little. He started investing very late in his property, when he finally purchased it from me. I did not have any property to develop, so I gave Keiji the necessary property for him to have the complete set of the yellow properties. I also bought a purple property for like 800 dollars from him for fun. He was kind of out of it. He invested a little in the yellow properties, and he wanted to go to sleep early. When he quit, he decided to give me all his property. Now I had a heap of property to invest in. Trevor had a lot of potential too, but the property that he won was mortgaged, and mine was not. It was a fun game.

     The job opportunity was interesting. We did inventory work for Outdoor World. I was really slow the first day of work. I only scanned about 1300 items while my brother heard that other employees had more than double the amount of items. There were a couple teenagers that Trevor and I hung out with during lunch. Taylor, the girl, is a junior, and Kyle, the boy, is a senior in high school. They are both really cool. Taylor got me into Instagram because she doesn't have a Facebook account. I love people, and I realized that I will be able to follow my friends more closely while I am away with the app. My second day, working inventory, was much more successful. I actually finished the section that I was assigned, and I finished my third section in a fashion that surprised the person that hired us. Taylor and Trevor were nearby and humored by his astonishment.

     Before the semester ended, my cousin, Shaundra saw my Revit architecture work, and she wanted me to help her design her home. She gave me her ideas. The main floor plan is inspired by a house featured in the Design Build Magazine. I don't think that the floor plans look normal, since it has very limited information, but I am working with it. The image is also very small. The house is very luxurious. She asked the master bedroom to be about 250 square feet. I feel that I am a very inefficient architect because a bed covered most of the room. The house has many weird angles. I think that the angles make the master bedroom hard to effectively use. The master bedroom is about 280 square feet, and that will probably make the entire house much larger than requested. Working with a client is interesting. The information on the house is very limited. I only have some exterior pictures of the house, and the floor plans. Shaundra said that she has been developing her vision for the house for over 5 years, and I have been able to see this from her Pinterest. Here are some pictures of the house. The progress of this house has slowed down because Sterling from Swinerton galvanized me to put together my portfolio for applying for internships.

I saw that in many of the images that Shaundra was impressed with in her master pin board. She liked a lot of big windows, so I put this huge 16 foot long double glass side-doors. 

blurry floor plans

The master bedroom is the red section. You can see the bed takes a lot of room.

I heard the word decal a lot in my class, and I did not understand that it was inserting image in a model until the end of the semester.

How do you like the nightstand lamps that I found on Revit City? I think that it matches the bed somewhat well. The material of the lambs are not shown well.

    Last Friday, we help Adrian, a member of my branch to serve his grandma. She doesn't have much help. We helped trim her yard plants mainly. We also took out a couple tree stumps out of the ground. I learned how to prune a rose bush. Humphrey, a member of the branch, saw me pruning a rose bush, and he trimmed down a rose bush a lot, but I pruned the bush how I was taught. Humphrey was very knowledgeable and a good leader.

    I want to add a series of pictures that I got from a run. I told a friend from school about a traiil from high school that goes to a Buddhist monastery. Here are the pictures of that.

Runner's discount :)

sorry i havent written in two weeks

sorry i havent written in two weeks but i expirienced a miracle with my brother writting me, thats been fun.

 

so lets see whats new. this week we found 7 new investigators! one family of three, a pair of brothers, a young mom, and the husband of an investigator. yesterday we were packed with lessons all day it was a miracle.

so we are still teaching the martinez girls and they are not going to be ready for the 9th so we pushed their date back to the 23rd, we asked them why and it is because they dont understand the book of mormon, even thou we read with htem everythime we go see them, it is not hte same because they need a guide at home teaching them how to lkive the gospel, os we had a little heart ot heart with the mother, about the importance of daily scripture study and family prayer, and bearing tesrimony to them of the truths of the gospel. she agreed. the girls are so smart and ready we did a re run fo rthe interview for batism and they believe everything they even talked about the importance of everthing like having a prophet and living hte commandments. We need to send y'all a picture of them, they are so cute! Their mom told them to pay more attention to the lessons and not be so giggly because the gospel is serioius stuff and they shouldnt be laughing so much when we teach them. then the girls told us that it is our fault because we make them laugh too much and  so we jokingly started acting serious, then they sat up straight and leaned in towards us, and were stroking their chins as if they were thinking and had straight faces on trying not to laugh, and we tried to teach them more seriously but it didn't work the whole situation was too funny.

 

so the women we are teaching who stays at home with her kids is reallly cool she is our age, and she grew up cathholic but she doesnt know anything about Christ or even how to pray. so its kinda cool because then as sh does those simple things like pray and read she will feel a big differenec in her life and her mind will be filled with understanding and she will feel the need to come unto Christ more fully. we taugh her the restoration and committed her to pray about it and she said she would, she gave a beautiful closing prayer and she thanked us for teaching her and resolved some of her concerns and for showing her how to pray , because now she will do it more often. she is very sincere.

 

next family was a family that i tti'd on the street once and went to try to teach htem a few times but were never home, so one night we had no planns and we had former investigators on our back up planns, so we decided to go visit, it was around 8:20 pm and we knocked and no one was home, but as we were about to leave they showed up back from their walk, so they invited us in, at first, not gonna lie it was sort of aquward, but then we just asked them questions and then the mom started telling us the issues she is having with her concieted son, who thinks he doesn't have to lift a finger because he is too handsome, and  he is only 11!! haha anyway more towards the end of our How to begin TEaching we started talking about church and all the fun things that the kids  will learn. He and his little 6 year old sister were super excited and begged their parents if they can go to church and they were totally fine with it, it was such a cool lesson because we got to ask them about what they want to learn about and we learned about their doubts and why they dont go ot a church, so now we know what to study for them for our next  lesson. our plan is to have the kids go, they will love it and this will then persuade their parents to come to church, it's brilliant!

 

if i sound like a TEXAN its not my fault it was sister Vargas :)

we are also teaching an amazing women who was a refferral from a member and thanks to her rightoeous example she wanted to learn more about the book of mormon, we  had a fantastic lesson at the members house and wow. the member taught her the ministry of christ the resroaraiton of the prieshood the book of mormon, the church's history, the first vision emma smith a whole bunch of stuff and even re comitted  her to pray about the lessons to see if they are true, so she said she will this was all after the lesson about the gospel, but becaue she made the comment about "it doesnt matter what churhc you go to as long as you have faith and live it its ok" my companion ans i were just so impressed and were glad she did in a beautiful confident was. it was amazing!! so we are hoping that she can feel better and recover from her lupus so she can come to church