2008 is officially over in a few hours and it occured to me that I have not written a whole lot in the past few weeks in part because I was finishing a semester at BYU. The year, though, started with me starting a semester at BYU and then two summer terms ending with the Fall semester. This has been a rather interesting and somewhat productive, in the realm of education, year for me. I went from looking at April 2009 graduating to December 2008 and then only if I completed by December 2008 otherwise the department I was a member of (English in the School of Humanities) would make me try one more time to complete a second language requirement (I tried French and Spanish at BYU and American Sign Language and before BYU I took German and in line with the Spanish and French I did Old English which is closer to Old Norse than modern anything and discovered that German syntactic structure is parallel with English syntactic structure and, in theory, I should more easily be able to learn German over anything else – rant over). As a result, instead of, say, taking a break somewhere in the middle and working full-time and maybe playing part-time with Erin and co. I ended up not and going to school for twelve months straight when the world conditions you to do nine months and then three off was a bit tough.

To start the year, though, Erin got pregnant. We don’t know exactly when, but there is some debate as to the early part of January. The outcome is that she spent almost ten months pregnant and most of that not feeling well on top of starting a master’s degree at Westminster College in Salt Lake City (a degree she decided she did not like and that the professors were not challenging enough). The combination of the pregnancy and work and school was a little more than she wanted to handle, especially since coming on summer we ended up asking her mom to come out and help take care of her. Which she did. She had a couple of plane tickets home and ended up staying until CAMPER was born, which was a great blessing. Her mantra and focus was to make sure I had the time to focus on completing my degree and about two weeks after CAMPER was born and after Erin‘s dad flew out to spend some time with his new (and only) grandchild, Lisa went home and Erin and I got to figure out how to be parent’s on our own.

Preceding our knowing Erin was pregnant was Erin being called in to work one day to have her [insert nasty colorful metaphor here] of a boss call her into the office on a Saturday and fire her for reasons that, a year later, still feel and sound like they were piles of dog-doo left out too long in the sun and just ripe enough to make your noise crinkle and your eyes water. On the one hand I was glad Erin was out of the environment and honestly needed her to move on but she wasn’t ready to and the two dip-sticks she worked for ended up causing a lot of problems and I am sure they feel completely justified to do what they did to Erin and one of her co-workers. Honestly, I hope they burn in hell. This caused me to have to work longer for the company I’d started working for the previous summer (until February) as Erin looked for a job. She got a new one in the accounting department of a web-hosting and design company and really enjoyed the camaraderie that went along with the experience. She quit that in September after hiring and training a replacement and then (definitely) after having CAMPER. After Erin got her new job and I was hired to help work on the School of Education’s website at BYU, I quit the other job and focused more of my attention on school.

I did end up having to take a few classes that matched BYU’s Languages of Learning credit (essentially higher math classes) and ended up doing Logic, both Deductive Logic and Predicate Logic, over the four months between the end of Winter Semester (other places refer to this as Spring) and Fall Semester. That was interesting and required a lot of dedicated time to the gods of studying and logic and frustration. But, in the end, I passed and moved on.

As stated, Erin was pregnant and there was an entire week where things got bad and I (pretty much) had to pull myself out of school and work for a week so I could take care of her. After Lisa came out, Erin didn’t drive herself anywhere until after Lisa went home. Of course, passing out in the grocery store affects what people allow pregnant women to do. In this case, driving was out.

Since this year marks (at least for me) the longest year of school EVER I am happy to note that I am now done. Sure, I’ve said it, but I finally got to gaze at my grades and I actually did make it. There is a surreal feeling about being done and thinking that something special should mark the end. The fact is, I am done and the day switched to night that switched to day and other than acting like a complete retard around my little (Hattaway) family. On top of which, the day after I finished my classes Erin and CAMPER and I were in a truck, accompanied by Erin‘s brother and Auntie (thanks Auntie) and driving due south and east and then east first on US 6 and then I-70 toward Massachusetts. We spent the better part of four days in a car and moving van driving, took a day off, and then spent a day unloading the truck before it was taken back in light of the Christmas holiday. We turned it in two hours after the Penske place was closed and still had someone move it out of the way for us.

We also set up the office (I am thinking of taking a series of pictures or maybe running film on the lair or loft space or whatever we are calling it and posting it under the title, “Where I Do What I Do.” If I do and you come back to the site I am sure you will see whatever it is I do. Of course, with everything set up I need to plug in and launch my external harddrive to make sure it is working. I am also thinking of replacing my other external hard drives hard drive because it died in the house fire and that was very sad for me. On top of which, I probably ought to have at least one external harddrive doing Time Machine to make sure my stuff is being backed up.

I think, if I take the time, I will look and see how many posts I did over 2008 and maybe do a review of what I wrote about and the elections. Anyway, my year, in recap, has been filled with school, Erin, pregnancy and CAMPER, and moving to Massachusetts. It’s been a good year and I hope to write the chronicles of the drive from Utah to Massachusetts.

Real Heroes Fly