1 Year!!!

We celebrated our first anniversary by going to see Brigham Young’s Winter House and Jacob Hamblin’s house.  Then went out for dinner.  It was kind of fun symmetry because the houses were decorated for Christmas, and last year on our honeymoon we saw Biltmore Estate all decorated for Christmas.

We learned that all the wood, and even this "marble" are actually hard wood,
painted to look like the type of wood or marble that they wanted it to look like.

The owner of this trunk wanted the rounded top so nothing
would be set on top of it and she would always have access
to its contents.  Pretty smart!

This is the master bedroom, and they believe this is the original
color

Brigham Young had his portrait painted sitting in this chair.
The portrait is hanging in the front room.

Outside of Brigham Young's House

Outside Jacob Hamblin's House

Jacob Hamblin's saddle

Jacob Hamblin was a peacemaker to the Native American tribes.  He did a lot of travelling, and didn't really spend much time in this house.

It's strange to think we've been married a year.  It seems like forever, and it seems like just yesterday.  I love you so much Peter.  I'm so glad I chose a year ago to be sealed to you for time and all eternity in the Temple of the Lord.  Happy Anniversary!

Christmas 2013 Part 1

Seems like we’re all doing Christmas in stages, nowadays.  I must say, it certainly makes for a different Christmas, but it also makes it longer!  For the first part of Christmas this year, we went up North to be with Peter’s family.  Peter’s dad was really excited since all of his kids were in town for Christmas. 

We went up Friday, and Saturday was busy!  First, we had the Hill family party at 10am, which was actually pretty fun.  There is a lot of family on that side, but the house was big enough that everybody fit comfortably, and there was food and a service project.  There was also a little Christmas program in which we sang “Angels, We Have Heard On High,” as well as a white elephant gift exchange. 

Our nephew was a shepherd in the Christmas pageant

Then we went to visit a friend from Peter’s dad’s mission.  They had an old fashioned ice cream parlor in their basement, which was pretty cool!  Next, we went downtown to the City Creek Mall, had dinner, and looked at the lights on Temple Square.  We also saw a bunch of cool candy displays.

This view was just too pretty not to take a picture

This is one of Peter's favorite sections of lights on Temple Square

One of the cool Candy Displays

M's smile looking at the Candy Displays

City Creek Mall

Sunday, Peter and I sang in a quartet with Peter’s parents and with their ward choir for their Sacrament Meeting Christmas program, which was pretty fun.  Monday, Peter and I did a little Christmas shopping for each other and for Peter’s siblings.  We hadn’t had much chance before because of school and because Peter worked at noon most of the week after we got out of school.  We were finally able to do some shopping two days before Christmas…

Christmas Eve, Peter’s parents had a party at their house for Peter’s dad’s family at their house.  Their tradition is a talent show in which everyone participates.  Peter and I sang a song from Frozen!  It was fun. 

We took this picture and sent it to my parents over Google Hangouts

  Christmas morning, we slept in all the way until 8 and then got up to open our presents!  Yay!  We got lots of goodies, including some clothes, some movies, and other fun stuff! 

Our only picture of Christmas morning haha

Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow

This year, as I’ve remembered the Nativity Story, my thoughts have been drawn to the Shepherds, humble men who were blessed to witness marvels.  While they were watching their sheep in the fields, which I’m sure was an everyday experience, an angel appeared and spoke to them!  Can you imagine?  In the darkness, while they went about living their lives as they always did, a messenger from the Lord appeared to them.  And the message he gave to them!  That their Savior and Lord was being born only a short distance away and they, the lowly shepherds, could go see him.  They must have been humbled and overwhelmed by this marvelous invitation!

I love imagining the shepherds in the fields on that dark, starry night.  I love to imagine the wonder they must have experienced when the angel appeared to them and then when they saw “a multitude of the heavenly host”¹ singing praises to God on High!  One of my favorite Christmas songs by John Denver says, “And they sat there, and they marveled, and they knew they could not tell whether it were angels or the bright stars a-singing.”²

As I’ve thought about the shepherds, I’ve thought about what they can teach us.  They must have had faith, for Moroni teaches us “it is by faith that angels appear and minister unto men”³.  In the Christmas Devotional, Elder Ronald A. Rasband said this about the shepherds,

“On the hills of Judea surrounding Bethlehem, Luke tells us shepherds were abiding in their fields. These were not common shepherds but ‘just and holy men’ who would bear witness of the Christ child.”⁴

His description of the shepherds as “just and holy men” comes from Alma 13:26. 

“And it shall be made known unto just and holy men, by the mouth of angels, at the time of his coming, that the words of our fathers may be fulfilled...”⁵

I wonder if the shepherds knew they were written about in prophecies.   Somehow, I doubt it.  I think these men were not much different than you and me—individuals who quietly lived their lives in righteousness.  I like to think they were surprised and overwhelmed at the angel’s appearance unto them.  Perhaps they asked themselves, “Why us?  Why were we chosen to witness this holy event?  Were there not ones more worthy than us?”

 If we know of Christ, we understand why shepherds were chosen to view his birth.  Jesus declared, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.”⁶ The Lord often teaches through symbolism, and He began teaching us who He was from the very beginning of His life on earth by inviting shepherds to his birth. 
A story I read or heard one time about a shepherd's love has stuck with me.  It is from an address by Elder John R. Lasater of the First Quorum of the Seventy that was included in the May 1988 Ensign entitled, "Shepherds of Israel."

Although the song entitled “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow” encourages the shepherds to “leave your sheep and leave your lambs…leave your ewes and leave your rams,”⁷ I don’t for one second believe those shepherds left behind their sheep.  Much of the reason Christ compares Himself to shepherds is because shepherds love their sheep.  This love means the shepherds would never leave their sheep unprotected, even to see their God.  And Christ, the Lamb of God, would certainly not be offended to have sheep at his birth.

Much like Christ is both a Shepherd and a Lamb, we are both sheep in the Good Shepherd’s fold and assistant shepherds who help care for the other sheep and bring more sheep into the flock.  As follow the angel’s invitation to the shepherds to come unto Christ this Christmas season, I hope we can bring other sheep with us that we may all feel the love of the Good Shepherd.

               

Shepherds

by Teresa Bateman

There was no little drummer boy at Bethlehem that night.

The animals did not know how to talk.

The wise men didn’t make it on time to see that sight.

But shepherds,

ah yes,

shepherds with their flock

of lambs who needed tender, watchful care

were out upon the hill ’neath starry sky.

To them the angels came with message rare—

Glad Tidings Of Great Joy … to shepherds.

WHY?

A man who tends a flock of sheep by day,

watching over them all through the night,

searching for the one that’s gone astray

until again the lost one’s in his sight;

Who leads his followers to pastures sweet

and keeps them safe from perils they can’t see—

This kind of man, this kind was first to see

the King of Kings. They knew that it was He.

Why shepherds?

Why were they the first to view

the babe?

Because,

He was a shepherd, too.⁸

Merry Christmas!!!

Resources

1 Luke 2:13

2 Denver, John.  “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913.”  John Denver & The Muppets A Christmas Together.  Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc., 1979.

3 Moroni 7:37

4 Ronald A. Rasband, “Glory to God,” Christmas Devotional, Dec. 2013.

5 Alma 13:26

6 John 10:14

7 “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow”, African American Spiritual

8 Bateman, Teresa.  “Shepherds.”  New Era, Dec. 1979.

Code Camp 2013

Several weeks ago, I attended Code Camp. What is code camp, you ask? Well, let me tell you. You arrive at 7am Friday morning, get all set up and settled in, and then at 8am, you begin writing a computer/mobile program, aka coding.  You continue coding for the next 24 hours. You are free to eat, sleep, and if you’re over 18, you can even leave if you need to grab snacks or something, but you have to stop coding at 8am Saturday morning. Hopefully whatever project you were working on is finished because judges then come around, and you show them what you’ve accomplished.  They then choose first place, second place, and third place winners from each division.  There were four divisions: rookie (who are given a kit to help them), novice, collegiate, and professional. My teammate Chaz and I were in the collegiate division. You were allowed to have up to 4 people on your team.

This was both mine and Chaz’s first year at code camp. I had come up with this idea to write an android app that takes pictures of things like fliers and inputs the event information into Google Calendar. We used an open source Optical Character Recognitino (OCR) program called Tesseract, which is run by Google, so we called ourselves the Tesseract Tekkies (the Tesseract is also the powerful cube Lokie steals in the Avengers movie, so we thought we were pretty cool).  Chaz worked mainly on the front end of things: he used Java (the language we were writing in) to call the Tesseract Program and get its output, and he also worked on connecting to the Andriod camera.  I worked on converting the text file Tesseract produced into things that the computer could interpret as dates and times and inserting them into the Google Calendar.

It was definitely an interesting experience.  I had expected to crash sometime in the middle of the night, but I felt alert all night.  I could feel my body getting pretty tired, and I even tried to lie down and take a nap, but my brain would not shut up!  I did crash in the car on the way back, and then I slept for like 5 hours Saturday afternoon (after I showered and ate a little snack, that is).  I got my part working at like 4 in the morning, but then I tried to make a GUI (Graphical User Interface as opposed to using command line), since I had heard the GUI was important if you wanted to win.  And I messed something up.  Once everybody started waking up the next morning, a couple of friends from another team were able to help me go back to what I’d had before, but something still wasn’t working.  We figured out that it was because Tesseract had given me a different format!  We were able to figure that out, too, and I was much happier J

Our presentation went fairly well, and we were hoping to maybe get 3^rd place in the collegiate division for our project.  When they announced the winners in the various divisions, I was in a daze, bordering on a doze.  So, when first place for the collegiate division was announced to be the Tesseract Tekkies, I was surprised, but too out of it to get really hyper and excited about it!  We really did not expect to win, and it makes me feel really good that we did.  Maybe we’ll continue working on the project and develop an app—who knows?  It would be pretty sweet, though, to have an app in Google Play.