Happy 24th of July!

"You! Boy! What day is this?"

"Me sir? Why it's Pioneer Day!"

For those of you who aren't from Utah, let me tell you about Pioneer Day. It's big. There's a big parade, and there's fireworks, and everyone has the day off, and all the businesses are closed, and everyone barbeques. It's like the 4th of July, except bigger.

Once, the summer after I graduated from high school, my friends and I camped out on Main Street to await the parade. (This was a long time tradition in Salt Lake--the party all night was a much bigger deal than even the parade the next morning.) So, we sat around and talked and ate and played cards and watched the dummies who were dragging up and down Main. And then, at about three in the morning, someone ran from the crowd into the street and taunted someone in one of the cars. The car stopped, the doors opened, and out came three guys with pistols and one with a shotgun. The taunter also pulled out his pistol, and then immediately a dozen plain-clothes police appeared out of the crowd, with their guns drawn. To clear the crowds, tear gas was tossed into a mob on the other side of the street, and all of us ducked behind stone planterboxes. It's little things like this that help us remember the sacrifices that the pioneers made, or something.

Anyway, I'm here in Minnesota, and I completely forgot about Pioneer Day until I called my parents a moment ago and they mentioned it. Lousy Minnesotans, neglecting the heritage of the West.

Marketing in Moab

I know this will come as a shock to one and all, but here is a post that is actually about the MBA program. I know! It surprised me, too.

Every fall before class starts, MBAMA (the MBA Marketing Association) goes down to Moab for a weekend of frivolity and merry-making. The new first-year students come in, all wide-eyed and full of trepidation, and the second-years promptly toss them in the river.

Julianne Hall, the MBAMA Vice President of Something, asked several of us to write blurbs about how much we liked it, so she could email the newbies and give them our endorsements. I, of course, overlooked the part of her message that said "only 1-2 sentences," and I wrote a freaking novel. So, here it is in its entirety, since it likely won't get emailed to anyone.

First of all, let me just say that I hate Moab. I hate its weather (because, holy crap, it's 110 degrees). I hate its over-the-top commercialism (I like to imagine that there's a sweatshop in Burma, where six-year-old kids do nothing all day but apply Kokopelli decals to shotglasses). I hate its very philosophy (last year, I took along a copy of Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang just to offset all the weekend-warrior, the-world-is-my-roller-coaster nonsense).

I don't like to golf. I hate to mountain bike. And last year we slept in a hostel with overflowing toilets and no air conditioning. (I understand that we have a real hotel this time around.)

And yet, in spite of it all, I loved the Moab trip.

The way I see it, you can get acquainted with people in a few different ways. They can leap from their canoe into your raft, grabbing the straps of your life preserver to toss you into the Colorado River--you'd need to learn their name there so you can exact your revenge later. Or, you can clutch onto their leg as your open-air Hummer speeds along the edge of a cliff (all while the driver is turned around, chatting with you)--you'd need to know their name in that situation so that you can shriek it in terror. Or, you can sit in the shade of Delicate Arch, surrounded by red, wind-worn stone and a spectacular view of Canyon Country--you'd need to learn their name there so that you can say "Man, this is breathtaking." Or, I guess, you could learn someone's name while you're crammed tightly together in a too-small study room, wearing too-tight suit coats, while trying to do too much homework in too little time. I don't know about you, but I don't think I'd pick that last option.

You guys already know the features of the trip: recruiters, rafting, whatever. But the whole point is that I met Brian Steffen on that trip, and he and I instant message each other almost every day; I met Charlie Skinner on that trip, and he and I are interning at the same company; I met Julianne Hall on that trip, and now she's the person I email when I need to vent my frustrations; I met Terence Stephens on that trip, and now I read his blog religiously; I met Anthony Nielson on that trip, and we sat together at General Conference.

The MBA program is only tangentially about how well you can determine the value of stocks, or reduce transportation costs in a supply chain, or deduce the necessary sample size of your market research. The MBA program is about people--and not in a hollow networking way, but in the sense that your ability to succeed in the program (and the business world, and life) lies in the relationships you make with other people.

Come to Moab. I promise that it will be worth it. And I promise that I hate that city more than you do.

The Name Game

So, my wife continues to be pregnant, and we're continuing to bat around name ideas. We're very pleased with our girl names (Marlo and Lindy), but we just can't find any boy names that we really like.

For quite a while, we thought that Benjamin Franklin Wells could work. Erin liked it because she liked the name Ben, and I liked it because then I could call the kid Hawkeye. (For you uncultured swine, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, aka Hawkeye, was one of the doctors on M*A*S*H.)

But now Erin's not as sold on it. I think she doesn't see the point in naming a kid Ben if I'm never going to call him Ben. (My son Sammy was referred to around our house as Mr. Pajamas for quite some time, but it's kind of faded lately. Holly was either Little Jo or Runty Gunterson.)

Anyway, Erin recently proposed a few new names to the mix, and I want you to see if you can pick out what's weird about them: Luke, Jesse, and Beau. Now let's think: aside from being thoroughly terrible names (Beau?) what do they all have in common? Any ideas?

Well, if you guessed "They're all from the Dukes of Hazzard", then you're right! She swears she didn't realize this, but I know better.

So, I have now proposed a few more names for her to consider: Rosco, Cooter, Enos, and Cletus. And, no matter what the actual name ends up being--and assuming it's a boy--I hereby vow to nickname this kid Boss Hogg. (Let's hope he grows up to be a lineman, rather than a concert pianist.)

Twine and Baseball

So, I let the blogging go another solid week. If there's any silver lining to this cloud of laziness, it's that I blog here way more regularly than I do some other tasks (like returning emails, or taking out the garbage).

This last week has been quite busy. My friend Cameron, who graduated from the BYU MBA program in 2007 and now works for Ford, brought his family down from Michigan to visit over the 4th of July. It was great fun. Erin has recapped the week in great detail over at her blog (including lots of pictures), but here are a few highlights:

We saw the World's Largest Ball of Twine Made By Just One Man. Does that name seem a little long to you? That's because it used to be the World's Largest Ball of Twine, but then some dang punk kids in Kansas made their own ball of twine that was bigger. And then a jerk in Wisconsin, who goes by the precocious initials JFK (his name is James Frank Kotera), made the heaviest ball of twine. (That ball of twine also has a little friend, who is a ball of string named "Junior".) And, of course, there's some tool in Texas who built some other ball of twine. But I think he should be excluded from the running because he's a millionaire, and probably forced little kids build the twine ball in a sweatshop.

So, it raises the question: what the freaking heck? Of all the dreams in the world, why are all of these people aggressively seeking the title of Twine Ball Champion?

If I had to pick sides, I think I'd definitely choose the Darwin, MN twine ball. On the highway they have a sign that says "Welcome to Twine Ball Country", and they have the annual Twine Ball Days festival in August. That jerk JFK's twine ball never galvanized an entire community!


In other news, I spent three days this week in Naperville, IL, which is a suburb of Chicago. I've never been to Chicago before, and I must say that I quite liked a very small part of it (downtown), and quite disliked the rest. If you've been reading my blogs for years--and I imagine that none of you have--you'll know that I have an intense dislike for urban sprawl. I think the definition of crappy urban sprawl is: it takes more than two hours to drive from the suburbs into downtown Chicago. Holy crap. (More than once we commented that there are about four times as many people in the greater Chicago area than there are in Utah, total.)

But when we got into the city, what fun there was to be had! ConAgra treated all of us interns to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, except that instead of sitting in the ballpark, we were at one of those rooftop places across the street. (Several former apartment buildings built bleachers on their roofs, and you have a magnificent view of the game--and all-you-can-eat awesome food, including Chicago dogs, Italian sausages, BBQ chicken, ribs, etc. My fellow intern Josh Gillett snapped these picture with his cell phone.

Now, regular readers of my blogs will no doubt remember that I couldn't care less about baseball. So, when another ConAgra employee (who I didn't know) sat next to me, he happily explained many of the rules and why baseball is awesome. For an hour, this man told me all about baseball, and how it's like chess. He even made me genuinely interested (though I don't know how long it will last). And then, after all that, I discovered that he's one of the four company presidents. As in, he reports directly to the CEO. Also: he'll be sitting in on my final presentation in August. So, now I'm just hoping that I didn't say anything too stupid, or had sausage stuck in my teeth.

(Really, that is one of the best things of this internship--we have great opportunties to meet with the top brass, and they're all very friendly and helpful.)

The Last Thirty Days

Well, it's been a good solid month since I last blogged.

Back when I was a teenager, I used to try to keep a journal, but I was really lousy at it. So, I'd write for about a week, and then forget about it for a month, and then try to get back into it. But I felt like so much had happened that future readers--I always wrote as though someone would eventually read it--would be completely confused. So then I'd have to write a big recap of everything that happened in the last month, to fill my future descendants in on all my exciting doings. And then, a month later, I'd come back to it and read what I'd said, and be embarrassed that future generations would hear about how enamored I was with Jenny Naylor, and so I'd tear all the pages out. Seriously, I think that journal has about four pages remaining. Nothing ever lasted long.

Anyway, the point of all that is to say that I'm going to recap the last month of Minneapolis.

The day after we got here, the air raid sirens went off and we thought the Germans were after us. But no, it was just a tornado. It never actually touched ground but the hail was nightmarish and it dented the roof of my car. (However, my car is a crappy piece of Korean tinfoil that dents when bugs hit the hood.)

My internship project is focused on Orville Redenbacher's kernels (as opposed to microwave popcorn). My whole life is popcorn. All day I read about expansion size and hybrids and unpopped kernels and mushrooms vs butterflies. I'm a popcorn salesman.

When we first arrived we got to go to a preview screening of Kung-Fu Panda, since several ConAgra products as co-branded (Kid Cuisine, Chef Boyardee, Orville Redenbacher's), and now my son is obsessed with it. As fanatical Holly was about Sleeping Beauty, Sam is about Kung-Fu Panda. He's the Dragon Warrior.

They have the world's most awesome grocery store here: Byerly's. It's carpeted, for crying out loud. It has all the regular stuff that a grocery store would have (a deli, a chinese place, a bakery, etc) but it's all really amazing quality. They even have a chocolatier area. And, the cheese section is phenomenal. (And, since our area is predominately Jewish, they have two butcher shops: a regular one and a kosher one.) I think it's neat.

It's really green here. Growing up in deserty Utah, I've always been of the mindset that if you live in an area with a lot of old trees, then you must be rich. Minneapolis must be full of millionaires! Also: there are rabbits and squirrels all over the place. (Several people here have described squirrels as rats with fluffy tails. But I like them.)

On Monday I took the corporate jet to Omaha and back, and I sat just behind the CEO. (I shook his hand and introduced myself, and he forgot about me an instant later.)

We visited Duluth and Lake Superior, and I later downloaded The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and now I know all the words. Would you like me to sing them to you?

I visited a factory that makes popcorn balls and fruit snacks, and it totally Willy Wonka. The machine was acting funny, and popcorn balls were flying all over the room.

If you would like to see pictures of some of my travels, go visit my wife's blog. And leave comments, because she wants people to leave comments. It's here.