Beauty Beyond Belief

Three weeks after our trip up to Alaska and Victoria, BC, I am still reeling from shock at our last "tourist" stop: Butchart Gardens.

I had heard about it, and I had even seen several pictures from various people who had gone, and, I must say, I was still hopelessly unprepared for the overwhelming beauty of the whole thing.

Just look how gorgeous it is!

The colors, the variety, the order are unlike anything that I have ever seen.

It's beautiful in the day time....

It's beautiful at night...

It's beautiful through a crappy can't-take-night-time-pictures camera!

Even the garbage cans were exquisite!

It was even beautiful when my finger invaded the upper right portion of the lens during a night-time photo with my can't-take-night-time-photos camera!

And, of course, there was a piece of time and space etched out in Butchart Gardens that perfectly complimented my wife's own striking beauty...

So, yeah, it was absolutely, unequivocally, unmistakably awesome beyond all reason.

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How Many Teeth Does The Tooth Fairy Pick Up Each Night in Utah?

Somebody asked me a question about my Tooth Fairy post the other day that got me thinking. How many baby teeth are lost every day in Utah?

I began with Googling. Surely someone else has thought of this and run some numbers, right? Lo, there is a tooth fairy site that claims that the Tooth Fairy collects 300,000 teeth per night.

That's a lot; however, when I ran the numbers, it started to seem awfully low.

Let's assume that the Tooth Fairy collects all baby teeth regardless of quality and we assume that all children lose all their baby teeth. The world population of children sits at 2.2 billion, with 74.2 million of them in the United States. Of those, approximately 896,961 of them are in Utah. This means that somewhere around .04077% of the world's children are in Utah.

If we assume that kids in Utah lose teeth at the same rate as all other children in the world and that each day in the year is just as likely as the rest to lose a tooth, then we have that of the alleged …

BYU and the Sunday Compromise?

I read an article by Brad Rock this morning where he quoted heavily from Dr. Thomas Forsthoefel who was giving his opinion on religious institutions being involved in sports. BYU, of course, came up.
I think Forsthoefel came off sounding a bit misinformed about the culture, drive, mission, etc. of BYU. Below is the email that I sent to Brad Rock this morning after finishing the article:
Brad -
That was an interesting article. I tend to disagree with Forsthoefel, though, or at least disagree with what I may have read into his comments.
A quote in your article says:
"There may be a kind of growing pain. BYU is in the real world and the real world works on Sunday. Can we (BYU) live with the adjustment? I'm empathetic with that, whatever decision is made, people are going to be unhappy.… Some will say get with the program, we'll be OK at the next level, others will say we've sold out and we've made a deal with the world."

This seems to suggest one or two things; fir…

Baby Names: What my daughter's name has to do with an ancient Persian Fairy Tales

If you read my previous post on my sons' names, you'll know that this post is about my daughters' names.

When we found out that we were going to have twins, I vowed that there names were not going to rhyme or alliterate. We weren't going to do Jadyn and Jordan, or Kim and Tim, or Esther and Edgar (all likely candidates for other, less elitist parents, especially Esther and Edgar). I did want the names to have something to do with one another somehow.

Felicity Mae CummingsFelicity's first name has little to do with its underlying Hebrew meaning or its tie to Biblical history and everything to do with the fact that this was a name that Kristi had always wanted one of her girls to have because she liked that it meant "happiness".

So, to tell you the truth, I didn't do a lot of research on this name because its place in our family had already been decided.

But, it was excellent material to work with. The initial spark that 'Felicity' provided gave …

I'd Rather Be Deriving

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