Our House

So, we are moving out of our house. We have liked it. Here it is, one year ago:

Things that are good

• We have a house to move into in Michigan, and it is my friend and her family's old house. She promised flowers in the springtime since the bulbs are still there. So exciting!
• Jacob is very cute and he has tolerated a lot of time in the playpen so I could work on things at home for school & packing these last couple of weeks
• We hiked Ensign Peak on Monday night with some friends and the view of Salt Lake City was amazing. Jeff said, "This is the result of urban planning." And he's right, and I would probably add "inspired" in there somewhere. :)
• Happy Pioneer Day!
• I still like my hair cut
• My sister took me to see Little Women the musical last night for an early birthday present. IT WAS SO GOOD. One of my favorite pair of lines:

Marmee: "Oh, Jo! You look so...alluring!" Jo: "I think the word is ALARMING."

And best of all, today I submitted my final draft of my thesis to my committee members. That is a VERY good thing. I'll defend at least once next week and then just have silly things to sort out after the move.

10 months and cute as ever!

Jacob had his 10 month celebration on Sunday, complete with (Mom's feeble attempts to take) pictures of him and his fuzzy brown bear that appears to be shrinking! He gained a whole pound in the last month, and is now tipping the Infantometers at 22 lbs 2.5 oz. Very healthy, and as you can see above, very happy and squirmy! It was a fun little game for him to see how fast he could turn to his left before I could get a picture; he was just laughing and laughing. We have several that turned out like the first one and the second one...it's no wonder why his socks were hanging off at the end.

My site

So, I finally have a website. I have made many sites in the past, including two famous ones:

angelfire.com/id/jlamro

http://www.hoopesgenealogy.com

But have never had one just for me. Well, since I will soon be a PhD student, where name recognition is important, I made a website for myself.

http://www.jeffreyhoopes.com

It is nothing fancy at all (unlike the angelfire site, which is basically amazing. It was built when I was in high school), but, it is what I need. A place to park my name and my face, and some of the little bit of work I have done thus far.

So, yep, there I am. Thanks to Kevin for funding this amazing venture.

Anniversary Trip

So, for our anniversary, Stacey and I went on a trip. It had been a secret where we were going for the last month, and Stacey was anxious to see where we were going. I made her wear this blindfold as we drove there, at least for about the first 45 minutes of the trip. So, we went to southern Utah, to stay at the cabin of one of the professors I work with. The cabin was amazing, but more on that later. The largest attraction near the cabin is Capitol Reef National Park, about 20 minutes away. In the park, we did a lot of stuff. Here we are at the Hickman bridge, a natural bridge we hiked to. Here is Stacey in the Grand Wash. It was pretty cool, like walking in an Indiana Jones screen set. In Bicknell, UT, at the Sunglow restaurant, they serve a pickle pie. It is famous (or, so the sign said on the door). So, we tried it. It was alright. So, the cabin we stayed at was amazing. It has many room, and a very many lot of beds. I have been in several people's second homes, and many of them focus on how wealthy the people are, and making the homes as flashy as possible. Not this cabin. It was very nice and pleasantly decorated, but not with the glitz and showy-off-ness that I have seen in other second homes. It was obvious that its main goal was to be able to bring a very large family together to have a good time. For example, it probably had 30 beds in it and many cribs. It was amazing. It was a very peaceful place in a very beautiful area. We enjoyed our stay there very, very much. Here is Stacey in front of the cabin. So, outside the cabin was an appealing feature. A bell. Here I am demonstrating the bell.

All in all, we had an amazing time together seeing the park and relaxing together. It was pleasant to celebrate three years of marriage to my best friend with my best friend. It was a good time.

Italy

So, a couple weeks ago I went to Italy for a conference. I never reported on my trip. Now, I know that 99% of the people who read this blog read it because of my wife and are primarily interested in her posts, but, I will write about this trip anyways. Mostly, I will show a few pictures of some things I saw, and provide brief descriptions. I started out the trip going to Lugano, Switzerland. It is just across the Swiss border, and is very beautiful. I went to church there on Sunday, and, the Church is still true when done in Italian in Switzerland.

This is Milan's largest attraction, the Duomo. It is the fourth largest cathedral in the world, and is amazing. I have seen many amazing things in my life created my nature, that make you sit back in awe. I had never experienced that with something man made. This made me sit back in awe. Started over 600 years ago, this building is old, huge, and so amazing. Here is me on the roof of this building. The statues all over the place are large - 4-6 feet tall, and there are over 1000 of them on the building. I just kept on taking picture after picture, hoping somehow I would be able to capture the magnificence of the building - I failed.

After the conference ended, I spent a few days in Italy on my own dime. I went to Venice. It was alright. This is a picture. While the thought of a city with streets of water sounds quaint, my vote is that it was somewhat overrated.

I also went to Verona, Italy. This is the third largest Roman arena in Italy, and the best preserved. It was amazing to see the Cathedral in Milan and think it was over 600 years old. It was even more amazing to think that this building is 2000 years old (completed in 30 AD). It seats 25,000 people. Had the people of the New Testament walked up to Verona, it would have been there. Amazing.

This is a castle in Milan. It was pretty amazing. At the conference, we had a dinner. It was the longest dinner I had ever been to, with official time (as kept by me) at 2 hours and 58 minutes. They like lots of courses, and like to eat slowly. I also ended up with 5 separate glasses at my setting. A lot of glasses. It was also the first time I had been given a fish knife. It was definitely the place for a refined and cultured Idahoan such as myself.

This statue of the dead Christ and the Virgin Mary is by Michelangelo. He didn't finish it. I saw a lot of art there, even though Milan is not known for its art. It was amazing to see works of art that were from 400-1600 years old, and see how beautiful it was. Amazing.

So, this was a little balcony in Verona, Italy. It is supposed to be where Juliet talked to Romeo. What they forget to tell all the tourists is that it is a fictional story. Anyways. It was still kind of cool.

So, that is that. Like I mentioned, I saw a lot of amazing things, and the more I saw, the more I realized I could not capture my amazement by taking a lot of pictures. But, I tried. Here are all the pictures I took on a little show. It will go through them. However, if you want to look at them, it would be best to click on them and look at them all at the same time.

Brown socks and a dark suit

So, this morning I was putting on my shoes, and I was thinking about a time on my mission. I was with one of my companions, and in the presence of the Assistant he was talking about the proper color of socks to wear with the proper color of shoes and suit. He had many different colors of socks, and chose them very, very carefully. I thought to myself, “that is so stupid.” The assistant said in a chipper, assistant kind of way, “That is so cool. You are so lucky to know all of that.” My companion then went on to talk about how he worked at some trendy clothes store (The Gap or something) and so knew all about clothes.

Well, I felt pretty bad for feeling the way I felt. In my emulation of the assistant, I wished I could feel proud of my companion for knowing what he did about “fashion”. I wondered if I was jealous, and with my missionary zeal, decided to be prouder of people and the things they knew.

Well, I thought about that this morning as I put on brown socks, brown shoes, and a dark, dark suit, and how I was not doing things as I should.

Then, during church, as I crossed my legs, my blessed wife leaned over and whispered, “why are you wearing brown socks and a dark suit?”

And, my thoughts of the morning came back to me. And, at the same time, I knew exactly why I was wearing brown socks and a dark suit, and why I had thought the information my companion knew was stupid. In order, because those are the first socks that came out of the drawer, and because it is.

I get dressed to keep myself warm and to keep myself modest. That is it. I utterly HATE fashion, matching, looking trendy, or anything like it. I realized this in a deep and satisfying way. I felt like I came to know myself a little bit better today. I feel liberated, like I could go put on my rainbow suspenders, and just be happy knowing my pants won't fall off.

Sharp scissors + (-12) inches = ???

In between working on my thesis and running other errands in search of an elusive shirt to wear to Kevin & Tess's wedding, I paid a quick visit to Supercuts this afternoon. Let's just say it'd been quite a while since I'd had a haircut.

Here's how it went down, literally: in a ponytail for the most part! I'm putting it in the mail tomorrow morning and I hope it can be used to help make a little girl somewhere out there feel happy. What do you think of the new 'do?

Three Years

So, we have now been married officially for three years. For those of you who may not know this, Stacey and I celebrate our anniversery on the date calculated in the Easter, Thanksgiving, fathers and mothers day style, as opposed to the traditional style. Our anniversery is on the second Friday of July. So, we just had it. One thing we do every year is to create a video with the highlights of the year. Traditionally, I give this video to Stacey for a present. This year was no different from all the others (well, the two others). Here is the video. I hope you all enjoy it. It could use some help, and could use a more sophisticated video editing program, but in the end, Stacey and I like it. So, that is that. Let us know what you think of the video.

Madonna con Bambino

So, I went to Italy recently, and was walking through a museum. It was amazing to see all this art that was over 500 years old. There was a little too much of it to appreciate it well, but, it was, nonetheless, amazing. But, I noticed that many, many, many of the pictures were simply titled "Madonna con Bambini". So, I started taking pictures of them. Here is a collection of several things that were thus entitled. They vary very much in how attractive they are, how anatomically correct they are, how many other people are in the work and from what time period (many contain additional Saints from other time periods) and many other such things. However, it was impressive to me that hundreds of years ago it was a popular thing to carve and paint the Christ-child and his mother. Note: All but one of these are original works that were in a museum. The photographs are bad, but the paintings were good. However, one of these pictures was hanging over my bed in my second hotel. Can you guess which one?