Advice to Mitt Romney

Observation:  Mitt has had a rough time of it.  Some say too good to be true, others say too true to be good.  Most say he's alright, but isn't there someone else, anybody else for President?  As for me, here is my advice for Mitt:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

English in The Chaos or Chaos in the English?

The Chaos by Rami

I love the English language, but it does have it's difficult pronunciations and spellings and rules of reading a word.  Can you read the poem below?  After looking it over it seemed to me that there should be a competition similar to a spelling bee where a student reads the poem and the one who gets the least errors in pronunciation wins.  At the national level it could be from memory!

The Chaos
Gerard Nolst Trenité

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is: give it up!

TESS-The English Spelling Society says:
The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. The selection of examples now appears somewhat dated, as do a few of their pronunciations, indeed a few words may even be unknown to today's readers (how many will know what a 'studding-sail' is, or that its nautical pronunciation is 'stunsail'?), and not every rhyme will immediately 'click' ('grits' for 'groats'?); but the overwhelming bulk of the poem represents as valid an indictment of the chaos of English spelling as it ever did. Who the 'dearest creature in creation' addressed in the first line, also addressed as 'Susy' in line 5, might have been is unknown, though a mimeographed version of the poem in Harry Cohen's possession is dedicated to 'Miss Susanne Delacruix, Paris'. Presumably she was one of Nolst Trenité's students.

Chaos by Robert Julian

Family Pictures: now with two sons!

Over the Christmas Holidays we had everyone home so couldn't miss a chance at getting family pictures taken.  Who knows when the next opportunity will be.

Haleigh is hiding from the backwash of Megan's powerful stare!

lovey dovey family

The people walking by enjoyed this one I noticed.

 Once again our pictures were done by MP Photography. 

Eldred G. Smith

 Recently I read an article about Eldred G. Smith who celebrated his 105th birthday.  He is an emeritus General Authority of the church at this point but served as the last Patriarch for the whole church.  After he was emeritus the Church decided not to have Patriarchs for the whole church but to have the ones assigned to Stakes throughout the world only.  If you would like to read the article I enjoyed click here.
 

This is more how I remember him looking.

The article reminded me of when I was 17 years old.  I had not yet had my patriarchal blessing and I was graduated from High School and was accepted to BYU.  My parents wanted me to have my Patriarchal Blessing before I left home so we made an appointment with the Stake Patriarch just a couple days before I left for school.  That appointment ended up getting cancelled because the Patriarch's wife got seriously ill and consequently I was unable to get my blessing.  Somehow we learned that if we presented ourselves to the Church office building in Salt Lake with my Patriarchal blessing recommend signed by my Bishop that the Church Patriarch may be able to give us the blessing.  So we did that.

Up to that point in my life I had been known as a very dependable and pretty serious young man.  I had avoided the troubles that many of my peers had gotten into and had kept my focus on doing what was right, working at jobs where I showed my dependability and being friends with lots of adults as well as youth including many of my teachers along the way, and had been preparing myself to serve a mission immediately when I was 19.  My plan was to put in my paperwork in advance of my birthday so I could be on my way when I turned 19.

Then the day arrived that we presented ourselves at the Church Office Building and Eldred G. Smith was able to provide the Patriarchal Blessing.  We talked for a few minutes and then he gave the blessing.  Aside from some important things that were said in the blessing, there was something he said after the blessing that changed my life and drastically affected my long term future.

After the blessing was completed and we were talking together he said that I might want to wait a little while to go on my mission "so you can mature" a little more.  That struck me as so strange because everyone thought I was so mature already.  But as time went by I began to feel that was the right thing to do.  So rather than going on my mission as soon as I turned 19 as planned, I went several months later when I was close to 20 years old.  The reason for that didn't make itself known until about three years later.

While being engaged to Lisa to get married we must have realized that if I had gone on my mission when I originally intended, then she and I would not have met.  Because I went a few months later things worked out just right so we met and had plenty of time to work together in the mission field, so that when it was time for me to come home, and she still had several months left of her mission, the thought occurred to me to wait and marry her when she came home.

It is funny how things work out.  But I learned that when a man of God tells you something--as a minimum you should give it great consideration and see if God doesn't lead you to do what has been recommended.  It might change your life in ways you couldn't even guess. I'm grateful to Eldred G. Smith for giving that advice from the Lord that I may not have listened to coming from anyone else.