Celebration

Evan graduated. (Yay, finally done with BYU!)

He was accepted into 4 MBA schools. Three gave him scholarships. Two gave him Dean's scholarships.

We are headed to Phoenix this summer so Evan can attend Arizona State University.

I finished my last classes on BYU campus.

I finished out the semester-from-hell with a 4.0.

And a scholarship for my senior thesis research, which received a Paper of the Year nomination.

*Lalala* *Celebrating* *Dancing*

News from the Frontline

This week is Hell-on-wheels: the biggest week for both me and Evan, and it is weighted so the second half is much worse than the first. We are going in head-on. Check in on Saturday to see if we are still alive.

In other news, it has come to my attention that from recent posts it may seem as if we only have one child. We do, in fact, have a daughter, and she is doing great. Here is the proof:

Oh, and one of our dog, too, who is Lena's biggest fan. No, really. Lena is the only one who can get the dog to dance.

Time flies when you're having... fun?

Quick(ish) update:

We are still alive.

I have been back at school since May. Full-time.

I will be mostly done with my degree by the time Evan graduates. I will have completed all my major credits.

I wish I had been as dedicated to my school-work last time around as this time.

Evan is still in school and will graduate in April. Full-time. Plus work.

Did I mention Evan is The Man and taking 22 credits this semester?

And next.

And we are both doing capstone classes next semester, too. Crazy? Why, yes.

We got a dog. Her name is Lulu. She is a 3 year old Greater Swiss Mountain Dog. With a puppy brain.

The kids love the dog.

Oliver turned two.

Evan turned 26.

Alena turned 16.

Oliver joined the circus.

We saw Aunty Hayley in CA in August.

The kids got 'bikes'. And love them.

Potty training is complete. (The grand finale was last night as Oliver wandered into my room and proudly announced, "Mummy, I did poops!" at which point I had visions of poop trails on my carpet. But actually it was in the toilet. Alhamdulillah.)

We went camping. Twice.

We went hiking. A lot.

And saw four moose.

We beached.

And parked.

Yes, that is our dog jumping up onto the slide. And, yes, she loves going down them, too.

And I ran a 5k in this:

Then overnight it went from this:

To this:

Ah, well. C'est la vie.

On with finals!

Why I love (and why I picked) Economics

I love Economics. Hannah consistently teases me about the way that it has affected my ability to think clearly (take that as you will) but I thoroughly enjoy my classes and the subject matter.

It helps that my teachers spend the first few minutes of every class showing Youtube clips like this one that they’ve received from their students or fellow professors. (It also really helps that BYU finally un-blocked traffic to the Youtube site from their on campus servers…) But, Youtube entertainment aside, this semester has been particularly enjoyable – I’m finally getting past the core classes and into the elective ones where we basically read an article or a paper and discuss it in class.

Today, in lieu of a Youtube clip, my professor started off my Healthcare Economics class by sharing the way he now introduces Monopolies in his Econ 110 class (Introductory Economics for you non-BYU-ites). I will attempt to recreate that all for you here.

He starts by saying that one example of a monopoly is the BYU Bookstore. For starters, it’s a great tie because it is so close to home and pocketbook for anybody in his student audience. Furthermore, BYU, unlike other bookstores at other local universities, has a return policy that is linked to the campus’ honor code. They will only accept returns for your books if you have dropped the class the books are for, and not if you have found them cheaper from somewhere else. Easily skirted, if you just bend the truth a bit, but every student signs away their right to lie when they enroll for classes at BYU.

In January of this year, a girl who goes to BYU wrote an excellent article about this conundrum, and cited my professor… you can read the full text here if you like. In the article, she quoted the following from my professor regarding the bookstore’s policy:

"The policy acts as a tax on honesty. If a student is honest and purchases a replacement product elsewhere, no refund is available. However, if the student fudges the truth a bit, the student can get a refund. Honesty is punished.

"Most stores compete for consumers not just by the prices they charge, but by the service they give, with a refund policy being an important aspect of service. A more typical policy is to match a competitor's price, or to offer a money-back guarantee if a consumer finds a similar product for a cheaper price. But the Bookstore has a lot of market power given their location; they can act like a monopoly so perhaps they don't need to compete as hard as the typical retailer."

… All of which is absolutely true.

The part that gets funny is the way that the managers of the bookstore responded to the truth. (Admittedly, everything else I’ve got to say is opinion or anecdotal… but as they say in Russian, “In every joke, there is a slice of truth”, I choose to believe there are more than a few slices of truth in this…)

Reaction #1: Following the campus newspaper’s publication of the story I linked to above, the bookstore retaliated by pulling all of their advertising from the Daily Universe’s pages for more than a month.

Reaction #2: The managers of the campus bookstore got in touch with my Econ professor, on the pretense that they wanted to make sure that they were “on the same page”. These geniuses showed up in his office armed with a statistical comparison they had compiled, ready to lay down the law. They set out to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was cheaper for students to buy any of the textbook materials used in the Economics Department from the bookstore than it was to buy them online. They did a great job – using the used book prices at the bookstore against new prices from online retailers like Amazon.com. My teacher pointed out the apples-to-oranges comparison for them, and they quickly changed tack.

Reaction #3: “But the bookstore can’t be a monopoly, because we employ people who are bishops and stake presidents (LDS ecclesiastical leaders)…” I’m not quite sure which angle to attack this one from because it is so vulnerable. Another one of my Econ professors has created what he calls the “Ad Hominem Index”. It is used to judge the logical and rational strength of one’s argument based on the number of personal attacks in it. In a nutshell, it is an inverse relationship… if all you’ve got is “You’re wrong because you suck,” your argument isn’t going to go very well. I think what the bookstore employees had to say is pretty much the opposite of that style of arguing, but no stronger. They’re saying, “we can’t be an evil monopoly, because we’re good people!” Obviously, my professor didn’t have much trouble seeing through their crap, and the managers left, angry and defeated.

But they weren’t done yet.

Reaction #4: To get back at my professor, the bookstore pulled all of the materials he had ordered for his classes from their shelves, replacing them instead with a sign that said “See Professor”.

Today my professor structures his courses so that students don’t have to buy books from the bookstore. In particular, he and the other professors who teach Econ 110 have set the course up so that it can be taken without purchasing anything from the bookstore. All of the reading and coursework can be found on www.aplia.com, for a small fee that goes into Aplia’s pocket. Considering the fact that Econ 110 is a part of the general education core classes for BYU students, and not just Economics majors, the turnover is immense. Easily 400-500 students take Econ 110 every semester, and the bookstore doesn’t get a dime. If the students do want to buy a physical copy of the book, the professors all encourage them to buy it online through Aplia, who sells it for a price less than 50% of what the bookstore charges (even for a used copy.)

I picked Economics because I wanted to be something other than the average “Business-Finance” undergraduate. I stuck with Economics because I thought it was a really effective way of explaining the things that people do and why they do them. I LOVE Economics because in moments like these, it gives you the skill set to intelligently present an impersonal, yet irrefutable argument.

Amazing how a little bit of knowledge goes a long way.

Updates

Fifty stripes for me for being lax at my blogging.

Things that have happened this month:

- Submitted my application (and a sizable chunk of our savings) to USCIS to remove the conditions on my permanent residency. 50 pages worth of documents to prove my marriage to Evan is valid raning from birth certificates to Christmas cards. Ah, bureaucracy.
-Kitchen sprung a leak... ripped up the whole floor and base cabinets, fixed leak, tiled the floor, and showered with our dishes for three weeks.
- Claire came to visit. Well, more came to visit Danny-boy, but it was really nice to see her, even if she did have to crash on our couch whilst our house was a disaster zone (see above). Claire: you have to come and stay with us again so we can redeem ourselves.
- Our car died. One year almost exactly after it blew a head gasket and we had to replace the entire engine. It was out of commission for the whole week that Claire stayed with us. It is now fixed-ish, and we are currently trying to figure out a permanent replacement.
- Received a one year extension on my green card, and we are now waiting for my biometrics appointment on Wednesday, and ultimately for USCIS to get around to approving my case... I have little hope of it taking less than 6 months.
- Oliver and I visited Sarah in Austin for 5 days. We jammed every day full of museums, exhibitions, and restaurants. I miss Sarah.
- Spring finally came, bringing with it blossoms, and colds and flu. It was pretty heinous for all of us, but poor little Oliver got hit the worst. We are on the mend, though.
- Watched conference. Elder Holland always gives the best talks.
- Both kids continued to grow faster than we cared to admit. Lena is jabbering away with rapidly increasing intelligibility. Oliver is crawling, standing (both aided and unaided), climbing, and stretching. Oh, and getting heavier.
- Lena got potty trained! Wohoo!
- We finished our taxes. We are still trying to get over our return amount. Hurray for EITC, and kids!
- Evan finished all of his midterms, and is now working on the last of his papers. Tomorrow is the last day of classes, and not a moment too soon. Then finals, and then more school. Yay!

Pictures soon!

T Minus 2 Hours

In two hours I get my husband back. This week has been pretty busy for him. Every week is busy, but this week he had two Econ midterms, and then one of his Russian professors (a professor that teaches Russian, but is not actually Russian, just for clarification) sprung a midterm on the class with 24 hours notice... scheduled right in the middle of both of his econ tests. Lovely. So, between revision and his normal (absurd) amounts of homework, Evan hasn't exactly had an awful lot of time to really be home and relax. But all of that is going to change in two hours, because in two hours the testing center closes, and even if he hasn't finished, he will have finished. And that means I can finally clean the glass surfaces in our apartment. One of Evan's little idiosyncrasies is that he likes to solve math problems on our windows and mirrors rather than on paper. I think it helps him to collect his thoughts, and I find it funny and rather endearing. So, I thought I would share pictures of some of the surfaces in our place that have been intelligently graffitied.

Some of the kitchen window graffiti...

And on our linen closet door...

And on our bedroom closet door.

I love my husband. And I'll be glad to have him back, and have our family be back to normal.