Shorter or Longer?

For many men there comes a time when the decision must be made. Will I try to hide or ignore my impending baldness or will I embrace it? I think the healthier approach is to rejoice in baldness. After all, it does come from increased levels of testosterone. I have been going more and more bald in recent years. I keep threatening to shave my head but Alicia was never on board. But I kept looking at pictures and seeing how pathetic it was to delude myself into thinking there was something worth keeping up there. In this time of life changes I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to make this bald...uh bold...move. I took out the clippers and used the largest guard we had and here's the result.

The picture is pretty crappy, but you get the idea. Here's my question, does it need to be shorter or should I let it grow back out. Below you'll find a fairly recent picture of me that shows what my hair looked like before the shave. Personally, I think it needs to be shorter, maybe the stubble look. It will look much better when my head gets tan (I hope). But maybe I'm wrong. Thoughts? Comments? Don't forget I get to moderate the comments so anything out of line will not be posted, and the FBI will show up at your doorstep, with the CIA, and the Mafia. No joke!

P.S. One more factor is the ease of care with short hair: no combing!

The Bartholomew Women

I just loved this picture taken over Christmas break so I thought I'd share it. L-R Trisha, me, mom, Melissa, Theresa. More great family pictures to come, thanks Laurel!

Move Update

Just thought I'd update a little on our moving plans. We will be saying goodbye to Dayton, OH January 30th and weather pending saying hello to Denver, CO on February 1. We are planning on stopping around St. Louis and the next night in Independence where we'll go to some church historical sites. Everything's looking good as far as the home closing process so we'll hopefully call [Eric's Edit: email us for actual address] Aurora, CO home in a week. If anyone needs a home here in Fairborn, I have one available for you :) The packers are coming on Monday and since Eric finished work at ATK on Tuesday, I've put him to work around the house painting and other jobs.

We're also finding how crazy some people can be on Craigslist. If you post anything for free, be ready for a lot of emails right after you post. We also sold some stuff and made some cash but the amount of emails we received really shocked us.

Sorry I don't have any pictures to post but give me two weeks and I'll hopefully have pictures of our new home with our stuff inside. Here's a map of our route out west, just a straight shot on the I-70.

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House. . . Hopefully

Since Eric likes to leave people totally curious about our future house, here's a picture. I went out this past weekend and found it in a day. This house wasn't even on my list of houses to look at but another one on the street was and so we picked up a flyer, got inside, and I fell in love with it. As my realtor said, it was the first one that I smiled in. If anyone is planning on selling their house, just make sure it's clean with no holes in the walls or doors because I saw some pretty interesting things.

Now we just have to get everything for closing by January 31. We'll be leaving Ohio hopefully on the 30th and have a nice snow-free trip to Denver. Crazy times but we're excited!

Why would we want to move to Colorado?

Here are some pictures pulled from Google Earth. The first one shows mostly the hiking and backpacking trails of Colorado (the green guys with a walking stick and pack).


This map shows the bicycle trail network in Denver. One of these trails goes right behind the house we're in the process of buying (curiosity piqued yet?).

Now why on earth would we want to move here?

Book Reviews: Game, Set, Match

Don't worry, this review won't be as long as the last one. I've always enjoyed spy novels and mystery. They are really not too different. I guess I should clarify, when I say spy novels I usually don't mean things like James Bond. The books I often like are really quite the opposite.

A case in point is the three books I just finished: Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match, by Len Deighton. I thoroughly enjoyed another book by him: SSGB, so I thought I'd give these a try. These spy novels are all about character and plot. In fact, I read a review that called them an anti-Bond genre. I know spy novels sound silly, but it's really a great vehicle for a good plot and good character development, these novels don't disappoint. I love a good plot with some twists.

Len Deighton definitely has that Hemingway thing going on of not saying too much. Perhaps it's just good writing, he elaborates on descriptions but he knows when to be succinct too. For instance, in one scene a character intimates that he might do something to see the protagonists friends killed (an idle threat). The next sentence (written in first person from the protagonists point of view) was "I shouldn't have hit him."

Anyhow, the protagonist is Bernard Samson, a middle aged man with a desk job in MI-6. He wasn't formally educated, and had great field experience. He's cynical, somewhat aloof, but can be generally counted on to do the right thing. He's wickedly funny in a sarcastic sort of way too. I won't get into the details, but these books generally have good plots with one significant twist in the end. What is so masterful about these books is the way his personal life is intertwined to the story without it seeming out of place or detracting from the flow. The plots develop steadily and slowly, but it's this steady rise to a climax that made it nearly impossible for me to put these books done. They are very well written. There are actually another two trilogies after this, which I'm starting now. If you want books with plot, wit, drama, and good characters I suggest you read these.

Book Review: Sergeant Nibley, Ph. D.

I finally got around to reading a book Trish gave me last year, Sergeant Nibley, Ph. D., Memoirs of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle written by his son, Alex Nibley. This is definitely a unique book, but I found it very interesting.

First off, it is definitely written in memoir form. There are many snippets directly from interviews that the author did with his dad before he died. There are also many entries that came directly from letter written by Hugh Nibley or journal entries. He also cites a lot of other books (Ambrose a lot, and Frankl too), to give some context. It is a visually appealing book, with interesting sidebars and photographs, and footnotes.

I suppose I should say that it takes a certain type of person to really appreciate this book, in my opinion. First of all, you have to have read some Hugh Nibley. I've read some of his works, and fortunately I read the one that I think is pretty much a pre-requisite to appreciating this book: Approaching Zion. I don't think it's even enough just to know who Hugh Nibley is. Of course, that limits the audience to Mormons, and only a small percentage of them. The reason I say that is because this book covers the experiences of Hugh Nibley just before, during, and just after World War II. If you read his works he's basically a pacifist (I know, that statement can be argued, but he's very strongly anti-war). That really puts the book in context.

But the interesting part was that he actually enlisted in the Army voluntarily. He didn't ever seem to indicate that what he did was wrong. As the Epilogue mentioned, he was a complex individual with some interesting dichotomies. As I read this book I realized just how much his "criticism" in his later years was really just the result of a pessimistic mind. He pretty much always thought the end was near.

On to the good stuff though. The reason I really enjoyed this book was for the war stories. There were some crazy ones. Nibley was in the 101st Airborne and his job was "Order of Battle." Basically he had to track where the enemy was, where they were going, and in what strength. He was an enlisted man but he scored so high on the IQ test they tried to find someplace where he could use his brain. But he was definitely there on the ground, fighting the Germans.

One funny story happened when he was part of the invasion of Normandy (driving a tank of guys in that he had personally waterproofed). When they in the process of getting into the jeep and driving onto the beach a thought went through his head, "Joseph Smith really messed it up when he put elephants in the Book of Mormon." But then he realized that that was only mentioned in the Jaredite time frame, much earlier than the rest of the Book of Mormon and long enough to make traces of their disappearance scarce.

Another time there was a fellow soldier of his who was Jewish and had escaped from Germany, named David Bernay. He hated Nazis and didn't mind killing them. When they were in France they found a man dressed as a civilian who was German. They thought he was a soldier so the commanding officer told Dave to go shoot him. As they went to a ditch the man started talking to Dave. Right before he was about to shoot him they realized that they were from the same town and this man was the Bernay family servant and he was the one who helped them escape. He was just trying to escape Germany. Obviously they spared his life and gave him a job.

There were some other fascinating stories as well. It really made me interested in WWII. In fact, I read Man's Search for Meaning afterwards and I'm now reading Band of Brothers. In closing, perhaps the most interesting thing, is the capacity of Hugh Nibley for understatement. He wasn't totally like a journalist, since he did interject some emotion, but it was minimal. A guy he was having a one on one conversation with pulled a gun out in the middle of it and shot himself in the head. Nibley just says that he got some towels around his head because "head wounds bleed like crazy" and got the medics. Then he mentions going to the funeral and having to write a report. Sometimes he seemed so detached, but it was obvious the war affected him. He was a very interesting man.