I’ll just wait here until you do the math in your head. Ready?

The city was (is?) obligated to provide the main sewer line for each house on new construction, but replacement when that main line wears out is entirely the homeowner’s obligation. Some of our neighbors have had their main line collapse and had to replace it under emergency situations; others have preemptively had it replaced or repaired; the most economical technique is one that slides a thin PVC sleeve inside the tarpaper, which costs about $4000. And others have, like us, crossed their fingers and hoped that if they ignore the problem it’ll go away.

But you can never really ignore it completely. So when the main line backs up and refuses to drain, as it has a couple of times in the dozen years we’ve had the house and as it did this morning, you can’t ignore the possibility that this time might be the time. We still don’t know; I wasn’t willing to pay the 50% overtime surcharge to get a rooter-wielding plumber out on a holiday, so we’re doing no laundry or dishes (and organizing trips out to Wal-Mart to use the pottie) until tomorrow morning to find out if the line can be rooted one more time.

You’ll know if it can’t, because I’ll be launching the mother of all blegs. Stay tuned.

This is the kind of theatrical B-movie that’s almost impossible to release these days. In fact, the same movie could have been made several million dollars cheaper (just cut out a bunch of unnecessary flying footage and some of the explosions in the finale — the audience would have been compensated by cutting back on the shaky-cam so we could see the fights more clearly), but then it would have been dumped to video by nervous distributors who think that expensive excess is the only path to theatrical profitability for “guy” flicks.

I enjoyed it as a throwback to the “good ol’ violence” days of the ’80s; my only complaint is that none of the merc team got killed in the climax, so there’s no room for Jean-Claude Van Damme to be recruited for the sequel.

(I’m probably the only person around who took note of Gary Daniels’ name in the opening credits, and kept imagining his reaction to the production: “I thought I’d be relegated to cheaper and cheaper DTV features for the rest of my career, and here I am duking it out with Sly Stallone AND Jet Li!”)

I suppose that opens me up for the neo-luddite accusations (or just from my mom) that I’m too dependent on technology for my day-to-day living. Here’s how I think of it: any technology that you can take or leave isn’t really useful to you; it’s just a novelty. For it to be truly useful, it has to be integrated into your life, and that means that its removal causes causes hardship and/or major adjustment. That’s the hazard that you have to live with if you want to take full advantage of the benefits of any technology: cars, telephones, TiVos, Google Calendar.

That meant that I couldn’t do most of the things on my to-do list (or even access my to-do list, as both UberNote and Google Calendar were cut off to me). Not many people have my cell number, so I can only imagine the number of voicemail messages that are backed up. Last night’s post about my twenty year missionary anniversary was actually posted this morning and backdated.

Bleh.

It’s become a bit of a cliché for returned missionaries to say that their mission was the “best two years” of their lives. Possibly they mean it was the best discrete two year period of their lives, or that it was the single period which had the most positive effect on them. (Or maybe they really mean that it was the best two years; I shouldn’t judge someone else’s experience.) That’s probably how I look at it: the most influential two years of my life.

And, frankly, that’s aside from any spiritual maturity I gained as a result of my service, not that I discount such. The entire experience is designed to turn boys into men, in a way that nothing else – not even military service – can match. To wit:

• Mormon teens expect and plan for their mission experience for years ahead of time. (LDS men are expected to serve once they’ve turned nineteen; LDS women, if they choose to serve, can do so once they turn twenty-one. It’s considered more of a responsibility of the men.) In fact, they’re expected to save their own money to pay for it.
• Much like the military, they adopt a proscribed hair cut and a “uniform” of a white shirt and tie. They give up the use of their first name and are referred to, even among themselves, as “Elder Whatever.”
• They do not choose the location of their missionary service. They could be assigned somewhere stateside, or anywhere in the world, and after a short stint at the Missionary Training Center (three weeks if going English-speaking, eight weeks if going foreign-speaking), they arrive at their “field of labor.”
• They are expected to leave behind all concerns, hobbies, and other matters which could be distracting. They should only call home on Christmas, Mother’s Day, and in extreme emergencies. They should write or email their family once a week, and any others on the same schedule. (Usually they do this on the one day of the week their mission designates “Preparation Day,” on which they do laundry, go grocery shopping, and catch up on anything else that isn’t proselyting.)
• They are expected to always been with a missionary companion, whom they don’t choose; the Mission President (himself a full-time volunteer for the Church, along with his wife) assigns him where and with whom to serve, with frequent transfers around the mission area to different locales and companions.
• They are expected to wake in the morning, spend an hour or two in study (both religious text and their foreign language, if any), then proselyte until lunch, then proselyte until dinner, then proselyte until bedtime.
• They are expected to sever themselves from popular entertainment – music, movies, video games, etc. They are supposed to also keep themselves away from any personal contact with the opposite sex.

Again, even leaving behind any question of whether what they teach is true or not, the missionary lifestyle creates a discontinuity with their previous selves. They replace pop cultural concerns with work. They learn to be outgoing, bold and devoted. They learn how to focus on the task at hand full time.

There’s a maturity that returned missionaries can exhibit which isn’t recognized or encouraged as much in the broader culture today. Returned missionaries are ready to stand up and be men; there isn’t as much of the “man-child syndrome” visible among Mormon men. Returned missionaries are ready to pursue their education, get married, and be adults. I know of no one, regardless of faithfulness, who hasn’t been changed for the better by the experience. And I’ve known a few young Mormon men who, for one reason or another, didn’t serve a mission (instead going into the military, or focusing on their education), and in each case I’ve said to myself, “You know what this kid needs to help him grow up?”

Of course, I’ve got more reason to consider my mission a life-changing experience that most returned missionaries. A first laid eyes on Sister Fuller a month into my time at the MTC; she had just arrived to train in Japanese to go to the same mission, Japan Tokyo South. I thought she was gorgeous. We never served in the same area at the same time, but we knew all the same people by the time we had each gotten back. I was going to Brigham Young University afterward and she was living in Provo, and we both got a ride with the same person to a missionary reunion. We started dating, and thus we each bypassed one of the traps that returned missionaries fall into: they want to tell all of their stories, and pretty much nobody cares. But we knew all of the same places and people, both missionaries and Japanese members, and by the time we ran down on stories we were engaged. That summer, a little less than a year after I got back, Sister Fuller became Mrs. Shumate.

The calendar tells me it’s been twenty years since I entered the MTC, but it’s hard to wrap my mind around it. It certainly doesn’t feel like the time since then has been greater than my lifespan up to that point.

Eric (Theric) Jepson and William (Wm) Morris are editing an anthology called Monsters & Mormons, meant to showcase fiction featuring, well, monsters and Mormons, aimed primarily at an LDS audience. (More info here.) I heard about it when they announced it in April, but I had no plans to submit — until I heard Jaleta Clegg’s submission at her reading at CONduit in May. “This,” I thought, “would be fun.” And no, I didn’t appropriate anything from Jaleta’s story except for the very broad idea of supernatural happenings in a contemporary Mormon setting.

So I wrote my story, called “Other Duties,” and sent it in. Submissions don’t close until October, but I heard back a week ago — and they’ve just made it public — that my story made the round of “early admits” for the anthology (so, too, did Jaleta’s).

It’s good to know that success in that particular arena is possible, if not guaranteed.

Over at Cold Fusion Video Reviews, I made the threatened template change this week, and I think I’m done tinkering with it for now. Here’s my constant dilemma: I’m drawn to clean templates. So I install them, then clutter them up immediately. I’m my own worst enemy, or at least my own worst design client.

Both there and here, I’ve been experiment with WordPress’ Google Fonts plugin, which allows you to use any of the free Google Fonts on your website instead of the old “Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman” trio of choices. This site, in case you’re wondering, is currently rendered in Droid Sans. I kept hemming and hawing over the font to use at Cold Fusion, until I finally realized that, unlike the clean and spacious layout here, I had enough clutter and color there that an unfamiliar webfont on top of it was an impediment to reading, not an inducement. So I’ve gone back to garden-variety Verdana. (Although I may end up using some other font for titles and headings.)

Every once in a while, I think that I should have gone into graphic design. Then incidents like this make me realize that, no, wait, I suck at it. I appreciate good design; I just can’t accomplish it.