Scrapping, Shooting and Lifting

Weekend with the Girls
Friday and Saturday Gloria and Elizabeth met in Ogden with family and friends for a scrapbooking weekend. It was soooo fun. They created some wonderful pages and talked into the night. It's so fun to socialize and have something to show for it afterward.


Tim's Photo Practice
Besides getting things in order before leaving for Europe this week, Tim has been grabbing some photos of the Fall colors and the local temples. He's getting his trigger finger in shape before hopefully getting some photos in Europe that can be used by the Church. Here are a few odds and ends.


Lifting Burdens

Watch and share a new Mormon Messages video, "Lifting Burdens,” in which Apostles of Jesus Christ testify of the Savior’s power to heal, change, and purify us through His Atonement. This video is also available in Spanish.

Tie Tacks, Pumpkin Acts and Travel Facts

Tim's Tie Tack Travesty
Since his days in Australia 40 years ago (OH MY!) Tim has been picking up a tie pin here and a tie tack there. Cheap souvenirs of travel or special occasions etc. Since he has had to wear a white shirt and tie to work everyday of his adult life, his spice is his tie pins. He has one (okay, several) for every occasion (He has four for Columbus Day).

As a part of cleaning up and organizing his office he has finally tackled the pin collection. He mounted a couple for all to see on the office wall, then mounted 6 more on the back of the door and behind it (They disappear when the door is open). Then he built a new board for behind the door in the bedroom which also disappears with the door closed (a good conversation piece only if you want to have the conversation). On the bedroom board (above right) the Wales collection runs top to bottom along the left edge and next to it is the England collection. Also on the board is the LDS collection, the Chinese Olympics collection and a dozen others.

The two boards mounted on the office wall include two different 2002 Salt Lake Olympic pin collections. The top one(on left) is unique. No one else has a collection of every Olympic pin with the Salt Lake Temple on it . The bottom board (on right) is Tim's collection of security badges including FBI, Secret Service, and state and local law enforcement.

Saturday evening Tim spent a couple of hours creating tie tacks by gluing backs to pins. He hasn't caught up for several years. On the right you can see a variety ready for backs and some completed. . . from antique Chinese pins dating back to Chairman Mao's day to modern military pins from Latin America. As with many things Gloria is patient in putting up with Tim's Tie Tack problem.

Preparing for the Pumpkin Party
The Grandkids are having fun preparing for Halloween. They have been decorating with Pumpkins and trying out their costumes. Last week they went fishing and caught some nice ones. Gloria went up and spent a couple of days helping out this week. She enjoyed being apart of her brother Neil's stepdaughter's wedding on Saturday.

Eastern European Education
Tim is preparing for a trip beginning the end of October to Eastern Europe. He will be recording the language versions of 'The Restoration' for the L.D.S. Church in Slovakian, Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Albanian. This will be a fast paced trip with long hours in the recording studios in each city. It will be a real education since he hasn't visited Eastern Europe before. He is looking forward to connecting with former EBM missionaries in Croatia, Slovakia and elsewhere. Stay tuned.

Mormon Messages Mount in MP3 Media
Tim recorded another interview this week for the Into All the World program on the Mormon Channel with Ciro Schmeil, a Stake President from Brazil. There are several interviews up on the website now. More to come!

Download an Episode

If you wish to download the file to your computer, right-click on the Mp3-icon and select "save-target-as".

Episode 9:	Randall Bennett (Samara, Russia)
Episode 10:	Oswaldo Pastore (São Paulo, Brazil)
Episode 11:	Kenneth L. and Mary Duvall (Bilbao, Spain )
Episode 12:	Lee and Holly VanDam (Hong Kong, China)
Episode 13:	Reid and Diane Robison (West Indies )
Episode 14:	Paul and Sara Peterson (Geneva, Switzerland)
Episode 15:	Emrol Gould (Trinidad and Tobago Stake)

Post Conference Euphoria

The 179th Semiannual General Conference, October 2009 was wonderful (click on the previous link for all the English audio/ video/ and text, or here for any of the 98 languages). This conference, for the first time ever, the First Presidency decided to post the audio, video as well as the text of the Priesthood Session. Tim has been making an audio CD of the music of each conference for years. This conference for the first time you can download the music: Conference Music (you can make your own CD).

Conference Content
An interesting analysis of the content of conference is done by doing a "Wordle" Word Cloud from the text. The image on the left is an example (it and others can be found here: Conference Wordle). Another very cool site has a topic analysis (Oct-2009 Conference Statistics) showing the most mentioned topics and comparing over the last 10 and 30 years how they have changed.

Here is a list of the top topics of this conference:
1. 560 references to Christ
2. 421 references to Families/Children
3. 323 references to Women/Mothers
4. 289 references to Love
5. 189 references to Men/Fathers
6. 116 references to Prophets Names
7. 105 references to Prayer
8. 100 references to Faith
9. 96 references to Priesthood
10. 88 references to Adversity/Challenges
11. 80 references to Revelation
12. 76 references to Missionaries
13. 68 references to Youth
14. 66 references to Service
15. 66 references to Scriptures
16. 62 references to Temples

Elder Holland's Testimony
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's powerful testimony of the Book of Mormon Sunday afternoon "Safety for the Soul" was sensational. One of our friends said "When Satan goes to sleep I think he checks under his bed for Jeffrey R. Holland". Here is the link to the Holland text, the Holland Audio and the Holland video on the Church web site. Like all the conference talks it is worth watching/listening to or reading again and again.

Old Testament Visual Resource DVD
The"OTVR" DVD is now available to the public at Distribution or online (OT Product Details) Here is a trailer for it:

Reunions, Conference and Fall is Falling

Conference Preparations
Conference is always a busy time at the Church Office Building for Tim. All the Area Presidencies come in for conference and their staff in AV meet with them to plan and coordinate efforts. Chris Wills is the full-time AV manager in Europe and Africa,. His wife Jeannie is a Church-service AV missionary. It is always great to have them here. We enjoyed having Elizabeth and the kids here for the conference weekend, since Denny had to work.

England Bristol Mission Reunion
The Friday evening before every General Conference the Taggart Family host their former missionaries. What a wonderful, dynamic, and beautiful group gathered this year. We had missionaries and their families come from as far away as Norway (Are Svensen) and from Boise, Idaho; Phoenix, Arizona and all around Utah. Here is a link to other photos on Facebook: EBM (Taggart) Reunion.

General Conference
General Conference was amazing. President Monson annouced 5 new temples (see video) All of the General Conference is online and available in MP3 (and other audio formats) including PRIESTHOOD SESSION for the first time. Just click on October '09 Conf Audio . The music of every session is available here: Music. You could have watched the streaming video in high definition as well as the local, cable and dish broadcasts in HD. It was a wonderful experience. The Taggarts have all committed to do better!

Choose This Day
President Eyring shares how to overcome complacency and discouragement and find joy in service:

How Does He Do It?

Law School Study: How Joseph Does It
We thought it might be interesting to share how Joseph manages to actually physically accomplish what is required of a 1st year law student. The biggest challenge is reading the text books and taking notes.

Text Books = 10,213 Pages, This Semester!
The 16 text books contain that many pages, they should at nearly $1000 dollars. How does one read them when you can't handle the books or turn the pages? The answer, thanks to this amazing age we live in, is to DIGITIZE them. If you pay for the book, many publishers will provide a PDF version. For the others the school provides the scanning into PDF files. So now that you have 10k pages of digital text. . . how do you read them.

Big Screen Monitor
Joseph found a good deal on a computer monitor and Tim mounted it vertically on his desk. Joseph can now drag the documents from his notebook computer to the large monitor to read the documents.

How to Take Notes
Thanks to the wonders of Speech recognition software, Joseph is able to dictate his notes and written assignments and print them out. The software he uses is Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Legal. He previously used the standard product, but the 'legal' version recognizes the Latin phrases and special legal vocabulary.

Trackball Mouse
Joseph is able to use the trackball mouse on his notebook computer and can type one letter at a time with his handy artificial digit made from a pencil with eraser. He calls it "Pedro", named after Napoleon Dynamite's sidekick (he was wearing his "vote for Pedro" T-shirt when he and his occupational therapist figured it out). He can beat his dad at speed-texting with it.

Notes for Class
After printing out his extremely well organized reading notes, Mom helps by putting the pages in plastic sleeves in the case he carries to class on his lap. He is able to turn the pages with 'Pedro' and is as well prepared as anyone.


Gloria: Birthdays and Scrapbooking
Gloria enjoyed celebrating her sister Diane's birthday in Logan this week. It was fun to get together with the kids and grand-kids. They also celebrated with Barta, Gloria and Diane's step-mom who also had a birthday last week.

Gloria and Elizabeth enjoyed a Girl's Weekend scrap-booking together in Ogden with friends and family. They accomplished a lot and had a blast.

Goodbye Red Toyota
The family said farewell to the 1996 Toyota Camry which Tim has been driving to work in since 2000. It sold, not on KSL.com or Craigslist where it was listed, but on Facebook when he mentioned the posting on the other sites. A brother of one of our missionaries saw it and is giving it a good home. Don't we love Social media!

Torts, Trikes, Trinidad and Turning Leaves.

Torts
Joseph is fully engaged in schoolwork. A normal day includes most of the day at the University and the entire evening reading and taking notes. His class schedule includes: Torts, Legal Research, Legal Methods, Contracts and Civil Procedure. He loves all of them except Contracts. His class has had several experiences to familiarize everyone with the potential areas of emphasis. A couple of weeks ago they did a "Big 4 Tour" of the biggest law firms in the city including Kirton & McConkie and Ray Quinney & Nebeker.

Faculty Recruitment Committee
Joseph has been asked to serve as a member of the Faculty Recruitment Committee for the law school. He loves being engaged with life and all it's opportunities.

Trikes
The Bird family is enjoying the waning warm days with wheels aplenty. With Gavin on his big wheels and Cheyenne on the scooter, Ethan leads the way on his new garage-sale bike which he can ride without training wheels! We just had to include one of Gavin's 2nd birthday portraits.

Trinidad
Tim's most recent interview for the Mormon Channel was with Emrol Gould, the stake president of the newly formed Port of Spain Trinidad Stake (read about it here: Stake in Trinidad & Tobago). This is the first stake in the West Indies Mission.

Tim's earliest interview on the Into All the World program with the mission president in Russia Samara has been posted. Here is a direct link to the MP3 audio: Tim's Randall Bennett interview.

Turning Leaves
Gloria shot this great photo in Sardine Canyon on the way to Logan this week. The leaves are just beginning to turn. Full glory awaits.

Tragedy at BYU
Wouldn't you know when a wonderful neighbor gave Joseph and Tim tickets to a BYU game it would be a crushing defeat for the Cougs? It was beautiful weather and a great day for football, just not for BYU.

What Matters Most
This powerful, positive and persuasive message from a living prophet leaves a lasting impact!

Towers

Twin Towers: We Remember
It has been 8 years since the tragedy that occurred with the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. Joseph was in Brazil and Tim and Gloria were in Belgium visiting the Bokrijk historical village near Turnhout, They saw the coverage on TV in a restaurant and watched the second tower come down live. The wonderful video done by AV for the Church is an uplifting way to commemorate the date.

C. O. B. Tower
The first definite sign of Summer's end is in the photo Tim shot at the Church Office Building this week. The Christmas lights are going up! When you have thousands of trees you have to start early.

It's a Tower of Love
The COB has been a tower of love in AV the past few months as Jennifer Dutson one of Tim's Production Coordinators in the AV International Section and Joshua Talbot one of Tim's Production Assistants fell in love. This week they were married in the Salt Lake Temple. They are a wonderful couple and we wish them all the best (Josh is looking for work elsewhere now, got a good job?).

Downtown Towers Rising
It is amazing to see how rapidly the new city center projects are moving along. Tim did a quick photo merge of how the former ZCMI Center area looks from the food court windows looking west. The amount of parking will be amazing.

South Temple Street has been torn up for months. a couple of weeks ago Tim took a shot of the entrance ramps to the underground parking levels below the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and the new City Creek Center. The second photo shows they are now getting the massive forms and re-bar ready for the concrete ceiling that will hold up the street above. The video that follows is a 3D fly through of the project. For more info see the Downtown Rising web page.