Letters from Home

We’ve been a family for 21 years, and Richard continues to remember and tell us about different jobs he has had. We’ll drive by a pizza place and he’ll say, “I worked at a pizza place once.” Or we will walk into a print shop and he can talk the lingo because he “worked a summer at Kinko’s.” Recently I found a paper where I had jotted down a master list of all the jobs he could remember one day. I am sure there are more, but this is a start.

1. First job: Babysitting twice a week
2. As a 15 year old, he cleaned offices at The Daily Spectrum in Cedar City.
3. Through a temp agency, he got a job working for Moore Business Forms where he loaded boxes and printed things.
4. In St George, he worked at The Spectrum inserting ads into papers from 11 pm-3 am on weekends. Sometimes the job went until 6 am. He would come to church at 8 am with blackened hands from all of the newspapers he’d handled all night.
5. He packaged software for shipping.
6. For six weeks he worked at Little Caesars Pizza until he found something better.
7. He worked concessions at the Dixie Center making nachos.
8. He was a parts delivery guy for the Steven Wade Auto Dealership.
9. He had a summer job at Kinko’s Copies and he loved it.
10. He tried a landscaping job in the middle of the summer, digging trenches for two weeks in Ivins.
11. At the Market Basket grocery store he bagged groceries and stocked shelves.
12. At BYU he worked in the bug lab with Dr. Baumann, “picking bugs” (larvae). This man knows his Mayflies, Stone flies, and Caddis flies.
13. As a TA for an electrical engineering class, he graded papers, tests, and homework.
14. As a lab TA for an engineering class he helped students with their circuit design.
15. During his graduate studies, he worked in the FPGA lab at BYU as a research assistant for Dr. Hutchings.
16. For two summers he worked as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory, programming with LabView. The first year he worked on the superconducting super collider. The next year he worked on a cytometer, a cell sorting/measuring instrument.
17. He worked at National Instruments for 8 years in Austin.
18. He worked at Raytheon Missile Systems for 7 years in Tucson.
19. He works at L-3 Communications now.

I am thankful for Richard’s abilities and interests. I am thankful that he has a desire to work. I see his sacrifices for our family. For many years, he has left very early, before most of us are awake, to drive a long way and work a long day. We are a team, and while it’s his paycheck that pays for everything, I know that because I am home he doesn’t have to worry about many things.  I can’t remember a morning when he didn’t kiss me goodbye before he walked out the door. When he comes home to a meal and an orderly house, it’s because I respect what he offers our family. The kids always leave the last cookie for Dad. It’s the least we can do for a guy who has worked so hard for so long.

?Richard read this post and told me that I missed one. He worked at another print shop, making the number an even 20.