Another day, another $0.67 (after taxes)

I’m at work today, as I am most every day. I’ve had a great week, though, so I can’t complain.

On Monday afternoon, I drove to Salt Lake for CPE. I stayed with Mom, had dinner at Café Rio (Mmmm... Pork Burrito. Mmmmm...), went Tuesday to class with one of my friends who used to work at the same place I used to work, ran some errands, and drove home.

This is my week to teach seminary, and we’ve had a raucous good time doing that. Well, I have anyway.

I’ve spent some time working on internal controls, and recurring journal entries. I’ve done a little database development and fixed some problems. And that’s what’s happening with me. What’s up with you?

Clark Family Touring Dates Announced!

MARBLETON, WY—The Clark Family (http://clarksinwyoming.blogspot.com/) has determined tour dates for the remainder of 2007:

• September 25: Aaron to attend the AICPA‘s Annual Update for Controllers at the UACPA Offices.
• October 6-7: The entire family to visit Salt Lake City for family pictures, semi-annual mexican food fiesta, and General Conference.
• October 16-17: Aaron to attend SEC Reporting CPE.
• Thanksgiving: Probable excursion to either Logan or SLC* for food, feasting, and football. Unless, of course, you want to come hang out with us.
• December 31: Possible excursion to Logan or SLC* for New Year’s.

* Weather permitting.

Some days are more intellectually stimulating than others

Today was a pretty good day for me. I spent some time figuring out how to account for stock options given as compensation for employees. My company uses stock options regularly as signing and annual bonuses, and until today, nobody here really knew how to account for them. Well, I read the accounting guidance, and looked at the auditors calculation for 2006, and I feel like I got a pretty good handle on things.

For those readers who may not be accountants, accounting for stock option expense is one of the more “technical” bits of accounting. The literature uses a lot of terms of art, and you have to determine things like volatility of the underlying stock, and the fair value of the option. (We use the Black-Scholes model, for those who are interested.) All in all, it’s now 7:15 pm, and I just finished putting together the spreadsheet that will handle the appropriate calculations, and figure our expense for each month. It feels really good to be done with that.

Now I’ll go home and take my stripes from Julie for not being home for dinner. Doh!

Chilean Independence Day 2007

If we were in Chile right now, we would have spent the day feasting on one of the most delicious Chilean dishes ever: the empanada (pronounced empana’a).

This is the best empanada recipe I’ve had since I came home:

RELLENO (Filling)

• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 3 medium-size onions, chopped (about 3 cups)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 12 ounces lean ground beef
• 2 teaspoons sweet paprika
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano, crumbled
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Hot pepper sauce of your choice, to taste
• 1 cup beef broth
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

MASA (Dough)

• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup vegetable shortening (Chileans would turn and spit at the thought of using shortening instead of lard, but this is an American version of the recipe.)
• 1 cup warm milk

ADDITIONAL ITEMS

• 1 large egg white lightly beaten with 1 tablespoon of water
• 12 pitted black olives, sliced (In Chile, you would neither pit nor slice the olives.)
• 2 hard-cooked eggs, peeled and sliced
• 1/4 cup seedless black raisins, optional (The recipe says “optional” but I completely disagree. Julie made these once without raisins, and it just wasn’t right.)

DIRECTIONS

1. To make the filling, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring a few times, until transparent, about 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic and salt and cook for 30 seconds. Increase the heat to medium-high, add the beef, and cook, stirring constantly, until it loses its pink color. Stir in spices and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the beef broth and cook for a few minutes, until the meat absorbs some of the liquid. Sprinkle in the flow, stir, and cook until thickened. The mixture should be soupy. Let cool, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate overnight to let the flavors develop.
2. To make the dough, put the flour, baking powder and salt in a food processor and process for 5 seconds. Add the shortening and process until the mixture looks like cornmeal. With the machine running, add the warm milk through the feed tube until the dough almost gathers into a ball. Transfer to a floured board and knead for a few seconds. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 30 minutes.
3. Form the dough into a log and cut into 12 portions. On a lightly floured board, roll each portion in to a 6-inch circle. Lightly brush the edge of half the circle with the egg white mixture. Place about 2 heaping tablespoons of the filling in the center, top with a few slices of olives, a slice of egg, and a few raisins. Fold half o fhte circle over to form a half—moon and press the edges together firmly. Brush the top with the egg white mixture. Fold the rounded edge over 1/2 inch, making three separate folds—one on each side, then one on the bottom—to create a trapezoid shape. Brush the folds with the egg white mixture and place on a lightly greased baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining dough and filling.
4. Preheat the oven to 375° F.
5. Pierce the tops of the empanadas once with a fork and bake until lightly colored, about 20 minutes. Be careful not to overbake. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Serve with onion and tomato salad, drizzled with equal parts oil, salt, lemon and cilantro. Mas rico que los mormones!

As requested, the photo from the header

This is the photo that I took when we were last at Fremont Lake. It was part of that week when we had nine guests from WV3 come and stay with us. I thought it turned out rather nicely.

Hope you enjoy the new template

So, I stuck with the monochromatic thing. I just can’t seem to get away and find a multichromatic theme that I like. Does that mean I’m a boring person?

If you were trying to look at the site this morning, and saw some of the garbage that I was seeing as I was frantically trying to see the new version of the site, I apologize.

Some of the exciting new features:

• Everything was hand coded by yours truly (except for the Blogger Bar at the top).
• Totally breaks on Internet Explorer. I’m working on it, but that will have to be another day. Until then, get Firefox.
• Comments are visible (or possibly invisible) on each page, so you don’t have to click through to see more stuff.
• The picture at the top? Fremont Lake outside of Pinedale.

Yes, there are probably a bunch of bugs, but I'm no longer dependent on someone else for design. Freedom, sweet freedom.

Updates from Aaron

Things here are going along swimmingly. Julie got mad at me for spending time on the computer, so I have been avoiding it a bit over the past couple of weeks. We’re in the middle of period close for August, and I have a couple of big projects that I’m tackling in conjunction with that.

Seminary is good. The waking up early has been difficult, to say the least. When I was a missionary, we followed special rules in our mission to conform with the Chilean culture: In bed at 12:00 AM, up at 8:00 AM. Ever since then I have had a hard time waking up early. When Julie and I had jobs that started at 6:30 AM and we lived in Ogden, there was many a morning when I pulled out of bed at the last possible second, skipped breakfast, and then took a nap when I got home because my system wasn’t used to the early hours.

I used one of Andrew’s favorite phrases today in Seminary about hopping in the “Wayback Machine” and it went right over everybody’s head. These kids today just aren’t getting educated in the classics like they should.

I find that I still have trouble, although, for seminary, it’s been easier. I think the Lord has a hand in making sure that my body wakes up at 4:45ish so I can prepare lessons and teach classes. I still like to take naps when I go home for lunch, though. Have I ever mentioned that I love having work be only 3 miles from home?

Tonight I have a meeting to talk about inventory. Inventory is such a fascinating issue. Businesses can live and die by their abilities to manage their inventory, because for a lot of businesses, inventory is such an important part of operations. I’m curious to see what happens at the meeting.

I’ve got to go. Props to Andrew (invite required) and Emily for creating blogs. We sure enjoy reading about your escapades.

Sorry for falling behind

I know, I know. I am becoming more and more lax in my posting of information. I’m also becoming busier and busier. Here’s a quick update:

• James started school last week. He like’s it a lot, so far.
• Anna started pre-school yesterday. The jury is still out on that one.
• Aaron was called to be the assistant ward clerk, and set apart on Sunday.
• Julie was called to be the Gospel Doctrine teacher in Sunday School. She was also set apart on Sunday.
• We are “bad” debt free as of 5 minutes ago. We paid off our car loan, and now we have only a mortgage and a student loan. Awesome!