Memoirs of a Noob Valentines day Sale

Nothing says, "I love you" like true stories from the life of another man.  This Valentines day, get her something special...Memoirs of a Noob is now on Sale. It's gotta be Deece: Memoirs of a Noob

Memoirs of a Noob is Live!

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After a lot longer than needed.  Memoirs of a Noob has been published.  Thank you everyone for your help with this project.  Here is a sample Chapter from MoaN...Please enjoy.

When John Lennon sang, “you may say that I’m a dreamer” and then sang, “but I’m not the only one” he wasn’t talking to me cause I wasn’t born yet. He was talking ABOUT me though. I'm a dreamer. I think up plans all of the time. I would say 1 in 600 of the ideas I have actually become a reality. This could either mean that I am a dreamer or I am just terrible at executing ideas. That is for someone else to decide. Someone like God probably. Usually the 1 out of the 600 ideas that do get executed happen because of someone else's initiative.

My friend and current roommate Jordan Roper is my hero when it comes to executing ideas. He has skills, resources, and some other factor that I just don’t have. It’s not drive because I have drive. It’s something else. Usually when my great ideas happen, they happen because I tell Jordan Roper my idea and then he goes to work. Usually these ideas are outrageous. 

Example: A few months ago I told Jordan that I wanted to start quilting. He dragged me to the car right then and there and drove the both of us to “JoAnn’s” which is the friendliest quilting shop I’ve ever been in. Just a warning if you ever go to JoAnn's: Some people (mainly women) get upset when you call it “JoAnn’s” instead of “JoAnn” which is the real name of the store even though it doesn’t make any sense that it would not be called “JoAnn’s”.

 We wandered around JoAnn('s) like a pair of Mormons in a liquor store but we were actually a pair of Mormons in a quilting store...so you would think we felt right at home. 

You are wrong if you think that.

 I told Jordan that we should ask someone for direction, tell them what we wanted to do and see what they had to say. So we did. We walked up to a young store clerk and I said, “Hi...um, this is our first time here and we were wondering what you would recommend for noobs.” She gave me a confused look which made me correct myself. “Beginners! What would you recommend for beginners?” 

She responded, “Well, a lot of times for your first quilt you can just get a square of fabric and then tie---" Jordan cut her off and raised his voice, “We’ve done the whole thing where you just tie knots on a piece of fleece and that is for LITTLE GIRLS! We want to do some serious, hard-core quilting.” She stared at Jordan to see if he was mocking her and the quilting world.  Jordan starred back at her, stone faced while I bit a hole through my lip trying not to laugh.

 “Follow me,” she muttered and before we could think twice, we broke the rule of never going to a second location.

 I’ll spare you the details of the next 45 minutes we spent wandering around JoAnn(’s). Turns out quilting materials are extremely expensive and we gave up on our idea NOT because Jordan was incapable of executing a plan, but because it just wasn’t worth it.

Rewind five years earlier to a cold night in late February. Jordan and I sat in his dorm kitchen with a few other guys trying to do something besides play Nintendo but what can you do on a Tuesday night at 11pm besides play Nintendo?  

My friend Brady’s mom has this philosophy about guys. The more guys you put in a room, the more irrational the ideas that are suggested and executed. 

Someone (might've even been Brady) suggested that we go rock climbing. It was freezing. Literally, below 32 degrees outside with a bit of snow on the ground. We drove up to Rock Canyon, Jordan with all of his gear, me with my pants on, and we went rock climbing. Other roommates came along as well. 

This was my first time rock climbing at night in freezing temperatures. You can’t really feel your hands which gives you a really weird sensation when you are using your hands to hold the weight of your body. We got back to the apartment around 1 am. My adrenalin was pumping. Testosterone was flowing like Hawaiian punch at a kindergarten picnic. There was no way any of us could fall asleep. So the five of us just crammed into the kitchen talking about how we were not tired and there was no way we could go back to playing Nintendo. 

 The kitchen became hot and we opened the window for a breeze to come in. I stood by our screenless kitchen window with roommate Brady Rice. A few months earlier, Brady had stood in about the same place and yelled, “Tomagatchi!” (yes, the little handheld digital pet keychain things) and punched the window screen that still sat on the grass below the window. As I stared out the the screenless window, something about it seemed good and right. Then, a glorious idea was had. 

I really don’t know whether Brady or I suggested the idea. For all I know we might have come up with the idea at the same time, “Let’s go repelling! Let’s repel, out the window,” said... someone. Brady also comes up with unlikely/awesome ideas that rarely get executed.

 Just then, Jordan walked into the kitchen. “Jordan. Let’s repel out the window!” I said with a little too much excitement. He didn’t respond. He just stared out the screenless window and it was clear he also saw the rightness of the situation. Then, he glanced around the kitchen. He opened the oven door and pulled hard on it. No. That won’t work. Fridge? No. Then, he walked over to the kitchen doorway and stared at the door hinges for a few seconds. He got closer to the hinges, examining them and pulling on them.

 “Yeah. I think we can set an anchor on these hinges,” he said mellowly.

 The next few minutes are a blur. Ropes came out, figure eight knots were tied and I somehow ended up wearing a harness connected to the hinges of our kitchen door walking backward toward the open window. Something you should know about me: I’m not what you would call a “Super Dude”. 

 You know the guys at the rope swing by the lake that aren’t satisfied with just swinging into the air and then falling into the water but instead need to do a triple-backflip-aerial-gainer in order to get a rush? Well, I’m not that guy. But I’m also not the guy who refuses to swing on the rope swing. That night I laid somewhere in between those two extremes of the spectrum yet somehow I was chosen to be the first to go out the top level, dorm window.

 I had repelled before this night once, maybe twice but 1) it had been a few years before and 2) the repelling approach was off a gradual slope that slowly turned into a cliff, something every Boy Scout could easily do by slowly walking backwards. The kitchen window repel approach required climbing up onto a windowsill and no gradual slope; just a 90 degree cinder block dorm wall. I sat on the windowsill, just a few feet away from the door hinges that Jordan determined sturdy enough to hold a full grown man (who had the height and weight of a prepubescent boy). As I was trying to stand up on the windowsill, I slipped, putting myself in a weird, one-foot-dangling-other-foot-barely-touching-the windowsill position.

 “Crap! Guys! I don’t really know how to repel,” I shouted.

 “What? You idiot! Why did you volunteer to go first then?” responded Chris Eppich, another roommate.

 “I don’t know, but please help me,”I pleaded. 

Chris Eppich held onto my arm while Jordan gave advice on where I should place my feet. Then, I pushed off the window, praying the door hinges would hold and that our R.A. wouldn’t see or hear any of this.

 I landed safely. And as the old adage goes, “If a noob can do it. Anyone can do it.”

 My roommates and I spent the next few hours repelling out of the window, then off the fire escape and any other place we could think of. If it were in my hands, the idea of repelling out the window would have remained just that, an idea. That is the difference between me and Jordan Roper.

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It's gotta be deece - Memoirs of a noob

Launched a kickstarter for my self published memoirs.  "Memoirs of a noob".

Mooch Pond One Year Anniversary

The one year anniversary of mooching off of BYU Campus has come and gone.  Ralf Waldo Emerson inspired me to try to live independently and deliberately.  Living on campus was memorable but exhausting.  I never slept too well and carrying my stuff around was a burden.  Here is the original project.  Maybe some day I will produce an extended version.

Family Legacy

My boss was asking about my BYU ID picture and I explained that it was a family tradition/contest to  get away with the craziest BYU ID picture.  They have really cracked down lately.  I had to retake my last one more than once.  I told my boss that my brother's had pretty good ones too.  She told me to pull up their BYU records in our database...

Time

Between something I read from Og Mandinos and discussing the parable of the talents in church today I concluded the following.

No matter how rich or awesome you are, you have the exact number of hours in a day as someone who isn't as deece. A king and a bum both have 24 hours in a day. How they use that time is the difference in who they are. Although maybe that is a bad example because when I think of a bum I picture him sitting in the shade of a tree with a few dirty belongings and a back pack. When I picture a king he is also sitting around but in a really ornate chair. So I guess how they use their time actually only determines how nice of a chair they get to sit in.

Every week I sit in church for 3 hours. To be quite honest, sometimes I leave church thinking, "that was sort of a waste of time. I think I would have enjoyed myself more doing many other things." In spite of this reoccurring feeling, I can count on one hand how many times I have missed church on Sunday in the last 23 years. Even if I go unwillingly, I still go every week because I feel it is the right thing to do.

What am I getting at? Besides the point of how awesomely religious I am, the point I am really trying to make is, just like the King and the Bum, I get to choose the intensity of those 3 hours in church. Like most things in life, the more I put into those three hours of church, the more I will get out of them. Either way, I will pass 3 hours in church.

We are given time, how much we make of it is up to us.

a list of deece things to do

10 days left of summer...I was making a bucket list but this seems more like a "to do" list because "get checked for narcolepsy" is not something I MUST DO before I kick the bucket. I'm really mainly doing this because I realized my last entry is about the flights from denver.

1. move in

2. read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance"

3. get checked for narcolepsy

4. plan out the semester

5. triathlon

Provo to Denver

Provo airport is about to get ten times cooler with daily flights from Provo to Denver. Although the Provo airport isn't nearly as close as my friend Peter and Lucy's great uncle's wardrobe, it is definitely the next best option as a gateway for adventure. Here's why.

Flights are inexpensive.
The airport is 5 minutes away...I could literally ride your bike.
Provo to Denver, Denver to anywhere. = Provo to anywhere (sept Narnia).

http://www.provo.org/airport.main.html.

Prisoner of Parkinson's law

It's another Saturday night and I'm totally under house arrest for breaking Parkinson's law. Every once in a while I learn a theory in school and then talk about it in casual conversation as if I've known it for years and believe it's common knowledge. When I learned about "sunk costs" I started mentioning sunk costs like it was nbd (no big deal). "We don't have to go to the movie if we don't want to because the $1.50 we spent on the ticket is a sunk cost." "Don't finish your ice cream if you are too full to actually enjoy it, it's a sunk cost." It's lines like these that make me the lady killer that I am. In fact, If any of my bros out there need pointers, I got lines on "Competitive advantage" that I learned in econ last semester and my latest and greatest hit is "Parkinson's law". It's really taking the co-eds by storm.

Parkinson's law says Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. (Thanks Wikipedia) I have two tests coming this week, both with a Tuesday deadline. This means I have until Tuesday night at 9:00 p.m. to study because that's when the last test is handed out at the testing center. Parkinson's law says that I will allot hours of time to studying and tell friends I can't hang out because I need to study and then waste time looking up YouTube videos and looking at photos of friends on facebook until around 3:00 p.m on Tuesday.
I am such a sucker for skimming through friends photos on facebook. What really gets me is when a friend is tagged in a stranger's album and I'm just clicking away looking at pictures of my friend and then they aren't there anymore and then after a couple dozen photos I "come to" and realize I don't recognize a single person in the "Prom 2008! <3" album I just finished.
I hope this happens to other people, but at the same time I wouldn't wish the feeling I feel afterward upon anyone. It's not unlike the feeling a 5 year old gets when he realizes he has walked out of the store with the bouncy ball he saw on aisle 3. He wasn't trying to steal but some how it happened and he feels terrible when he realizes what he's done. Again, it's possible I'm the only one who has ever experienced this. Maybe everyone else is more aware of what they themselves are doing with their own limbs. Maybe I'm the only accidental stalker/thief and no one can relate. Speaking of which, how do comedians know that the quirks they talk about are universal?

I remember Jeff Foxworthy talking about squishing Jello around in his mouth which is something I do and everyone in the audience laughing did it too obviously. But what if Foxworthy talked about squishing jello in his cheeks and his audience thought, "squishing jello between your teeth and your cheeks? What is he talking about!?" Comedy seems like a risky business. Choose one unique quirk and you're out on the streets being forced to move your show to TBS.
Anyways, Parkison's law is what is keeping me from studying right now. I really only need to study for a couple of hours. I'll probably need between 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm on Tuesday. In the mean time, I'll be waking up early to have more study time, rejecting offers to go do fun things with friends, and skipping fhe because I have, "TWO big exams this week that I need to study for." What I actually do during those times is play dice wars and catch up with my friend hulu.

People have suggested an easy solution would be to set my own deadline for when I will take the test like...for example...Monday morning. That way the work can only expand to fill my time until Monday morning. Well I'm glad all of you are comfortable lying to yourselves but personally I just can't fool myself into doing that. I know when the real deadline is. I know come Monday morning I don't truly have to study and take the test. I have until Tuesday night at 9:00 pm and that's the way it is. That's law...Parkinson's law.
I wish I could write more but I REALLY need to get studying.

Why did I ever quit my stand up career?

Why did I give this up? Such passion. Such laughter. The hilarious accent, the professional delivery, the...tears? Don't ask me why I started crying when the big mouth frog asks Mr. Horse what horses eat. Must have recalled some memory from my even earlier childhood. Looking back, I'd have to say I enjoyed my comedy career, but it was just too emotionally draining.

Why did I ever end my acting career?

This is me in the 6th grade. Such passion. Such swordsmanship. I portray the nothingness of death so well. Why did I ever end my acting career?




This was my favorite scene because I got to say "damn" and it was chase's favorite scene because he got to call me a "hell hound"

figuring out life

I'm sitting in the Career Center at BYU surrounded by other students who don't know what they want to do with their life. The guy directly to my right just stopped reading, "great jobs for Computer Science majors" and picked up "careers in Medicine." Turns out I'm not the only occupational bipolar kid around here.
I'm starting to enjoy figuring out life. Before it was stressing me out but I've realized what an awesome predicament I have. While the majority of the world is wondering how they will pay rent or where their next meal will come from, my problems are, "I have too many interests." and "I have the capacity to be most anything I want to be and therefore don't know which path to choose." I feel bratty and spoiled that these are my current problems but they are. It turns out that this is actually a very common problem (Dr. CS and I aren't the only ones in the career center) and there are tons of interest tests and books and resources out there. The most helpful one I've found is a book by Patrick Combs called "Major in Success." He's made some really good points. He said do whatever you are passionate about. Well Duh. The problem is I don't know what I'm passionate about or my interests change every week. He said that is fine. He said that is what college is about. It's just a big super market of courses and you should try to figure out what interests you. So, that's where I am right now. He suggests thinking of your dream day. Not a day dream but a dream day. He puts out 2 questions. First. What would you love to be paid to do? and second, What would I do if I was certain I couldn't fail?
If I could be paid to do anything, it would be to make people laugh. I really like making people laugh. I've always said that my dream job would be to have a Column similar to Dave Barry. I respect that guy a lot and I want to have his job. Making people laugh would be my dream job.
If I was guaranteed to not fail?
I would try to solve the world's problems. Medical problems, social problems etc. I would try to help people.

Bloggers lament

I don't mean to boast but I consider myself a pretty witty guy. I'm quick with a joke, or I'll light up your smoke, but when it comes to blogging, there's someplace that I'd rather be. Things just don't come and fit together when I sit down and blog. So, this is my lament. I wish I was good at blogging because then the whole world would be able to appreciate my awesomeness and boyish good looks. That's all I have to say about that.

This picture is from the other night when we went and played music on Benny Whoduh street. This guy was a drunk pirate and yelled and had some nice boots. We made 125 shekel making music for a few hours. It was fun.

Overdue Jru

So here I am in the Holy City of Jerusalem. I think this blog is way over due. Here is a picture of me being a shepherd.
That's all I have time for.

June 2009



I brought home a friend from Italy for a few days. It was a highlight of the year I guess. Domenico was able to accomplish one of his dreams. A lot of people helped him out. My mom helped a ton and so did x missionaries. He had a huge checklist of things to do. In his words he wanted to 1. take a walk 2. get some gelato and 3. eat some pizza 4. stop by the White House and speak with Obama 5. See the statue of liberty and buy 50 statue of liberty figurines. We were able to check most of the things off of his list.



Fly for the first time...Check.














Listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir live...check.









Go see animals with Luc...check.










Eat at a Japanese Steak House where they cook right in front of you














(yep, that's him running away from the table)





Eating at this restaurant actually wasn't on the list but it's clear we were wise to add it














See the Statue of Liberty...CHECK.











I want to thank a lot of people for helping Domenico live his dream of coming to America. Especially my mom. Thanks mom.

My Christmas Card. 2009 in a nutshell.

Here is a summary of 2009 for Steven Shelley. Merry Christmas to all of my loved ones.


From January 7th until June 23rd, I lived in Palermo Italy. This was the happiest 6 months of my mission without question and arguably the happiest 6 months of my life. One of the families I grew to love was the Cricchio family. All three of them are recent converts to the LDS faith and they are so happy and beautiful.

byu cougs

Here I am at college. Things are going pretty good. I have 3 classes with my brother Nick and so we see each other a lot, more than we ever have it seems. I've liked that.
Still transitioning from mission life to real life. I still dream, pray, and curse in Italian. Mizzica!

I went and got a blog. It was free.

I guess I'm going to start blogging now. I'll try to do cool stuff and blog about it.