Lance here writing a guest post today, as my dear wife felt I'd be more informative on this entries' subject matter. As you may have heard already, we ended up switching jobs and are now back in Utah. My new place of employment is in exotic Mona, Utah, where the defining features of the town are the factory where I work and the rope swing at the pond down the road. As luring as these attractions are and despite Annie's efforts to persuade me to live in the rural outskirts of society, I finally convinced her to reside in the more populous town of Spanish Fork. We are currently waiting for our house to close (and wouldn't mind waiting a bit longer since our intermittent residence is equipped with an indoor pool) and should be moving in during the first part of March.
But on to the reason for these big life changes. Those who know me know my passion for the outdoors, hunting and shooting. For those that don't, let me enlighten you. While some youngsters made paper link chains to count down the days until Christmas, my boyhood friends and I employed that same technique for the opening day of the deer hunt. The snipping of each link was accompanied by endless debates about who was the better shot, who had the best gun, and why so and so's caliber was better than what's-his-face's. As a boy, I never got into trouble with girls, drugs, or bad crowds, but constantly made my family and church leaders laugh for getting grounded because I sneaked out to go fishing in the middle of the night, or was caught bbq'ing the neighborhood squirrels and birds that had fallen victim to my 760 Pump Master BB gun. Aside from my friends, there was also a pull from within the walls of my own home. I would wait up every night on the deer hunt until my brothers and uncle returned, to see their harvest. My brothers enjoyed having a younger sibling with such fascination, for it gave them lots of leeway when they lowered me into the chest cavity of a hung deer by my ankles, or persuaded me to eat raw deer liver, because to a certain extent, that little boy in me loved it. After preparing the fruits of the hunt, family dinners as a child bring a flash of memories of the epic struggle between my young jaws and the tough sinew in that game meat I was raised on. At times I felt it would be easier to eat my way through the radial tire swing in the back yard, but it was what I was raised on and had learned to love.
As life progressed and I got into BYU, I maintained my manly mania by going on as many weekend hunting, shooting, fishing and backpacking trips as I could. As I studied Engineering, my interest for the physics of bullet flight and mechanics of guns grew deeper, and I eventually found myself renting out DAQ's and thermocouples to attach to my rifles at the range for heat transfer projects. While limited in what I could bring to school grounds, I took every opportunity I could to incorporate some part of my hobby in my school work.
As my graduation date closed in, I accepted a position with the railroad up in Oregon. I was able to learn a lot about trains, but was away from home a lot. I was working holidays, weekends, and was gone for long periods of time, enough so that it was taking it's toll on my family.
One evening, as I was checking the Barnes Bullets site to see how I could spend some money on products that I would never have the time to use on my current work schedule, I noticed they had an opening in their R&D department. My shakey hands started to click the links, as I was experiencing something relative to buck fever (the adrenal craze that overtakes hunter upon seeing that "big one," with the mysterious side effect of causing accuracy malfunctions in equipment).I realized that there would probably be a very high amount of applicants for this position, so was trying not to get my hopes up. I couldn't help but wonder "What if?" I decided to go ahead and at least send in the application for the position. 14 hrs later I was contacted, and the rest was kind of history. I am now working at Barnes Bullets and couldn't be happier. I have a great boss and great work schedule, and get to participate in the design and testing of new products in a field I love and have been passionate about my entire life.
I feel incredibly blessed. I am one of the few individuals that gets to do my hobby and passion for my profession. More importantly, I have time with my family. The one thing I learned in this job switch is what mattered most to me. I had a job with the railroad that would've been highly lucrative had I stuck with it, but I would've missed out on a lot of the little things that matter most. While I do have an obsession with my current field, my family is what I am most passionate about, and couldn't be happier to have a job that allows me to do what I love and be with whom I love.
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