Welcome!

Hello there.  This is the first post in this brand new blog that I've created.  Yeah, I know--blogs are nothing new, I 'm kind of a late comer,  I don't have any real reason to be broadcasting myself to the entire World Wide Web, and so on and so forth.  But hey,  neither does Paris Hilton, and you don't see that stopping her.
 
I guess I ought to tell you a little bit about myself and what you can expect from this blog.  My name is Jake and I live in Utah.  Yes, I do happen to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as the LDS or Mormon Church).  In fact, I just returned from serving a two year mission for my church a little over a month ago.  Those of you who are Mormons know what this is all about, but for those who aren't :  this means that I was one of those guys you may have seen in white shirts and ties that you may have seen around town riding bikes and knocking on doors (perhaps it was yours at an inconvenient time).  This also means that for two full years, I was living away from my friends and family here in Utah, with my only contact with them being emails, letters, and two calls to home a year.  I was also severed from most of the rest of the 'real' world.  We missionaries don't watch TV, listen to radio or popular music, or go to the movies.

Here is a picture of me in the mission field, whilst in front of a bean field.

I'm the guy on the left.

My dad told me that the hardest part of serving a mission is coming home.  It really is kind of a culture shock in a lot of ways.  When I left home at the beginning of September, 2008,  the world had just barely found out who Sarah Palin was.  George W. Bush was still President.  Michael Jackson was still alive.  'The Dark Knight' was the big movie (and the last movie I saw).  Nobody knew what Twitter or Skype was.  When I got back in September, 2010, I had never heard a song from Lady Gaga or Justin Beiber (I didn't really even know who those people were--I just knew that one of them was a girl that dressed funny and appeared everywhere, and the other was Lady Gaga).   And this is all the cultural stuff.  The weirdest part about coming home is the personal stuff.  Seeing home again, catching up with old friends, that sort of business.  It's definitely pretty crazy to see how things have changed ("you guys did what to my bedroom!?"), but even crazier to see the things that don't change ("It's been two years and you're still arguing with that person?!"). 

Yeah, it's fair to say that my religion is going to play a fairly large role in this blog.  I'll probably regularly  share stories from my days as a missionary and such.  It should be fun.  But I'll also be writing a lot about my interests here--things like the YouTube videos I discovered, or thoughts on current events, movies, etc.  Hopefully, this will be an interesting read.