Happy Birthday Shane!

Dear Shane, 

Take a close look. Is it any wonder that the power goes out!

Happy birthday!!  I can’t believe we pulled this off with all our outages of late.  We have had not one but two typhoons go through here in the last two weeks—nowhere near as calamitous as the big one last December, but nonetheless they brought high winds and strong rain and much shannanigans to cable, internet, phones and electricity. In the main island of Luzon there has been lots of flooding.  Even our water supply was in and out.

But all is restored!! Just in time to wish you a proper Cropper Happy Birthday.  

As you know, Sara’s Grandpa Cropper was a safety engineer at Geneva Steel and retired after 37 years of service. He was close friends to the safety people at Kennecott. If you two had been contemporaries, you would have known each other. Your career in industrial hygiene and your job at Kennecott with Rio Tinto seems to us to be along the same lines, although I’m sure there are tons of differences.  With all that in mind, we decided to start your blog post by introducing you to Blaine a little.  He was always concerned about safety.  He had seen too many accidents that all could have

Three on the bike with laundry and dinner. You can't even see the driver.

been avoided had there been a little care taken.  He had a poster made for him by his co-workers that said, “Blaine Cropper, Mr. Safety”.  This concern manifested itself in constant reminders to his family.  For example, put your seatbelt on or when he would walk into the kitchen, find a cupboard door left open, then close it carefully and call out, “Safety Hazard!”  Whoever left it open would get the point. He was a kind, caring, highly competent and careful man, and his integrity was unwavering.  You remind us of him in all those ways.

So, in his honor and of course yours, we would like to show you some safety hazards that might make you cringe or just laugh.

Torpedos? Gas tanks? Scary going past this guy!

Of course it’s very easy to draw parallels between safety in our home or work environments and our spiritual safety. We run into so many people here (no different from anywhere really) who have forgotten their life preserver, failed to wear their helmet, or over indulged in appetites that have wreaked havoc on their lives and the lives of their families.  With a little restraint, forethought, and care, so many of their problems—our problems—could have been avoided.

Just heading off to work 

We are working right now to untangle a mess that started years ago.  A baby was born 25 years ago in Bayawan, and her parents failed to register her birth, so she had no birth certificate—couldn’t afford it and didn’t foresee the need.

They then moved and had her baptized in the new town using her accurate place of birth on that document.  They kept moving and each time they would register her for school, they would write in that she was born in the new town.  This was a short cut, to avoid problems with her lack of birth certificate.

Fast forward to 5 years ago, to age 21, she wants to get married but has a wad of documents that are all conflicting as to her place of birth, and her baptism record, the only accurate one, and the one that carries the most weight to reconstruct a birth certificate is lost. So her sister has a great idea.  She should go to

Motorcycle with a trailer and no tail lights? Usually there is a kid in there.

that priest in her new town, and ask to be baptized—don’t worry that she has to say that she has never received the sacrament of baptism, and the crazy thing is on the baptism certificate, she used the town she is now living in as her birth place instead of the real one she was born in (to give her the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume she was ill-advised by someone who talked her into it being somehow okay) in the same way her parents have done in the past, and put Amlan as her place of birth, attesting to the truth of that falsehood by affidavit.

In the meantime, she and her LDS boyfriend are now living together, she wants to be baptized into the church, but she can’t until she gets married, but she can’t get married till she has a "delayed application birth certificate" which she can only get if she is properly baptized with the real place of birth.

Humpty Dumty.

Does the mother know that little kid driving?

We won’t even tell you all the work and cost and falderal that will have to go on to get this resolved, if it even can be. She is sincere and they really want the baptism to take place. We have some ideas to try and we are hopeful something

Road Safety, whether your in a truck or pedicab, the rule is... "just hang on!"

will come of it.  But suffice it to say, like any good safety engineer or industrial hygiene professional knows, there are no short cuts—especially when they mess with things like honesty, chastity, and virtue. The other truth this illustrates is that making one mess, failing to clean it up, and just covering it up or building over it will ALWAYS cause bigger problems than the original.  It’s true in industry, in business, and in our personal lives.  Better to just face the music, pay the price, clean up the mess, repent, and move forward, clean and unencumbered.

Safe Family Travel

 Shane we are so grateful that your family is now linked to ours.  We are grateful that you are the kind of man who we can trust to always take good care, not just of the physical well-being, but the spiritual health and strength of your family.  We find the parallels between you and Grandpa Cropper very endearing and interesting—he is a man to look up to, and we see a lot of him in you.

May god bless you as you continue to avoid the Safety Hazards.