Blogger of Jared

In the interests of promoting friendship and fellowship on the Bloggernacle, I wanted to try a series of ‘Getting to Know’ posts. A kind of spotlight on people that I particularly would like to know better on a personal level. For the first victims I chose Bradley and Keryn Ross from PonderIt. If you don’t cruise by PonderIt once in a while then shame on you! You are really missing out. Bradley and Keryn provide faithful and uplifting posts that I am sure you would enjoy. I am please to introduce them to you through a brief e-mail interview.

Brother and Sister Ross, thank you for participating in this ‘Get to
Know You’ effort. You two have been blogging for quite some time in blog years. What lead you to decide to blog together, and how did you find the bloggernacle?

Thanks for inviting us! We’re looking forward to seeing where the series goes and getting to know other bloggers as well.

Before we started blogging, we’d seen a few political and religious blogs that we liked. We both have plenty of opinions and we thought it would be great to write them out so we could refer back to them (and dazzle ourselves with our profundity). Originally we each had our own blog–Hot Blava for Keryn and Ponder It for Bradley. We soon realized that we were writing posts for two distinct audiences. We switched to the co-blogging style and made one blog for politics and one for religion. It has really worked out well for us.

We didn’t set out to be part of any larger community and really never expected anyone would read what we wrote! Eventually, though, we found our blog listed on a few blog rolls around the Bloggernacle and then later included in the Mormon Archipelago and LDSelect. It has been an honor to be part of a community that we respect so much.

I noticed through your site that you had organized a group called
ReJoySing. Can you tell us a little about that? Are you still doing it?

Calling it a group is a stretch.

The concept was to invite friends and family over to our house once a month to sing religious music. There is some really great free music available online and we wanted an outlet to try to sing it with a group. We planned it to be a very informal setting where kids could run around and parents could sing as much or as little as they wanted.

It seemed like a great idea, but hasn’t worked out that well so far. We’ll probably try it again in a few years when our kids are a little older. But it was a fun experiment.

What church callings do you currently have? What callings have you
recently had?

Bradley is serving as the assistant advisor in the Priests quorum. He is one of six adults called to serve a group of 8 active young men who all meet together in a single group. Before that, he and Keryn did battle each week teaching a Sunday School class of 14 year olds… and 13 year olds who didn’t have a teacher… and 15 and 16 year olds who just wanted to be in with their friends… Someday Bradley aspires to be the primary pianist. Hopefully he didn’t just jinx it by saying that out loud.

Keryn is serving in her newly discovered dream calling as 2nd counselor in the Primary. She loves that she gets to interact with all the kids in the Primary instead of only working with a single class of kids. She loves being in a position where she can have a positive effect on the programs her kids will be in soon… without having to be in charge of the whole enchilada. Keryn still reserves a little corner of hope in her heart that she will someday get to serve as the Girls Camp Director. (Crazy!)

What do the two of you do as far as career, students, etc.

Keryn exhibits superhuman strength each day in staying at home with the kids. Bradley is usually ready for a nap after about 2 hours of that. Instead, he sits around in an office most of the time where he works on training programs for computer support people at BYU. It is a great environment and one of the few professions where you can still go to the weekly campus devotional!

Keryn moonlights by impressing her many nieces and nephews and random elementary school classes with her knowledge in geology. She spent a while teaching introductory geology at Utah Valley State College. She hopes she’ll get to do that again someday when circumstances permit. Bradley suspects that the real reason she wants to go back is for the ego trip of all the glowing reviews she gets from her students about what an energetic teacher she is.

Can you tell us a little about your family?

We have a son aged two and a half and a daughter who just turned one. Shortly after the birth of each child, Bradley questioned each of the doctors and nurses to verify that this was indeed the cutest boy/girl they had ever seen in all their years of medical experience. They all agreed, so we take this as proof positive that we are the most blessed people on the planet to have such great kids.

I noticed something on your site about Bradley and Israel - what was
that all about?

In the Fall of 2000, Bradley went to the BYU Jerusalem Center. About halfway through the semester, Ariel Sharon thought it would be a good idea to provoke the Palestinians by walking around near the Dome of the Rock, and the Palestinians thought it would be a good idea to start blowing up cars again. Thus collapsed the 5 years of the Oslo Accords and thus began the 2nd Intifadeh.

BYU students get locked in the Jerusalem Center. Bradley never makes it to Bethlehem. Students haven’t been back to the Center since.

Bradley comes home and shows Keryn his photographs. She proceeds to teach him stuff he didn’t know about them. She’s never been there. (She was totally showing off and trying to impress Bradley. It worked and we got married.)

What hobbies do you enjoy?

Do we sound really boring if we say blogging?

Brag a little. What accomplishments and exciting things have you done?

Not everyone gets to fulfill one of their cherished childhood dreams. When Keryn was eight, she discovered volcanoes, and promptly developed a life-long passion about things that explode boiling-hot liquid rock. She read about a scientist who actually got to stick a pole into red-hot lava and pull out a sample, and that became a dream of hers. (She also had nightmares about a volcano erupting in her backyard because everyone knows the crust is thin (her concept of “thin” was a little hazy), and her parents were digging holes in the backyard for the sprinkler system. But that’s another story.)

Fast forward almost twenty years. Keryn became a geology graduate student, studying (what else?) volcanoes. She got the golden opportunity to spend a month in Hawaii studying the eruptions there. And–glorious days!–she got to stick a rock hammer into a red-hot lava flow and pull out a sample–multiple times. A (very strange) dream come true.

Thank you so much! If there is anything else you would like to add
for this please include it.

Thanks again for inviting us to participate. Both of us thought this post was ridiculously funny, which will probably explain why we are married to each other and not the rest of the Bloggernacle. Besides, Utah has laws against that type of thing.

Bradley and Keryn Ross