Tuesday, July 29, 2008

George Riel

Yesterday was a great day. Our first stop on the week of fun was the air and space museum in Balboa park. They have a Star Trek exhibit and my family was kind enough to humor me and let me go. I was able to get a picture of my bridge crew. I especially like my communications officer there in the background. It was then necessary for me to beam down to the nearest planet with a group of my officers. Following the Star Trek exhibit we went and saw an Omni max film about the Egyptian mummies. It was very fascinating. It was even more weird when they showed us a picture of Ramses (the one who negotiated with Moses and the Israelites) and said, this is probably the only face from the bible that we will ever see.
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My work at Global was fascinating. When the founders of Global left 3M they brought all of the files that had anything to do with thermoelectrics that they could find. My new boss, Layne Wilson, took me to a file room and showed me a stack of about a dozen file boxes and said, your job for the next six months is to read these files. It was wonderful. Also, at Global I met George Riel. What a unique person. George was the only other active member of the church who worked at Global and we hit it off perfectly. The best way to describe George is the mad scientist. He was a genius and used to do math problems during his spare time just for the fun of it. He dressed like a nerd and didn't worry the slightest about what other people thought but his faith in the gospel was unshakable. We would spend hours discussing obscure inventions and potential new technology. He quickly became one of the best friends I have ever had. He would give you the shirt off his back. Very few people understood George, his mind definitely worked very different than most peoples minds but I loved him. Once we moved to Rosemary George (7) and I car pooled. Our ride into work and back every day was always a time I looked forward to. George taught me many things and if I only had the money, I could get rich building the things that we invented in that beat up old blue truck of his. It was a sad day when George accepted a job offer with another company and he packed up his wife and his many children and left Rosemary.

4 comments:

Lynn said...

Looks like you are having real fun this week. I did not know there was even such a place. Great pics!

Interesting that you would write about George. I had no idea that you became such good friends. I use to babysit for him and his wife. Then years later, even after they got divorced, they both ended up in our Stake. Dean and I saw them quite often (separately of course), during many Stake functions. Their kids grew up to be such great and beautiful kids. Just like yours.

Lisa said...

How sad! I didn't know they got divorced. Glad to hear about their kids.

Kira said...

Was it Ramses' mummy? It couldn't have been a picture?! Tell me more about it, that is awesome. Cool Trekki pictures.

Fred ... said...

yes, it was really Ramses' mummy. We saw the man himself. Cool eh?