Day 30 - Letter from Daniel

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hey uncle bill, dad said you want me to update you on some current events regarding my progress and such. well, things are going great. I feel great and am walking and getting around pretty good. physical therapy on my arm is quite painful but the progress is fairly noticeable.

Christine's been coming over every day for about half the day. i may be boring her but i more than enjoy her company. she's been amazingly wonderful throughout this whole ordeal, by my side daily and i believe she's very happy now that i am able to put my arm around her and that she can hug me without me wincing in pain. oh, and for the record Ben, i did not get in this accident just to make sure Christine was the right girl or to test her, I've always known how incredible she is.

for those who don't know, Christine and I met my senior year of high school when i moved out to salt lake from Tennessee. we swam together and i was really good friends with her older sister Danielle who was one of the captains on the swim team. i first noticed how beautiful Christine was at her 16th birthday party. her dad, Jeff, has a printing company and he made all these giant posters of her and put them all over their house. it was a bit much but looking at all those gorgeous pictures of Christine sure left an impression on me. I was star struck for her for quite a while after that but never acted on it for some reason. we continued to be friends up until i left on my mission and after that we didn't really keep in touch.

upon my return from Russia two years later, i just so happened to be at a party where i was graced with her presence. she was more beautiful than ever. we engaged in a long conversation on my friend stein's back porch and along with a few other friends, peter, stein and Paul, we sort of formed a new group of friends for the summer and began hiking, climbing and camping alot. a quite ironic foreshadowing of Christine's and my engagement occurred on a camping trip in august up little cottonwood canyon. as we passed a beautiful Toyota Tacoma i stated "oh i love Tacoma's, their my favorite car!"(or something similar to that) after which, Christine agreeingly stated that the Tacoma was her favorite car as well. Paul told us that we should just get married and buy a Tacoma together, we laughed and said ok (we were not dating at all at this point). later on the trip, once we were at our camping site at lisa falls, we decided to take some pictures together in front of the river. well we all got shots together, in twos and threes. after looking at them all, someone, maybe peter, pointed out that the pictures of Christine and me had turned out the best and continuing with the joke made earlier about marriage, suggested we use that picture as our engagement photo. neither of us thought twice about this comment but a few weeks later we were climbing and she impressed me so much with how well she climbed that i decided it was time to ask her out. I did that night and two nights later we went out and 4 and a half months later we were engaged and 4 months after that i got in this accident. we are getting married august 1st now and are much more anxious than we should be for having 3 more months ahead of us. we are completely in love and can't wait to get married, so we've decided to go to Vegas this week to speed up the process.

well, other than being engaged to the most beautiful girl in the world, my injuries are healing, slowly but surely. I'm walking great, my spirits are up and the only big thing I'm struggling with is sleep. thank you all for your prayers and love, it's much appreciated and the many miracles of my recovery are quite apparent. I love you all.

-Daniel-