Dan and Lexie Gordon Family Blog

Isabella Jane Gordon

2011-07-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Isabella Jane Gordon born 8:07AM, July 1st, 2011 8 lbs. 3 oz., 20 inches long.

Thoughts about LIFE

2010-12-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

In the ED 206 class I am teaching we had a unit today which covered blogs. Teaching the unit reminded me I had one...

Yesterday for Family Home Evening we played the Milton Bradley game of LIFE for the activity. The game was a lot of fun and a little spooky that I drew the trailer, what do you know...

I found it interesting that for all of the thought and emotion that goes into the game, by the end of the game there are only 3 or 4 decision a player makes that makes a difference to their outcome in the game and the impacts are very minimal. The entire game it feels like you are making decisions, but really you are simply making decisions about how you feel about what happens to you, not anything which affects what will happen to you. I'm not sure that really is a good model of life, but it definitely feels that way some times. Indeed how a person feels about what happens to them probably is more important to their happiness than what happens to them anyway.

Another thing I found funny is that as a kid I remember getting really excited if I could fill the little life car up with children, not much has changed :-)

Priesthood thought

2010-04-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

I was asked to share a thought in Priesthood meeting today. I decided to share it here as well...

My son Dallin along with Jackson Pettit and Christine Kunzler were baptized and confirmed members of the Church yesterday. Preparing for and having this wonderful experience has me thinking about the Holy Ghost. The thought I am going to share today is from the book of John chapter 14. This is an account of Jesus teaching his disciples about the Holy Ghost and his comfort, John 14:15-27

15 ¶ If ye ^alove me, ^bkeep my ^ccommandments.

16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another ^aComforter, that he may ^babide with you for ever;

17 Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

18 I will not leave you ^acomfortless: I will ^bcome to you.

19 Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.

20 At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.

21 He that hath my commandments, and ^akeepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be ^bloved of my Father, and I will love him, and will ^cmanifest myself to him.

22 Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?

23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will ^alove him, and we will come unto him, and make our ^babode with him.

24 He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.

25 These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you.

26 But the ^aComforter, which is the ^bHoly Ghost, whom the Father will send in my ^cname, he shall ^dteach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

27 ^aPeace I leave with you, my ^bpeace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be ^ctroubled, neither let it be afraid.

Let us focus on our love for Jesus. There are many distractions in life. Many of the things we are called on to do are difficult and challenging. Everyday we are called on to choose between the things of the world and the things of God. As those choices come before us, let us remember the Savior and that he has left us the Gift of The Holy Ghost which will lead us in the path we need to follow. Let us have the courage to point our feet in the direction they need to go and to take the next step. Even though we may not have the strength to make it a very big step, let us remember that when our steps lead toward God it is with his strength we step. He has not left us comfortless, we will find peace in him.

I share these things in the name of Jesus Christ; Amen.

Jan. 31, 2010

2010-01-31T13:01:00.000-08:00

Thoughts of Spring

For everything we left when we sold our house and left for the road we have missed nothing more, and it is even close, than the garden. A dishwasher, a king sized bed, a downstairs playroom, a basket ball court in the back yard really haven't been items that have pulled on the heart strings the way our oversized weed filled garden has. We weren't crazy about the weeds of course, we were just too __________________ to keep them out. I left a blank there because I'm not really sure what goes in it. Not lazy, I don't think the word should be inexperienced, the word is probably undisciplined, but it is less painful to put in the word busy. Yeah, let's go with that, we were to busy to keep the weeds out of the garden. So even though we were to BUSY to keep the weeds out of the garden, we loved it and miss it.

We are very excited that it looks like this spring we will have an opportunity plant a garden on my parent's land. Like the plans go every winter, next year will be the best garden we have ever had. I have been getting carried away thinking about all of the possibilities with the almost 5 acres available here. It seems that it would indeed be possible to grow enough food for the family for the entire year right on the property. I don't believe we will be able to get every little thing, but I think we could possibly hit all of the major things and that possibility excites me. Potatoes are my latest bit of excitement. We have been reading the Swiss Family Robinson together as a family and I know some of the book (quite different than the movie) is rubbing off on me. It occurred to me in a way that it never had before, what a significant portion of our families food needs we could meet with potatoes. When ever I get the chance as Lexie and I are talking about potatoes in the garden I like to joke "Oh, do those grow well here?". For the information of anyone reading this blog not from the planet earth, potatoes grow well in Idaho! The science of economics is not lost on me to the point that I do not understand that it would be more efficient to get a job at Mc Donald’s pushing fry and drink buttons and then using the proceeds to buy potatoes, than it would be to undertake the time and effort required to manually plant, raise, and harvest potatoes. The difference however is much like the difference of climbing a mountain to the top and riding in a helicopter to the top. Many times the most important things in life have a lot more to do with process than they do with results. I am very enamored with the challenge of being able to bring up my own food off my own land (borrowed from the parents :-)). I have been spending the afternoon day dreaming about how good a loaf of bread that was baked with wheat I planted and harvested would taste (The loaf of bread I was eating during this day dream was quite tasty too, Lexie makes great bread).

Unaswered Prayers

I am really confused about the track my life is currently on, however I am traveling it with the calm assurance my path is the correct one. I had a finalist interview for a position in the IT department at BYU-Idaho in the middle of the January. At the time it seemed like everything was lining up so well for me to get the position that up until the time I was shocked with the news that I had not been selected for the position, I had it in my mind I would be working at the university this spring. I know some of my shock was just a good healthy dose of arrogance. I know I still haven't settled it in my mind that they selected a candidate that would be more capable of their desired job function, my mind has only accepted that they chose someone that more closely matched the candidate they had in mind hiring. It was very disappointing not to get hired, but not in the way I thought it might be. In as much as BYU-I is a church school I had been afraid that I might feel the rejection in terms of the job offer was rejection from God. I was pleased that in the end I did not feel that way. Indeed with 27 applicants for the selected position, I felt honored to be given the chance to be interviewed as one of the final three candidates and I am very happy for the person they selected. I don't fully know the will of God (I have my hopes), but I do feel confident that if I live correctly I will be able to fulfill my part of it for him. If it was his desire that I started work at the university right away, I believe it would have happened. Since it didn't happen and I know that I put every bit of possible effort I could have into interview preparation, the lack of a job offer was not a failure on my part, but rather a manifestation that the will of God was not for me to get that position at that time.

That is part of what has me confused. Working for the church seemed like such a great idea. I would be around my family, I would have a steady income that would provide for needs while allowing for a few fun family trips, and it would give me an opportunity to apply my God given talents toward building and bettering a university that I truly love. With that said now that events have passed it is obvious that me getting that position was not the will of God (or the hiring manager, but I really believe things happened over his head). So knowing that it isn't, I feel good about going on and looking forward. I will keep my eye open for positions in the department, because I was very impressed with the people and the environment and I do believe that if it is supposed to work out that I am working at the university, I eventually will be, whether it be 10 months from now, 10 years from now or 50 years from now.

Before the interview when people would ask me "What are you going to do if you don't get the job?", I really didn't have a good answer. All I could come up with was “cry”. For what ever reason I am not a very good crier, so I didn't actually ever get that good cry, even though I was feeling absolutely crushed and lost. Lexie was great and took a walk with me around "the block" (a square loop of roads near the house that is about 4 miles long) as we were on the walk and talking about what we were going to do, the conversation kept coming back to the Spelling Castle. By this time I had given up on the games short term financial viability, but the more we talked the more I realized what a shame it would be to leave it "on the table". Even though my focus has always been on my family, as far as my vocational efforts go I truly have given everything for this game. Since not getting the position at the university I have put in two more grueling weeks of work (a pace I can't keep for long) to get the game to what is very close to what I would consider a market ready state. Being the game's designer and developer I am extra sensitive in that I am aware of several flaws in it, and even though I am very proud of what it has become, like the difference between a dream and reality there really are some gaps between what I wanted to get and what I have been able to accomplish to date. With that said there are some places where I have gone beyond what I believed I was capable of doing.

December 13, 2009

2009-12-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

A quick update about the back pain... For the most part it is gone. I read a very amazing book which I highly recommend to anyone experiencing pain or who has a profession which deals with people in pain or even people who are a pain. The book is titled "Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection" and written by John E. Sarno. The pain I was experiencing in my back apparently was directly related to what he discusses in the book in that I experienced a miraculous recovery almost immediately after reading the book. I'm still stiff hear and there, but that is very different than on the floor crying pain.

At risk of giving away the book's content to people who might read it and at risk of scaring people away from the book who would otherwise read it, I will divulge the thesis in it, as I understood it. The main idea is the body will generate pain as a coping mechanism to distract a person from uncomfortable emotion. I am not going to give the author's explanation any justice so I will restate my recommendation that you read the book, but he explains that the unconscious (subconscious) mind generates several thoughts and as the thoughts try to surface, in some cases, our bodies will use pain as a way to prevent the ideas from surfacing to the conscious mind. If there is a great enough magnitude of pain even the most unpleasant emotions can be blocked. The primary emotion he focuses on in the book is anger. When I first read it I thought I had wasted money on the book. I thought to myself, "that's a ridiculous idea, I'm never angry, how could anger be causing me any pain?". Of course after a little bit, the light went on. I am never angry because my conscious mind is never realizing the anger because my body will attack itself to prevent the anger from surfacing.

That lead me to the next book I found quite profound, "Anger Management for Dummies." I am normally much to proud of my intellect to buy, or be caught reading, "For Dummies" books, however referring back to my last entry, a purpose of pain may well be that it is humbling. Anything that might be of any use in freeing me from the pain I was in was very welcome. Actually, I will admit that I have read other "For Dummies" books, and even though I really hate the title, the series is extremely well written. The "Anger Management for Dummies" book referenced the "Mind-Body Connection" book a couple of times and brought up other health links to anger as well. After reading the books I gained a new insight into the link between a person's emotional health and their physical health. I am almost to the point that I believe that the start to the cure for almost any ailment begins with addressing emotional issues. Amazingly enough that even includes things like broken arms and sprained ankles. There have been studies which show a person is up to 12 times more likely to have a work place accident if they are very angry.

I don't have a firm enough understanding of the psychology of anger to give it really good treatment here just off the top of my head, but I will say that anger isn't quite what I thought it was. Before my reading I thought of anger in terms of being angry at someone. The feeling is much broader than that. Anger is a root of disappointment, jealousy, frustration and a lot of other emotions. In fact as I understand it any intensity in an emotion could be rooted in anger. I didn't ever get a finger put directly on what the source of my anger was that was causing my back pain, but as the "Mind-Body Connection" book states a person doesn't really need to, they only need to know that their pain is caused by the body trying to avoid uncomfortable emotion from surfacing. My best guess is that the emotion that I was trying to block was tied to stress around getting ready to move into uncertain circumstances and getting close to releasing the Spelling Castle game. I have tried to explain a couple of times in the blog how and why the release of the Spelling Castle is difficult emotionally, but frankly I don't really know myself, so it is probably even more confusing to the reader. The emotional difficulty is a weird mix of being afraid of failure and afraid of success at the same time. Right now I believe I have worked through the emotion (life sometimes works better when you lie yourself) and am limited to tactical business items that need to be resolved before game release. The game still does have a couple of bugs which I believe are still blocking to a sensible release.

Skipping details of some personal items... ha, I'll bet you didn't think I did that in here :-) I will say that any anxiety I had when leaving Oregon was well justified. Life has felt like I was the ball in a pinball game ever since I got here. Plans have seemed to go back and forth at very violent extremes. Work on the game came to almost a complete stand still between recovering from back pain only to get a really nasty case of flu and then get buried in a lot of home improvement chores. After more than a month I am finally making progress on the game again. So the fall out from my ride through the pin ball machine is that the plan to travel to Texas and possibly on to Florida this winter was replaced by a play to stay in Rexburg on my parent's land indefinitely and freeze our 's off. On the surface that looks like a dumb plan, but it really has been working out quite well so far and even makes sense in some places.

We are excited with the idea of starting a small family farm. The land in Thornton (which by postal addresses is part of Rexburg, but still remains its own township) offers a way that we can get a few chickens, maybe some ducks and possibly a pig without having to shell out for a large mortgage. We have a very nice camp site here which, with some amazing help from my dad, has become even nicer. We did two major home improvement projects. The first was to tie our water supply to my parent's new well by installing two freeze- free hydrants. We really only needed one, but it made sense to put in the other while we had a big hole in the ground. The big hole in the ground was by far my favorite part of the project. We rented a small track hoe which I used to dig the 5 foot deep 200 foot long trench needed to connect the water lines. The digging took longer than we expected and I wound up needing to rent the track hoe half a day longer than anticipated. That dampened my enjoyment of the project a little, but as I told my dad the real expense in the project wasn't the $300 I spent renting the track hoe, the real expense was the need I created in my mind to own such a nifty little toy. So despite what QuickBooks says, I put the project cost of installing my water line at around $25,000. Fortunately $24,300 of that is deferrable expense.

The second major improvement project we did was to add a little eight foot by eight foot enclosed porch to the front of the trailer. As accustomed as we are to the small space in the trailer, the need for winter clothing really overruns us. Adding the porch has given us a great place to hang heavy coats and a double entry to minimize the effects of the cold during ingress and egress, which anyone with kids understands can happen with an average interval of about 45 seconds during the active part of a day. So far the little porch is an outstanding success. We have insulated it and have a catalytic propane heater which we run in it. In fact, I am out on the porch now typing as the family is still sleeping. It is very nice to keep the shoe mess out of the trailer and we have been able to keep cozy and warm even with temperatures dropping into double digit negatives.

Now to the negatives of negative temperatures... We have not been entirely successful in our combat there. I think through the course of the last couple of weeks we have frozen every pipe possible to freeze. Fortunately, to date, the only one we have broken was an external drain pipe. The current cold snap is over, for my friends in warm places, cold snap over means our low temperatures are above 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-17.8 degrees Celsius). We may see one or two highs above freezing, but I am not holding my breath. We were thinking that our plans to get four seasons out of our three season RV were going to fail because it really is so difficult to keep pipes thawed when temperatures drop below zero. However, we decided that we do want to stick to the plan of being in Idaho through the winter and that during break from the most bitter cold I am going to install a few extra circuits to run strategically placed heaters. I will stress that we are very warm and comfortable inside even in the most bitter cold, it is simply that it is a very difficult living situation when the toilet won't flush because the drain is blocked with ice.

My in-laws have graciously offered us their basement if we do indeed find that we cannot win the battle of the cold. So with that as a fall back plan we are going to persist in our idea of staying here, thinking that the worst that happens is we need to make a hurried move.

I still don't fully understand all of the details of our decision to stay in Idaho. I know a lot of it has to do with tactical issues such as time and money management (we loose a lot of both time and money moving) and a lot of it has to do with enjoying being around both sets of grandparents for the kids. First and foremost, every time Lexie and I talk about it and pray about it, staying seems like the right thing to do, or at least leaving doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

I have applied for a position at the local university BYU-Idaho to work in the IT department as an application analyst. I have been very conflicted about the idea of returning to a traditional job in that the time and mental commitment required by a full time job will be a great hindrance to my game development. The hindrance to my game development however isn't the big issue. The big issue is the hindrance to my life that is implied by the hindrance to the game development. So there, I've said it, or written it rather. The game development is my life. Fail at the game development and I've failed at my life. OK I just gained some clearer insight to some possible sources of anger. Failing at life could really leave a person feeling foul. Really, I don't consciously believe that if the game doesn't sell 1 million copies my life failed. I do however believe that if I quit and don't put every energy I have into making my life meaningful to myself and others I will have failed. If I let fear overcome me in my pursuit of what I believe to be right, I will have failed.

I really want something from my life. I don't exactly know what it is, but I want to have a positive impact on the world. The Spelling Castle, although just a cheesy little computer game, fits that in its own way. I hope I can do more than just that, but it is very representative of what I want. So with that decision to return to traditional work really is at odds. I have been highly selective about where I will apply. This has nothing to do with an aversion to work. It has everything to do with wanting to be sure that fruits of my efforts are in line with the goals of my life. If shoveling manure moves me toward my life goals I will be shoveling manure, in fact, as stated earlier, that is the plan for this spring and summer. Working at BYUI is very attractive because I love the school and the church that owns it. It is very exciting to think about the opportunity to make both better through my efforts. I think the position is a great fit with my skills and talents. So with that said, I believe that given an offer I will accept the position. I believe in fact that I may do much better in my marketing efforts if I can use my skills and talents to do something I actually understand, and then contract the marketing efforts. It is very heavily on my mind that this position may be the reason we have felt so strongly impressed to stay in Idaho. Back to my life in the pinball machine reference, I have thought that about other things that were not the case, so I don't really know, but I still entertain the idea that it could be.

I really don't know what my chances of getting the BYUI job are, I just believe that if it is supposed to happen it will happen. I've heard several stories of open job positions getting assaulted with hundreds of resumes. Rexburg isn't exactly overflowing with salaried positions. We passed two days that I believed were the last possible day for me to expect a phone call for an interview. After passing the first day I phoned trying not cry asking if my application had been over looked (I did succeed in not crying). I was assured that there was another week of application review. I spent the next week wondering if I had done something atrocious on my resume like misspell the name of the school, BYUI, nope, I think I got that... was my GPA too low?... my experience not deemed relevant?... and so on. Late in the next week I had fully resolved that it was time to move on and that application to full time work was a mistake in that it distracted resource from game development and I was a fool for even looking at it. So of course, with that fully resolved in my mind, I received a call Friday afternoon asking me to come in for a job interview after the holiday break January 14, 2010. Now I am off the pin ball paddle headed up the ramp toward the bell thinking that getting the BYUI position would be wonderful.

Too long for facebook status

2009-10-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

This was written as a facebook status, but facebook wouldn't take it because it was too long so I am putting it here ...

It looks like facebook got rid of their notes, or at least early this morning half awake I am not finding them. This is probably more fit for a blog entry than a facebook status, but oh well, I'm here and so are you. Oh by the way I did finally get the blog sort of up to date in case you are interested. Much thanks to Lexie for the encouragement and a significant portion of the writing through the summer.

I had my back go out a couple of weeks ago and have been in pain like I haven't been since my back played the same trick on me half way through my time as a missionary in Korea 14 years ago. I am confident that I will get through the pain in less time and more smoothly than I did then, but it still isn't easy. The experience is making me a bit reflective. I've been up since about 4:30 mostly looking at the ceiling and thinking. A project I hope to get to some time, but will forgive myself if I don't, which I have been designing in my head this morning is a "belief mirror". Being a life member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints and not ever really taking time to study other religions in any real depth, I don't have enough background to expand the project to the scope which I would like to get it by myself, but I think I could get a good start. The idea is to come up with a series of belief questions such as "Do you believe in God", "Do you believe God loves you" and so forth. Each question would allow a person a 0-10 rating to give them a range in answering. In my design the results would be private and the intention would be simply for a person to be able to make a snapshot of their current state of spirituality. While the results would be very interesting I would think it better to just leave it as a service that people could use as a way of exploring themselves rather than making the results anything to study or publish. It seems it would be nice to have a journal section on it and have people come back to it at a regular interval such as each year or maybe even each month to take a look at how their life view might be changing.

So as you might guess I have been running through some of those questions myself. With out the nifty little tool I have in mind writing someday I don't have a very clean picture of my results and as I put down earlier, I don't really intend to share the results or have the results shared. What I will share today as it relates to my current thoughts is that I am wondering about the purpose of pain.

I do believe in God as a creator. With that as a premise it follows that unless there was a design error, pain was intended. I have been going back and forth in my thinking as to whether pain increases one's sensitivity toward others or one's spirituality. My conclusion is that it can but it won't necessarily or automatically. I think it is as easy for a person to become bitter as to become loving, to become believing as to become agnostic. So I suppose in some ways it is simply accelerates the character development of an individual. On the other hand sometimes it seems that pain can be so overwhelming as in the cases when it leads to depression that it can just crush what would otherwise be a strong person. The same way there is not a level of physical conditioning that would prevent a person's physical demise if they were hit by a train traveling at 50 MPH it seems that there are levels of pain that could overcome a person at almost any level of "spiritual conditioning". I suppose a point of many of the stories in the scriptures is to talk about the people who didn't fail under stress, but does that mean there isn't an unpreventable failure point? I don't think I am anywhere close to that point right now, I've just been thinking lately that it is possible that one could exist. I really don't understand the combination of the church doctrines that "people are not tempted above what they are able to resist" and "no unclean thing shall enter into heaven". To state my confusion more clearly the New Testament teaches even thoughts can be sins. I know I have thoughts come to me even before it seems like I have a chance to resist them. It seems that I am pushed to unclean before the choice is even in front of me, or much in the same way that it would have been possible for the disappointingly too slow BYU cougars to beat TCU yesterday in the football game it didn't happen. In the same way there are a lot of times that I know it is possible I could have done something better, I just don't. I'm not sure where that leaves me with God. Then again, giving both teams an "A" game was it possible for BYU to beat TCU, should it have been?

Something slippery about the pain experience is that it is so easily forgotten. It is interesting as I have been going through these last experiences how many flash backs I have had to Korea. In some ways it has been reassuring. I have lived with some self doubt and still do with regards to my performance as a missionary. There were several days that I didn't even leave the house because my back hurt so bad. Being separated from the pain for a while I would find myself wondering if I was just weak and lazy at the time. Having my latest experience reminded me that indeed I may have been weak, but there really wasn't any other reasonable expectation of a person in the same physical condition. Pain will simply reach levels which are not tolerable and a person really can't even remember how bad they are unless they are in the middle of a similar experience. This forgetfulness of pain is well evidenced by the fact that there are several women who have more than one child, in fact if women do not average 2.1 children born a population will shrink in a modern industrial society. I am obviously doing a bit better now with respect to my pain as evidenced by the fact I am writing. In fact this episode has been different from the time I was in Korea in that the pain comes and goes. I have been able to enjoy some almost completely pain free time. Now I just have a slight headache which is just annoying and not worth the level of whining I'm doing now.

I'd really like to think I am learning something from my experience. It seems like too much cost to take on without some of reward. I feel like I am getting close to some sort of enlightenment, but not necessarily there. Writing sometimes helps clear things. As I have been writing an impression that returned to me that was part of my thinking along with my belief project was another project that I feel even more doubtful I'll ever get to, but would be nice... The project was to go through all of my facebook friends and maybe even a few of my friends who are facebook hold outs and give them a quick note to let them know something I appreciate about them. I do have some "friends" on facebook that I don't really know, but for the most part if you are reading this you are a person who has touched my life in a positive way and I give you a thanks for that from the bottom of my heart. The positive relations we are able to share with others are the most beautiful thing I have found in life. You are the wonderful part of my world. So as I said even though the chance of me overcoming my procrastination and personal inhibition of expressing myself to complete the project of telling you personally why you are meaningful to me is very low, know that you are and I appreciate you as a friend. Thank You!

September 13, 2009

2009-10-19T07:48:00.001-07:00

Hoodoo?

Dan and I have been laughing all afternoon from the entertainment our older boys have provided. We got home from church and they were musing about whether or not Aaron and Julie received any "camp host questions" while we were gone. They were joking around and broke into an impromptu dialogue acting as "camper" and "camp host."

Dallin (asking with a goofy, dizzy look on his face): I have a question. Can I move from campsite 2 to campsite 10 in the horse camp?

Ty (pretending to look in a book, and acting very serious): Hmmm, I don't know, let me check the official camphost guidebook. Yes, it says right here you can move three times and then we kick you out."

I guess it's time to move on so the kids can pick up some other life-skill now that they have camp host under their belts.

Jacob - Where did my baby go?

Can he be one already? This has to have been the shortest year of my life! We invited some friends to come up to the lake and have cake and ice-cream to celebrate. I made Jacob a little cake to eat on his own, and made cupcakes for everyone else. There's just something gross about sharing a cake after someone has blown all over it that I can't handle. We put Jacob in the middle of the picnic table, sang happy birthday, and presented him his cake. He really surprized us when we put the cake in front of him. He is usually so excited about his food we thought he would dig right in, but we learned that he has some shy tendencies. There were so many kids staring at him, he was too intimidated to even poke at his cake. After everyone else started eating, he poked at it a little bit, but he never did eat very much.

After the cupcakes were gone, we all headed down to the lake for more fun and more friends. There were some other friends from the branch at the lake that had come to play. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing in the water and building sand castles.

When the Dad's away...

Dan will write about his hike climbing the North Sister with a group of friends. I'll tell the story of how the kids and I entertained ourselves while he was off playing. We dropped Dan off at his meeting spot and then met a group of other moms and kids at the Liddell's pond. The pond is the perfect size for the kids to put on their life-jackets and swim, take out a kayak or pedal boat, or zoom across the pond from the zip-line onto the island. For the little kids who want to hang out with the moms, there is a mini-trampoline on which they took turns jumping.

Of course, since Dan was gone, that put me in charge of compliance. I loaded up the cleaning supplies into the suburban so all five kids could go on rounds with me as I cleaned the campground and checked payments. We were hoping that some friends might come up to camp, so we hurried through the rounds as best as possible, while Dallin gave a report on the clouds. Unfortunately, the clouds won, and the friends stayed home because of rain.

Saturday morning my cheerful helpers loaded up and we did our jobs. We got home and made a fire for "Roman Soldier dinners" (tin foil dinners) for lunch. We were very happy to see Jodi Ford and her children come up to play. Jodi's husband, Barrett, was on the hike with Dan. They had brought their kayaks and were ready for a good time. We met them down at the lake and played all afternoon. The kids built a mote and caught frogs and a snake. The ground was hopping with little frogs by time they were done! I even took out a kayak for my first time. Jacob came with me, and other than not caring for the life-jacket, I think he really liked the ride. I know I enjoyed every minute! It got me thinking about overnight camping trips on an island somewhere for a few days.

We didn't know exactly when the men would come home, so Jodi watched the kids while I started evening rounds. She called Barrett to tell him where to meet us for dinner. Dan got home surprised, but happy, to have a party in full swing when he returned. We roasted hot dogs and smore's until it got dark. What a great way to spend a day!

Thanks Jerry

Just down the road from our campsite all summer was a little store that sold bait and tackle and rented boats. We had intended to rent a boat all summer to take out on the lake and just play around. Labor day we finally made it down to Jerry's boat rental. Since we had been the only neighbors all summer, he was nice to let us take two boats out for no charge. We had a really great time as the two boats played a little pirate game and chased each other and shouted things that the kids thought pirates would shout to one another. (Things like, those land-lubbers are gaining on us! - nothing inappropriate).

Just a small observation (if it's too preachy, just skip this part)

Of all the questions and comments we received all summer, being a bit of a novelty as camphosts with so many young children, many people seemed more surprised that we had a bible in our home than anything else. I was surprised each time someone would mention the bible as if it were a novelty of its own. Has our faith as a community become such that owning the word of God is noteworthy?

School starts again

This school year has had a great start! Without being pregnant, or taking care of a newborn, I find that I really do enjoy homeschooling the children more than I remembered. Natalyn started kindergarten this year, so I was concerned about how we would get all of the lessons taught during a day. So far so good. The kids have been on task, and I have had time to plan and organize fun activities to keep things fun and engaging. My favorite lessons so far have been:

our preposition hike

building an edible oasis

chemistry experiments

building roman pillar ruins out of cookie dough

recording the kids do a puppet show of Sinbad and the Valley of Snakes

We've had a lot of fun, and the kids have had a lot of positive energy.

Life in the trailer part 1

2009-10-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

What is Life Like in the Trailer?

Now that a year has passed since moving into our humble abode, (I say humble smiling because even though it is very cozy, I feel more spoiled than ever before). we have figured out quite a few things and have a pretty good routine down for how things get taken care of with respect to water refills, propane, dumping, garbage, etc. The kids, Dallin and Tyrell especially, have the morning routine down pat. That doesn't mean they are always as quick or quiet as I would like (I'm sure they feel like I am always after them), but their help in putting away blankets and clothes is helpful. There are a few questions that I get asked more than others, so I decided to take some time and try to describe what life is like in our trailer, and on the road.

FAQ"'S

How do you sleep at night?

The most common question I'm asked is how we manage with a baby when he wakes up at night. The answer is that I live with 5 very heavy sleepers, and Jacob is not a fussy baby. Even as a newborn he didn't squawk a lot; he just cheeped a little and I would get up to feed him. Now he is sleeping through the nights just as well as the rest of them. (So why don't I get any sleep?) If he had the lung capacity and voice projection that Dallin did as a baby, then we might have needed to invest in heavy duty commercial earplugs for everyone. In fact, once we get through the commotion of unfolding the beds, getting out blankets, changing, and brushing teeth, things settle down a lot faster than they did back on Henry. I had a fear at the beginning that they would keep each other awake and partying, but the opposite has happened. When the lights go out, for the most part, they seem to realize it is time to go to sleep. With that said, the commotion of getting ready has increased, and I often have to count to myself, set a timer, or separate children as they clamor around each other and have spontaneous wrestling matches while they should be getting their beds made.

What is the hardest part?

I have what I call my, "crazy" times of each day. They are the morning and bedtime routines. Even Dan knows that if he wants me to respond or pay any attention at all, my "crazy" time is not the time to try talking. It just seems that the quicker we get breakfast on the table and the day started, the smoother the day goes. Once breakfast is served the chaos seems to die down and we can start to enjoy each other's company. With the night-time routine, after all the shuffling is taken care of and everyone is still, crazy time is over. Then we go into one of my favorite times of day, which is reading together as a family. We start by taking turns reading the scriptures, and then either Dan or I will read to Natalyn and Davey, and then read a few chapters out of a bigger book to everyone.

So, you must homeschool your kids. (Not a question, but the questions usually follow after that. Homeschooling is a whole FAQ on its own!)

My usual answer is that homeschool is a "love-hate" thing. I feel a huge responsibility being in charge of my children's education. I take that responsibility very seriously. I believe in exposing children to every type of learning method that is possible. I believe that if a child can read something, write about it, do experiments with it, manipulate it, skill and drill, and then play fun games to reinforce it, they will internalize it and become master of whatever subject they choose.

The love part of school is when this theory works and becomes reality and we are all working together enjoying each other's company learning. I love being able to play games with the kids that reinforce what they are learning. I love the fun we have at the beach playing in tide-pools identifying creatures, or in museums where history comes to life for them. I get a great charge when the children see something that excites them, like a bug, and then they go to all of their books to try to identify the exciting thing and learn as much about it as they can. Having one of the kids read out loud in a part of one of their science or history books because they find a particular section interesting and they want to share with everyone is just thrilling. I'll admit that I also enjoy how much I learn as I teach the kids.

The hate part of school is that we have many days that are just chug through days. Many days we struggle to trudge through the cirriculum and still hope we want to be around each other by the end of the day. I know that is normal, but after experiencing some really great days, the normal days can be hard to swallow. There are so many things to learn, and so many fun ways to present that information, but more often than not, we just scratch the surface in the fastest way possible to move onto the next subject. Enter the children and their different learning styles from the, "do your work as fast and sloppy as you can" approach to the, "stare at my work for five hours without touching it with a pencil," approach and one might sense the tension that can build on occasion as expectations don't meet reality.

Can anyone talk about something as important as schooling and children without addressing fears? My biggest fear (and it is not mice) is that when my children are adults they will be sitting in a jail cell or in a counselor's office talking to some proffessional about how their mom messed them up, while I'm locked up rocking back and forth in a padded room. (I don't really see that happening, but no one ever said fears are supposed to be based on reality). My second biggest fear is that I will be the weak link in our traveling lifestyle. As Natalyn is beginning kindergarten and will need more attention in her studies, (which to this point have been fun and unfocused) I sometimes think that if I'm going to avoid the padded room, then the kids might have to go back to public school. I'm really hoping that with a little bit more planning and organization of lesson plans I can avoid that possibility.

Please don't misunderstand if this seems all negative. I just don't want to give the wrong impression that homeschool is all rosy and perfect. There are some real concerns that we are consistently trying to address. Some women are naturally born patient and soft and quiet. I am working toward being one of those moms.

What cirriculum do you use?

We use the same cirriculum that the public schools in Idaho are using - Saxon math and Houghton Mifflin Reading. For science we have a series called, "Explore and Learn" that we use in combination with several experiment books. For social studies we have a wonderful book called, "The story of the World" that we use along with map skills workbooks and activity books about the countries and states. Rosetta Stone and Spanish for Dummies cover our foreign language. For art we have a few different books about drawing 3-D or cartoon characters that the kids love to practice with. Tyrell has especially developed a love of drawing lately. We have several learning games for math, logic, phonics, and spelling that we use once a week on, "Fun-day Friday."

What did you do with all of your stuff?

This is an interesting question to me because a very major part of our decision to live a more, "simple" lifestyle was because we felt like, "stuff" was beginning to control our lives. An interesting phenomenon with people is that they get a lot of space, they fill it with stuff, and then they need a bigger space. We think we own our stuff, but if you stop and think about how much money a person spends to get their stuff, repair it, store it, maintain it, clean it, sort it, rearrange, and even use it - the obvious conclusion is that the stuff really owns us.

With that said, we do still have some stuff we weren't ready to part with. Some of our food storage is stored at my parent's home, and some of our other things are stored on Dan's parent's/grandma's property. A lot of what we own we are now ready to part with and just need to figure out what to do with it. For now it sits and owns us while we discuss whether we should sell it, give it away, throw it away, or just let it sit and collect dust until we become dust and our children inherit the sentence of possession.

How do you get anytime alone as a couple? (wink, wink)

Only one person has been bold enough to actually ask this question, but I know it has been burning in the back of many minds. It will just have to continue burning.

Mt. Hood Climb

2009-10-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

Overcoming first impressions

When I first met Aaron Varney, my first impression was a bit of disgust and a lot of disappointment. Those of you who know Aaron Varney are no doubt highly confused by this, so I'll explain ... I was 6 or 7 years old, and I was told that I had a new cousin! My parents were both very excited and their excitement quickly transferred to to me. I am sure it wasn't a very long drive, most likely from Layton to Provo Utah. I don't remember very many details, but I do remember being all but ready to explode with anticipation of getting to meet my new cousin. When we finally got to the Varney's apartment, there was Aaron laying in a little ball fast asleep. It became quickly apparent that it was not going to be very interesting to play with my new cousin. Somehow, prior to meeting Aaron I had missed the detail that my new cousin was a baby! My parents assured me that he would grow up and I would be able to play with him later and I gave a nod and harbored the, "yeah like in forever from now," kind of a thought, after all, to a 7 year old it does take a full lifetime to get to be 7 years old.

I am pleased to say that Aaron has long since passed the stage of development at which he became interesting to play with. Even with a relatively large age difference for kids, we had a lot of fun together growing up when ever the families visited. As I was looking at the pictures of the climb up Mt. Hood, I got a laugh thinking about the difference between my first thoughts of Aaron and the way things are now, especially considering that he he has two kids similar ages to two of my own.

Hood Climb

I don't remember if it was my idea or Aaron's idea to climb Mt. Hood this spring, but it was one of those ideas that really didn't matter who the idea originated with, because we both quickly held the idea so strongly. To speak back to first impressions a little, the first time I saw Mt. Hood, I just about went off the road because I had my eyes fixed on the mountain rather than driving. The mountain is absolutely gorgeous. Mt. Hood was the first of the Cascades that I had ever seen. I hadn't ever seen a mountain stand so tall all by itself before. The green orchards below giving way to a snow and rock peak was absolutely breathtaking. From that moment on I have strongly considered, and still do consider living in the shadow of Mt. Hood. That moment also of course seeded the thought of, "I need to climb that thing."

People who don't climb much may think the word "need" was a bit of an overstatement and I will concede that in the most absolute sense it is. I use the word "need" in the way a person does when they say they need cloths to wear, they need three meals a day or they need a dry place to sleep. Those too are things that a person can continue their existence without, but the absence of which would beg the question of what kind of life are they living. I'm sure if I ever get to the Himalayas or even Mt. Mckinley, I will want to climb them, but would be able to contain that desire with a dose of rational about other pursuits in life that may be more fulfilling than what could become a last attempt at a mountain. Mt. Hood jumps to need status because the mountain is small enough to not be a direct Russian Roulette style gamble with one's life to take a try for it, yet the mountain is large enough to be highly satisfying. The simplest route up the mountain is straight forward enough that I felt very comfortable with it. The majority of the mountain's casualties I learned about came from what I consider highly avoidable circumstances.

As plans for the climb developed my brother, Robert (the one I climbed the Grand Teton with) and one of Aaron's friends, Mike were added to the list of people in the party. I was very excited that Rob was coming. I didn't think to invite him because he lived so far away, but it turns out that a direct flight from Salt Lake to Portland isn't too expensive these days and Rob's desire to climb Mt. Hood (and wife permission factor) was high enough to pay for the ticket. Aaron's friend Mike concerned me a little because I had never met him before and of course had never climbed with him. Aaron's description of how badly Mike wanted to get to the summit concerned me a little more. I am a very strong preacher of, "summits are nice and parking lots are mandatory" when it comes to the result of a mountain climb. Especially on big mountains there are times when one just needs to turn around. Meeting Mike relieved all of my concerns about him. Mike proved to be very level headed, highly personable and in general great to be around. He is an automatic invite to any other hikes or climbs I do. We decided that Aaron was in the best shape of any of us in the group so he was awarded the honor of carrying the rope. I felt awkward about not carrying my own rope, but between fears of slowing the group down and memories of knee pain. I was able to ease my conscience pretty quickly and enjoy that someone else was toting the rope.

The risk of ice and rock fall near the summit of Mt. Hood mandate that a prudent approach to a one day trip to the summit and back starts between midnight and 2 AM the morning of the climb. The early start allows climbers to be on and off the summit before the sun rises and starts melting things up high. As a group we decided that we would wake a midnight and try to be on the trail and climbing by one. As a safety measure a free self- issued permit is required to climb Mt. Hood. The permit requires filling out details of where you are going, what you have with you and when you expect to be back. I found it interesting that included in the checklist of things you were taking with you along with the listings for things such as ice axes, crampons, ropes, belay devices, cell phones, map etc ... was common sense. At nearly one in the morning facing a huge pitch black snowy mountain that none of us had ever climbed it made the most sense to us not to list "common sense" as an item in our possession, so we left that box blank.

Mt. Hood is a very popular climb which simplified the route finding and ascent quite a bit. In the dark pretty much all that was needed was to follow footsteps and look up the mountain for head lamps ahead of us to get the general direction of where we were headed. We did use maps and GPS's to verify that the headlamps were indeed using our intended route. As an all snow route there aren't really any switch backs on the climb up the mountain. The climb makes a pretty much straight shot from the timberline lodge to the summit. For people who want details about our route you can do a Google search for "Mt. Hood South Side Route." I think you will get about 20,000 matches to blog entries, many with a crazy level of detail, which I have no intention of providing right now. I don't want to understate or overstate the route. I think staircase is an apt description of our climbing experience on hood with the given snow conditions in as much as we were able to follow frozen footprints up the mountain. Every now and then we would break through and sink into the footprints causing for a little more effort in the climbing, but for the most part the footing was good and was mostly about the effort of making an ascent. Staircase may under describe the ascent a little in that most staircases contain between 1 flight in home or small office and 30 flights of stairs in a giant building where as the Mt. Hood climb if in stairs would be somewhere in the range of 500-600 flights of stairs depending on how large each flight was. Even though it is straight forward, it is still a lot of climbing.

By the time we didn't need our headlamps for light any more we were well above the ski lift. We were very pleased to start to see some of the view. The most spectacular feature of the morning was the shadow of Mt. Hood which seemed to stretch all the way to the ocean. If the shadow had been pointed toward Mt. Jefferson it would have come close to touching it, so I have an easy time believing the shadow was 80 miles long.

At around 9000 feet I started getting nervous that we were going too slow. We were getting a lot of light, but weren't hearing things fall yet. We picked up the pace a bit toward the summit. At around 10,000 feet we met the first people on the way down. It turned out that they had not summited, but rather had someone in their group take poorly to the altitude. We could see across what is called the Hog's Back to see that there was a very large collection of climbers gathered for the final approach to the summit. We decided to put our crampons on early so that we wouldn't need to stop when we got to the steep pitch in front of the summit. After another group going down complaining about being sick passed us, I told Rob that I didn't have rational input to offer with respect to a decision about our own turn around. Getting the crampons on and an ice axe in my hand, looking at the ridge leading to the summit left me with much less than a clear head. I wanted up and I wanted up badly. I am reasonably sure that if I saw something that I recognized as an unacceptable risk I would have had the discipline to turn around, something like vomiting and light headedness, however wasn't going to be the thing to stop me, especially in light of how quickly we would be able to get below 10,000 feet.

It turned out the route was very nice and avoided the most ominous cliffs, which would be likely to dump large amounts of rock and ice. With that said the climbers above would kick down quite a bit of ice and even a camera case at one point, so we did get good use of our helmets. We also, with the help of someone who seemed to know the mountain, found a chute, that for some reason other climbers weren't using, that saved us a lot of exposure bypassing a part of the climb know as the "cat walk". Even though the climbing was super easy we decided to rope up, because an uncontrolled fall would either put a person in a fumeral or off a holy hallelujah of a steep slope into a cliff. I took the lead of the rope, because I had logged the most time with crampons and an ice axe and had the confidence in my own ability to stop if someone went into a slide.

At the top of the steep part, it was a simple traverse to the summit, I switched the lead over to Aaron to let him be the first to the summit, as a way of thanking him for carrying the rope.

We had very clear weather and the view from the top of Mt. Hood was everything one might imagine from the bottom it might be. We could see over a hundred miles in every direction. The contrast of the green valleys and snow covered peaks was stunning. The summit itself surprised me in how pretty it was. Even though Mt. Hood is very heavily climbed when on the summit, I still felt like I was in a very privileged, special place.

Aaron lead the way down the steep part. He was a bit unsure about it at first, but got into it right away. I took the back of the rope to act as an anchor in case anyone slipped. Some people actually did use snow pickets,but they were over kill for the situation. With the snow condition I couldn't see any situation that would warrant their need. I think it may have been a mountaineering class that was simply teaching people how to put them in.

It was about 9:30 AM as we were coming down the steep slope off the summit. We had read that one wants to be off by 10AM. Indeed relative to the climb up, there was a lot of ice falling. With the exception of a couple of baseball sized rocks that went zinging down, nothing was more than what I consider an annoyance, but it did keep things interesting. We would either yell or hear climbers yell ice, and then dive into a self arrest position to hide under our helmets as the ice went down. I got hit in the backpack with a piece that I think would have hurt if it had hit me, Aaron got hit in the shoulder with a piece that he thought would have been a lot worse if it hadn't made its main impact on his strap padding. Rob got tagged in the leg and I think Mike got hit as well, but I am not sure. Again, everything was small so it was a bumps and bruises risk, not a life risk so I felt very comfortable with it. All the same I was very happy when we made it up Hog's Back and were out of falling ice. As a post note ... When I got home I found a few unaccounted for bruises on my legs when I got home, so I am sure I did get hit more frequently and harder than I had realized when climbing.

On the way down we were very pleased to find that a part of the steep part of the climb that had been a real pain coming up offered a great route for a glissade (slide) on the way down. My pants were a bit too sticky to allow sliding on my backside, but the mountain was open enough that I was able to put my pack on my chest and slide down head first on my back. I would turn around before I got going to fast and a couple times was able to maintain the slide in a seated position, otherwise I would simply resume to my back. When the glissading didn't work something tha also made the decent very nice, other than the obvious fact that it was down hill instead of up, was that the snow had gotten much softer. This made i such that our feet were taking about six inches of travel from the time they hit the snow to the time they stopped. This made the effect of having pillows on the bottoms of our boots, making what I believe is the easiest on the knees decent of a mountain I have ever had in my life.

We made it to the bottom at about 1PM for a total of 12 wonderful hours on the mountain. It was a great joy and privilege to have such a great little adventure.

August 2 2009

2009-10-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

The year is more than half over so I am going to give myself a mid year evaluation of my New Year's resoultions with the hope that I might keep track of them and change things if I am very far off course in the way I have been managing my life in pursuit of those goals.

**Dan's mid year review of New Year's resolutions**
Goal	Rating	Descripton
Complete training programs for and race in a 5K race and a 10K race.	good	My training program for the 5K race started and stopped a few times and I got so sick the week before the race I wasn't sure I was going to do it. In the end the race was one of the most fun I have ever run. Something funny about the race was the organizers made a mistake and didn't clearly mark the turn around point so the race wound up being more of a 7 or 8K race. I felt great that I was able to run the whole thing even with the extra distance and feel like a 10K will be a very managable distance confining myself to the goal of simply running the whole thing as opposed to acheiving a particular time.
Establish a monthly income above $2700 while working about 30 hours per week remotely.	poor	Yuck, I am holding out hope that I can get game sales to ramp quickly, but I don't really think it is practical to expect them to ramp that quickly. Income is becoming a larger and larger source of stress to me, however at this point it is not enough of a stress to me to prompt me to change course. I would rather be poor following my own dreams than to be rich as a slave to another person's dreams. With that said I am open to the idea of working for someone else again, just not enthused by the idea. There are companies that make some very nice educational software that seems to line up reasonably with my idea of how educational software should work.
Make one visit to Mexico in 2010.	N/A	I think I meant 2009 here, it turned out that there was a travel advisory against going to Mexico because of the drug war. We did get the family into Korea town in LA, which fulfilled a lot of my desire for the trip to Mexico.
Learn to locate the Andromeda galaxy on a clear night.	poor	I haven't been studying astronomy lately.
Learn to identify 10 constellations which I currently can not.	poor	I haven't been studying astronomy lately.
Learn how to find the planets which are viable without a telescope or binoculars.	poor	I haven't been studying astronomy lately.
Finish the Spelling Castle game and get it visible in the market with sales in excess of 1000 copies. (The game isn't financially viable at this point but it will mean that I have at least sold it to someone not directly related to me).	fair	The Spelling Castle game is very close to being ready for market. I don't know if 1000 copies sold before Christmas will happen, but it definately could. I have already sold 2 copies so that only leaves 999 more to sell in order to exceed 1000 could. People who see the game seem to like it. If tomorrow goes well I'll have a pretty cool little flash description of it up on http://www.mindjumpsoftware.com.
Get the kids to at least one major museum or educational site such as the Monterey Aquarium or the Lebrea Tar Pits.	done	We were able to get to both the Lebrea Tar Pits and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We also were able to make it to several fantastic National Parks.
Direct 2% of my income toward combating world hunger. (I really hope this does become a significant amount of money).	poor	I had forgotten all about this good intention. I will turn course and get something done about it. So far 2% of my income this year isn't very much, but it really is important to me to make sure that the money I do get is used properly.
Have one month in this year preferably an early one in which I do 30 sit ups and 30 push ups every day.	poor	The chance to do this early in the year is over. This is also a goal I had forgotten about. I won't be able to get the goal in August because I already missed yesterday, so I guess I will use August to get ready for September. If I make it to my birthday with 30 sit ups and 30 push ups every day that will take some of the sting off the awareness of wearing yet one more year off the non existant warrenty on my life that comes with a birthday.
Maintain or improve my current body composition. (This will be tough to measure because I don't know my current weight or body fat percentage, but if my church pants don't fit next January I put this one in the toilet)	good	I'm a guy so I naturally exagerate how good I look by a factor of about 1000. Just this morning I was looking in the mirror thinking that I am looking more trim than I used to. With that said after ending my fast today I loaded up on carmel shortbread squares and now I feel like the Pilsbury Dough Boy.
Do an outing with each of my four oldest children at least once a month.	good	I haven't been keeping track of the outings, but I have been getting some great time in with the kids. Something nice about camp host work is the kids understand and are capable of most of the work. We have been giving them turns to do rounds with us, which give good opportunities for talking.
Write updates in the blog at least once a month, with at least 20 updates through out the year.	fair	This one I'll have to count to see if I am on track. Counting Lexie's entries I think I am. The last couple of months have been a challenge with respect to uploading the blog. With a great burst of luck and inspiration, I'll have it up tomorrow.
Give an accounting of the goals in early January of 2010.	good	Getting in this mid year accounting gives me a great start on an account in early January.

Summer 2009

2009-10-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

If a person looked up mileage from Quartzsite, AZ to Sisters, OR it would say 1085.4 miles. We managed to take almost 4000 miles to make that trip! We didn’t exactly stick to the, “optimal mileage” route.

“At T minus 60 there will be no delays or interruptions expected or accepted…”

I think we left off from our last writing playing in the surf at Jalama beach waiting for the rocket to launch from Vandenberg Air force Base. The closest we could get to the rocket was about 6 miles from the launch pad. There were bleachers set up with a big speaker transmitting all of the final checks and tests and, of course, the countdown. We’ve waited so long to see a rocket launch we were all very excited. As they started the final countdown I felt like I was sitting at the top of a roller-coaster waiting to go down. The air was electric! Although it was all over very quickly, we were not let down. We saw a burst of fire, heard the explosion, and then watched the trail (that for all intents and purposes didn’t look any different from a jet stream) until it disappeared.

Waiting for the rocket

Take it from the locals – they know!

We’ve learned a few things on the road, and one of those things is to follow the local’s advice. At church on Sunday we were given very good advice to visit the La Purimisa mission and a Danish town, Solvang, with instructions at which bakery to try the pastries. What a ball! As we walked through the mission (a fully restored catholic mission that was self-sustaining in its prime) we pretended to be walking through the free-commots from, Taran Wanderer of the Chronicles of Prydain (the Black Cauldron series). We had a good time talking about Hyevid the blacksmith and looking at the loom of the weaver woman. We’ve been talking about someday settling down and having a farm of sorts that could be self-sustaining, so we had a good time talking and planning. The garden at the mission was very different from gardens I am used to. If it hadn’t been posted what all of the plants were, and how they were used, I wouldn’t have known it was more than decorative landscaping.

We topped off the day with Danish Desserts. YUM! We sampled many varieties of butter cookies, shared a filled, “waffle” and had a cream cheese filled croissant. We ate the treats at a park that had a bust of Hans Christian Anderson, so Tyrell read us the story of the Matchbox girl. What a sad story; hardly my idea of a child’s fairytale.

We enjoyed a trip to a cute little Danish area.

Otters are Awesome

Monterey Bay has an amazing aquarium. We were able to spend the day there with the children, and we were not disappointed. One of the more impressive exhibits were the sardines. Not much imagination is required to see how the makers of, “Finding Nemo” came up with their use of sardines in the movie.

From the displays they have on preserving oceans and the animals the inhabit them, the kids are still noticing in grocery stores if they see something, such as rockfish, that is on the AVOID list, and try to talk us into buying fish, like tilapia, if they remember it was on the BEST CHOICES list.

The shark exhibit was fascinating as well, along with the seahorses, the docent presentations, the penguins, the touch pools, and – well you can see we had a great time!

Exploring the Montery Bay Aquarium.

Rock and Waterfalls

I grew up hearing about Yosemite as being a very popular National Park, and after marrying Dan I knew about it as a very popular place to rock climb, but I really didn’t know what to expect. Anybody who knows me well, knows that I am a waterfall junkie. It was a joy to see all of the waterfalls Yosemite had to offer. The first trail we took was a short walk to Bridal Veil Falls. The kids loved getting sprayed by the mist and it was a warm enough day that we all dried very quickly.

Dan would have loved to hike up Half Dome, but he recognized that the children were still a little young. He’s planned a tentative trip for when the older boys are in their teens. We hope to make it back before then, though. As for the rock climbing, he couldn’t peel his eyes off El Capitan, but was happy to stick to a safe, family friendly route up Swan Slab. The three older children made it all the way to the anchor! Their climbing technique and strength has improved over the last year and a half.

We had a fun surprise as we were packing up our things to leave our rock climbing. The rangers had suggested that a black bear that frequented the area might come our way looking for food in our pack. They assured us the bear was friendly enough, just to shew her away. Sure enough, the bear came along, about 20 yards away from us, like a big dog begging at the dinner table. The kids quickly gathered in around us as we had talked about and we shouted for her to leave. She took one look back and then loped off like a sad little puppy that got told no. We saw two more bears from the safety of a vehicle the next day.

The kids have started collecting Junior Ranger badges at National and State Parks. In Yosemite National Park this program was especially fun because in order to earn their badge the kids just had to go on a ranger led hike designed especially for children. They walked along looking for signs of animal life. The ranger had a lot of energy, something I was out of. She guided the children and taught them with her enthusiasm, and I was so grateful for the break.

Our hike up to Vernal Falls included an awesome shower on steep steps. The trail is about a 3 mile round trip. Only the people who thought to wear rain gear didn’t get soaked on the hike. Kudos to the kids, especially Davey. It was his hardest hike ever, and he did awesome!

Things in the Yosemite Valley don't really fit into pictures.

Under Bridal Veil Falls.

I loved stone trail on the hike up to the falls!

We were able to do a little rock climbing.

On our way out of Yosemite we had been thinking to go the quickest route to Crater Lake in Oregon and then end our trip in Sisters, OR. Another thing I have learned, a little earlier in life, is that my mom often has very good advice. When she first suggested visiting Redwood National Park, my reaction was to think, “But we saw the redwoods at Sequoia, how different can they be?” I’m glad she encouraged us to go – and that we took her advice. The answer to my question is very different! The trees are much taller, and most have faded to the color gray over time. It gave me a new perspective to learn that only 3% of these amazing creations are still standing, and that is only because people took military action to protect them. I’m so glad they did.

On our hike through the Big Trees loop we heard a sound like a bull elephant. I’ve heard enough bears, and seen enough in Yosemite, to not want to come up on a bear by surprise in the thick cover of trees. Dan agreed we should turn around. We heard another sound that made Dan think the limbs were creaking and it wasn’t an animal after all. We turned around anyway. We had fun talking about our, “Bigfoot sighting” that we missed because we turned around.

Right through the heart of Big Foot country!

We heard some strange noises in the woods.

Notice the relative size of the kids and the tree trunk.

The redwoods are amazing!

Oregon has some gorgeous coast line.

Grant’s Pass and New Friends

I can’t miss writing about Grant’s Pass. As a rule we take Sundays off of traveling. We make a point to go to church and be in a place where we can park to observe the Sabbath. We happened to go to church in the town of Grant’s Pass, Oregon. I have never been more overwhelmed with kindness! I lost count of how many people greeted us before and after we sat down. By the end of church we had been invited to move into town several times, and we had two dinner invitations for different nights. Since we didn’t really have a hard schedule to keep we thought it would be inconsiderate not to accept. We could use the time between appointments to catch up on laundry and errands. Sunday night the kids had a blast playing with the Fisher’s children, we enjoyed delicious food, and by the end of the meal we were invited to sleep in their driveway with electricity, refill our water tank, and do laundry at their house. We took them up on all but the laundry.

The next night, at the Page’s, the kids got to swim in their pool while brother Page visited with us and cooked chicken on the grill. Sister Page had a special bond with Jacob. After dinner they got the bunnies out for the kids to feed and play with. I think David and Natalyn picked enough clover for the rabbits for a week! Again we were invited to stay overnight with showers, electricity, and water. (We did sleep in the driveway and wondered if we were becoming bums, but decided that it was practical because it was past the kid’s bedtime and since we hadn’t asked – or even hinted we could use a place to park, we could excuse the notion a bit. They are just super kind people).

Crater Lake, a Snow Park?

Crater Lake was nothing like I expected! We arrived to 5 feet of snow. Unlike every other park I have been to, this is a winter park. People go to Crater Lake to cross-country ski, snowmobile, snowshoe, and camp in snow caves. Dallin was especially thrilled to get the coats out and go sledding. He felt like we had denied him an inherent right all winter by living in a place without snow! I was glad we could accommodate him while knowing that the snow was as temporary as a couple hours drive away. We did get a beautiful look at the lake and learned that it is the deepest in North America. Tyrell really impressed the Ranger with his knowledge about the place. He learned it all on his own, too, by reading the displays in the visitor center.

On our way into Sisters we drove by Smith Rock just to take a peek. Of course, by the end of the day, after we had climbed something on the cinnamon slab, and all had a turn, we realized that we would need to get a better look soon!

We were surprised to find snow at the Crater Lake.

Crater Lake is beautiful.

A little summer sledding.

Smith Rock is an amazing place.

How far can Dan pull the Trailer on a Bike?

We were so excited to get all set up at Sisters. We even washed the suburban and the trailer and deep cleaned our, “garage.” Dan ran into town (we were camped about 8 miles out of town in the National Forest) and the suburban refused to start. I was pretty proud of myself for correctly diagnosing a broken fuel pump. Of course, it was Saturday of Memorial weekend so all of the garages were closed until Tuesday. Sisters did not offer anywhere to rent cars, but did rent bikes so Dan rented a bike in town and had a very steep uphill 8 mile bike ride to get back home to us. The sheriff told him he could keep the suburban where it was until Tuesday.

We had a wonderful church for the family at home.

Tuesday morning Dan got to see how well the brakes on the bike worked as he went down the “trucks use lower gears” hill to meet the tow-truck to take him into Bend, OR. We were grateful we have towing insurance.

Since they had to order the fuel pump from Washington, Dan needed to find a place to stay overnight. We were both grateful that he was able to locate his cousin Jenifer Harris that we had met at the last Gordon family reunion. Her family took good care of him while he was in town. I was grateful that he was able to let me know he would be spending the night before my cell phone died.

I’ve heard that some people have a thing with watches that they can’t wear a wristwatch without it breaking. I seem to have the same type of phenomenon with cell phones. Fortunately, if you want to look at it that way, we’ll be out of signal range until September, so a phone won’t do me any good anyway.

Dan came back Wednesday afternoon with a working Suburban. The kids and I were just heading out for a little hike, so he was able to join us on the trail that Natalyn and David found. The deer at our spot didn’t seem to mind us at all and came very close to the trailer. We were surprised how close they let us come while we were on our hike as well. Deer are such pretty animals.

Not going to work!

We got set up in our campsite at Camp Creek near Mt. Hood just before Aaron, Rob, and Mike pulled in. It was a beautiful spot and I was very happy that they had big dumpsters. The biggest trick I have found with free camping is trying to find a place to put the trash. The kids did an awesome job of cleaning up the National Forest spot so we had an abnormally large amount of trash with us. Of course, Camp Creek isn’t free camping, but it was almost worth the fee to dump the garbage!

Mt. Hood.

We were happy that Aaron invited us to visit at his house for the weekend and to go to church with his family. Julie’s parents were there as well. We had a wonderful barbeque and the kids had fun playing with their cousins. We really enjoyed relaxing and visiting with them. We were also grateful to them for letting us park in front of their house for the weekend.

Baby steps

Jacob took advantage of the carpet and extra space in the Varney’s living room to take his first official crawling steps! He’s been pretty happy with his new mode of transportation. We have to watch him carefully because he keeps an eye on the door. He’s determined to go headfirst down the steps!

On the subject of Jacob – he has been popping out teeth like popcorn. Since he turned nine months old, he has grown a new tooth every week and a half. As soon as one is all the way in, the next begins.

Just a Little Further…

No one can really blame us for heading toward Mt. St. Helen’s instead of back to Sisters, can they? What else could we do? From Aaron’s house it was about an hours drive to get to Ape Cave at Mt. St. Helen’s. When Tyrell was a year old we went to the visitor center side of the state park, so I was excited to see this side of the park. We were prepared this time so we could go inside the lava tube. We all donned our headlamps and went in. Natalyn was delighted when she realized we were underground. The cave has two formations we located, the meatball and the railroad tracks. We did the, “easy” part of the cave so quickly we took a vote and the majority voted to take the, “hard” trail as well. Dan helped carry Davie because he had been voting for a nap. There were a lot of boulders to scramble over, and it was twice as long, but we did it! We all felt like explorers by time we were through.

The next day we went to the other side of the park to get a better view of the crater and visit the visitor centers.

We had fun exploring the ape caves.

At Mt. St. Helen's visitor's center.

After a lot of discussion we decided not to do the just a couple hours farther north to get to Seattle. A person is just not able to do everything even if they try! Had we gone to Seattle we would have been near Vancouver, which is just down the road from Prince Rupert, which is just down the channel from Juneau, which is just below everything we had to turn around without seeing last summer…

Say Cheese!

Tillamook, OR isn’t that much further out of route to get back to Mt. Hood than just going straight there. It was the only route we saw with a cheese factory stop as well.

We were all talking about what we were going to order for dinner, (yes, we had decided to splurge and eat at their café) when we started seeing signs for Lewis and Clark National Park. Dan wanted to know if he should take the exit or keep going. I asked the kids if any of them could tell me about Lewis and Clark. The answer was less than satisfactory so Dan turned into the National Park.

We were thrilled with our timing because a school group was there and they were just getting ready to do a musket display and telling stories about the expedition. We were even more thrilled the next morning when we were let in free to the interpretive center because we were considered to be a school group! What a great place! I remember spending a long time in fourth grade Idaho history learning about Lewis and Clark, but I realized that I really had no idea what they were all about until we made this stop. Please, feel free to ask any of my children who Lewis and Clark were.

A great Lewis and Clark program and some great camera timing by Lexie.

Inside the interpretive center.

Take Two

Off for cheese again. After we got on the road again, Dallin exclaimed, “I hope we don’t have to make another emergency National Park exit!”

We made it to the factory in time to have a late lunch and early dinner. The kids were glued to the window watching the assembly line and learning about the different steps of production. At one point Tyrell exclaimed, “I don’t like cheese, but this is cool!” He was even brave enough to try the squeaky cheese. He didn’t like it either, but the rest of us agreed that the vintage white extra sharp was worth tasting!

Dallin especially caught on to the aging process of cheese and noticed the difference in taste with how long it had been aged. He was amazed to learn that good cheese can’t be made in one day.

While we were eating our ice-cream, a couple came over to visit with us. They were impressed with the children and had been watching them eat their ice-cream. They suggested a county park to stay overnight. Once again, the locals were right. Since it was indeed a great little park and happened to be free fishing weekend we decided to stay through the weekend and took a break from traveling.

We were disappointed to learn that the fishing on the river was on a catch and release basis, but still had a good time getting out to fish. The river was very beautiful. In the end the catch and release policy didn’t inhibit us any in that there wasn’t any catch to release. Part of the lack of catch was due to only having one over sized lure that had hooks on it. The other pole we had simply had a stick attached to it to give the kids practice casting. The kids were quite certain they got some nibbles on the stick. We did have enough fun that we decided to buy fishing licenses so that we would be able to go out again during the summer.

Mt. Hood

We had been anxious to get to the Varney’s after Dan’s climb, so we didn’t stop at the lodge, or do much exploring around the Mt. Hood area. We decided to go back and give the area a little bit more time. The lodge is a National monument so we started there. Dan showed us the route he took up the mountain, which really got me thinking that when the kids are older he’ll have to go up again, with me. I fell asleep through the movie about the lodge, and their, “museum” was not much more than a display of old door knobs. The kids were disappointed not to be allowed to play in the filthy snow.

The camp host shared a pamphlet on Wildwood with us. We decided to see what that was all about after lunch. We were very pleasantly surprised. David led us on the path by following the arrows to the underwater viewing area. Along the way the kids gathered armfuls of cotton that had blown down from the trees. They gloried in their, “snow” that didn’t melt. Tyrell started to sing, “PHAT Dippin’, a comical song by Rhett and Link, which glorifies swimming with cloths on, as we walked into the underwater viewing area to see the small fish fry. We had a good time trying to identify the little Chinook and Steelhead that were in the river.

We saw a brown sign marking a national fish hatchery on our way back to Sisters, so of course we had to stop and see what was available to see. We were excited that we showed up on a day that they were harvesting the salmon. We saw up close and personal how they sort, count, and harvest the fish. We were the only group there, so the workers let us stand right next to them and look over their shoulders while they worked. I’ve been to a lot of hatcheries, but I’ve never seen so much happening at a hatchery before.

Home in the Meadow

We started our job (technically Dan started his job as camp host, the kids and I are just along for the free camping). The meadow is a gorgeous place where deer frequent. The kids built a great fort with the fallen branches and logs in a little grove of trees. We took out their plastic toy food and had fun walking through the meadow, hiding the toy food and finding it again pretending we were travelers that had to search for the food, build our own shelter, and get water from the stream (no, we did not drink from the stream). Natalyn and Tyrell really had fun pretending they were hunting and making clothing and blankets from the hides, and drying jerky. It reminded me of a book I read as a child, based on a true story of some pioneer children whose parents were ambushed by Indians and so they had to finish the journey on their own. I think it was called, Eight Alone, but I’m not sure. I’ve tried finding it so Tyrell can read it, but I haven’t been able to. Anyone who might know about the book, I would be very grateful if you could let me know the title or author so I can find it.

We’re not too far away from Bend where there is some really good shopping to be had. My shoes had completely worn through, and it was time to get a new pair. We went to a running shoe store, Fleet Feet to look at and try on shoes. We were at the point where Dan and I were deciding if we should keep looking, wait and think, or buy the pair I liked. David heard us talking and chimed in, “Wind her up, and let her go!” Speaking of David, he informed me that, “My name is not Davy, it’s David!” He corrects anyone who forgets. Who gave him permission to grow up so fast?

Our camp in the meadow.

David fishing.

The meadow is very beautiful.

The kids were very excited to do camp host work.

Camp site #5 in the meadow.

Three days later…

We were happy that Hoodoo, the company who manages the campground, agreed to let us have the whole week to travel to our family reunion. We passed through Boise, ID on our way to Swan Valley, where the reunion took place. Just before we got into Boise, we gave Cody and Caureen Miller a call to see if we could stop by and visit. Cody and Dan were in the Electrical Engineering program together at U of I. What fun it was to finally meet their two darling children! They made us a delicious lunch and we had a super visit!

We had a nice visit in Idaho Falls with Grandma Meikle on our way through Idaho Falls. I always have a fun time watching the kids play with the same toys I did as a kid and have just as much fun as I had. Except for Jacob; he hated the jack-in-the-box. I also have fun watching them grow using grandma as a measuring stick, as my brothers and sisters and I did when we were young.

What’s the difference between a horror house and a haunted house?

This is the question that Dallin asked me as we were driving. I answered that I really didn’t think there was much of a difference, that they just had different names. He insisted that horror houses were much worse, even awful, so I stated that he must be thinking of a whore house (yes, I’m very open with my children).

“What’s that,” he asked. I answered, “When a woman sells her body to a man.”

Dallin’s eyes got as wide as saucers, “Is that why there are so many chopped up body parts in horror houses?”

Family Reunion

The bi-annual Gordon family reunion started June 25. We stopped at Thornton to see Grandma Marler and meet up with Dan’s parents and meet Malcom (Naomi and Patrick’s little cutie). After lunch, the family split up in three different vehicles to go to the Avery ranch where the reunion was being held. I should have known that Ray would let Dallin drive.J

As always, there was way too much food, and it was all good. Like Dallin commented, “I want to keep eating, but I know I am full.” Dan and I stayed up way too late visiting with Rob and Becca the first night, but it was really fun to talk without interruptions and sample the caramel shortbread squares without getting caught by little eyes.

Two years seems to fly by so quickly; I was surprised at how young the children looked in the video of the last reunion.

As usual, Aunt Jessine really outdid herself with the crafts. Natalyn looks forward to the crafts the most. She spent all morning with me decorating balls and making door hangars. David held his own with the crafts for quite a while also. I enjoyed spending the time together with the younger kids.

Visiting with the Varney cousins is always a treat. Emily has me convinced that the backpack I want for Jacob is an ergo-baby. He has pretty much outgrown his front pack. Dan had a great time getting to know Kalon, talking about business ideas. Sara and I had fun talking about babies and traveling. I wish her the best of luck with the rest of her pregnancy.

Friday night a hailstorm started just as dinner was getting started. The hailstones were about the size of small marbles and really made a great sound bouncing off the tin roof of the shelter. It was really fun watching people’s reactions as they laughed and covered their ears, or in Jacob’s case, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

We played games inside the cabin to get into a warmer environment. After the kids played a mummy game where they wrapped themselves up with toilet paper in a race, and won candy bars in the left-right game, they went downstairs to watch a movie while the adults and older kids played games. The, “what-if” game, a game where people ask “what if” questions and other people answer them, was particularly fun.

At the family reunion.

Visiting the Andersons

Katie, Landon, and Amanda were on a pioneer re-enactment handcart trek with their stake young men/young women group while my family was at the family reunion. We all got to the Anderson house about the same time. I was really glad they were willing to get together, even though I know they were all exhausted from their trek and Mike was sick. Mike made his delicious meatballs and rice.

After dinner we were able to help Katie take inventory of the tents that her group had used on the pioneer trek. I went back into the house after getting my kids to bed and we had a good time laughing, talking, and playing Frisbee in the house.

Aunt Darlene stopped by the Anderson house to drop off some clothes she picked up for Natalyn from a garage sale. We talked about David rubbing his hair off because he loves the feel of hair between his fingers. She suggested that she had a piece of wool that was soft and felt like hair. We stopped by her home after church on Sunday and picked it up. I’m so grateful, too. David calls it his beaver and carries it around with him everywhere and sleeps with it. He doesn’t rub his hair as long as he has his, “beaver” near. I hope his hair starts to grow back!

Katie's yard looked like a camp ground after the trek.

Mom and Dad

We were able to buzz down to see my mom and dad in Salt Lake for dinner. Wow, it was good to see them. They made a great meal, and we played some games, and went for a walk. Mostly we just talked. Time just seemed to go by too quickly before we had to leave.

We like to listen to tapes while we drive. Natalyn especially loves to listen to the songs. One of our favorite tapes is about people and families. The best song of all is, “I’m a V.I.P. in my family (very important person). Natalyn was very happy asking if we could please listen to I’m a P.I.G. in my family. She couldn’t stop laughing, along with the rest of us, when she realized what she had spelled. We often sing the chorus as, a very important piggy, now.

Home at the Lake

For the next several months our home is in one of the most gorgeous spots on earth! As the snow melts off the ridge and higher up the mountain even the mosquitoes are becoming manageable. We see the fish jumping, and have tried our hand at catching them, but we have proven to be unsuccessful thus far. We still have fun trying! One of these mornings I’m going to get up early and go by myself to catch breakfast.

Natalyn is Daddy’s girl as she helps him go on rounds almost every day. She rides along in the company truck as he collects garbage, recycling, cleans bathrooms, and collects fees. Her favorite part is helping to spot recyclable litter. In exchange for helping around the campground, the kids get to split all of the funds earned from recycling here. So far they’re on their way to earning quite a bit of cash this summer. They’re also making money spotting deer. For every deer they spot in or near the road before mom and dad, they earn a dollar. At the rate the boys are trading teeth, the tooth-fairy will be out of business as well. I say trading teeth, because it has been uncanny how either Tyrell or Dallin will lose a tooth on the same day that Jacob will grow a new one.

We got a ground carpet for the tent which helps keep the dirt down a lot! Jacob loves the new floor as he crawls around the big space.

We have more firewood than we’ve ever owned before due to the forest service clearing out dangerous trees. We’re making good use of it with campfires in the evening.

The lake is just perfect for swimming and the weather has been perfect for it also. Even David can go far out in the water before it reaches his waist. The kids take turns between playing on the body board we got in San Diego last winter, and floating the little wooden boats that Grandpa Gordon made with them last summer.

Dan has started playing softball with members of the branch. We hope the turnout is strong so it doesn’t fizzle out.

I’m looking forward to start hiking with the ladies on Tuesdays. This Tuesday the kids have dentist appointments, but after that I’m setting the day aside for some rejuvenation time for myself.

Looking out from our Lake camp site.

May 4, 2009

2009-05-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

Lexie Writing

Kids will be kids!

As we were walking through the park to see the Lebrea tar pits, we saw some birds. David pointed to them and said, "Look, birds!" I nodded my head and said,"They're pigeons." David very innocently said with enthusiasm, "They look a lot like birds!"

David has also picked up a Wall-E voice from watching the movie with the cousins at Aunt Jennifer's house. He plugs his nose and talks. He's learned that Jacob gets a real kick out of it, so while we're driving, or if J starts to get upset, I start to hear Wall-E. Most of the time it works too.

Natalyn and Dallin came in so excited about a green bug they found outside. I asked them if I could see it, but it was gone. Natalyn said she would, "do an actment of it" for me. She thought for a bit and then said, "I don't have enough legs so I'll only use two." (She did use her arms as legs and did a very good impression of a bug with an extra long leg.) After her impression she got out all of our bug books and started looking at pictures trying to identify the correct insect.

Jacob is scooting around on his bum. It's the cutest thing to watch! He gets furious on his stomach or back and so is very careful not to fall. He will get to his hands and knees and rock back and forth also, but his mode of transportation is the bum scoot.

Tyrell received his wolf badge at pack meeting. He worked very hard to earn it and never complained about doing his requirements. He also received a gold arrow point. He got to pin the mother's pin on me, but I didn't feel like I had to push him to earn it at all.

On the Road Again!

Goodbye Quartzsite! Was that too enthusiastic? Let's just say our two week stop there was the longest two weeks I've spent anywhere! I'm not complaining. I helped make the choice to stay; and we had a wonderful time and met wonderful people. We also had experiences we couldn't have had anywhere else. It's just time to leave. When the kids get the idea to take the thermometer outside for experiments, and we can cook our family home evening s'mores without the fire, it's time to move on. (The marshmallows didn't quite melt.)

We did stay long enough to notice some interesting phenomena I don't think everyone gets to participate in during a lifetime. The first was the migration of people. At one point the church building was so crowded we were in the overflow room with kids sitting on the floor. By time we left there was a handful of people left to tell goodbye. The second was the butterfly migration. For two days we saw hundreds and hundreds of butterflies passing by. They were the color of Monarchs, but much smaller. It was a little like watching leaves fall from trees in a windstorm in autumn. They just kept going and going. The third, and least pleasant, was the bees. For about five days we had a swarm of bees around our camp that would get in through the air conditioner. At one point we counted over one hundred for the day when we came home from pack meeting and the air conditioner had been left off. They were very friendly bees and for the most part just flew to the door to be let out again. There were the few strays that went to the window instead and needed coaxing to find the door. My biggest fear was that a child (or adult) would step on one of the hurt bees that got injured on the fan on its way through the air conditioning system. Fortunately nobody was even accidentally stung. We were told that the swarms were just passing through, and sure enough, on Sunday they were gone just about as fast as they came. We do like the local desert honey we buy at the fruit stand in town.

We had a few toasty days before leaving Quartzsite (Really its probably only 100 degrees, but hot all the same!)

Ty gets his wolf badge

We had a great camp site in Quartzsite!

Happy Birthday - to me

I had a great birthday. We celebrated with Snicker cake on Saturday and ice-cream on Sunday. Tyrell and Dan saw to it that I didn't have to do any dishes on Sunday. Saturday I sort of, "took the day off" and read a book. My mom and sisters have been awesome to keep me in good supply of reading materials. The kids didn't seem to mind extra long computer turns. A mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do, right? At least occasionally.

Enjoying some birthday cake.

First Stop

We were happy to even be on the road come Monday. Our goal wasn't to get very far - just to get. We got as far as the BLM land in front of Joshua Tree. It was almost physically painful for Dan to stop for the night without stopping to rock climb for a couple of days, but even though we have over a month before our job starts in Oregon, it's a pretty packed month. We had an easy drive the next day (for me, Dan did the driving - especially in L.A. traffic). The Labrea Tar Pits and Page Museum were our first stop. WOW! The museum is really quite small, but packed with a ton of information. The displays were one of a kind also. I have to say I enjoyed it as much, maybe even a little more, than some of the really big museums. I liked the way they presented the preserved bones with descriptions and details about how they know if it was male or female, young or old, injured or sick, crippled, etc. This may not be news to any of our readers, but it was news to our family: there is no such thing as a Saber Tooth Tiger. The correct name is the Saber Tooth Cat. They are not related to tigers apparently.

The kids had a lot of fun playing on a rock in camp.

Camping south of Joshua Tree.

The tar pits were free (if you don't count parking). I didn't realize they were still active and trapping squirrels, insects, and dogs. We could see them bubbling up (not because they are hot, but because of the methane gas and some other sulfuric gas that they release). They did have fences around them (for which I was very glad). Again, just WOW!

At the tar pits!

Leaves blowing over the pits likely contributed to animals getting stuck.

Pit 91 is an active excavation site. The bones in the bottom are 30-40,000 years old.

Natalyn examines a replica of a mammoth's footprint.

Dallin in front of an impressive array of Dire Wolf skulls.

Korea Town

For anyone who doesn't know, Dan served his mission in Seoul, Korea. I went with him in 2005 for a mission reunion. Dan has been craving some good Korean food. We couldn't even find Kim-Chee in either Rexburg or Quartzsite. He was thrilled to learn that Korea town in LA was just blocks away from the tar pits. He got practice with the language ordering some of his favorite foods for us. The restaurant was awesome! The kids weren't afraid to try anything. They dove in with their chop-sticks and didn't stop. For those not familiar with Korean food, it can be very different from American food - even from Chinese food. That didn't slow down my five. That's right. Jacob wasn't about to have just milk when he saw how much his brothers and sisters were enjoying it all. I'm not sure everything he ate, or any of us ate, but we all enjoyed it. I caught a glance at the waitress and the hostess, and they seemed surprised and pleased that the food had such a good response. Both Dallin and Tyrell claimed it was the best meal they ever had. I don't know if it was that comment, or just good service, but we did get served an extra dish that we originally requested, but wasn't on the menu, and a wonderful drink for desert that we didn't order.

The kids also loved seeing live squid for sale at the Korean market, and it was hard to pull Dan away from the Kim-Chee display. He just kept talking about wishing we had more room in the fridge. Has anyone seen my fridge? He had to settle for the pint size and not the 10 gallon size. We came away with enough snacks and food to last us two more days.

This Land was Made for You and Me...

For anyone wondering if it's really worth the trip to see a tree - it is! The largest tree in the world is General Sherman, a sequoia redwood in Sequoia National Park. The other sequoias are totally worth it also! The scenery is breathtaking and the roads are lunch-taking (ask Dallin about the switchbacks). Maybe it was shock from being in the desert too long, but I always feel a piece of me come back when I'm in the pine trees. The air was so crisp and clean with that musty pine scent that tickles your nose and makes you breathe deeper. The flowers and trees were in full bloom. The river was full and running at top speed over rocks and over waterfalls. The kids were happy there was enough snow to slide on and roll in, even if it was filthy by now. (They felt kind of cheated this winter at not having any snow).

In Sequoia National Park.

Jacob

A wonderful campsite!

Tyrell (picture by Dallin)

The tall grass was a big change from the desert.

A mercy stop for a boy getting queasy on switch backs.

Snow!

Magnificent trees!

In front of the largest tree in the world!

Even with some help we only made it half way around one of the large sequoias.

I found myself wanting to talk to the trees in the forest, they seemed to hold some kind of wisdom.

The views were magnificent!

The kids are sworn in for their tenth junior ranger badge.

Surf's Up!

Hello Ocean!

We're currently living it up at Jamalaya beach near Vandenburg Airforce Base. We missed the shuttle so we were not about to miss the rocket launch set for May 5. We've had a ball burying each other in the sand and chasing waves. The kids were a little worried that I didn't get wet. They thought maybe I didn't have fun because I didn't swim. I assured them that I loved every minute watching them soak and splash themselves. We all have our favorite way to enjoy the beach. My favorite way to enjoy the ocean is from the beach. That doesn't mean I enjoy it any less. My joy comes from hearing the surf break, hearing the kids giggle, seeing them run from the water to the blanket and back again, and seeing the sheer power of the ocean. I like building castles and cities in the sand with the kids too. I do have very strict rules with the children that the water can't go above their knees and they have to stay next to Dan when the waves are as big as the waves we enjoyed today. David is in ocean heaven chasing seagulls, of which none are lacking here. Jacob likes to watch the waves and clap as the older kids run in and out of the water. Tyrell, Natalyn, and Dallin vacillated between sand castles and splashing. Dan would have loved to get out the body board, but there was a surf warning, so we heeded their advice. He spent his time staying close to the kids in the water, and burying kids in the sand.

Another great campsite!

Jacob loved the ocean!

Natalyn and Ty run from the surf.

Ty having a ball!

Dallin and Natalyn

David neck deep

Dallin buried in the sand

Jacob didn't share everyone else's enthusiasm for getting buried.

Running from the surf

Building a sand castle

Dan writing

Bees, Bobcats and Sand castles

I spend a good part of my mental energy trying to understand life. It seems that I put a lot more effort into the thinking, than I ever get in progress of understanding from the thinking, but understanding life seems important, and like most good things, getting something is better than getting nothing, even if all it does is leave you with a taste for more. Every now and then I do get little surprise peeks at what feel like deeper things. As I get these little glimpses I feel like a small cup dipping into a large hidden lake, I would like more, but being a small cup, can only hold what I can, which also unfortunately for you means I am also probably going to do a terrible job explaining my little thoughts, but I will hopefully be able to share some of it.

First bees, as Lexie mentioned earlier we experienced a lot of bees in Quartzsite. The blooming palo verde trees sounded like someone was running a chain saw because the buzzing of the bees was so loud. When on a walk with Ty and Dallin I had the thought to go inside one to look for a hive, thinking it would be really cool to find some wild honey. I failed to find any honey, but from inside the tree got the most dramatic view I have ever had of watching bees work as they flew from blossom to blossom. The bees level of activity and apparent urgency was quite captivating. Bees play a very important role in our ecosystem. In many places they are dying off at alarming rates. It was very satisfying to see these very interesting animals up close performing their part of a larger system.

As warned, my explanation doesn't do the experience justice, but we'll move on anyway, under explained bobcat up next... Last December I got it into my head that I would really like to see a wild bobcat. Bobcats are less rare than some other animals, but relatively elusive. In all my life I had never seen one in the wild. At times it would almost bother me that I thought about looking for one, because it seemed like a silly use of energy, especially when the majority of my time is spent with small children that are mostly the opposite of quiet. As it turned out, on our way back from the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park as we came around a turn there was a bobcat on the side of the road going up a hill - and then there wasn't. Dallin and I were the only ones in the car to see the animal. I was delighted to finally see a wild bobcat and found myself wondering about the experience. I wondered how much wanting to see the bobcat had to do with seeing the bobcat. Sort of the way a sports fan will watch a basketball game and when there is a free throw or other critical play, the fan will make a very strong mental image of their desired outcome, as if they have some sort of capability to affect the trajectory of a ball with their mind. It seems like there is some kind of power and understanding available to humans that they do not have a very good sense of, or control over, but to which we have some vague connections.

Finally, for today, sand castles... I know the imagery is very heavily used in writing, but I am going to add to the weight of the coverage anyway with my own thoughts. When a sand castle is built on the sand below the high tide line, the outcome of the castle is to get washed away by the tide. As we were playing yesterday on the beach we had a lot of fun building a castle. There was also another group that built a castle a little closer to the ocean. Their castle was the first victim of the tide. It was fun to watch them play, because they resisted the rising tide by digging a channel around the castle and making a small rock wall in the front. I will admit I felt a little smug as I watched their lower castle fall. The emotion was funny, because it was only time that separated the tide from my own castle. If you leave your thinking at the beach you will miss my point. If you expand your thinking to think of things like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or life and death you'll be on the right track, if you find yourself confused about the meaning of it, we may well be in the same rail car. In the mean time, I think I'll go find some sea shells to decorate my castle.

I think I'll go find some sea shells to decorate my castle.

April 19 2009

2009-04-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

Moving, slowly, but moving

Our new campsite.

We decided to stay in Quartzsite until the 27th of April so that Ty could attend day camp and would be able to attend his pack meeting where he will receive his wolf badge. Our permit to stay in the long term visitor area expired on April 15th so we needed to find a new camp. Since Ty's day camp was in Blythe we thought it would be a good idea get an extended permit and camp in the LTVA (Long Term Visitors Area) near Blythe for the day camp. We were disappointed to learn upon arriving at the LTVA in Blythe that one needed to go to Yuma to get the permits. This wasn't practical of course so we simply returned to Quartzsite and setup camp in their two week area and arranged with Ty's leaders to get him a ride to day camp.

I continue to be impressed especially after being in camp for a long time how quickly we can move. I feared adding the wall tent and not really knowing where it would fit would make packing very slow. I was pleased that the tent didn't take very long at all to strike and even though I am eventually planning to get a covered car topper to help protect the tent from rain, for now the tent straps very nicely to the top of the car. Setting up the tent wasn't too bad either. I would like to time myself when I don't have a 20-30 mph wind. Even in those conditions I had the tent up, staked and with the fly on in 50 minutes with Ty, Dallin and Natalyn's help. The kids were cute and looked like little sailors in a storm trying to hold the fly ropes in place against the wind. Natalyn and Dallin doubled up on a rope to have more pulling strength. It is very nice to have kids getting a little older to where their help is becoming much more substantial.

Day Camp

Off to day camp!

The day camp here was held earlier in the year than usual to avoid the extreme heat of the summer. Since the day camp spanned school days the way the organizers arranged things was to have camp split over three days. Thursday and Friday camps went from 4PM to 8PM and the Saturday camp went from 8AM to 4PM. At about noon on Thursday I got a call from a highly stressed scout leader to learn that the parent, we had arranged for Ty to ride with, was stuck in San Diego with car trouble. I volunteered to help give scouts a ride over and help at the camp for the day. Internally I was going through a lot of stress because I really wanted to get the part of the game I was working on finished, but I was also happy my employment is currently flexible enough that I am able to drop things to spend time with the family.

I had a lot of fun at the day camp with Tyrell. The camp leader was very full of energy and encouraged a lot of yelling and cheering, which was very popular with the boys. The camp was arranged into stations at which the scouts spent about half and hour each. On Thursday Ty did leather work, first aid, knot tying and geology. They also listened to a speaker from the BLM, and made a den flag. The next day when we were talking to Tyrell about camp I was very impressed with how much information he had retained from camp.

I didn't go to camp with Ty on Friday, but based on what Ty recounted, I am sure the day was as high quality as the first. He came back with a very nice chart of the Solar System and a lot to say about black holes. He also spoke quite a bit about a relay race game in which he apparently had a lot of fun. Oh yes, and he would not stop talking about BB gun and archery safety. He had a class in that and was very excited to shoot an arrow and a BB gun on Saturday. During the day we had forgotten that Tyrell had an assignment to create a container to protect an egg in an egg drop contest. After picking Tyrell up at around 9PM we were up pretty late with the duct tape and bubble wrap getting a drop container ready.

I dropped a very sleepy, but excited Tyrell of for his ride at 7AM and then returned back to camp. Saturday's day camp invited the parents and family at 2PM to watch the egg drop contest,camp skits and have a barbeque. The rest of us were planning to watch a civil war reenactment during the day and then get to the barbeque. We were disappointed upon arriving at the civil war reenactment to learn that the reenactment would not happen until 1:30PM which would conflict with day camp, so we filled the time running errands, shopping for things not available in Quartzsite.

I know it's stupid, unfortunately even when I am aware thinking is stupid I can't always voluntarily push it out of my mind, I was feeling a lot of pressure about the egg drop contest. Being an engineer it seems that I have a responsibility to know how to make a container for an egg such that the egg won't break, and being a father I have a responsibility to pass that knowledge onto my son so that he doesn't have to feel embarrassed about a broken egg. I had been analyzing and reanalyzing the design we had in my mind. The basic concept I know was nice, but I wasn't sure how well it was implemented. I had about 4 design fixes in my head that I would have liked to implement, but was just able to watch in gripped anticipation as the eggs were dropped. The eggs were dropped off a fire truck ladder. I was feeling even more unsure about our setup when I saw how high the ladder was. What we had done was go for a cone shape,and weight the tip, so that the container would drop like a shuttle cock, hitting nose first and then place the egg high in the center of the cone with just a little padding on the top in case the container bounced and flipped on impact. My thinking was that in as much as the contest included a sized restriction we could get about 50% more padding under the egg by directing the side of the impact. In the end with the way the duct tape pennies and milk jug worked out I think we pretty much broke even, in that we lost most of 2 of our allowed 8 inches to pennies. I was also fretting that we did not have break seams along the outside of the container, which would have been able to dissipate a lot of force and allow the egg a longer path of travel in its deceleration. Anyway, with a heavily flowing stream of ideas of everything that was wrong with our design and implementation and having convinced myself that I wouldn't need to seek a refund in tuition or deem myself and idiot engineer if the egg broke, I watched Ty's container fall and was very pleased that the egg was perfectly in tact. If anyone feels the need to remind me that this was Ty's egg drop contest, I'll invite them to reread the first two sentences of the paragraph. At some point I hope the stupid parts of my brain will cease to generate thought, but I imagine that day is a ways off. If Dallin ever has an egg drop contest with similar rules I think the answer will to put about a dozen eggs in the box with a bunch of nitro-tri-iodide (a mild contact explosive) and watch everyone get sprayed when the box drops. See I told those parts of my brain were still firing with all too much power and frequency.

With all of that said I guess I will hold a little to my bad thinking in that Ty was very happy his egg didn't break and seemed pleased with the level of input he had into the project. I remember when I was in the fourth grade my dad had a very high level of input into a science fair project that I did. I won the science fair and looking back sometimes wonder if that little telegraph project didn't start a career as an engineer. At any rate I do think of it as a time that I knew my dad loved me and was paying special attention to me. Even if I was a bit overbearing about the egg drop project, what I want Ty and all of my children to know is that I love more than I can say or understand and want to do everything that I can to bring them happiness and success.

Getting ready to watch eggs drop.

After the egg drop, the firemen were nice enough to spray the boys.

A very wet and happy Tyrell.

A great barbeque to end day camp.

Ty with his egg protection.

An extra drop for fun.

Quick note about the birds and bees

Really this is more about the bees, it was just fun to include birds in the title. Although as long as they are there I will say I have been impressed with the number of raptors we have been able to see here. I am very bad at my birds, I keep going back and forth between thinking our big birds are hawks and vultures. They don't seem to circle like vultures or have a lot of that fleshy material around their head but are very large and seem to fly with their heads dropped. Back to bees... in the desert water seems to be very important. We were very surprised the other day in camp when we looked at our water bottle. It has a small hole in the top. The hole attracted a swarm of bees. The bees in the picture are only a few of the bees that were around the water container. I put a cup of water out away from the trailer. I haven't noticed any bees by it or by our water jug since. It was quite something to see that many bees just show up like that.

Bees by our water jug.

2009-04-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter!

Natalyn works on dying some eggs.

Our days around here have been having highs around 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 C). Lexie and I agreed that it wasn't weather to be putting boiled eggs outside. We had the kids hunt for plastic eggs stuffed with coins and candy. Another constraint we don't usually have added to an Easter egg hunt is that we told the kids that eggs would not be hidden in holes, in as much as we don't know which holes might be homes to gila monsters or rattlesnakes (we haven't seen any snakes here, but have heard they are around). It was fun to watch the excitement of the children as they searched for the eggs.

Conquest of Mt. Molehill

Ty and Dallin on top of the Mountain

There is a little mountain near camp that I climbed earlier this year and decided was a bit to steep for the three youngest kids, but that Ty and Dallin might enjoy climbing. I don't know the mountain's name, it is near Quartzsite so it could be Quartzsite mountain. The mountain is bigger than it looks so I have taken to thinking of it as Mt. Molehill.

Much to my pleasure after introducing the idea of doing a climb with Ty, Dallin and myself, several weeks ago, the two oldest boys had been very consistent in reminding me of the idea. It still remains a bit of a mystery to me how busy we are sitting out here in the middle of the desert. For the past several weeks every weekend we had intended to make the climb something had come up that took the place of the climb. With our time in Quartzsite quickly drawing to a close we realized this was one of our last two opportunities to get the climb done on a weekend and it did not seem wise to wait for the last Saturday before leaving as a climb date if we intended to be successful on the climb.

After having made the resolve to go, it looked like we might once again get our plans sidelined to outside forces. Friday brought a brief although powerful lightning storm, and we were we listening to strong wind through the whole night. The morning was cold and windy, I woke up thinking that we might not be going after all. I am very skittish about lightening and decided that if the weather forecast included any predictions of thunderstorms we would be staying home. I was pleased to see that the forecast was clear of electrical storms and we were indeed finally able to set out on our little journey.

We have been reading the Prydain Chronicles as a family. On the way up the mountain we saw a few vultures. We had fun pretending they were Gythaints. I took the roll of Prince Don, Tyrell was Taren and Dallin was Gurgi. We pretended we were marching toward Annuvin. That's about as far as we took the roll playing, but it made it fun all the same. The mountain is very bare and raw. There is little soil and the sparse vegetation that is there all seems to be prickled with thorns. I am very weak in my geology so I won't make a guess at the type of rock on the mountain. The rock and landscape (minus the cacti and shrubs) reminds me of pictures of Mars sent back from the rover.

One part of the hike required going up a very steep slope of loose rock. I didn't take the GPS and I am bad with distance, but I would guess the slope to gain about 250 feet of elevation. There wasn't any danger of a bad fall, but the boys found this part of the climb quite unnerving. Once we made it past that part of the climb I was excited because I knew the boys would be able to finish the mountain. It wasn't too much later that we were indeed at the summit. I exclaimed, "Wow, boys! I should have found a taller mountain for you. You don't seem to even know you have a mountain under you." The boys wouldn't agree with me and thought they had climbed plenty of mountain. Up on the summit the weather was quite nice, it was a bit breezy, but the breeze kept it from being too hot. Tyrell curled up a while and tried to take a nap. We all had a piece of chocolate cake and a piece of bubble gum to celebrate the summit.

The boys were a bit nervous about going down the steep slope with the loose rock, but were brave enough about doing it once they got there. Since there really wasn't a great way down the slope without kicking rocks on each other I pointed out a carin to Tyrell and told him to go first and wait for us there. Dallin followed and I went last. At that point we were very happy to be through the hardest part of the hike.

Lexie and I were both surprised when we arrived back that the trailer at half passed noon, having allocated the entire day to the hike. The boys really had made great time. I was very pleased with how well they did on the hike. For all of the food we packed it turned out that had we simply taken the chocolate cake and bubble gum we would have been just fine. Something to keep in mind for the next hike I suppose, or not ...

We pretended the vultures were "gwythaints".

Ty and Dallin work up to the summit ridge.

Ty and Dallin strike a celebration pose on the summit.

Dallin enjoys a piece of chocolate cake on the summit.

Ty tries to catch a quick nap on the summit.

Dallin and Ty work down part of the mountain. (Not the steep part)

The steep part of the climb. (It doesn't look steep because the camera is pointed down hill) The sort of big rock just right of center is Ty.

Work, life and stuff

Other odds and ends to mention about the week. Even though the tent is sorely lacking a floor (I am counting days until I can get somewhere that sells good outdoor carpet) the tent is serving very well as an office. Lexie was nice enough to handle the weekly water and sewer chores. She was a bit nervous about the job in that she doesn't drive with the trailer attached very often. It didn't do much for her confidence that she managed to get stuck within 100 yards of departing. Fortunately getting unstuck was a simple matter of switching to 4 wheel drive. I'm sure she would have been able to get out just fine, but there is too much little boy in me to miss a chance at driving the Suburban in four wheel drive. After the initial minor mishap Lexie managed just fine and I enjoyed the first uninterrupted Monday of work I have had in quite a while.

I am almost ready to make a beta release of my game. Finishing this project emotionally has felt very similar to finishing college. My emotions have been running between extremes of excitement and frustration. One minute I feel like a great success, the next moment I feel very shallow and empty, wondering if I have squandered my time and money in a vain pursuit. Without much pause after that my thoughts and feelings will roller coaster back to seeing a very clear vision of what I am doing and realize my proximity to a key mile stone in my goals. I know there is a part of me that wants the game to fail. That sounds ridiculous and is, but all the same it seems to be the way my inner wiring works. Failing makes things simple and give a shield behind which to hide. In a very strange way failure is less scary than success. With that out, there is of course also a part of me that desperately hopes and lives for the game to come to success. I am sure a lot of my internal emotional ride lately is the struggle between these parts of my mind working their way.

In many ways I call the game a success already even though I have only sold one copy so far to a friend. Starting projects is about one billion times easier than finishing projects. I am very pleased to have found within myself the fortitude to stick to a project of the size of the Spelling Castle and get it as close to fruition as it currently is. In the metaphor of a mountain climb I am on the summit ridge and can see the top. I don't believe there is a force short of death that will be able to keep me from finishing a market worthy version of the game. That's the happy news, keeping with the mountain climbing analogy although I am almost to the summit, I realize that I still need to get down, and much like the summit of a great peak, although physically less strenuous than the ascent the path down posses some of the greatest danger. My work in The Spelling Castle isn't going to get anywhere without getting a proper business structure around it. So after I finish the code development over the next couple of weeks it is time for another plunge into the darkness and I get to try to become a business person in short order.

I know everything in my venture does not depend on the immediate success of the spelling game and even though I have taken more than a year to develop it, it really does not represent a full year's work, in that much of my time has been involved in learning new programming languages and some contract work that I took in the fall. I really hate accounting and because of that I do not have a count of how many man hours I have put into the spelling castle, so I really don't have a good way to measure how financially successful the game is. At this point my standards are that if I can feed the family and keep gas in the tank, the game is a huge success. Also as I mentioned before, the simple fact that I will have an albeit simple, fully developed game is a huge personal success in itself.

People all end their lives as food for worms. I believe the best people are the people who can find their dreams and visions before they do. I feel a great sense of inner pride that at this point in my life I honestly feel that every bit of my capacity chases the dream and vision that lies within my heart. As much I would like to see those dreams and visions materialize, I am satisfied that as long as I can keep my eyes looking toward the vision and my feet moving toward the dream, that is enough, regardless the count of my remaining years or days.

The person I am and the person I want to be are vastly different. I picture a person with much more skill, patience, strength and discipline than I currently have. It is hard not to be frustrated with myself as I see these differences in nature and capacity have negative consequences on the pursuit of my goals. With that said, in the words of Popeye, I am what I am and that's all that I am. Right now I am OK with that, as long as little by little I can become less of what I am and more of what I want to be.

Thinking of the inevitable flood of criticism that will come with the release of the game, that with any measure of success will be seen by thousands or hopefully even millions, I think it would be easier to disrobe and run through a super market naked than to face the flood of negative feedback which is certain to come. Come to think of it, a quick little grocery store run might make good marketing, just kidding, mostly. My pictured person doesn't streak in public, it is the scared little man that I am that would think of doing something like that, bad Dan, bad Dan, NO!

Now that I have said that I am afraid of negative feedback I want you to know if I involve you in the beta testing I need negative feedback (If you are not involved in my beta testing but want to be, please let me know). Having fewer things screwed up than my competitors is vital to my success. I guess mostly I am trying to let you know I'm going through quite a bit inside and it really kills me that my efforts haven't amounted to more. I have no desire to spend thousands of dollars printing discs containing a game with bugs that are going to prevent the game's success.

OK, off work, and very disturbing images, I'll get back to life for a little bit. We did a bit of story book cooking this week. I'm not sure how many of my four readers are familiar with the story of Stone Soup. In case you aren't, I'll spoil it for you by telling you it is a story about some travelers that trick a village into fixing a delicious meal for them by telling them they will cook Stone Soup. The soup starts by boiling stones in water which gets all of the townsfolk interested and the travelers tell them little by little ways to make the stone soup even better by adding little things like herbs, vegetables and meat. The kids love to have Lexie make stone soup. She is very careful to scrub and boil the rocks she uses and has come up with a great soup recipe to put around it. We had an added treat by an experiment with adding ham and swiss cheese to a bread recipe. That was very good with soup. The other storybook cooking which was done was the chocolate cake mentioned earlier as the summit snack. I didn't hear the story, actually I think I did, but wasn't paying attention, at any rate, the gist of it is something called thunder cake. When you hear thunder you need to have the cake finished and in the oven before the rain falls to have a real thunder cake. To Dallin's disappointment we wound up with a chocolate cake, in that the thunder and rain came at almost the same time. Of course there are worse things in life than to be stuck with a chocolate cake and the need to try again for a thunder cake.

April 7, 2009

2009-04-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday Tyrell!

Blowing out candles

Opening presents

Frosting the cake (he has a white spoon)

Tyrell turned nine today! It is hard to believe he is already that old. With my encouragement we bought him a pocket knife, one of those swiss army types with lots of gadgets. It was fun to watch him as I showed him all of the knives' features.

Our Doings and Happenings

The Saturday before conference Tyrell had a scout activity to which the entire family was invited. The activity was a sort of mini day camp. The kids had a lot of fun playing on the puddle jumpers, which are simple little stilts created by attaching pieces of rope to number ten cans. After the activity the boy scout troop, who had camped out behind the church, invited us over to roast hot dogs. I forget what the called the biscuit things they did but they were very good. You basically take a biscuit and roast it with a special roasting stick with a dowel at the end. When you are done the hot dog fits in like a pig in a blanket. We enjoyed them so much that we had them for dinner again on Monday night as a lead in to family home evening, however we skipped roasting the biscuit and hot dog separately and simply wrapped the hot dogs in the biscuits.

Work wise I have been making good progress on the spelling game. I decided to purchase a canvas tent to use as an office. When the tent came one of the angle pieces had a defect that made it unusable so until I got a replacement I simply duct taped one of the joints together. The new tent has been working great with a couple of problems I still need to work out. I am sure I can solve them, it will just take some more time, money and effort. One problem is the sun light. A white tent without any shade is very bright inside during the day, this makes the lap top difficult to see. Putting the fly on the tent helps a little, so far I am getting by well enough I don't think I am going to do anything until I see if there is any issue in the forest. The other problem which is a bit more sticky is the dust. Especially last week when we were getting 30mph gusts of wind, everything in the tent would get covered in dust. I am going to buy an outdoor carpet, but so far don't know where to buy one in town. In January you couldn't go anywhere in town without seeing it for sale, but now that the vendors have left I am not sure where to shop for it. I think I'll just grab some in a few weeks when I pass by a Home Depot.

My new office

I really enjoyed listening to conference over the weekend. The children were terrific. When I went to the Priesthood session I took notes so I could give the family highlights of what I heard from the talks. The next day Dallin decided he would take notes. He wrote down four pages before he declared his hand hurt too much to write anymore. I was very impressed with him.

Lexie made Jacob some new booties

Close up of the booties

March 22, 2009

2009-03-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

Saguaro National Park

I was excited to get down to Tucson so we left the Pinal County Campground a day earlier than we originally planned. On the way to the Gilbert Ray Campground we stopped at the visitor's center for Saguaro National Park to pick up Junior Ranger packets for the kids. I was impressed with a display about water in the visitor's center. It stated that the average house hold uses 100 gallons of water per person per day. Our family has been using 60 gallons per week. With seven people in the family that comes out to 1.22 gallons of water per person per day. I guess that doesn't include laundry which we do at the laundry mat, all the same I think it safe to say we are below the average when it comes to water consumption.

I was pleased that the campground wasn't full, by time we got setup and had dinner it was time to go to sleep. The kids spent Friday (March 6, 2009) working on Junior Ranger packets and school work in the campground. I lost the day reinstalling Vista on my laptop with the hope that I could resolve some of the crumby behavior I was getting from my laptop. I did get some improvement but overall I really think Vista has missed the mark.

The kids working on Junior Ranger packets.

Natalyn measuring a cactus.

I love Arizona sunsets!

There was something eating the prickly pear cacti over night!

Lexie took the kids to see more Petriglyphs.

Petriglyphs in Saguaro National Park.

I find the plants of the Sonora Desert very interesting.

Kitt Peak

When I was somewhere around ten years old we took a family trip with my cousins that included a stop to the Kitt Peak National Observatory. I don't remember much about the trip other than I had a fabulous time and I got in trouble for climbing on the walls. In fact I was confused about the location until I saw an add for Kitt Peak on a web page I was visiting to gather information about the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. I had grown up thinking that the Kitt Peak National Observatory was near Flagstaff. That is part of the beauty of trips as a kid, you just get in the car and go somewhere without sweating the details, sometimes you know where you are sometimes you don't. Well, when I put it that way I realize that not much has really changed.

I was very excited to see that we would be able to fit a visit to Kitt Peak into our vacation plan, I was extra excited when I learned that Myron Anderson, a man I served with as a missionary in Korea about 13 years ago would be able to bring his family and meet me there. He has three kids that are similar in age to my kids. I hadn't seen Myron since Korea so on the way to the observatory in the morning my excitement kept shifting between seeing the observatory and seeing Myron. It was great to be able to do both at the same time.

We did a tour of the helioscope before Myron arrived. I was very impressed with the scale of the telescope and all of the engineering and politics that went into its development. A major problem with getting a large image of the sun through a telescope is that a large image of the sun gathers a lot of sun light, which contains a lot of heat, which will melt telescope components if the telescope isn't large enough. The telescope they have up there of course is gigantic. Another issue that comes up with a telescope that size is that the light path inside the telescope needs to be kept at the same tempurature. The telescope is lined with a network of copper piping for heat regulation. Manufacturing lenses the size they need is its own challenge for several reasons. Anyway, in short the work required to make the telescope requires an amazing amount of expertise and an amazing amount of work. It is very gratifying to see a great human acomplishment like that one. It is one thing to get a great idea in one's mind and another thing to get that many human minds and hands together to achieve a great result.

Myron and his family were waiting for us when we got back from the first tour. I was glad to see that our children seemed to get along well and had fun playing together. We all went on a tour of another telescope. I thought the tour guide and some of the guests were too grouchy about the noise the kids were making, but I decided not to make a scene about it. I don't have much sympathy for people who sit in the back and complain they can't hear, especially when the kids were not being exceptionally noisy. I think the kids exposure to the telescopes is more important than the adults, because for the most parts by the time people are adults, and especially old grumpy ones, most of their life choices are made. Children are the ones who are the most likely to gain a life directing influence from exposure to a tour like the one being presented.

After the second tour we had a picinic at a picinic table next to the parking lot. I had a lot of fun visiting with Myron and his wife, somewhere in the conversation we realized that the third tour of the day was leaving, but by that time I was more interested in visiting than seeing another telescope and was satisfied that the kids were doing just as well to be playing by that point. All in all it was a great day. I would like to go back for one of their night tours sometime, but I don't really know when I'll be able to.

Natalyn and Dallin at Kitt Peak

Some very impressive telescopes

Our kids had fun playing together

It was great to see Myron again and meet his family

Hold on Jacob, it's a wild ride!

Tombstone

We stayed at the Gilbert Ray Campground through the weekend so that we could go to church in Tucson. Finding a church in Tucson proved a bit tricky because in addition to the operating system problems I was having with the computer the internet connection also went bad on both computers. I took the first address I found in the phone book and got us to the church distrabution center about 10 minutes past nine. By 9:30 we had found another building that actually had a meeting in and decided to stay at that one even though we were half an hour late. The rest of Sunday just diappeared the way Sundays seem to. I think a nap and reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" to the kids ate the afternoon and evening.

At Kartchner Caverns it is required to get reservations for the Big Room tour and recommend to get reservations for the Rotundra Tour. We made our reservations for Tuesday. We dropped our trailer at the campground and continued on toward Tombstone. We didn't really know what there would be to see in Tombstone, but I had become intrigued with the place as I had been doing a little reading about Wyatt Earp. Our plan was to check town and if there was nothing to do continue on to the border to check out Mexico. It turned out that there was plenty to do in Tombstone albeit it seemed they charged for everything. The reenactment of the OK Corral gun fight was quite interesting to watch. The play emphasied how quickly the events transpired and also how it really wasn't clear who was right and who was wrong in the altercation. While on the subject of quickly traspiring events, just before the play started (in an outdoor theater) as I was working to get kids in their seats I heard a loud crashing sound, that I assumed at first was a stage prop of some sort to get the play started. I looked left over my shoulder (we were on the top row at the request of the kids) and saw that two cars had collided in the intersection. I don't think anyone was hurt. I found myself entertaining the thought of whether or not there was any significance or connection in crashing one's car at the site of the OK Corral gun fight. I'd imagine the connection if any was as simple as a tourist was looking at signs instead of looking at the road, however every now and then it is fun to try to weave a bigger web when connecting events in life. I pity anyone nerdy enough to know what a linear feedback shift register is and I won't bore anyone here with the scant details I can recount from college, but I will share that it is a very simple circuit that can among other things be used to produce "random" numbers. Even though the numbers show up as statistically independent, meaning they don't show any immediately obvious relationship to one another they are in fact generated through a very simple, predicatable and reproducable process. So we can leave the crash at the OK Corral as a couple of distracted tourists or we can view it as a piece of a larger puzzle.

The gift shops in town had a great collection of cap guns. Imagining the outcome of buying some cap guns the kids didn't have a chance, even if they used their own money. Even Natalyn was getting excited about a set of pink cap guns. I was sympathetic to them however. I did leave town wanting a mustache, a long trench coat and a sawed off shot gun. Dan is kind of a tough cowboy name isn't it! I actually see myself as more of a pioneer than a cowboy.

On the way home we stopped, or more acurately were stopped at a border security check point. We asked the border patrol officer what he thought of the safety of a day trip to Nogales, we got a "you're crazy" stare, a small laugh, and an answer of "I wouldn't do it!" We took that as enough to make a full abortion of our plan of seeing Mexico this trip. I was very frustrated to scrap the trip because Nogales is such a neat town. I had been very excited to get the kids into a new country, show them the shops and let them hear people speaking Spanish. I suppose I am going to need to figure out a way to raise some more cash and get them over to Spain or Italy. Pizza in Italy, that sound nice...

Jailed in Tombstone

This historic district in Tombstone is very impressive

In town with Wyatt Earp and company

Get a whip on that horse!

The kids had fun working with some lassos

Natalyn in an 1885 model pickup truck

Boothill, here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a 44, NO LES, NO MORE

Karchner Caverns

We were warned several times that we were taking a lot of kids into the cave, and that kids were often scared in the cave. I don't know a better way to get a kid into a cave than to take a kid into a cave so I really didn't see a viable alternative. I thought it would be much better to take the kids in and let them be scared (they could leave if they needed) than to deny them the opportunity based on what might happen. It turned out the kids had perfect behavior and totally loved the cave. We had a wonderful tour guide who was probably the best balance of personable, educating, and entertaining that I have ever seen in a guide. The limestone formations inside the cave were wonderful to see, of the 30 known cave formations 28 formations are found in the Kartchner Caverns.

Children under 7 were not allowed on the Big Room Tour so I watched Natalyn, David and Jacob while Lexie took Tyrell and Dallin on the Big Room tour. She reported that the Big Room was even more impressive than the Rotunda Room. I was glad she was able to go. I am excited to explore more caves in the future.

Natalyn and David

This visitor's center had some fun mock cave tunnels.

Every now and then Natalyn gets some great photos

Pima Air and Space Museam

Having decided that it was not prudent to go to Mexico we had an extra day available to play. Our campground neighbor loaned us a couple of books about day trips in Arizona. After reviewing the books I thought the thing that looked the neatest was the Pima Air and Space Museum. We went to an air and space museum near Seattle when Ty was a toddler and he loved that one, we thought a pretty sure bet he would appriciate this one as well.

The museum is wonderful. The first exibit as one walks in is a reproduction of the Wright Flyer, the aircraft which made the first controlled human flight in 1903, after several wonderful displays including what became David's favorite of the world's smallest air craft, one got to the museum's Black Bird, a stealth jet developed in the early sixties capable of flying at over 2100 mph (mach 3.2) and at altitudes of 85,000 feet, quite a jump from the wood and canvas contraption in the openning display which catalyzed things just 60 years prior. Looking at all of the different air craft left me excited with the idea of designing and flying a jet, it just seems so simple ... motor, wings, controllers, flight! Dallin couldn't get to a paper fast enough after the museum so that he could start drawing airplanes.

Inside my heart I know I want to fly. I also know that I don't want to die any earlier than medically neccessary. I haven't resolved yet just how dangerous flying really is. I know that flying anything I designed would be very dangerous. At some point I think I will find a balace that does have me flying, I might be old enough that I am wearing adult diapers by the time I finally do, but that's all part of the balance.

A great museum!

The kids really enjoyed pretending to pilot some of the planes.

Mmmmm, me want dat!

In the outdoor part of the museum

A plane used by Nasa, for zero gravity training I would imagine, but I don't know.

Ty by one of the Blue Angels

Ty really liked the planes with teeth on the nose art

David's favorite plane was the Bumble Bee.

Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is another place that I remembered from childhood trips, although I remembered it more clearly because I had been there more times. I had so much fun going with my cousins as a kid, I was delighted that Lexie's sister Jennifer and family would be able to join us there for a day. I really appricate my parents and the great opportunities they gave me as a child. I feel really good when I feel like I am able to share a part of the world with my children. I experience it as a tribute to my parents.

For people who haven't been to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, I would recommend finding a calendar and getting a date marked to go see it. Of course I would lean toward winter or fall weather months for that calendar mark over summer months, a great part of the museum is outdoors. I also recommend the camping at the Gilbert Ray campground, it is only about a 5 minute drive from the museum. There are more places like it now, but at the time the museum was developed it was quite novel in that the museum features several natural displays. We did not have a bit of trouble filling our day as we went between demonstrations and exhibits. I think left on my own I could have spent three or four days there without loosing interest in things. At some point in my life I think I will become a docent at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, or a place like it.

I can't really pick a favorite part of the day, but if I had to, I think it would be a lecture the museum gave in the afternoon about the gila monster and rattle snakes. I was very amused to learn that the statistically most common profile of a rattle snake victim is 1) Male (no surprise) 2) Young 18-35 (no surprise) 3) Drunk (no surprise) 4) Tatooed (suprise!). I guess the mind that generates the idea that a permanent skin picture is a good idea, is also a mind that generates the idea that it might be fun to pick up a potentially fatally posionous snake. I think I would have let the thinking about the tatoos go as funny buy not really significantly realated, but it was the very next day when I was talking to someone about rattlesnakes, they were telling me how they had recently seen one and were throwing rocks at it, but couldn't get it to strike. After that they showed me their tattoo! The presenter said that most rattlesnake bites are preceeded by the words "hey, hold my beer and watch this!" Something I did not realize is that 1 in 20 rattlesnake bites are fatal. A reason more are not fatal is that we have good medical intervention for rattlesnake bites. The catch, which is also something I had no idea of, is the average bill for treatment of a rattlesnake bite at a hospital is $100,000. The presenter also told a story of a person bit by their pet rattlesnake who with a life flight managed a bill of $320,000. Having been to the air and space museum the day before, several ideas for better uses of that kind of money quickly came to mind. Playing with snakes just isn't worth it.

A few interesting things I learned about hawks... A hawk can see a mouse from 1 mile away. Their vision is so sharp that if they were able to read, they would be able to read a newspaper from across a football field. The Kestrel Hawk can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, which enables it to see urine trails of rodents. Finally the Harris's Hawk is a pack hunter. Several hawks will perch around a hunting area. The lowest hawk in the social order makes the first dive when game is spotted. The first hawk likely misses and pushes the prey into a bush. The hawk then uses its talons to flush the animal from the bush. Once the animal is flushed the second lowest hawk in the social order makes its dive and so forth. Pretty cool huh?

Lots of things were in bloom at the desert museum

Happy Jacob!

We got a great view of the Mountain Lions

I forgot what everyone was looking at in this picture.

Isn't that cute?

Ty looking a bit tired

Learning about a bird that can see mouse pee

A western diamondback rattlesnake

Learning about the Harris's hawk

The kids work on some navigating

Kevan, Jennifer, and Natalyn

After the lecture we were so hungry we started lunch in the parking lot

Hotdogs!

I have a weakness for hot dogs and often think their advertising should be regulated much like tabacco or alcohol, it just isn't fair of places to advertise that they are selling something so toxic and enticing at the same time. I can't see a place that advertises hot dogs without wanting to eat a hot dog. In this case it was my own church doing the tempting, so I had a religous obligation to indulge, how convienent!

The morning's schedule and day's travel on Friday (March 14, 2009) centered on making it back to Quartzsite by 4PM for the ward hotdog and hamburger barbeque. I was not disappointed at quarter to four we pulled up next to the pavillion the ward was using and I could see quarter pound hot dogs making their way toward the grill. The parking place doubled as a camp site in as much as it was in the South LaPosa Long Term Visitor Area. It was quite a convienence to be able to take the house to a church function in that it made it simple to put the kids to bed afterward.

There was a brief animal demonstration by a member of the Arizona BLM. The kids got to sit right up front and get a great view of a gopher snake, desert tortoise, screech owl and Harris's hawk. I left the demonstration thinking a gopher snake seemed like a pretty handy critter in that it likes eating mice and loves eating rattlesnakes.

After I had finished my hotdog and had been stealing chips of the kid's plates for a while my friend Alva came by and said he was on his way home to watch the BYU-San Diego game. I don't remember if I was invited or somehow just invited myself, after getting cleared by Lexie to ditch the activity (I had what I came for) Ty and I went off with Alva to watch the game. I was very amused as Ty watched the game he would point out the tatooed players as rattlesnake bait. The game ended wrong if you are a BYU fan, but it was entertaining to watch.

When we got back we learned that people at the church party had gone home before starting the bon fire which they had planned. The BLM ranger told Lexie she could have the wood and was welcome to a fire if she wanted it. As we pulled in Lexie and the younger kids were sitting about 10 feet back from a very impressive pile of coals. The five of them had enjoyed a fire that was big enough for the two or three hundred people it was intended for. Down in Mexico they sell marshmallows almost the size of baseballs. The kids had a lot of fun roasting their oversized marshmallows over the oversized fire. I was impressed with how quickly the fire burned. It didn't seem like it burned much longer than a normal campfire, just hotter. When it came time to put the fire out we decided that we would have to make an early water trip the next day and put most of our containered drinking water onto the fire. It was impressive as we poured the water on the ground it would just stay in a rolling boil. I think the ground was holding a lot of heat from the fire. After we poured over 10 gallons on the fire and everything was underwater we decided it was good for the night.

At the ward party waiting for an animal demonstration

Gopher snakes seem like pretty neat critters

Dallin on the edge of his seat

The kids got a great view of the animals

Ty and I came back from watching the game to find a party!

Monday After Vacation

I titled this section with the word Monday but it really describes the whole week. Be warned it is very whiny so probably much more fun for me to write than for you to read so I won't fault you for not reading it. It is easy to blame the vacation getting everyone worn out, but I think it was just coincedental. I think it would have been a hard week regardless. My last work day before the vacation was fighting Vista. I spent my first two work days back between fighting Vista and then finally giving up and switching laptops with Lexie to go back to XP. Mac lovers need not give me any advice. I am planning on dumping the Windows scene as soon as I have the cash for nice Mac laptop. I had an extention to the spades game I wrote for Global Chat and Games to write which should have taken about two days. With a full week of effort working well into Saturday I finally got it finished. Vista wasn't the only problem during the week. The weather had heated up quite a bit so I needed to figure out a way to configure my portable air conditioner for the suburban (last year's solution was to go to Alaska). Nothing really went wrong with the generators, but it seemed like between giving them oil and gas I was monkeying with them quite a bit, which wasted a lot of time and I would loose time switching my office between the car and trailer as Lexie needed the car for in town items. Natalyn broke out into what we thought was a case of chicken pox, which turned out to be hives, which also added to the general stress in that what ever had gotten her sick I think was also dragging a bit on everybody else. Really just having a sick five year old on its own drags on everybody else. Thursday I actually got a nice day of work done and Friday started out as a very promising day. Lexie was in town running errands and I was working from the trailer and watching Natalyn. After a couple hours of getting some nice progress on the code, Lexie called and explained the trouble she had in town with a dead battery. A couple people tried to help give her a jump start but the efforts failed. One of the people "helping" called a tow truck, which did get the truck started but tagged us with the burden of trying to get $45 back from our insurance. Had we made the call to the insurance company I'm sure there wouldn't have been a problem, but since the other guy called the tow truck directly there might be issues. I hope there won't be issues but anyway it is a pain. A dead battery really shouldn't consume a day, but it did. Lexie got home and we discovered that the car would not start again. An errand she hadn't gotten to before the dead battery was getting gas. This meant that we didn't have gas for the large generator and hence couldn't run the air conditioning. I don't think the heat was dangerous, but it was very uncomfortable. We tried charging the car battery with the small generator but after a couple hours it didn't really seem to be making much progress. With some calling around I found a place in town that sold a battery that would fit the suburban so we decided we would get a neighbor to help us jump the car and then go buy a battery. I took a quarter mile walk over to our nearest neighbor and was pleased to find he was willing to help us. After about an hour of trying several things including using the batteries from the trailer we weren't able to get the car to even pretend to start. I felt bad enough for the time I had taken from the neighbor so I didn't ask him for a ride to town. After some consideration of taking an 8 mile walk with the stroller to go fetch a battery and some encouragment in a more practical direction from Lexie I decided to call Alva and ask for a ride. I felt horrible about interupting the Utah game (or really it should be called the Arizona game given the result) I was sure he would be watching, but I was very greatful to be rescued. After getting to town and back, and getting the battery installed we had just enough time to throw everyone and dinner into the car and rush off to get Tyrell to scouts late. After dropping Ty off we did the grocery shopping, got gas and dropped Lexie off at the laundrymat. The rest of us picked up Ty and then came back to the laundrymat where we waited until about 9PM for the laundry to finish. Saturday we had been talking about doing a hike up the little mountain next to camp, but with the inefficiency of the week I felt a lot of pressure to get more work done. With both the mountian climb and the work seeming like important uses of my time I decided to do the work because it sounded like less fun and thus was most likely more important. I was pleased that with most of Saturday I was able to finish my programming task for Global Chat and Games.

The fall out of the week is that I found the inefficiencies of our current infrastructure so frustrating that I have decided that I am going to purchase a canvas wall tent to use as an office. The economics don't translate directly, but overall I think it will be a good investment. The good work days I have had in my current life style have been so good that I feel very justified in my pursuit of the life style. The bad work days of last week were bad enough to have me wondering if I was stupid and crazy. I have resolved that I am mostly crazy and just a touch stupid. Crazy is pretty much unfixable, but stupid can be overcome or at least counter compensated with perserverance and hard work.

Jacob and David

March 5, 2009

2009-03-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to Natalyn!

Natalyn is now 5 and she is sure to let people know it. We have been answering the "how many days until my birthday?" question since early fall. She spent the day beaming and was sure to announce at regular intervals that it was her birthday. Something kind of funny during the day was when her aunt Amanda mentioned on facebook to wish her a happy birthday, I told her that, "Aunt Amanda wishes you a happy birthday!" She just looked at me and said "well ... sing the birthday song for me then!" After that she decided that every time she came into the suburban (I was working that day) I was to sing her happy birthday. After that if I was late on singing I would hear a chorus of, "Dad I'm in the suburban!" I thought it was cute.

Birthday Girl!

Blowing out the candles!

Heavy heavy hang over thy poor head!

We do a separate small cake for candles to keep the spit and wax off the main cake.

Making the birthday lunch, mmmm macaroni!

February Sunburns

There is a small cave and some Petriglyphs about a mile from our Quartzsite camp. I had been individually with Ty and Dallin but Lexie and the rest of the kids hadn't seen it so on Saturday we decided to take a family hike. Things are coming into bloom so it has added an extra element of enjoyment to the local hikes to be able to observe the spring changes. We don't make very good time hiking as a family but it is a lot of fun. David likes to stop at almost every flower and stop every three feet or so to pick up a rock or dig a hole. By the time we get anywhere his pockets are bulging.

We didn't stay at the caves very long because I was anxious to be back in time to make it to the church social. They were serving hot dogs and I am a big fan of hot dogs. We did stay long enough to let the kids boulder on some of the rocks and then we all climbed a small hill. I am not quite sure why they do it or who does it but a couple of the hills in the Quartzsite area have flags on the tops. It makes it a lot of fun to climb the hills with the kids because it offers a fun summit.

When we got back from the hike we put the kids directly in the car and went to the church social. I was surprised how many people at the social didn't realize we were in the branch. We haven't missed a week in the last 3 months and in a group of about 500 people mostly in their 70's we are one of two families with kids. The other family is a young couple with a two year old. I guess it goes to show that in general people are paying much less attention to you than you think they are. The hot dogs did not disappoint, quarter pounders! I was surprised at how much the kids ate.

I have toyed with the idea of starting to call Quartzsite, Quirksite, because there are so many little quirks about the town. It seems like we just keep finding new things every week. I don't remember if we mentioned the store keepers who drink beer behind the counter or the bookstore owner that doesn't wear pants. He does wear a little brief thingy but it isn't very modest. I put pictures of the little pyramid in last week, and mentioned the flags on top of the hills. Another quirk we discovered is that in a town with a median age somewhere in the seventies they have a wonderful playground with what must be most of a half million dollars in equipment. After the social the kids had a lot of fun at the playground, which although it did have mostly brand new toys, it still sported a teeter totters and a merry go round, which are getting harder and harder to find at playgrounds. I think the kids would have been happy to spin on the merry go round well into evening if we didn't tell them it was time to go.

The weather has warmed up to where the mornings and evenings are very nice and the middle of the day is just a little too hot. There was a breeze blowing in the morning so we didn't notice how high the temperature really was. When we got home from the playground in the afternoon we were surprised to find that everyone was sunburned. We have been out so much that I didn't think we would need to worry about burns, but it was evidently enough of a temperature change to cause a problem. We are going to need to be much more vigilant about sunscreen in the future.

The top of a nice little hill near camp.

It was fun to take a hike as a family.

Petriglyphs near camp

Hotdogs!

The boys have been really enjoying some Calivn and Hobbes comic books some friends gave us.

Day with the Becksteads

Jacob and David are due for immunizations so we came back to Maricopa for the dual purpose of getting immunizations and visiting with Lexie's sister Jen. Dallin will turn 7 next week, since he would be with cousins we decided to celebrate his birthday a week early, as I am writing this I am not sure why we didn't celebrate it a day late, because we'll be with the cousins again then, but I suppose it makes sense. I don't think I would have wanted to wait an extra day for a birthday party at that age. We were disappointed to learn that the nurse was out so we would have to wait an extra day for immunizations. We had two days in our schedule for shot recovery so the delay wasn't critical but it did make things inconvenient.

We had pizza for lunch. Dallin chose an ice cream cake instead of a traditional cake for his birthday. I was happy with the choice. I mostly eat birthday cake for the ice cream that goes with it. The kids played with cousins through the day. Kevin had a half day of school, but didn't seem to be gone very long. Dallin was funny in the morning when he was thinking about the day he said: "That's OK that Kevin has a half day of school, I'm glad he doesn't have a full day of school or else we wouldn't get much out of him." I'm not sure exactly what he meant, but it gave me a good chuckle. I imagine he meant they wouldn't be able to play much. I worked kind of off and on through the day. I have been having trouble sleeping lately and that really messes up my effectiveness. I was frustrated I wasn't more productive, but I was very pleased to get an installation procedure figured out for my game. Even though things feel overwhelming little by little I am getting it chipped away. Metaphorically speaking, I just need to keep my paddle in the water and I'll be able to get my boat across the lake.

Dallin was thrilled Aunt Jennifer decorated for his party.

Blowing out the candles.

Cutting the cake.

Early birthday party!

Heavy heavy hang over thy poor head.

In the evening I went with Wade to a presentation by the city mayor of "The State of Maricopa". It seemed like a nice way to visit with Wade and I was interested in the topic because there has been such a drastic shift in the Maricopa housing market. Houses that sold brand new 3 or 4 years ago in the range of $250,000 can now be bought on foreclosures around $80,000. I think that the housing prices are severely undervalued, but right now I don't have an extra 80K to put into one and I am not interested in having a mortgage. I am also not very interested in getting more rental units because I don't like the exposure tenants give you to damage. When I do rental property again I think it will be either commercial property or an RV park. With that said I might do a lease to own contract on a family dwelling, I could see that working out, but for now as I said it doesn't matter to me because I don't have cash for that scale of investment and I don't want to get financed. I am really surprised the houses aren't getting snatched up by snow birds. In Quartzsite $80,000 will barely buy you a place to park your trailer. In Parker (30 miles north) bring $200,000 for a parking spot or don't come. Back to the presentation, the food wound up being much better than the presentation, the mayor just seemed to want to highlight anything that looked good, whether it was or not, for example he gave a slide comparing crime between counties using numbers of incidents without adjusting for population. In general I think Maricopa is a great little town. I expect their property values to be up soon if the economy does anything near normal.

Too Big To Fail?

Time for a little ignorant whining... How did the United States get into a situation that it has companies which are "too big to fail"? OK, I think I know the answer, but I don't like it. I believe the answer is greed and dishonesty. Next on the plate, now that the country has companies which are "too big to fail" why are we putting them on life support looking for ways to make them healthy again instead of looking for ways to kill them? OK, another question that I think I know the answer to but don't like. I think it is greed and dishonesty once again. The ignorance in my whining is I don't really have an answer of how things should happen. I just have serious objections to rewarding the people who caused so much trouble for so many other people.

I believe that when organizations and institutions start to maintain power for power's sake instead of for merit's sake people suffer from loss in efficiency, loss of freedom, and loss of happiness. We need to have people in charge. It does not work to have a group of people make every decision. All decisions have trade offs and it is highly effective to have a person who can weigh the trade offs well and point a direction for the masses. When the person who is doing the directing is highly skilled, good at collecting input from the masses and well suited to the environment in which they are operating it works very well to have them in charge. It is just very difficult to decide who that person should be. Even if the masses do select the right person when the environment changes it often doesn't make sense to have the same person in charge. What happens however is that once people get power they can use the power to keep it. One great example of power maintaining power is the way one of the first acts of a new CEO almost always seems to be to fire the better part of the vice presidents and many of the long time managers. Graciously one could view that as a way of changing direction toward improvement. I view that as a way of sustaining power by creating an experience barrier between the CEO and the next most likely person to become the CEO. It also gives the CEO an opportunity to surround themselves with people loyal to them. So now when ever I get a position in the corner office and fire everyone you'll know why I did it, to change direction toward improvement of course.

February 22, 2009

2009-02-22T21:42:00.000-08:00

Natalyn loves to go on walks with Lexie and show her the flowers.

There are some really pretty purple flowers in bloom here.

Natalyn took this photo, I thought it was great work for a 2 days shy of 5 year old.

David and Dallin looking at a lizard.

The lizard David and Dallin were watching.

What a cute little cub! J-cub!

Quartzsite has some very interesting shops.

A nice vendor gave each of the kids a Hot Wheels car.

We stopped to see the Hi Jolly Monument.

Jacob loves the pattern blocks, we only give him the big ones because he is still at the age he can't tell a pattern block from a cheese burger.

If you chance to meet a frown do not let it stay ...

Quickly turn it upside down and smile that frown away!

Work

I am getting really excited about progress on the Spelling Castle game. This week I got through a lot of code I had been putting off. The game is taking really great shape. It will not be the fanciest game ever made by far, but the game is turning out better than my original target. Saturday, I had a flash of excitement remembering my excitement last year when I started the venture and realizing that even though I have blown the schedule and the budget for the project, I may actually come out with a marketable product that could overcome the schedule and fiscal over-runs. Maybe not, but I do know that I am going to be very happy with my work and in some ways that makes everything worth it on its own.

I have been beating myself up a lot over the last 6 months over how slow I have been with the development. I know it is a waste of energy, but my mind does the attacks anyway. I have been working a lot lately to reframe my thinking into the present and looking forward, but not too far forward. If I look too far back I get discouraged, if I look to far ahead I get discouraged, but keeping my overall target in mind and taking the steps in front of me one at a time I am finding work very enjoyable.

I feel a lot of pressure to be successful in my venture, if for no other reason than I am spoiled right now in terms of my work environment. The thought of going back to a work environment that doesn't offer three meals a day with the family and a window office in any part of the continent I choose, doesn't hold much appeal for me. With that said, if I need go back to cube jail to put meals on the table, I will; I just hope I don't have to. The other side of the coin is. it really is a lot more fun to gripe about a manager for his screw-ups when he doesn't look back at you in the mirror, and of course having income in the budget as well as expenses is always an alluring idea.

Half Baked Conspiracy Theory

I mentioned when I wrote 25 things about myself earlier that I entertain, but do not develop or pursue conspiracy theories. This week I have decided to share one of my raw and undeveloped theories. Calling it a theory is probably an abuse of the word. Let's rather call it a collection of ideas that might be facts. I am not very bright with respect to the way the world works so this is extremely simple. Even though it is simple, it gives a bit for the mind to chew on, well, at least my mind. OK, here are my collection of "facts." 1) The war in Iraq has cost about 735 Billion dollars to date. 2) The US has about 1 trillion (1000 billion) dollars in public debt. 3) China holds 2 trillion dollars in foreign treasury bonds 4) China is the largest foreign holder of US bonds.

Am I putting the dots together incorrectly if I conclude that the invasion of Iraq was funded by China? Could be, that's what makes it a half-baked theory. I am not sure I even have my facts correct. With that said, if I were playing a game of, "Let's see if I can dominate the world" and one player wanted to borrow money from me to attack another player, from a strategic point of view I would be pretty quick to loan the money, because I would be gaining power on two players at once. The kind of point in the game that I realize I am starting to win because everyone else on the board is starting to lose their grip on the game. If I could devalue my currency to tip a trade balance in my favor while I was at it, all the better. I am not saying anything negative about China. I am just throwing out that China and Iraq may have a connection I hadn't previously considered. Sometimes I wish I hadn't ever read, "Animal Farm" or "1984." On the other hand, I find a lot of in-sight in the books.

As far as my assertion that there are people lusting to dominate the world, I feel pretty comfortable with the knowledge I gain in the history classes, I slept through during my school years, that there have been such people in the world before. I don't think I am making a really large jump in guessing we may have one or two of those type of people crawling about on our little rock now.

OK, that's about the end of my energy for conspiracy theory. I may throw out some ideas about North Korea in the future. Well, one right now... Something I hadn't put together until much after I had lived in South Korea and done some reading about the Korean War, was that the Korean War had as much or more to do with a war between the US and China than it did to do with a war between North and South Korea. Again, working on partial facts with a likely misunderstanding about the facts I am stating, but trying to put another puzzle piece on the table to see if any of the colors and shapes match well with any of the others. In the end, I am not sure how much it matters. I have trouble knowing what I would do with a pieced together puzzle, I just find it interesting to look at every now and then.

February 15, 2009

2009-02-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

Family Fishing Day

Out for a nice day fishing.

This Saturday in Parker Arizona, (about 35 miles north of our Quartzsite campsite) the Arizona BLM and Fish and Game put on a "take a kid fishing" day. I had never been to anything like it. The day was fantastic. The organizers provided rods, reels, bait and hooks for all of the kids. They stalked two ponds with somewhere between 2000 and 3500 fish; I heard both numbers. They provided free hot dogs and soda pops and held a drawing at the end to give away several fishing poles, tents and camp chairs. The weather was about as good as I have ever experienced. I didn't see a thermometer, but I would guess we were in the high 60's or low 70's. It was very comfortable to be out in a T-Shirt, at least for someone who has lived in Idaho as long as I have. I joked to Lexie that we should have brought coats so we would look like the locals.

Something that was challenging about the event was that it was so popular that people were basically shoulder to shoulder at the fish ponds. That, on it's own, is an issue, compile that with the fact many of the people were 5-10 years old and casting a fishing pole for the first time and you'll get an image of some of the types of problems that might arise. I didn't see it, but I heard that a kid did get hooked in the face. One of Ty's scout buddies hooked his mom in the arm, and Natalyn had firmly hooked Dallin's clothes before the event was over. Something the organizers did that I thought was very smart was they gave out very small hooks. This did minimize what could have been much more severe problems. I was very impressed that almost as soon as the kids lost a hook in a tangle an event person offered them a new hook. They didn't even need to walk back to the main table to be up and fishing again.

In general, I am not a very patient fisherman. Yesterday was pretty much the general. With that said, I do like being outdoors and I do like being near water. I just get frustrated quickly when it comes to dealing with fishing line. After David and Dallin had their lines in and out of the water a couple of times, I realized how logistically tricky things were going to be, I was ready to give up on fishing and go catch a hot dog. Lexie was helping Ty and Natalyn with their rigging. Almost as soon as Natalyn got her line in the water she had a fish hooked. Lexie helped her reel it in. It was fun to watch Natalyn bring the fish in. She was very excited and looked a bit scared of the fish. Natalyn's catch got my interest back into the fishing for a while. I rigged a line for David and got a couple of bites, but wasn't successful in bringing in a fish. Tyrell caught a fish early on. Killing Natalyn's fish had been a bit clumsy. My usual method to kill caught fish is to use a rock. In as much as this event was held on the edge of a park, there weren't any rocks handy. I also hadn't thought ahead to bring pliers for getting the hook out. Having managed mostly dealing with Natalyn's fish and still not knowing how I was going to clean it (I was also short a knife), upon seeing Tyrell having the fish hooked, I know my decision to let Tyrell bring the fish in on his own was biased by my thought that if he did lose the fish, I wouldn't have to clean it. As it was, he didn't lose the fish and I found yet one more reason to be delighted with the event. Just behind where we were fishing there was a booth setup where you could take the fish you caught to be cleaned and bagged for you.

Since Dan and I (Lexie here now) have very different opinions of fishing, it seems appropriate to put in my version of the day. It was one of the very best days I have had since coming to Quartzsite. I love fishing, and have since I was a little girl. I remember fishing as a family in Swan Valley and again as we were camping for three days somewhere that has remained a mystery to me, but seemed to be in the middle of nowhere and the best place in the world to camp. I don't remember if I caught anything on those trips, but I had a ball. I love the feel of casting the line and reeling it in. I love watching the water, seeing it ripple, and watching the sun reflect off it. I did a lot of fishing during college, but since marrying Dan can count on one hand the number of times we have been out. I'm not blaming him for this. He does an amazing amount to please me and help me do what I want to do. There are just other things that we have in common that so we do those things more often. Another reason we haven't been so much is that I really don't like deep-sea or shore fishing in the ocean. After fishing several times in Alaska, I just didn't get back into fishing after moving back home. Anyway, I had a great time Saturday and I am looking forward to taking advantage of living next to the lake in Oregon all summer.

Natalyn Catches a Fish!

After Natalyn and Ty's catches, the fishing slowed down quite a bit. Even though the fish stopped biting, I enjoyed helping the kids get their lines in the water. I enjoyed the enthusiasm the kids had for fishing. At the end of the fishing event they had a drawing using the numbers the kids were given when they registered. With about 500 people participating they gave out somewhere around 50 prizes. We felt fortunate to win two. Both Natalyn and David were drawn to win new fishing poles. David was funny in that he was fast asleep when his number was called. Lexie carried him up to the stage and came back with him without him having any knowledge of what was happening. When the event was over and we were walking away from it, he was finally awake. The look of surprise in his eyes when we told him he won a fishing pole was great. I am sure that it wonderful when life works out that way, take a nap and wake up with a new toy. Lexie and I are both very softened to the idea of getting Oregon fishing licenses this summer based on our positive experience yesterday and owning two new fishing poles.

Didn't everyone make blue bat cookies for Valentine's Day?

Natalyn and David showing off Their Hat Stack

Ty Reading, Jacob Napping

Dallin Reading

Get to know the Kids a Little bit Better

I had a good time visiting with a couple of the kids this evening while Dan found pictures for this week's blog. I asked David what his favorite thing was. He got out a book and said, "Read to me." It doesn't surprise me that reading is one of his favorite things. He will listen to anyone that will read to him, or he'll just look at books himself. Nursery leaders have been surprised at how much he wants to just listen to stories instead of playing with the toys that are very abundant.

Tyrell was mentioning how he likes to put himself in the past and think about what life was like a long time ago and pretend he is there. He mentioned pretending he was a Native American hunting with a bow and arrow and a farmer back in the Roman times. When I asked him which section in science he wanted to study next he said he wanted to learn about astronomy. He mentioned wanting to know more about anthropology as well. He didn't know at first what it was called, but that is what he described to me. He really keeps me on my toes in respect to any movie that we have seen. He will randomly ask a question about a movie, or quote a line from it, even if it was three years ago that we saw it! I find myself asking a lot, "What is that from?"

Dallin is interested in chemistry. He has been having fun with our, "Icky Sticky Slime Lab" book and wants to continue doing more experiments from it. This doesn't surprise me at all. He's often wanting to make new recipes also. If I remember correctly, the first recipe he did was back when he was two (with Tyrell as his assistant) was the underwear soup experiment! His latest recipe was a lot like mountain of eggs (also known as German pancakes or Dutch babies), but with more sugar in it and very different ratios. He called it cake and we had it for breakfast one morning. We all decided that the first couple of bites were edible if you were really hungry, but it was too heavy to eat as a meal.

Natalyn's new favorite game is to dress up in a jacket, hat, and backpack and pretend she is going to school. She has been very service oriented and loves going to the church on, "service day." She was able to help glue pictures on card stalk to make picture books. We cut out puppets together, and our next project is to cut out hats. I don't have my sewing machine with me, so we bring home the fabric and cut them out during the week, then someone else sews them up. Natalyn is very persistent in making sure I don't delay on our part. She is so bright and happy helping me pin the pattern on the material. Her favorite service to give to Jacob is cleaning the lint from between his toes. I don't particularly like her doing this, because I worry that she pulls his toes too far apart, but she glows and says, "I'm doing service!" I did see her cleaning between David's toes yesterday. It makes me laugh because I won't touch anyone's feet! (Okay, I do kiss Jacob's, but that's all).

February 8, 2009

2009-02-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

Jacob says Hi!

Natalyn and David having fun recording themselves.

Tyrell reading to his brothers and sister.

If Family Home Evening Were a Sport ...

For readers of my blog, not aquatinted with the Mormon church, I'll explain the context of this clip a little. In the church, members are instructed to reserve Monday night as a special night for the family, which includes a lesson on a spiritual topic, a family activity and often a treat. In practice, although simple instruction, it can be difficult to get Family Home Evenings to work quite as well as they do in the church videos, or appear they might from the church curriculum. Most of the time we have a great experience as a family in the time we share in Family Home Evening. Ever since the kids could tell a Monday from a Tuesday they have all be consistently excited for Mondays, because a Monday meant we would have Family Home Evening.

The following link is a little audio satire I did about how Family Home Evening feels sometimes, which I think turned out pretty cute.

If Family Home Evening Were a Sport.

Maricopa

During our travel, Jacob has fallen a bit behind in his immunizations. After some calling around, we found that Yuma was the closest place to get immunizations at a reasonable price. However, in Yuma, proof of residency is required. Blythe was out of immunizations. The Quartzsite clinic doesn't see patients under the age of ten years old. It didn't take too long to think about Jennifer and wonder how she and Wade immunize their children. We decided to take a trip to Maricopa to catch Jacob up on his immunizations and buy cheddar cheese (it's not available here either).I think I mention it in the blog every time after we move camp after being in place for a long time, but it seems to surprise me a new each time how quickly we can pack up and move everything. The joy of pulling into a random campsite or parking lot and announcing "Kids, we're home!" hasn't lost much luster in a year on the road.

In as much as our visit was during the work week, I spent my Maricopa time in the trailer working while Lexie made day trips to run in- town errands and visit with her sister. I really enjoyed the silence of sending the kids and cell phone with Lexie. I was able to get through a bunch of bugs that have been eluding me for the last several weeks. Lexie really enjoyed the time she got with her sister and the kids really enjoyed being able to play with their cousins.

We are going back to Maricopa in a few weeks for follow up immunizations. I hope to be able to visit with Wade and Jen when we make that trip. Dallin is hoping to celebrate his birthday with his cousins!

Chilling with the cousins.

Hind sight is 40/40

Yesterday, marked one year that the family has been living in the travel trailer. When I was leaving work I told people I didn't really know what it would be like to live in a place as small as a 21 foot trailer, but in six months we'd be either picking a spot to never move from again, or putting new tires on the trailer to keep the wheels rolling. It seems things have developed into the latter situation. We all really love the mobile life style (you can even ask the kids) and we have needed to replace two trailer tires within the last 12 months. The main thing that bothers me about the last year is my failure to have my game completed and marketed by now. When I was doing my planning I was thinking I could have had two or three done by now.

Looking back over the last year I asked myself; "if you were to go back to Feb. 1, 2008 and redo the last year, what would you do differently?" The answer I came up with was nothing. That means to me that the year really hasn't taught me much, in as much as not making any decisions differently would yield the same results that I have now. I really do believe that I thought things through carefully last year. It is just that not all of my decisions focused around work and money. Looking back the part that is fuzzy is whether they should have or not. I can buy into the idea that I should have been a lot more concerned about getting in longer hours and spending less money. I can also buy into the idea that I shouldn't have worried about work and money as much as I did and I should have held more enjoyment for the great experiences I was able to have. A quick analysis would be to think the answer would be somewhere in the middle. The middle of more than I did, and less than I did, is the amount that I did.

So, into 2009, with new experience and knowledge, ready to do the same thing all over again. In some ways that really worries me. In other ways, I think that if 2009 can be anywhere near as good as 2008 than things are going to be great. I wouldn't want to repeat everything from 2008. I had some of my life's darkest time in 2008, I also had some of my brightest time in 2008. It does seem that higher "ups" do just get followed by lower "downs," but that isn't a reason to avoid trying to live a full life. I would like to think that I will be better prepared emotionally for negative experiences. The presence of both the positive and negative experiences appears to be a fixed part of life. I am led to believe that a key to happiness is soaking up as much of the positive that is available while it is available, and discarding as much of the negative as possible, when negative is all that seems to be available.

The idea of discarding negative experience isn't as obvious to practice as it is to think about. People have an affinity for intense emotion. People are not picky about whether the emotion is positive or negative, but tend to gravitate toward the most intense emotions. If a negative emotion is the most intense, it will stick with the person for quite a while if they do not make a great effort to sacrifice the emotion and let it go. Just today, for possibly the first time in my life, I was offended by a local church leader. Even as I am thinking and writing about the incident now I can feel myself sort of enjoying the return of the anger I felt at the time of being offended. Stupid, I know, that just seems to be the way we are wired. Oh, if you were curious what offended me, I'll just leave it out in public that I was right and he was wrong. Now that I have calmed down, I have resolved that people are allowed to be wrong 1,233,542 times in their lifetime and I should feel honored that a person of his age, who would almost undoubtedly be pushing that limit by now, would choose to spend one of his precious, "allowed to be wrongs" on me.

Facebook

The next two sections are also on Facebook, but since all three of our blog readers aren't all on Facebook, I am going to post the sections here as well. If you do decide to get over your aversion to Facebook and send us a friend request, we'll be your friend. I have decided that I like Facebook. It is a lot more fluid for staying in touch than e-mail. The downside, of course, is that information on Facebook is extremely public. My philosophy is that as long as a person isn't trying to hide from an unconvicted felony, or harboring nuclear levels of bigotry that would not be containable were they to express an opinion in a public forum, a person will be just fine on Facebook. Many people choose to put up a picture other than their own, or use a shortened version of their name as a way to hide. I think that is just dandy. Something to be aware of, if you do join, is that the profiles and comments are very public. If you join any networks (you will automatically be included in a network as you fill out where you live when you sign up) anyone in your network is able to view your profile. It is easy to unjoin a network after signing up. It is even easier to not put any information online that you do not want the world to know. If you are a Cowboys fan, and don't want everyone to know, then don't put that you are a Cowboys fan in your profile. If you are Cowboys fan and want everyone to know, then hurray for Facebook, you have more place to shout it. Overall, I think the way Facebook enables people to communicate is excellent. I have been thrilled to get in touch with the in-laws, some of my cousins, and to hear from a mission companion I served with in Korea.

Oh yeah, by the way, if list you are a Cowboys fan in your profile and want me to accept a friend request from you, you will need to also list at least two socially redeeming qualities about yourself in your profile J/K LOL. (That's Just Kidding Laughing Out Loud).

For many people born in or after the mid 80's Facebook seems to be the best, if not the only way to communicate with them. I imagine text messages would be a great communication vehicle as well, but I am not up for adding text to my phone plan in the near future. So the twitter world will need to wait a while longer for Dan Gordon.

25 Things About Lexie

1. I have five beautiful children, the oldest is 8 and the youngest is 5 months - 4 boys, and 1 girl smack in the middle.

2. Exactly a year ago Dan and I sold our five bedroom house and moved the family into a travel trailer so we can travel North and South America. We are going slower than we planned, but there are just so many cool things to see everywhere we go! We also had to slow down a bit for Jacob to be born. I didn't want to go into labor on the Alaskan-Canadian highway. He was kind and was born a week late.: - )

3. I homeschool my kids and actually think it's fun! - most days.

4. I love drive-in movies and it's about the only time I eat Whoppers.

5. I enjoy the desert and the ocean, but love to be in the pine trees.

6. I have climbed three mountains in Alaska and got to the saddle of the Grand Teton. Next time I will get to the top. One of my favorite parts about the climbs is the guilt-free bowl of ice-cream at the end.

7. My appendix got removed two years ago and I would not wish that on anyone else.

8. My wonderful husband, Dan, can still make me laugh several times everyday after 11 great years of marriage.

9. I got my B.S. in Sports Science and a cognitive study in dance.

10. I have been to Korea, Italy, Canada, and a border town in Mexico.

11. I am terrified of devil rodents-aka-mice. Even the ones in pet stores.

12. I love thunder and lightening storms.

13. I think its funny that my three year old favorite song is, "Who Am I," from the musical, Les Miserables (not some thing normal like "Old McDonald").

14. The chore I hate most of all in the whole world is folding laundry.

15. My favorite color was blue until I had my girl, and now it seems to change with each kid (weird). My favorite color is currently sage green.

16. I love to play UNO with my kids.

17. I love to read. Are there any recommendations for good books? Fiction or non fiction, I just can’t stomach anything where children are hurt…

18. My favorite movie is still, “Ever After.”

19. I just took it on as a personal challenge to make all of our food from scratch. I don’t know how long this will last, but I’ve had a lot of fun with it, and my family loves the homemade bread and homemade pasta.

20. I don’t understand mother-in-law jokes. I have the coolest mother-in-law ever.

21. We are always looking for someone to go rock climbing with, to take turns watching kids. Landon, I promise if you come again, we’ll let you go first five times! We’ll be in Yosemite in April or May and next to Smith Rock in Oregon over the summer. Anyone interested let me know.

22. I had braces twice, at least I still have all my teeth.

23. I am going to make a deal with Dan that someday I’ll to a pro football game with him if he’ll go to Olympic figure skating with me.

24. One of my favorite things to do each year is to go to the state fair.

25. I am planning on doing some graduate school work after my kids are older.

25 Things About Dan

1. I hate, “forward this thing to one million people” messages with almost a religious zeal. I am doing this because I love my wife and she asked me to do it.

2. I have already forgiven you if you ignore the instructions at the heading of this note.

3. I don’t have 25 friends on facebook, is that bad?

4. When I was in elementary school, I used to fantasize about catching a touchdown pass in a Super Bowl. Sometimes when I am in a reflective mood or just feeling a little sorry for myself I retrace my life and try to figure out the exact moment that the fantasy lost all of its possibility of fruition, when I was born, the 4th grade, the 8th grade, the 12th grade, am I denying myself a dream now because I am lazy or scared …

5. Another one of my elementary school fantasies was to be so rich that I could build a house with a swimming pool in the middle that had a diving board and a water slide. The house would also have a go kart track and an arcade. I still hope that I get that rich, however, when I do, I hope that before I spend money on that kind of stuff I will spend a lot of money drilling wells and building schools in Africa.

6. I respect the effort of public education, but I am frustrated by its focus on institutionalization over individualized education and enhancement.

7. I was married to my wife by the time we had known each other three months; Lexie is the best thing that has happened to me in my life, since being born.

8. I fear wasting my life more than I fear death.

9. I would like to travel to all seven continents before I die.

10. I don’t really know what kind of music I like; most genres have something about them that offends me. In general, I like inspirational music. Whitney Houston’si “One Moment In Time” has been ringing in my head a lot lately.

11. I am within three months of finishing my first educational software title “The Spelling Castle.”

12. I have five great children.

13. A year ago I quit my job and sold my house to support development of a new educational software business. I now live in a travel trailer with my family so that we can show the kids the United States and Canada while I do my software development work.

14. When I was younger, my dream was to become an engineer or an astronaut. I decided that being an astronaut sounded to difficult, so I became an engineer. I placate myself now by thinking of myself as an inner space explorer wandering around in my Jayco rover.

15. I am interested in astronomy.

16. I served a mission for the LDS church in Seoul, Korea.

17. I got my bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Idaho.

18. When I get enough money that I can take a few years off I am planning on getting a PhD in educational psychology.

19. I am slowly working toward running a marathon, but so far I am finding knee pain to be limiting my distances.

20. I like to climb mountains, but back to the risk of wasting my life as opposed to the risk of dying, I am limiting myself to mountains that are not very likely to kill me, at least until I have met some of my grand kids. Mt. Raineer is right on the border line of the amount of risk I am willing to take.

21. I am frustrated and fascinated at the same time by the number of secrets the world holds.

22. I enjoy and entertain several conspiracy theories, but I don’t really develop or follow them very closely.

23. My greatest hope in life is that by the time I die the world is better for me having lived in it.

24. Cherry Garcia bars by Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or Hageen Daaz Almond and Chocolate vanilla ice cream bars are probably my favorite treats.

25. I lived on the Navajo Indian reservation as a kid. We played cowboys and Indians with a little more excitement than most kids. It was all in good fun.

A heavy rain put a small stream in the wash. The kids had fun playing with boats.

February 1, 2009

2009-02-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

Natalyn has taken to calling herself Super-Jack

David having fun on a roll out piano.

The kids got a chance to learn how to pan for gold.

(they got to keep some real gold)

Campfires are fun

Most people don't know that I (Lexie) actually comment on most of the blogs, filling in details, helping with captions, or adding my own thoughts. Yes, it just seems easier to write about myself in third person than confuse people with a lot of switching. Dan does the bulk of the writing still. He gets credit for just about anything witty, clever, funny, political, scandalous, or misspelled. With all that said, I have been asked to make an appearance, so I am (this once) giving up my anonymity of hiding behind Dan.

I have had a love-hate thing going on with the desert. We are in an isolated part of the desert here in Quartzsite, made even more isolated by our goal of "grounding" ourselves until our game is finished. That includes jaunts into bigger towns that are further away. We both get distracted easily and it is much easier to stay focused if we stay put. Part of the love-hate thing I've had with the desert has been self-inflicted by our personal "grounding." I have felt somewhat trapped (go figure). I guess that's the distracted part of me wanting to be distracted and get moving again. The land here is quite barren here, and I have always been more of a pine-tree person. Even after spending months last year by the California coast (as beautiful as that was) I was at peace again with myself when we got back into pines. Now to the part that I love about the desert - I have been looking for things to enjoy about living here and my list is finally getting long enough to list.

Wildlife here is about as sparse as the plants, but our wildlife list has started coming along. We have seen a tarantula, the lizards are fun to watch, jack-rabbits, coyotes, and Dan and the two oldest boys saw some white tailed deer. I am really hoping to see a desert tortoise before we leave.

The sunsets are magnificent.

I have discovered the amazing smell of rain. The smell is so different from rain in the city or in the pines. I had never experienced a desert rain before, but if Downey could somehow capture the fragrance...

We have met an eclectic group of people here who have all been wonderful to visit with and learn from. I'm always amazed at what I can learn from other people, and how we need other people for our lives to be fulfilled. I believe it was Mother Theresa who said something about a life not being complete without other people. For as much as I like to serve other people and try to help, I'm always behind as so many are sharing with us and giving back even more.

My favorite part of living here has been the campfires. We often talked about putting a fire-pit in our backyard before we sold everything. Once a year, it seems, we would have a marshmallow roast in our garden after we had harvested what we wanted. Here we have been able to enjoy wonderful campfires as a family and with friends. The weather is just chilly enough in the evening that it is comfortable to sit around the campfire and enjoy it, but not so cold that everyone is just huddled near the fire wondering when we can go in to get warm. There is something about a campfire that leads one to reflection and higher thinking. It seems that many barriers go down in conversations and things take on a deeper meaning. Not always, of course. One of the kids' favorite games is to start a story, with each person taking a turn and then ending after it has gone around the fire with everyone having a turn. These times are just plain silly.

Blip, January is Gone!

(Dan writing) In case it has passed anyone's attention, I will announce here that January has passed. The year 2009 is only 11 months long now. The illusion I start every year with, about how many things I will be able to accomplish in the new year, is already fading into the reality of the way time rapidly slips away. With that said, I think I kept this year's goals modest enough that I will still be able to get them, I just have one less month than I did before.

This week in particular just seemed to evaporate. Monday I was working on catching up on basic infrastructure. For the last several weeks the kids have had flat tires on their bikes. I started the day with the thought I would take a couple of hours and get the bike tires patched. At the end of the day, and 10 patches later, we still had two flat tires. Tuesday didn't seem to be much more efficient. By Wednesday I was simply going out of my skin and decided it would be a good time to finally hike the little mountain near our camp. My knees haven't been letting me run much over a mile lately. Hiking the mountain, in lieu of a run, was a good idea. It was the best work out I have had in a long time. I have a theory, well I can't call it my theory, I'm sure there are really theories about this, I just have a mental model, that the body builds up emotional toxins if it doesn't get good exercise. It was nice to get the poison drained a little.

When I got back from the mountain I started the generator. The cord must have been worn out because it pulled all the way out as I started the generator. Since I didn't know how long it would be before I would be able to start the generator again I left it running to try to get a good charge on the batteries. I am not very mechanically inclined, so whenever I do anything kind of mechanical repair I feel a little extra excitement at having cheated my nature. I was very pleased that, with a little help over the phone from my brother, Robert that I was able to get the generator running the next morning. The prospect of being left without power didn't really sit well as a prospect for continuing my work. Even before I broke the generator I had made a 90% decision that I would by a small 1000 watt generator to charge batteries and run the laptops. Most of the work I do uses much less than 1000 watts, but since batteries are so slow to charge, I wind up running the generator several hours a day. It would be nice to have something a little quieter that uses less fuel.

Palm Canyon Hike

Ever since the first time I read about it, sometime last year, I have been intrigued by a place in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge called Palm Canyon. The canyon harbors some of, if not the only, native palm trees in Arizona. After all of the time we have been here, Saturday finally seemed to offer a good opportunity to take a hike of the canyon. The area to view the palm trees is a nice trail of about half a mile. We hiked up to the viewing area and had lunch there. The children had a lot of fun exploring a little cave-like tunnel near the viewing area.

Viewing the palms brought to mind several feelings that I haven't yet been able to form into thoughts. The isolation of the palms is fascinating in that there aren't any others native palm trees near them. The little pocket high up the canyon is possibly the only place around that palm tress could natively survive. I don't think it is resolved as to whether the trees got there by animals transporting seeds, or if the grove is left over from the last ice age. Either way, thinking of the small little cluster of tress huddled together surviving in the only place in the area that they could, evokes a very unique emotion in me. As I looked at the palm trees I felt like there was something I could learn from them. I just couldn't, and still can't, quite form the thought. The thought is something of the same flavor as thinking about the way the earth sits alone in a very vast and empty looking universe.

After lunch we continued up the canyon a little farther. The trail mostly disappeared and left a lot of scrambling. The children did really well on it and had fun showing me how far they could jump off rocks. The canyon walls are quite magnificent. I am not a good judge of height, but I would guess some of the cliffs were somewhere between 150 and 300 feet tall. It was the kind of scenery that brings the soul a reverence for its creator. When we were almost to the point I had in mind turning around, we started to hear rocks falling down the canyon. I took the guess that there was an idiot farther up the canyon throwing rocks to listen to their echo. At any rate, I took it as a strong sign that it was time for an immediate turn around.

If palm canyon were any closer to a population center, I am sure it would be much more widely publicized. I had thoughts myself of not mentioning our hike on the blog for fear that it might loose some of its appeal if too many people went there. I decided to write about it, with the selfish motivation that with the way things are now there are not enough people visiting the canyon to make it reasonable for the BLM to put a bathroom by it, but there are too many people visiting the canyon to make needs of that nature very convenient. My conclusion is we need just enough more people to visit the canyon to justify one of those stinky little outhouses, and then the rest of the world can continue to exist without knowledge of the canyon's presence. The 9 mile drive over a bumpy dirt road on the way out was a bit difficult on a full bladder.

Hiking to view the palm trees.

Not a high quality picture, but it shows the isolated grove in which the palms grow.

It has been really nice to get some hiking in this week.

We had a nice lunch at the palm tree viewing spot.

The kids had fun scrambling on the rocks.

Hiking up the trail.

David stopped for a drink.

My pictures don't do the canyon justice. It is absolutely breath taking.

January 25, 2009

2009-01-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

Friends Over

We have become friends with a really neat family here in Quartzsite. I believe I have mentioned them before in the blog. They sold their house in Kentucky last June to go on the road full time. They said they felt it was something God wanted them to do. They have 12 children and are expecting a thirteenth. They are also hoping to host a campground up in Oregon, but they have found that with the number of kids they have, the campgrounds have been a little slower to give them a definite commitment.

On Thursday we invited our friends over for a marshmallow roast. We thought about inviting them over for dinner, but were intimidated by the idea of preparing a meal for that many people from the trailer. While we waited for the fire to burn down to coals we got a wonderful game of steal the flag going. It was a lot of fun having so many people of different ages playing together. It was also a nice way to learn the kids names in as much as there was a lot of yelling of "Watch out for Peter!" or "Come on Sam!" I still only know the names of their fastest kids, but I think Lexie knows all of their kids' names. After each side had won a game it seemed like a good place to stop the game and roast marshmallows. It was great to sit around the campfire and visit.

We talked about the hunger problem in the world. I had not been aware of how bad things are in Zimbabwe. Something their family does which I think is really interesting is they will fill international flat rate shipping boxes with food and mail them directly to Africa. I got excited about the idea, because it is something very visual, which could help the children understand what is being done for someone else. It also eases some of the concern about how aid money is spent. After doing some more research, while I am still not certain which organization is best, I think I am going to channel my effort through an existing organization rather than try to do something on my own. Even though the flat rate shipping provides a reasonably priced shipping method it still adds a lot of overhead for something with as low of a value density as food has. I am sure that for the same money, I could use to buy food from a grocery store and send a package through the mail, an existing organization could distribute a lot more aid to a needy country. Right now there is a cholera pandemic in Zimbabwe. Cholera is a disease which can kill a person within 18 hours of contraction if not treated. Untreated cases can have a mortality rate as high as 50 to 60%. When cholera is properly treated the mortality rate drops to around 1%. If my reading was correct proper treatment can be as simple as oral re hydration. Even home made mixtures of clean water, baking soda, salt and sugar can be helpful. The prevention of contracting the disease also seems pretty straight forward in that it is a bacteria which is transmitted almost exclusively through drinking water. That means that boiling or bleaching drinking water will greatly reduce the spread of the disease. It seems that some very simple intervention could have some great positive consequences for people. The fact that the problem exists and is spreading indicates that the resources available for that simple intervention are currently insufficient. I'll need to look into my family history to get the exact details but I believe it was cholera that killed my great great grandfather and most of his children, on my mom's side, when they they were migrating west to join the Mormon settlers.

11 Year Anniversary

Yesterday, Saturday January 24, 2009 marked the completion of mine and Lexie's 11th year of marriage. It really is amazing that we have been married that long. Not amazing that we have stay married, just amazing that the time has gone so quickly. We didn't do anything really extravagant to celebrate, however, we did get our friends' two oldest kids to watch our four oldest kids so we could have a date alone. We have been married long enough that us and the baby counts as alone anymore. We took the opportunity to take a slower look at some of the booths in the rock and mineral show, which were more interesting to adults than to children. I was thrilled that after talking quite a while with a person, selling meteorites at a booth, he gave me both a meteorite and a slice of a "fools meteorite" as a gift. I can't tell the difference between the meteorite and the fools meteorite by looking at their composition. I am also careful to keep my meteorite in its bag in as much as I am not very confident I could tell it from most of the rocks in camp. Even though the appearance of the meteorite isn't spectacular it is a lot of fun to have something that came from space. I suppose that according to present scientific theory and really most religious theory for that matter, everything on earth at one point was out in space somewhere. All the same it is neat to have something that came crashing into the earth. When I was a kid when ever I got a coin from a foreign country I would stare at the coin and wonder about the culture and circumstances which surrounded the coin and how odd it was it came into my possession in a place so far away. That is how I feel about my meteorite now.

When we got back to the trailer the baby sitter was sweeping up an impressive mound of dirt. The kids were in great spirits sporting their now typical dust glow. We were glad they had a good time. The baby sitters also acted like they had a lot of fun. I really appreciate a baby sitter that will actually play with the kids as opposed to gluing them to a cartoon.

Church

David had a couple of other kids in his nursery class with him today, but the oldest three kids were the only kids in primary again. With about 500 people in the branch almost all great grandparent age, the kids found they got a great reaction to pictures they colored in primary. After church they would walk around proudly showing the pictures to as many people as they could. Everyone they showed them to was extremely polite and grandparent-like in showing them a great amount of interest. I know I haven't ever seen pictures colored in Primary ever get so much attention.

January 21, 2009

2009-01-21T17:12:00.001-08:00

Life in the Desert

The weather has become very nice. For the last couple weeks it has been perfectly comfortable outside in shorts and a T-Shirt. The kind of weather that it doesn't matter if the door is opened or closed because you don't notice the difference. The kids have had a kind of strange brown glow because of how much they are playing in the dirt. I think it is funny. Lexie has some other ways to describe it. I'll give a kid a hug or pat on the back them and they'll give off a little cloud of dust. Dallin and David are particularly striking in that their hair is naturally a sandy blonde color. After they have been playing around outside a while the color difference between their skin and hair reduces making them look sort of fuzzy. I find myself blinking to try to bring them into focus, but they just stay fuzzy. We do bathe them frequently, but they can go from clean to dirty in about 30 seconds out here. On the bright side, it is clean dirt. A long time ago, the Navajo would actually bathe in the dirt itself, so I suppose we are double bathing the children.

As Josh and Camron, who had the great fortune of tenting outside of our trailer will testify, our camp area is almost all rocks. There really isn't much dust on the surface because of all of the rocks giving our campsite an almost paved effect. The notable exception to the lack of dirt is directly in front of our trailer. By the entry way there is an appreciable amount of dirt. For reasons known and understood by children, one of their first tasks upon arriving at our campsite was to run down into the wash, where the dirt is, and bring it up in front of the trailer, one shirt load at a time. I am impressed with the volume of dirt they were able to move that way.

New subject ... (that's why its in a new paragraph, but I am explicitly stating it for the benefit of people like me that found their minds wandering excessively through most of their english classes in school and also to warn people used to reading fluid continuous material that there is a sharp turn coming up and I don't want them to slide off the edge). I had a really nasty head ache last night. The kind that has you alternating between vomiting because of the pain and being curled up in a ball crying. I traded beds with Tyrell so that I would have a more direct shot at the bathroom in case an urgent need for it were to arise. The funny part about this, hopefully none of you have found any of this funny yet, but rather found the imagery at least mildly repulsive, is when I woke up this morning. You know how, especially when you sleep in a different bed, you will sometimes wake up not knowing where you are. This happened to me this morning. It was the most extreme case I have ever experienced, in that even after I had finally figured out I was in the trailer, in the wrong bed, because all of the curtains were closed, I didn't have any idea where the trailer was. My mind went through possibilities all over the United States, "the mountains, a parking lot, the beach, a forest, by a river, by a highway, oh now I remember, the desert, Quartzsite."

Big Foot here I come

Along with the weather one of the big draws to Quartzsite in January is the huge flea market that develops here. There are a series of several different shows that come and go giving a wonderful array of various ecclectic items that can be purchased. It is a lot like some of the fairs I have been to, but it seems bigger. and some of the items are more unusual. For example there was a booth dedicated to authentic African tribal masks.

On Saturday we went as a family to see a new RV show that had come into town. I should have known better than to go in, knowing that I left the last show thinking about buying meteorites and fossilized dinosaur poop. I was able to relatively easily, with help from the rationalizing power of the blog, talk myself into a very long term deferrement of the gratification of those desires. This show was hosted by Honda Generators. Now there is something that isn't quite so easy to get out of the mind of a person like me. It is amazing how quiet those generators are. I think my best personal defense against ripping out my wallet to buy one of the little beauties will be a combination of staying away from all generator displays, engineering a casing for my current generator that will make it more quiet, and self talk of "finish the game, sell enough copies, and its all yours!".

Another display of interest that was so far out it was easy to ignore in the short term, was the booth for RV tours of Europe. They advertised six or seven different month long RV tours through Europe all of which seemed absolutely fantastic. The catch of course was the per tour price of around $7,000 per person for the first two people and then $4,500 for each additional person. A pretty hefty price for a family of seven. The booth did, however, seed an idea for a great way to tour Europe. I hadn't realized there were RV parks over there. My experience with European hotels is that they are much too small for the family. At the cost of those tours, when we do finally get over to Europe, I don't think we will go on the tours. Either renting or buying an RV could work out really well. Europe isn't on the near term anyway, in as much as we have so much left we want to see in North America, but it is nice to have a little piece of a long term plan.

The booth that we did not make it past without major short term consequence was the "Be a camp host in Oregon or Washington" booth. Lexie and I have been thinking that after our traveling we will likely wind up in Oregon. Getting paid camping for the summer seemed like a great way to get some experience of Oregon and stretch out the time I have to develop the game before we run out of money. I also have had it in my mind that some day I am going to buy a campground. I think that managing someone else's campground will be a great way to learn how interested I really am in the idea. It will also prevent a lot of the early mistakes I could make buying a campground without previous experience.

The campground we will be hosting is in the Deschutes National Forest near Sisters Oregon (about 45 minutes from Bend). I will be in charge of four camp grounds each with about a dozen sites. The campground hosting starts in mid June, but I may start doing work setting up campgrounds in Oregon as early as late April. I am still waiting to learn how well the campground setup work will pay. If I can live off the wage I can make for doing the campground setup I will most likely do it also in the name of experience. This is a link to the campground at which I will be staying: http://www.hoodoo.com/Deschutes_National_Forest/Sisters_Area/Three_Creeks_Meadow.htm .

Oh yeah, before I close the section, I should probably tie into my title. The Cascade Mountains are the location of several Big Foot sitings. Ever since I heard of research by one of the Idaho State University professors, Jeff Meldrum, about the existence of Big Foot, I have been interested in Big Foot searches. The local museum in Pocatello went as far as to put up a display devoted to Big Foot with a map of the sitings and evidences found to support Big Foot's existence. The little bit of research I have done has left me very convinced that Big Foot does not exist in any way currently understood by science. The arguments against existence are much stronger than the arguments for existence. With that said, there is a lot to be said against the scheme of thinking that says something doesn't make sense so it isn't so. I've found many of the dots in the Universe to be farther apart than my small mind will connect. I have also found it very simple to make connections that felt very good, but were entirely incorrect. So while the odds of me finding Big Foot this summer in the mountians of Oregon are about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% if that high, the need to have my eyes and mind open for things new and unexplained is 100%. Even something as simply explained as a mountain lion or a bobcat would be a great find. Well, simply explained if one doesn't think about it too deeply.

January 11, 2009

2009-01-11T20:36:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Fort Gordon I'm actually not sure what this is we found it a bit over a mile from camp.

Can I have a restart?

Things aren't really that bad but it does seem like 2009 is disappearing at an alarming rate. It seems that the New Year holiday just ended and now more than a week of the new year has disappeared. To be on schedule I should have 2% of my resolutions accomplished already. My guess is that I am closer to .2%. It is very early to already be behind schedule. With respect to astronomy last night I did see one of the most magnificent views of the moon I can ever remember. The moon rise and sun set are at approximately the same time and about 150 degrees apart on the horizon such that the sun shines on the moon as the sun is setting and the moon is rising. The full moon seemed two or three times its normal size due to its proximity to the horizon and the sun set effect around it gave it an amazing purple glow. I thought about trying for a picture but decided that I probably wouldn't be able to do the scene justice with the combination of my camera and photography skills. Now I am kind of wishing I had at least tried for the picture. Well, maybe tonight.

I love the sunsets here (photo by Josh Peterson)

The Tyson Wells Gem and Mineral Show

One of the things that attracted me to the Quartzsite area was reading about the large open air RV and mineral shows that are held here. I think I read somewhere that it is one of the largest open air markets in the world. Having never been to a mineral show, I didn't really have any idea what to expect from one, but after going for marble on Quinn Pass the week before, I was really excited for the show. On the way to the show I was expressing some of my excitement to Lexie saying "I really have no idea what they are going to have there, you know the way the gift shops have those neat little rocks you just can't help putting your hands in? Maybe they'll have an Olympic sized swimming pool full of them you can swim in!" I was exaggerating of course, I didn't really expect a pool full of rocks. I was, however, impressed with the number of rocks sold at the show. About every forth gift shop will have one or two of the really large (three feet tall or so) geodes. There must have been at least 200 of them for sale at the show. Another thing I was impressed with was the price. Many items sold for a half to a fourth what they do in most gift shops. Lexie picked up a very nice necklace for a dollar that would have been at least six dollars at most of the stores we shop.

The problem with going to a show like that is that you go knowing the entire place doesn't have a single thing that you actually need, but after being there a while your mind starts wandering. I can guarantee that the thought of owning my very own piece of fossilized dinosaur poop had not crossed my mind before my attendance at the Tyson Wells Rock and Mineral Show. I also am wondering if a meteorite might not be worth the $200/Kg they are asking for them. I am pretty sure the meteorite purchase is going to wait a bit I am just laughing at myself for letting myself get such an odd thing on my "want to buy" list.

Oh yeah, another item at the show of interest were the crystal balls. They had a great variety of different rocks polished into the most wonderful balls, with sized ranging from large marbles to large basket balls. When I was in elementary school I was absolutely crazy about marbles. In the spring it seemed that every lunch and most after school free time was spent playing marble games. One of my memories from the fourth grade is being absolutely engrossed in a game of marbles and then shifting wrong with a pocket bulging with marbles such that it emptied the contents of my bladder. You didn't really need to know that, but it is demonstrative of how engrossed I was with marbles. While I was at the show my imagination would carry me back to the field of my elementary school with me holding a marble the size of a grape fruit. I would think about how well it would cut through the grass and how many marbles I would be able to win. If marbles were as popular now I am sure my kids would find their dad soft to their requests for anything marble related.

An item at the show that was actually already on my "want to buy" list, but that I am still not ready to buy is a good pair of binoculars. There was a booth at the show dedicated to binoculars that would let you try the binoculars. The booth had a spotting scope set up pointing to a hill about a mile a way with a flag on the top of it. I was impressed at how well I could see the flag through the scope. I was also impressed to learn that there is such a thing as focus free binoculars. Before buying any I want to look through them a little more carefully but at first glance I was very impressed that all items both near and far seemed to be in great focus without anything to adjust. This seems like the perfect thing to have as a family pair of binoculars to pass around. Incidentally I did just learn that we will be buying the binoculars sooner than I had thought. I didn't realize until recently that the premium launch site viewing for rocket launches happen six miles from the rocket. That is as close as they will let the public. I had imagined being able to get much closer. Oh well, I still think that it will be a great experience when we finally get there.

New Friends

After church we went to see the rock collection of a man we had met at Ty's pack meeting. I was impressed with the variety of rocks he had as well as how well he new the type and origin of all of the rocks. Cutting rocks at least with hobby equipment is a very slow business. He told us that a rock about five inches in diameter will take about half an hour to cut. Polishing a rock face takes about an hour. It was impressive to see how different the rocks looked before and after being polished. I also noted the difference between the insides and outsides of the rocks, especially geodes. I am sure that there will be a few hours of my life spent watching a blade cut through rocks so as to see what is on the inside. In fact I was pleased that we were invited to come back another time to cut and polish some rocks. I would really like to see what I can do with the chunk of marble I got of Quinn Pass. Our new friend also gave us a bunch of grape fruit and tangelos the trees in his yard. I don't think I have ever had a grapefruit right off the tree before. I can almost guarantee that I have not ever had a grapefruit as good as those before. There was almost no bitter taste at all in them. The past tense in the last sentence is very deliberate in that even though we got quite a few grapefruit from him they did not last long.

Almost right after getting home we went over to our neighbor's campsite (1/4 mile a way, I love this place) where we had been invited for dinner. Our neighbors are from Kentucky, have twelve kids and are expecting their thirteenth. It was a lot of fun to visit with them. We found a lot we could relate to with each other. When we asked them about their decision to sell their house and go on the road they replied they felt it was something God wanted them to do. When we first met them we thought they might be Amish because their daughters wear dresses and bandanas in their hair. It was a little awkward when we were talking and the mother explained that one of her worries was that people would see them and think they were on of those Mormons. We told her that we were Mormon, but not the type of Mormons she had seen on TV, our sect doesn't practice parallel polygamy anymore. I haven't met many people in the US without much experience with Mormons, so I think we probably should explain things a little better to them, but then again, there really isn't a lot of clarity to really be found in the details with respect to the doctrine of Mormon polygamy.

Work

I am going to put a little in about work because it is consuming most of my time lately. Working from Quartzsite has some limitations in that we need to run the generator for electricity and we need use the cell phone for an internet connection but in general I think it has been working out well enough that I don't feel the need to change accommodations. Something that I have been pleasantly surprised by is the cell phone data signal is better here than it has been almost anywhere in the western United States.

I got a contract to do a spades game in late November. Getting the client server stuff cleaned out proved to be a little trickier than I had initially thought and I am still not done with it. I am, however, getting very close. I think I probably could have even finished yesterday but I got busy with other things.

The plan is that we will be in Quartzsite until we finish the spelling castle game. I got the game out to do a little work on it yesterday and I will say that we are going to have to work quickly to not get cooked out by the weather. The kids had a great reaction to the game as I was working on it. They kept asking for turns. I hope that all of the other kids in America feel the same way about the game and not just the kids who have their next trip to Disney Land depending on its completion.

Emotionally, it is hard for me not to beat myself up over how long it has been taking me to get this game done. It is also easy to beat myself up over how many flaws the game still has and likely will have when it is released. With that said, I also feel a great amount of excitement in that even though it is far from the best program ever written, it is by far the best program I have ever written. I finally feel like I am getting done what I went to school to enable myself to do.

My brother-in-law Patrick is very good with a guitar and I am trading web design services for a martial arts/physical fitness web site he is building for game music for the game I am working on. I was very delighted when doing research for the web site development to come across an open source project for creating interactive web sites. The project is called drupal, you download source code from http://www.drupal.org. The intent of the project is to provide a tinker toy sort of set of components for web development from which someone without programming experience can create a web site. From what I have seen so far, I would say that it is doing well living up to its goals. I was very impressed with how easy it was to get some relatively complex functionality implemented. To anyone thinking they need to create a web site I would recommend a look at drupal. When I get around to overhauling my mindjump web site I think I may use drupal there as well.

Camron and Josh come to visit

It was fun to have uncle Camron and Josh over.

We were pleased to learn that on their way to Texas, Josh and Camron would be stopping by. Josh and Camron have a unique view of the world and I thought that they would really appreciate Quartzsite. They are also a lot of fun to visit with. Josh is working on his PHD in nuclear engineering and is one of the few people I can talk with about nuclear bombs without having my conversation partner get a worried look in his eye. Maybe Josh just doesn't know me very well yet. He did convince me that there would not be a good way with present technology to get a nuclear reactor into a travel trailer, although it would be very handy in terms of solving the electricity issue. I guess there is some sort of radio active battery, but inhaling even a milligram of the substance it is made of is enough to kill a person, not exactly the sort of thing to have around kids.

Camron and Josh brought a tent which they used to spend the night beside our trailer. I felt bad for them in that even though they had ground pads, the selection of tent sites here ranges from sites with lots of rocks to sites with lots of big rocks. They were great sports about sleeping out on the hard ground in the cold. In the morning we took them out geo caching. Camron was delighted that the first geo cache we found had a rubber mouse in it. He knows that Lexie is terribly afraid of mice and was quick to fulfill his duties as little brother by not letting her miss a single feature of the rubber mouse.

Camron on little brother duty teasing Lexie with a rubber mouse.

The second geo cache we found put us at the bottom of the hill with the flag on it we saw from the rock and mineral show. Ever since the show I had wanted to hike up the hill to pull faces for the benefit of other people who might be shopping for binoculars at the rock an mineral show. For those of you thinking that sounds immature, I will point out my great deal of maturation in that, my face was the part of my anatomy I was planning on exposing to the show goers, not my more lunar feature. The hike up the hill was a lot of fun, just steep enough to get the kids crying, but not so bad that we needed to bother with ropes. By the time we got to the top, pulling faces didn't sound like as much fun as it did at the bottom, but Ty was still pretty excited about it. He pulled some pretty good faces, but it is hard to know if there was anyone at the show to appreciate them.

My sweat shirt was a bit large on David. (Photo by Josh Peterson)

We had a nice little hike up a hill near town.

Almost to the top.

On Top (Photo by Josh Peterson)

Natalyn pulling a face on the top. (Photo by Josh Peterson)

After geo caching Josh and Camron invited us out to lunch. We owed the kids a pizza party because of their points they had earned through reading so we decided it would be a nice way to take care of the pizza party. The only place we knew of in Quartzsite that served pizza is a place call Silly Al's. From the outside we were a little concerned that the kids would not be allowed in because the place is also a bar. We were pleased to find that they did indeed have a section where we could take the kids. We also were delighted to find that they really knew how to make a pizza. I am a big fan of Pizza Hut Pizza and while I haven't found anything better in the way of pizza than Pizza Hut's stuffed crust, the pizza part of the Silly Al's pizza was first rate. At the time I would have said better. Thinking about it now, I would like to try the two side by side. Something funny that happened through lunch was that Jacob had not ever shown any interest in solid food. When the pizza came out that abruptly changed. Lexie found it a little more challenging than usual to eat because Jacob kept batting at her slice of pizza. He is delighted that he is now entering the world of foods.

Camron and Josh treated us to pizza!

I was really excited to go back to the rock and mineral show. I was especially excited to go with Josh and Camron because they have an eye and an appreciation for the unusual. I will say they did not disappoint. Within a couple of minutes of arriving at the show Camron found a very unusual elephant like sculpture I had missed on my first trip. The older kids had enough of the rock and mineral show the first time we went and were not especially interested in going. I will say that the kids did have great behavior, but I can appreciate that staying in the middle of an isle, being told not to touch anything and hearing "get away from that table!" at 30 second intervals probably isn't the most enjoyable childhood experience. Lexie was feeling stressed about the school day that was getting off to a very slow start, so it was decided that the older kids and Lexie would make a graph of license plates in the parking lot while Josh, Camron, David and I went to the show. We didn't stay long but it was fun to get another look at the rocks.

Camron and Josh looking things over at the rock and mineral show.

We've been really spoiled with the amount of company we have been able to have out here. This morning I was telling Lexie, it would really be fun to have someone else down. At some time my Uncle Kim has said he may be swinging by. I hope he is able to make it. Friends and family are all invited, we have plenty of rocks to sleep on in camp!

Church in Quartzite

The population of Quartzite swells in January. We're not sure yet how much it swells, but we are starting to get an idea. Last week despite arriving five minutes before the meeting started, our family wound up sitting in the back corner against the wall, facing the opposite wall rather than the speaker, with Tyrell on the floor due to the lack of available seats. They announced they would be splitting into a 9:00 and 1:00 meeting the following week. This week we were surprised to find that we had three kids on the floor due to lack of available chairs. We think that this week many people may have not realized there was a second session available. We go to the 9:00 because that is the session that the primary president wanted to attend and so far we are still the Quartzite primary. It is quite unique to be in a congregation of 400-500 of older people. I found my mind wandering today as I was thinking that at the time most of the people in the room were children, Hitler was gaining power in Germany. I really enjoy the amount of wisdom available in the lessons and conversations in our ward.

Jacob was quite the hit today (and every week). Today he bumped up his flirtations a notch. If the ladies didn't gush over him immediately with his prize winning smiles, he would coo at them insistently until they noticed him sufficiently.

Children

I have logged enough parent miles to realized that I can not perfectly prevent my kids from hurting themselves. With that said, I am not yet experienced enough to not be surprised at the ways a child can find to injure themselves. When sacrament meeting ended last Sunday, Dallin had several burn marks on his forehead, the biggest was nickel sized with a blister in the middle. We found out the way he got them was by rubbing his head vigorously against the top of the chair he was sitting in, add church chair fabric to the list of hazards for children.

How do you stay awake in church? (Photo by Josh Peterson)

The kids wanted to ride Josh's motorcycle to Texas with him. (Photo by Josh Peterson)

While David was shopping with Lexie yesterday, he lost any chance he would have had at working in the deli at the General Store. While waiting for their sausage, a man came up and asked, "Can I have three of those T-bone stakes?" Before anyone could answer David looked right up at him, and very clearly said, "NO!" Lexie told him he needed to practice his customer service skills and the man laughed saying he was glad David didn't work there, or he would be hungry. The people behind the counter had a good laugh also. As Lexie was walking away from the counter she overheard the people behind the counter imitating David and having another good laugh.

David is his own side show. Not exactly an orange beret there David.

Living with a scarcity of water in the desert we have been strict about the amount of water with which the kids clean themselves. Yesterday Tyrell mentioned he would rather have hook-ups than a place to ride his bike. When asked why, he answered that he wanted to take a bath. Lexie and I laughed and then quickly granted him his wish. Apparently he can't play with his boats in a sponge bath.

The other day was extremely windy so the kids wanted to fly kites. Dallin and Natalyn were especially adamant. Lexie gave them each a plastic sack and told them to bring them back and NOT litter in the desert. One of the sacks blew up a tree too high for them to reach. Lexie overheard them problem-solving how to get the sack down. Dallin went through many ideas, and then announced, "I have it!" He went to work throwing rocks at the sack to get it down and Natalyn very seriously, and awestruck, like a princess exclaiming for her knight said, "Dallin's a real hero!" The wind really was impressive. Dallin's kite was made by tying his plastic bag to a 1" wide nylon tie down strap. Even without any aero-dynamic structure the bag and the strap would fly a little bit.

For mention of Jacob and his cute antics see Josh and Camron's visit and church at Quartzite.

Natalyn shows us how strong she is.

What is it with boys and sticks? (Photo by Josh Peterson)

J-Bird snoozing. (Photo by Josh Peterson)

Camron and Natalyn (Photo by Josh Peterson)

Tyrell (Photo by Josh Peterson)

Dallin (Photo by Josh Peterson)

Discount Marshmallows

A while ago Lexie came home from a shopping trip exclaiming "we must have really been out of a lot of expensive things. The bill came to $360." We are trying to cut our weekly grocery expenditure to $200 a week so the $360 price tag came as a concern. Reviewing the receipt we found an entry for about $159. The receipt wasn't very detailed so we thought it might be an intermediate sub total but weren't sure. Lexie was in a hurry to get Ty to his spot for the Hi Jolly Parade so she planned to take the receipt to the store after the parade to have it reviewed. She came home concerned because somewhere between the house, the parade and the return to the house she had lost the receipt. We decided to make a spreadsheet of all of our purchases and the price of each item. We guessed the prices on things like produce of which we weren't exactly sure. We found that indeed the total was much closer to $200 than $360. Lexie returned to the store with the receipt and was relieved to find the people at the store very helpful and were willing to admit their mistake. What had happened was the marshmallows were on sale from $1.59 to 99 cents. When the marshmallows were rung up instead of ringing in $1.59 marshmallows at $.99. The clerk rang in 159 marshmallows at $.99 cents each. We took a cash refund instead of the balance of 158 bags of marshmallows.

As a cub scout Ty was able to march in the Hi Jolly parade.

January 1, 2009

2009-01-01T18:26:00.000-08:00

Jacob says hi.

Happy New Year!

I don't have the holidays precisely ordered by personal preference, however if I did, the New Year's Eve, New Year's Day sequence would likely rank as one of the top two favorites. Right now I would say it would rank at the top but that will probably change when the Fourth of July roles around and I get to feed the pyromanic part of my personality. The thing I love about New Years Day is that the day starts a fresh page. The day provides a great reckoning point from which to evaluate personal progress and direction. Missteps and misdeeds of the previous year can be washed away into thoughts of possible improvement in the next year whereas accomplishments of the previous year can be relished.

As far back as I can remember every new year I get really excited about writing goals for the new year. For the last few years I have included in those goals a goal to keep my written goals such that I will be able to evaluate them on New Year's Day the next year. So far every year I have managed to loose my written goals somewhere through the course of the year. This year in particular I am sure I wrote goals in 2008 but I do not have any idea where I put them. I find myself very curious of how well I did on my goals. I am sure I flubbed some that I thought were must wins. Most potently the thing that comes to mind is I do not have a game on the market yet. I am also not running more than 4 miles at a time. With that said I am still free of my cube cage, still getting great time with my family, making great progress on what I believe will become a great game and I am starting 2009 running farther and with a lower body fat percentage than I started 2008. So even though I am frustrated with myself for not keeping track of my goals I am sure that even if I didn't reach any of them I am heading the right direction on all of them.

Perfectionism and idealism are enemies to my personal happiness. It is a source of great displeasure and discomfort as I look at what I perceive to be a possible reality for myself and I take a measure of myself against that unattainable picture of perfection. Even though I know that it is toxic I am afraid to let go of my idealism. I hold the belief that if I just want something badly enough and just torture myself long enough I will be able to attain it. I also hold the fear that if I take my eyes off the prize of perfection I will have my energy disappeared into meaninglessness (is a person allowed two suffixes on an english word? Oh well, if not I'll take this one as a bogey and move on). My mental model of the nature of God has been very strongly challenged over the last couple of years such that at this point I honestly can't say I have a fully reconciled view of his nature. What ever God's nature I do view life as an extremely wonderful and valuable gift. I can't think of any horror greater than to stand before God following the consumption of this gift to find that I had squandered the gift. It is obvious to me that God does not want us perfect right now. If he did he made some gross design errors on knees, backs and hormones. Dealing with imperfection fits into the human experience somehow, it just doesn't feel comfortable. Any mistake or missed opportunity can feel like such a waste.

Thinking along those lines the way I am going to approach my goals in 2009 is I am going to start with my unformed wishes of things that I would like to have happen in 2009 and my lying mind tells me should happen in 2009. From those I will break them down into things that I do actually think are responsible for which to hold myself accountable. Hopefully by putting my goals on the blog I will also know where to find them on New Years Day 2010 when I find myself wondering where I wrote down last years goals. Also by sharing my goals with others my hope is that if any of my friends find me wildly off course, drunk in an alley somewhere, they will at least be able to help me get staggering back in the direction I was originally headed.

Dan's thoughts and wishes for 2009 (unordered).

Learn conversational Spanish.

Learn all of the constellations names and be able to consistently find the visible planets.

Get the mindjump website implemented to the architecture I envisioned in 2008.

Run a marathon without walking.

Get a 5K time under 20 minutes.

Slam dunk a basketball at a ten foot goal with two hands without a running start.

Get a national distribution of the Spelling Castle game with over 1 million copies sold.

Maintain or improve my quality of married and family life.

Watch a space shuttle launch in Florida.

Donate a significant amount of money to combat the problem of world hunger.

Reach true financial freedom such that all of my and my family's basic needs can be met without action from me.

Get my body fat down in the 12-15% range.

Become free of neck pain.

Increase my spirituality.

Be happy

Refine definition of my life's purpose.

Learn to identify most common rocks, birds, plants and minerals.

Climb Mt. Rainier or do 100 miles on the Appalachian trail depending on whether I am on the west or east coast of the country.

Write the Chicken vs. Ducks math baseball game.

Update the blog every week.

Get the family hiking and climbing more.

Get my chess game in the 1600-1800 level.

Only eat foods produced in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.

Only eat organically produced meat and dairy products.

Avoid products which are developed through sweat shop labor.

Help the children get ahead in their school work.

Help the children solidify a positive self concept.

Let everyone in the family know how much I love them.

Find life's perfect balance of work, family, church and play.

Find the perfect balance of eating healthy but still getting ice cream, chili cheese dogs and root beer as often as possible.

Now goals Dan intends to evaluate himself upon in 2010 (also unordered)

Complete training programs for and race in a 5K race and a 10K race.

Establish a monthly income above $2700 while working about 30 hours per week remotely.

Make one visit to Mexico in 2010.

Learn to locate the Andromeda galaxy on a clear night.

Learn to identify 10 constellations which I currently can not.

Learn how to find the planets which are viable without a telescope or binoculars.

Finish the Spelling Castle game and get it visible in the market with sales in excess of 1000 copies. (The game isn't financially viable at this point but it will mean that I have at least sold it to someone not directly related to me).

Get the kids to at least one major museum or educational site such as the Monterey Aquarium or the Lebrea Tar Pits.

Direct 2% of my income toward combating world hunger. (I really hope this does become a significant amount of money).

Have one month in this year preferably an early one in which I do 30 sit ups and 30 push ups every day.

Maintain or improve my current body composition. (This will be tough to measure because I don't know my current weight or body fat percentage, but if my church pants don't fit next January I put this one in the toilet)

Do an outing with each of my four oldest children at least once a month.

Write updates in the blog at least once a month, with at least 20 updates through out the year.

Give an accounting of the goals in early January of 2010.

I am excited. It is a lot easier to have good intentions of getting goals written down than it is to get them written down. I feel like I have made a great step forward. I also think I have good chance of actually being able to find my listed goals next year. If I do hit all of my goals I will still not be sure I made the best possible use of the year. I will at least get some satisfaction of feeling like I am going the right way.

New Years Eve Party

For the first time this year we let our kids stay up to welcome in the new year. We didn't expect them to stay up, Jacob was out early, but David lasted until 11:30PM and the rest were up all the way until mid night. Lexie made popcorn (thanks to my little brother David), cookies and something with sugar, oatmeal, chocolate and caramel. We watched the movies "That Darn Cat", "Scoobie Doo Pirates Ahoy", and "Chicken Run". We heard a noise that sounded like a bomb at midnight. I don't know what it was. I had been joking about exploding a propane tank to welcome in the new year. I wonder if someone actually did.

General Family Stuff

We had fun with a paper chess set I printed off the computer.

I was able to get out with Dallin, David and Tyrell on father son hikes. Dallin and I had fun looking for a geo cache but we didn't find it. The GPS led us to a small cave that had a lot of bat guano in the entrance which I didn't dare enter without a flash light. I am not a fan of close encounters with bats. We were pleased to find what I belief are genuine petryglyphs. Tyrell and I made an attempt on the little mountain near our camp. We got a late start in the afternoon and found that our chosen route was too step to make good time. We settled for a couple of small foothills and finding a geo cache. I would still like to make it to the top of the mountain, but we are going to need to allocate some more time to make that happen. David and I just went out for a little walk in which I let him lead. I was impressed that after getting out of sight of the trailer and turning David didn't have any trouble navigating his way back to the trailer.

David out on our walk.

Tyrell making a selection from a geo cache.

On Tuesday night we took advantage of some Mc Donalds coupons Grandma Meikle sent the kids for Christmas. I didn't miss the opportunity to tell the kids that it was convenient that Mc Donalds put their garbage food in garbage bags for you, referring to the paper sacks in which happy meals are now served. I actually like Mc Donalds fries and chicken Mc Nuggets but I find their hamburgers nauseating.

The kids enjoyed the toys from their happy meal.

Jacob didn't care for the head set, but isn't he cute!

With the new year and nice weather outside we started the day with some spring cleaning. The project turned out to be a little bigger than we anticipated but it was nice to get things organized under the couch.

The kids helped with the organizing.

Natalyn found a tarantula.

A view of home.

Lexie's turn for just a minute. Most of all I want to make sure I write down what I thought were two of Natalyn's funniest sayings of 2008. Dan may have written them in other blog's, but I'm not sure so I'm going to write them now at the risk of repeating another blog. The first was on Halloween a lady was talking to Natalyn about Jacob and she exclaimed, "We have one baby and LOTS of baby clothes!" She loves to choose his outfits everyday and has recently been trying to dress him. Her other funny (which is really more scary than funny, but I choose to laugh): One of her favorite tapes is about a princess who learns how to be happy. One day she was complaining I wouldn't give her something so I quoted her tape, "but little princess, happiness doesn't come from things, happiness comes from within." Her answer to me was, "They didn't teach me that and I won't learn it!"

I agree with Dan about setting goals and one of my goals for this new year is to stay in touch with people better than I did last year. I'm going to start by at least making an appearance on the blog occassionaly. Since it's time to get the kids ready for bed right now I'm going to call this an appearance and say goodbye for now.

December 27, 2008

2008-12-27T20:11:00.000-08:00

Jacob got his first hair cut.

Guests

Lexie's sister Jennifer lives in Maricopa about 3 hours east of Quartzsite. We were delighted that her family came out to visit us today. We did a sort of pot luck Christmas dinner together. Given our lack of oven space and a few miscalculations about cooking times dinner was a couple hours later than intended but that made it all the better. It is a wonderful experience to be very hungry around delicious food with the great excuse of "It's the holidays! I am supposed to eat!".

We had a great time visiting with Wade and Jen. After dinner the Becksteads didn't have a lot of time because they needed to get back home. In the little time they did have we took them out for their first geo caching. I had a lot of fun and I think they did as well. I enjoy watching the kids sort through the junky toys in the caches deciding which one to claim as their treasure. I also of course love the hiking.

Once the Becksteads left for home we continued from our last geo cache find to a place between Quartzsite and Bouse that the president of the local rock and mineral club told us we could find green laced marble. My geology skills are very weak and I am not sure how to tell marble from other rocks but we did find several rocks with very interesting patterns. There was also a small cave which appeared to be the start of a hard rock mine which the kids were able to enter. It is easy for me to see how people get excited about rock hounding. The longer we were out the more I wanted to be out. We finally wrapped things up as we saw the sun was setting.

Happy Christmas

The kids loved their presents.

Things were a bit different from our norm for Christmas this year. One of the neighbors did run Christmas lights off their generator for a couple of days before Christmas but overall the atmosphere lacked a lot of the things we typically associate with Christmas. The most notable thing missing of course was the snow. My mind shifted from thinking that we were in very non Christmas like weather to realizing we were in the most Christmas like weather we ever had been. I did a quick check of the weather at one point and was pleased to find that Israel was at 55 degrees fahrenheit and lightly raining just like the local weather here in Quartzsite Arizona. I have enjoyed looking at the local desert and mountains imagining what things might be like in Israel.

Christmas really is a strange holiday in that even though it is stated as a celebration of Christ's birthday most of the celebration that surrounds Christmas in the United States is a morph of St. Nicholas day in Europe which Europe celebrates between the 5th and 6th of December. Also the date of December 25th itself is not the understood birthday of Christ. It is my understanding that the date was selected to overlay a Roman holiday to give the Christians a way to celebrate Christ's birthday without drawing attention to themselves.

It would seem it would be possible to get things cleaned up. We could Get St. Nick's day on the 6th of December, give the 25th of December back to the Romans for their holiday if they still want it. We could then celebrate Christ's birthday on his birthday. I am not sharp enough on my history to know if there is a consensus concerning Christ's birthday or if each little church has their own date picked. Lack of exact knowledge concerning the date could be part of what is keeping things as muddled as they are.

As for our family's particular celebration this year we took further liberties with the already muddled traditions. Tyrell made our Christmas tree out of construction paper. Because of the lack of space in the trailer we did not buy a lot of presents. We skipped the stockings and instead wrapped what would otherwise have gone in a stocking. That aside I suppose it was a rather normal Christmas. At first Lexie and I were really wondering if it would be. Tyrell and Dallin woke up Christmas morning about 7:30 AM. Dallin began chattering about the dreams he had the previous night, which he usually does when he first wakes up, and Tyrell pulled the blanket over his head to try to get some more sleep, which he usually does when he first wake up. Lexie and I turned and looked at each other quietly talking back and forth about how strange it was the kids didn't seem to acknowledge Christmas. Not long after that, Ty sat bolt up in bed and asked "Hey, when do we get to open presents?" After that the morning had the electricity in the air Lexie and I had been expecting. By the time we finally got to opening the presents the kids were literally gyrating with excitement. The kids were very pleased with their presents exclaiming they were exactly what they wanted. Natalyn was particularly cute when she got her Barbie, she held it up and joyfully exclaimed "My Dream!".

Tyrell made our Christmas Tree this year.

The Barbie's dog was the hit of the morning because it could poop. The dog came with little brown tick tack shaped metal poops which doubled as dog food. A person could lift the tail to feed the dog, drop the tail for the dog to poop, and finally clean up the mess with a little magnetic pooper scooper. The mess cleaned into a trash can which attached to the dog food container from which the process could be repeated. It was my preference to simply feed the dog directly from the pooper scooper. The boys spent the morning between Transformers and Legos. By the time lunch came around the kids were so loaded up on candy and cookies that they weren't hungry so we decided not to push the issue. Skipping a meal really helped to keep the day simple. For dinner we had elk meat, which I got from my brother Dave, with rice, it was a big hit.

The pooping dog was the hit of the morning.

Tyrell bought me a glass chess set for Christmas. Unfortunately the board was broken when I opened the box. I am quite sure that we did not break the set so we will be returning it. I was touched that Ty was very obviously reaching out to get some time with me. I am looking forward to when we can get down into Mexico, we are planning to shop for a replacement chess set there. In the mean time Ty and I can still play chess on the computer. It really does surprise me how grown up Ty is getting.

Ty bought me a chess set, somehow some toilet paper got wrapped, hey, I'll take it.

I felt more vested as a dad this year than I ever have. I am sure it is because I now have two children old enough I can remeber when I was their age and also I have the same number of children as I grew up with in my family. As I was giving the lecture of the meaning of Christmas to get interrupted by "when can we open presents?" it was fun to ride my little power trip and say "You'll open your presents when Dad says you can open your presents." I'm sure I have heard that some where before.

The kids loved openning presents.

December 21, 2008

2008-12-21T19:46:00.000-08:00

The London Bridge didn't fall down it was moved to Arizona!

David takes on the big 3.

Heavy heavy hang over thy poor head.

Whatcha gonna do with a bump on your head?

Nope!

You'll watch it!

Lexie here. I haven't written in awhile, okay, only once way back in February, so here I go again. Jacob is sleeping. Natalyn, Dallin, and Tyrell are playing with the pattern blocks, color tiles, and bears, and David is sitting next to me twirling my hair. After the way this morning went I wouldn't have imagined I would have any quiet time, let alone some free time to be able to write. This is really exciting! For those of you now wondering what happened this morning let's just say the kids lost their computer turns last night for not going to bed well and it is pouring rain outside. Your imaginations can fill in the rest!

It has been reaffirmed in my mind why children are not the protectors in the family. As we were discussing why they need to stay somewhat close to us while they ride their bikes and we are on walks Natalyn and Davey were positive they would be able to protect themselves. David gave me his best growl that was sure to scare away any bobcat (which do frequent the area - although not so much here as in Needles - and we haven't seen any)! Natalyn was just as confident exclaiming that she would simply suck on a candy cane until the tip got sharp and then she could use it as a spear! That's an idea I certainly hadn't considered. We'll continue to leave the job of protector to the parents for now.

Speaking of being protector, included with that is also the added job of being responsible for feeding the kids and in general making responsible decisions. With that said, Dan and I have decided to stay in Quartzite, Arizona until our spelling game is finished. Our original plan was to pass through here on our way to Florida to see the shuttle launch that is scheduled for February 12. The process of decision making is very interesting as two people start talking about what they want and what is probably best for the time being. It was a little revealing for me to realize that one of my underlying fears of not going to Florida right away was pride. I was so embarrassed to think of not going after telling everybody that we were headed there that it weighed very heavily on my mind while we were taking finances into consideration and if I hadn't recognized it, I could have pushed to make a decision that would have been financially foolish. Quartzite is a place we can live virtually free of hook-up fees, save on gas money, and live extremely frugally as we boondock in the desert. Clothes are even optional we discovered! We chose against parking next to the nudist colony, however much I hate doing (and paying for) laundry. Before you all panic and think we're stranded in the desert without any money or way to feed our children (except for the occasional lizard that they catch for lizard stew), I will let you all know we are doing fine. Our decision was based on the fact that Dan cannot be doing free-lance work, and private work at the same time. We're 1 month to 2 months away from finishing our game completely and we have come too far to quit the game now to do free-lance work full-time. Our plan is to live as frugally as we can for the next 2 months while we finish the game, then we will pick up more free-lance work and market our game. When the cash starts coming in again we will continue our travels. There is another shuttle scheduled in May and hopefully we will make it to that one. I can hope!

Quartzite has filled me with all kinds of conflicting and strange emotions. In so many ways the desert is just plain ugly and bland. When we go into town it really does fit the stereo-type of trailer trash. As we come into the desert I realize how alive everything is here. The sunsets are absolutely gorgeous! The cacti are really fascinating. The sharp mountain ranges are intriguing. I'm finding that this place has a very definite beauty worth admiring. Even though the town itself looks like trailer-trash, it's not. The majority of the town consists of seniors that are snowbirds, just looking for a warm, economical place to stay in the winter and take advantage of the flea-markets and mineral shows that come into town. There is nothing trashy about the people we have met!

We have enjoyed magnificent sunsets.

David seems to be confused about who he is lately, which confuses me because I never seem to call him by the right name. After seeing transformers at his cousin's house he wanted to be called Bumblebee, after hearing the story, "Holes" with his brothers he was Zero, today he said, "Call me Scooby."

The ward we went to had a primary president, teacher, nursery leaders, and that's all. There is normally a little two year old boy in the nursery, so David doubled the attendance in nursery. Tyrell, Dallin, and Natalyn made up the entire primary! The youngest family besides us and the couple with the little boy was probably 55. Their were about 300 people in the ward! J-bird is awake now so I'm signing off!

We had fun singing christmas songs around the campfire.

David playing at the Lake Havasu park.

Dallin enjoying the gold fish perhaps a bit too much.

There is a wonderful park near the London Bridge in Lake Havasu.

A picture at Lake Havasu I (Dan) thought turned out neat.

B Y Boo Hoo

Dan here... I've had a few scattered thoughts that I thought would be fun to further scatter across the world wide web. I find the decision making process a very interesting thing. In life we are bombarded by a series of choices in such a rapid succession that we really aren't even aware of the majority of the choices we are making, we rather just flow along and try not to get bumped too hard in the process. It really is important to make good decisions because in the end one's success or failure is likely simply the arithmetic outcome of whether one makes more good decisions than they make poor decisions. With the great number of choices we have I find it interesting which choices we choose to grab on to as a part of our own definition, which choices we let float by and most of all which choices we make habitually without even realizing that we were taking a path that offered an alternate course.

So what does this have to do with our dear sweet cougars of the Provo valley? Not a lot... That's the scattered part. The center of my thinking about decisions revolved around the way I handled my choice of whether to go to their bowl game or not. When I heard they were playing in Las Vegas I was excited because we were in the area and I have never been to a live BYU football game. When I learned that bad seats were $20 dollars, reasonable seats were $50 and good seats were $100 dollars my enthusiasm was dampened. At that point I made a decision that in as much as going did not directly fill any of my current family goals, the expenditure represented too much outgo for not enough income we would not go. So that was the level 1 of the decision making process. The decision had come to my conscious mind, I had evaluated it and made a mental determination of the outcome. The thing that was interesting to me was that even though I had done this I don't believe the decision was truly made until about 5:45 on Saturday when I realized that it was impossible to drive to the game, buy a last minute ticket and view the game. Even though my mind had been made up weeks ago it wasn't until the opportunity had completely passed that my mind would fully release the decision.

I sometimes wonder how much control I really have of myself and how much I just float around in my sea of possibilities and drift from one thing to the next. Even in cases where it seems that I have taken direct control of a choice it seems that currents still push me one way and another. I guess in the end what we get, really is not the ability to control our wind but rather the ability to adjust our sails. Sometimes I think I get caught in the trap of wanting the right decisions to feel good and that very frequently does not seem to be the case.

Back to the Boo Hoo part. I was very disappointed that the Cougars lost the game. I find that emotion funny in that I only went to BYU for one semester, and I most definitely was not anywhere near their football team. Another piece of my stupid thinking is that I really have trouble with the Cougars loosing sporting events. In the scriptures it seems like a major theme is that God chooses a people and then the chosen people kick the tails of their enemies in battle. In as much as the church claims to be God's chosen people it looks wrong to see them get run weary into a defeat. I'm not as bent up about BYU losses now as I used to be, but it is always uncomfortable to see the shadows show up on the wall in the wrong order.

December 6, 2008

2008-12-06T14:45:00.000-08:00

Week In St. George

Natalyn and David near our Sand Hollow camp site.

Well, the week was really in the Sand Hollow State Park just out of St. George. If I understand correctly Sand Hollow is Utah's newest state park. Given the Thanksgiving Holiday the park was relatively full so we were not able to get the exact site we had last February, however we were able to get a back in site right next to it. Now I am conflicted, undecided about which camp site I like better.

The desert is beautiful in a "nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there" sort of way to me. With that said, in as much as a significant part of my childhood was spent in Kayenta Arizona, the desert feels very much like home to me. Sunrises at Sand Hollow State Park are quite breath taking. It rained toward the front of the week but by the end of the week the rain cleared and we were also able to get some wonderful night skies. I have had an interest in Astronomy as long as I can remember, I just haven't yet fed that interest with what I consider any decent amount of education. When I was a freshman in college I took and Astronomy class and it stood as one of my favorite classes in school. Something I love about being out in the desert is the great view one gets of the heavens. While I don't have the time or money right now to take more collegiate level Astronomy courses I would like to think that this winter will be one in which I get a lot more familiar with the stars and planets. There have been two very prominent stars or planets next to the moon in the evening lately and it has been very frustrating to me not to know what they are.

Thanksgiving

We have some friends in Pocatello who told us that after they had their first Thanksgiving dinner in their camp trailer they didn't do it any other way. I have had a lot of wonderful Thanksgiving dinners with extended family, so I am not sure I am quite ready to say I wouldn't do a Thanksgiving any other way. I will say that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in the trailer and being together as a nuclear family is a delightful way to spend the day. Lexie was able to find a turkey small enough that it would just barely fit in our oven. The bird was more chicken sized than turkey sized but it turned out to be big enough to feed the family and leave left overs.

Lexie found a Turkey small enough to fit in our oven.

On Sunday we went to the St. George temple to show the kids the grounds. I am pretty proud of this picture I took it from the car on an errand to get a diaper.

Las Vegas

We did another repeat of camping locations from February and stayed at the Arizona Charlie's RV Park in Las Vegas. The park doesn't offer much for the kids in the way of a place to play outside of the trailer, however it does have a great pool. The kids have grown a lot since February, they were able to touch the bottom of the pool in a lot more places. At most RV parks you can stay a week for the cost of 5 days. Since we wanted to stay at least three days for the wedding anyway we decided to make our Las Vegas stay an even week. Most of the week we have just been in a daily routine of work and school. I guess a little more accurately the routine has been work, school and pool. The kids have been very eager to get in the pool at every opportunity we'll give them. As I am writing this I am getting asked about the next time we'll get in the pool.

The kids love the pool here.

Jeremiah and Crista's Wedding

Jeremiah was delighted with his limo ride to his wedding.

Jeremiah and Christa just before the wedding.

With five kids and a suburban, that needs most of ten feet of clearance with the bikes on top to park, I decided that we should leave extremely early for the wedding in order to make sure we weren't late. Finding the chapel and finding a parking place proved to be simple, leaving us with two hours before the wedding started. The neighbor hood of the wedding chapel has a lot of barred windows. The commercial area is a mix of bail bond businesses, tattoo shops and wedding chapels. I didn't really feel comfortable having the kids play out side. We decided to try and visit my mom's hotel room but aborted that idea while driving toward the hotel when we realized that by the time we got to the hotel, go the kids out, found my mom's room, got the kids in and drove back we would be at risk of being late for the wedding. In the end we simply parked by the chapel and let the kids watch Magic School Bus video's in the back seat for an hour and a half while Lexie and I got the best naps we could manage sitting in the front seats of the car.

I have heard a lot of stories about Vegas weddings so I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised with ceremony Jeremiah and Crista had chosen. For reasons I don't entirely know they chose to have a Celtic wedding ceremony. The music was very nice, the script was beautiful, and the ceremony included a lot of very interesting symbolism. Before the ceremony had started I leaned over to Lexie and as I pointed to each one of our boys told her that it was easier to picture Jeremiah at that size, that size, that size or that size, that it is to picture him at that size, as I pointed to him. It really is amazing to me that he is already married. The chapel was the first place we had ever met Christa. We are very pleased with her. I expect she and Jeremiah will be a great couple. It is nice to have her as a part of the family. For people who might want full resolution images of the wedding pictures I took, I uploaded them to a Picasa web album. You can get to it with this link. If you just want to view a larger photo you can of course just click on the photo.

This is a posed photo but probably my favorite from the wedding.

After the wedding we went to the Sahara Hotel where Jeremiah, Christa and most of the wedding guests were staying. I was concerned about parking but found a very simple solution. The hotel offers free valet parking. I have never used valet parking so I was a bit hesitant about it. Now that I have done it, I will say it is the sort of thing one can get used to in a big hurry. I really hate casinos. It infuriates me that they force you to walk through the gambling areas to get to hotels and restaurants. The kids were well behaved but walking through a casinos is like walking through a pig pen. You just don't come through clean. While I will entertain the thought that there are people who view gambling as legitimate recreation with in the bounds of moderation I think it is better to just draw a line at saying one will never do it. It has been shown that the presence of Casinos is correlated to an increase in crime. This means that the presence of a Casino means that more people are going to get robbed, raped and stabbed than they would in its absence. My vote is for their absence.

We had dinner as a group at the Casino's buffet. Tyrell and Dallin were especially excited about the food. As part of an effort to bring in our budget lately before most meals we have been adding the cost of all of the food items to get an awareness of how much different meals cost. Ty and Dallin left the wedding dinner exclaiming that was cheep! That meal should have cost one hundred dollars (meaning per plate)! We need to do a bit more work in teaching them their economics, but I was glad that they enjoyed the meal so much.

My mom and grandma had a great view from their hotel window.

November 27, 2008

2008-11-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

The Indian Museum

About 20 miles south of Richfield there is an Indian museum which my brother Rob told us about. We started the day with a stop there. Originally I had been planning on working while Lexie took the kids in but my curiosity got the better of me and I went in with the family. I was glad that I did. If I had ever heard about the Fremont Indians I had forgotten about them. The museum was small but very well organized with some great displays. There was a lot of detail explaining how current theories about the ancient people were developed. The thing I found most interesting was a model of one of the ancient inhabitants recreated from a skull. There is a technique developed by forensic investigators trying to identify murder victims which measures features in the skull to determine muscle thickness. Clay is over layed to replicate the muscle tissues to develop a face shape. Relatives of victims on whom this technique has been used say the results are eerily accurate, much like looking at a photo. We can be reasonably certain we were looking at a model of a face that was much like the face of the person that lived in the canyon about a thousand years ago. I was also very interested in the pit houses. Although the pit houses were very similar to hogans in a lot of ways, their dug in structure seemed more appealing to me. We were pleased to find that there was a model pit house outside which we could explore. I was surprised by the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the pit house.

There was a model pit house outside.

Lexie and Jacob make their way into the pit house.

Dallin notices the sun light on the wall.

Ty going up the ladder of the pit house.

Something very impressive about the museum that I failed to get in pictures was the quality of the petroglyphs around the museum. I am not sure I have ever seen as many at such a high quality so close together. It is interesting to me to think that those were their blog of the time. In a thousand years it is easy to think that this blog will be much less readable. With that said I am not quite ready to carve a picture of my trailer with an eagle over it into a cliff.

Traveling

After the museum we got off the interstate and took state highway 89 with the thought that we would take a peek at Bryce Canyon. By the time we got to the intersection with highway 20 we decided to abort the plan in order to keep the day simple and avoid being at a high elevation when the predicted rains came the next day. We resolved that we owed ourselves a couple of months in Southern Utah at some date in the future but that for now it would be better to get into warmer weather. We pulled into a Wal-Mart in Cedar City at about 4 PM. We were behind on shopping and it was 6PM by the time we finally got out. After a scan for no overnight parking signs didn't reveal any, we decided to make the Wal-Mart parking lot camp for the night and head for St. George first thing in the morning.

On our trip through St. George last February when I had just quit my job at AMIS we camped at the Sand Hollow State Park. For everywhere we have been this camp site is Dallin's favorite and ranks high on my favorites as well. We were pleased to get the camp site right next to the one we used in February. We decided that we will spend Thanksgiving and the weekend here. Next week will be split between here and going to Las Vegas for Jeremiah's wedding.

Politics

In as much as I have failed to properly sway the election and I have expressed my gripe, until further notice I will not be including a political section in the blog. Oh yeah, while I still have a headline that says politics, I will share joke I heard from my cousin. There are some now calling us the USSA.

November 25, 2008

2008-11-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

Week in Salt Lake

It was nice to visit with Nana and Papa in Salt Lake.

We found out one of Lexie's friends from Rexburg was in Primary Children's Hospital with her new born baby. The baby, Evelyn, was having some breathing trouble that was getting treated. It turns out Evelyn has Treacher's Syndrome and a small jaw. She should be able to outgrow the breathing problem as her trachea hardens and her jaw grows. In the mean time it sounds like she will have to use oxygen until she is 5-7. I dropped Lexie off at the hospital to visit with her friend Adonia and then took the kids to a park and played with them. There was a small hill that the kids started rolling down which developed into races. I called the starts to the races and declared the winners. At the peak of participation we had eight kids in the races, four of them mine of course. A development in our game that I found amusing was that I started offering a dead leaf to the winner of each race. The area we were playing in was carpeted with fallen leaves. The thing I found amusing was how excited the kids were to win one. After each race one little boy in particular would all but bounce as he ran back to hand his prize leaf to his mom.

Lexie was able to visit with her friend Adonia. Adonia is holding Evelyn.

That evening I went to the Jazz game with my father-in-law. We were on the very top row but could still see enough of the game to make it enjoyable and of course something you don't miss no matter where you sit is how loud everyone is. Compared to other games I have been to at Energy Solutions Arena the crowd was calm for most of the game. Anything that may have resembled calm broke down in the fourth quarter as the Jazz were pulling ahead and Kirlinko solidly blocked one of Shaq's shots. After the Jazz scored on the turnover created by the blocked shot Kirlinko followed with another block of Shaq which kept the crowd in its usual frenzy for the rest of the game. The Jazz had lost to a couple of weak teams recently so I had been expecting to watch my first live Jazz loss. It was a nice surprise to see a win.

During the week Lexie was able to make it to the Planetarium with the kids. I stayed at camp to work. Lexie and the kids were able to spend some extra time with her mom and dad. They went to the church history museum, where the kids loved to play at the children's section. They toured temple square and Nana and Papa explained to the children which country each nativity set represented.

Adonia was scheduled to be in the hospital until Friday. Originally we were only planning to be in Salt Lake until Wednesday but decided to extend our stay a couple of days so Lexie could offer support to Adonia. On Friday we left for my brother Rob's house to visit and to see his girls in a junior/high school musical. It seemed a bit of a shame to leave Salt Lake one day before BYU and Utah played. I must have set a bad precedent by leaving Salt Lake early in that BYU didn't seem to stick around for the fourth quarter of their game.

Altamont

We had just finished the book "Holes". The kids were very eager to get at Rob's dirt pile.

I think it is mostly just to full fill my duty as a little brother and get jabs in at big brother, but I have trouble going to Altamont and not reminding my brother that the early saints had walked over a thousand miles by the time they got there and they kept walking. Altamont really is a pretty area. I am especially interested in the wilderness to the north of it which includes King's Peak, Utah's tallest mountain. I am hoping to find an opportunity to climb King's Peak with Robert some time. The climb isn't technical like the Grand but it is a fifty mile round trip.

The musical was a lot of fun. The title was "All Shook Up" a play which featured a lot of Elvis music. Rob's wife Becca played supporting piano, my nieces Rachael and Emily had major parts. They all did wonderfully. There was a lot of effort put into the sets including one scene in which they brought a classic Corvette onto the stage. I found it ironic that just that day on our drive over I had been telling Lexie that I believed I was finally mature enough that no matter how much money I ever had I would not spend it on a Corvette because it didn't really represent any of my life's values. Seeing the car on stage caused a definite lapse in my resolve. I'd like to think I'll stay strong but the truth is it seems apparent that I am living a virtue supported more by my current financial circumstance ( lack of $50,000 disposable dollars) than by inner strength. If I ever do buy a Corvette I'll need to think of some wonderful reason to support the decision. Get to the grand kids little league games faster? Bolster the American auto industry? Save metal? Well I don't have to think of it now. I really would like to think that an extra $50K of mine would be feeding people in Haiti and not just roaring around on the road but as my feelings during the play revealed my character may not be as strong as I would like to think it is.

I'm not really sure what happened to Saturday. It doesn't seem like the activities reconcile to a full day but somehow the day went by. I did have some nice time visiting with Robert as we hung a rain gutter on the garage he is building. I am really impressed with Robert's garage. He has done a great job on it. I know he has been wanting the garage for a long time. I think every visit to him and many of the phone calls to him over the last ten years have included conversation about the garage. It is fun to see him as close as he is to getting it. I am really happy for him.

The kids had a lot of fun with their cousins. (photos by Becca)

On Sunday after church I was pleased to see that my brother Dave, his wife Lisa and their little girl Anna had come over from Vernal to visit. We called my brother Jeremiah and were able to talk him into coming over without his fiance Krista who had to work. Jeremiah is getting married in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. When we asked Jeremiah why he had decided on Las Vegas he told us that the original plan had been to elope. They had scheduled their service and then decided to invite people. My favorite part of the visit was when we started tossing the smaller kids back and forth. Tyrell got thrown once but he was quickly disqualified as a candidate projectile in as much as he would lead his flight with his knee, not a nice thing for the receiver considering where his knee lines up when he is caught. Jeremiah even threw me a very short way to Dave once. I was impressed both that Jer could throw me and that Dave could catch me. Anymore it is very much tongue in cheek that I call them my little brothers. My little boy David probably got most of the air time and wouldn't stop asking for more.

We had a lot of fun tossing kids. (photo by Becca)

Super Nate! (photo by Becca)

The Party is at Rob's House! (photo by Becca)

Brother Picture (photo by Becca)

On the road again

Monday morning we continued our migration south toward warmer weather. There are some options in route getting from Altamont to St. George. We decided to go through Indian Canyon to Price. I was very pleased with the decision. I had forgotten what a pretty drive it is. We stopped for lunch at a pullout with a vista that reminded me of some of the places we had been on the Alaska highway for its remoteness. It is something wonderful to be able to fill one's eyes with a landscape that does not reveal a man made structure.

I really appreciate a vista that lacks man made development.

In an event of good bad luck we had a blowout sometime as we were coming into Price. I really don't know when the blowout happened. We were at half a tank of gas so I decided to be conservative and stop for fuel. While we were fueling a car pulled up and asked if we were aware we had a blown tire. We were not. The lady explained to us where it had happened so we assume she saw the tire go. The gas station happened to be two doors down from a tire shop so it was reasonably simple to get the problem resolved. The tire was in the same position as the tire we had blown in California last February. The tire is under our fresh and waste water tanks so my current theory is that the problem is one of load. We put a tire with a heavier load rating on. I hope that solves the issue.

Our run of good bad luck. We were only two doors down from a tire shop when we discovered this.

We arrived at Richfield at 5 PM and pulled into a Flying J. Flying J's often allow free overnight parking so it seemed a nice place to have Family Home Evening and sleep. We were pleased to find that we were indeed allowed to park overnight.

Random Tidbit

My kids now out weigh me. When we were in Salt Lake we all weighed ourselves on my in-law's scale. If I remember correctly I weigh 188 pounds and my kid's weights sum to 191 pounds. So now I am not only out numbered by my kids I am also out weighed by them.

Family Portrait.

I made this one link to the full size image because some people have been asking for a family portrait from us. After clicking the link, right click and select 'save picture as ...' to grab the photo. (photo by Becca's sister-in-law Jenica)

November 16, 2008

2008-11-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Our journey of however many thousand miles this will be, started with a trip to the Blackfoot rest area. By the time we got everything ready to leave, had a nice visit with Lexie's grandmother and then her sister Katie's family it was pretty much time for bed. We had been planning on driving to my mom's house to park for the night. After leaving Katies house we discovered it was raining really hard. Between the rain and the darkness we both concluded we'd just as soon not be driving, so we kept things simple and slept at the Blackfoot rest area.

In the morning my mom invited us over for breakfast. We had a great visit with her and a wonderful breakfast. It was a little odd saying good bye to grandma because I am not sure when we'll be back and hence didn't really know how final the good bye was. I really doubt it was the last good bye but you never know with things like that.

After visiting with my mom we drove over to the Dredge's house so Lexie could visit and see Melinda's new baby. Based on previous displays of more energy than control by the children I stayed with them in the car for the visit.

We had a short day of driving with a final destination of Antelope Island State Park just west of Layton Utah. I am sure I have been there before but I haven't ever appreciated it as much as I did on this visit. Something that made our visit extra special was that we got the entire camp ground to ourselves. In the evening we tried to get down to the water to collect a sample of the water. I have been wanting for quite a while to do an experiment with the kids where we boil out sea water and find out how much salt is left. I had been disappointed that I had failed to think of it at an appropriate time when we were by the ocean. The Salt Lake of course was all the more promising because it has about five times the salt concentration of the ocean. Walking at David's two year old pace we did not make it to the water but did have a nice time on our way toward it. As part of their Junior Ranger activity the kids were collecting litter. Among the litter Tyrell found a working laser pointer which he had a lot of fun with on the walk home in the dark. I couldn't resist begging a turn from him to try and hit the reflector of our trailer as we were approaching it.

I was very surprised to learn that there are bobcats on Antelope Island. I would like to go back sometime on an extended stay and try and find one. Even without that I would simply like to go back to Antelope Island, it was so much fun.

Antelope Island was great.

This was the view from our camp site.

We had a nice walk as a family in the evening.

Wednesday Morning we drove into Salt Lake where Lexie's parents are serving a Mission in the translation department in church headquarters. There is a KOA campground on North Temple about 2 miles from her parent's apartment that is a very comfortable place to stay. I was happy to finally have a chance to get back to work. The transition of the move had been pulling a lot of time from work. It was nice to see Lexie's parents. On Thursday Lexie and her mom took the kids to a candy factory, then on Friday we all went to the Disney on Ice show at the Energy Solutions Arena. While we were in the arena I took the opportunity to pick up a couple of nose bleed seats to the Jazz vs. Suns game for this coming Monday. I have heard psychologists say that people first make a decision and then do thinking to justify the decision. With that in mind I have decided not to waste my energy trying to justify why I bought the game tickets but just accept that I have made the decision.

The Disney on Ice production was great. I was bit of a wet blanket when first presented with the idea of going to watch ice skating but consented to the idea knowing it was something Lexie would really like and it promised to be a great experience for the kids. Lexie told me by the end of the performance I would be wishing I was ice skating. She was right, although I would like to skate without wearing a duck suit.

Saturday morning we did a little geo caching. It really is a shame how little of it we have been doing. Not having been geo caching in a while made it difficult to get started and I forgot how helpful it was to print out the clues before looking for caches. As it was we had time to find one and fail to find another.

The Disney on Ice production was fantastic.

We did a little geo caching.

Dead guy duty

Those of you who have seen the movie Nacho Libre will likely recognize the reference in my heading. Those of you who don't are invited to pollute your cleaner thinking through exposure to one of my favorite movies. In addition to the obvious point that the movie is pee your pants funny, I think the thing that carries the movie for me is the plot line that passion and desire will eventually win. I like that idea that a person feeling an inner burn will succeed if they are willing to follow their feelings. Oh yeah, back to the dead guys...

Lexie has always had a fascination with human anatomy. There is a museum display which shows plastisized cadavers in various positions to display the inner connections of the body. We first learned about the display last year when it was in Phoenix. We were standing in line for the exhibit and then left the line because the kids were misbehaving. The result of the decision to leave the museum line has been a bit spooky to me, in that it is easy to think that had we not left the line, we would not have been where we were when that dizzy lady in Flagstaff ran us off the road. I am not being quite as facetious as I might sound when I call her dizzy. At the accident scene she claimed to have partially passed out as a result of cold medications. The next opportunity we had to see the exhibit was this summer in Edmonton. When we tried to get a camp site we found that they were all filled because it was the Canada Day weekend. Up to that point we didn't realize Canada even had a day. There were some camping accommodations which would have been possible but expensive and inconvenient. After giving it a lot of thought we decided again to miss the museum with the thought we would be able to see the display in Salt Lake, which we finally did.

Speaking as a person with a strong belief that a person's insides are better left inside, I was delighted with the display. I would even venture to say that I have gained a real interest in human anatomy through my experience in the display. The human body is absolutely incredible. I was pleased to see several graphic displays of what an iliotibial band looks like. I have been having ITBS (Iliotibial Band Syndrome) issues causing trouble with my running. It was interesting to get a better view of what was causing the trouble. I was surprised at how much I learned in such a short time. If we were not running so short on space in the trailer I am sure I would have bought one of the anatomy books they were selling at the end of the display. I fully intend to buy one later after we have a bigger trailer or have jettisoned some of our other books. I was pleased to gain a new understanding of the heart as it relates to physical performance. I always knew the heart was a muscle but I didn't really ever think of it as behaving like one. There were several hearts displayed. I was impressed with the variance in size. Like other muscles as the heart gets stronger it gets bigger. Athletes develop larger hearts than non athletes. A display claimed that Lance Armstrong has a resting heart rate of 30 beats per minute, less than half the heart rate of an average man, because his heart is so large and so strong. Another interesting tidbit I picked up was about the nervous system. I think I had learned this before but had forgotten it. In routing signals for items that need a quick response such as a reaction to touching a hot stove the signal response sequence bypasses the brain with the action response getting routed from the spinal cord. I would guess that people acting without engaging their brains extends well beyond hot stoves.

I think this is a legal picture, it is a picture of a picture. We weren't allowed to take photos inside.

Circles

I imagine I have put in some similar conversation to the following somewhere else in my blog. The topic lends itself to repetition so well I am sure I will put it in again sometime in the future. I am facinated with the circles we make in life. In today's case I am thinking mostly about travel. We are back in the KOA where we were last November. It was our trip here last November that accelerated our decision to take to the road full time. I remember last November how badly I wanted to go south after our stay here rather than north. It feels really good to be heading south this time. Something I find geometrically interesting about getting back to a place where one has been before is that in mathematical terms ignoring orbital position (which is another circle in itself) continental drift, and erosion the sum of all of your displacement (motion) is zero. You have gone exactly the same distance up as down, exactly the same distance north as south, exactly the same distance east as west. Returning to a place puts you at a point of balance in your life. It also lends a great opportunity to reflect on the significance of the zero sum journey. How are you different for your travel? What has transpired on the journey?

In this case for me it seems quite a bit has transpired. If nothing else we need to count to five instead of four before getting in the car. I also know that I feel a lot different. I have solidified some view points that were just beginning to sprout last year. Last year I know I was feeling a lot of need for change where as this year I am feeling a lot of intensity for persistence on my course. Last year I felt like my limits were externally imposed where as this year my limits are all internally imposed. It is a day to stand and find out who I am.

All Hail Obama!

I don't think it is mandatory to have a political section but lately I've been in the mood to do so as I have had a small sprinkling of an increase of political awareness. This is the kind of writing that is almost guaranteed to leave me embarrassed, fined or imprisoned at some point in the future but all the same it's fun, I'm young and why not? I don't have enough knowledge to actually know or do anything useful, but I feel like I am getting to the point where I can almost tell what is going on, sort of like when I was six years old and hearing grown ups talk about relatives over dinner.

As I watch the american dream and our fundamental freedoms give way to institutionalism, laziness and fear I am discouraged. The tax payer funded economic stimulus packages are an outrage. They are a shift of power from the populous to the elite. The elite will continue to grab power until the populous is finally beaten and starved enough to pick up their pitch forks and revolt. The shame of it is the pain, suffering and loss of life that will happen in the transition. It isn't time to pick up pitch forks now but it is time to at least question a system that is accelerating our movement in that direction.

I have found a couple of things to like about our next wanna be king. First he is in favor of a college football playoff. He suggested an 8 team playoff whereas I would like to see at least a 16 team playoff if not a 32, or 64 team playoff. That aside the man is thinking correctly. In fact I think it would solve a lot of problems if he would leave the economy and abortion policies alone and focus on college football. I find the BCS commissioner's statement that a college football playoff would not best serve the needs of the colleges, the players, and their constituents laughable. The statement is so transparently translated as, I have power as the BCS commissioner and if you change the system, I and my cronies loose that power, therefore it is a bad idea. Power maintaining its power for the virtue of it having the power and not for the merit of its position is one of the fundamental problems we have in the country now. Another thing I like about Obama is that he is increasing the use of technology in his political interaction with the populous. I understand he has a database with e-mail addresses of his supporters. He uses the database to send messages directly to supporters without having the message first filtered by the main stream media. He also claims he will take input collected through his website in evaluating political policy. I believe technology offers some very interesting options in bringing us closer to becoming a true democracy. While I am not sure a full democracy really is a great answer, I think a few large steps in that exact direction are great.

Here in Salt Lake people are having more fun than they realize with the reactions to the results of the H8 definition of marriage proposition that passed in California. I understand the proposition passed with 52% voting in favor of it. I think it is really interesting to think about the many factors that put a person on one side of the issue or the other. Whether people realize it or not I think they like having an issue as exciting as sex to argue and think about. The down side is that people are people and they don't always discuss their disagreements nicely. There are a lot of feelings getting hurt and people feeling a lot of extra internal anger. I find it interesting how each side of this disagreement seems to feel the same emotion of moral self righteousness over their position. I know I do, I am right after all! :-)

November 9, 2008

2008-11-16T19:29:00.000-08:00

As excited as I have been to get on the road again now that the time to leave has actually arrived I am surprised at how much stress the move has been causing me. I felt that we had figured out how to travel with four children pretty well. It seems logical that traveling with five shouldn't be too much different. In a lot of ways it is possible that it will work out a lot better in that Lexie will have more mobility.

It seems that at any time a person seems to feel like they are doing everything that they can be doing. At least that is the way I feel most of the time. So with the feeling that I am now doing everything that I could possibly be doing, the prospect of adding school and travel planning seems a bit daunting

So now that I have done my whining it is time to flip the coin and look at the shiny side. I am really excited to get moving again in that I believe we have a lot of great adventures ahead of us.

A thought that kept coming to me today is that it is really easy to fall into the trap of living a life in a way that would suggest one would get a second chance at it. While it is true that each sunrise brings a new day. It is my understanding that life is a one pass experience. The opportunities that we want to take advantage of and the things we want to accomplish much be pursue or we will lose our opportunity to pursue them. It seems that there is never a convenient time for change and that the unknown is always scary. However it is through facing the unknown and embracing change that we make our progress toward our goals.

Something I find interesting about the human experience is that even though we all float around on the same rock, we all have widely varied experiences depending on our circumstances. Even within the same family at the same event the experience is different according to an individuals experience and perception.

November 3, 2008

2008-11-03T19:44:00.000-08:00

Carving the pumpkin

The kids each got to choose one feature to shape on the pumpkin.

Boo at the Zoo

The Idaho Falls Zoo hosts an event which they call "Boo at the Zoo" on Halloween. The zoo gets decorated for Halloween, local businesses set up booths and games, and the kids get to go around the zoo trick or treating.

My favorite part of the zoo was the tiger exhibit. It seemed that the tigers were much more active than usual. Also, I got a small glimpse of the snow leopard which I had never seen at the zoo before.

David refused to wear any part of his fireman costume that he picked out. Despite that, his cute little smile and "tik ol teet" wound up getting him a him a huge hall of candy. Something kind of funny about Idaho Halloweens is that they are generally so cold that kids need to wear large coats over their costumes. I'm not sure many people noticed he was out of costume. Ty and Dallin were really excited about the martial arts booth. The people were dressed up in karate cloths and had little plastic "boards" for the kids to "break." Given the choice, I think Ty and Dallin would have spent the entire evening there breaking the little plastic board. Natalyn liked a little inflated haunted castle they had there. Jacob slept through most of our visit to the zoo. When he woke it was amusing to watch his face. He was very obviously bedazzled by the lights.

Natalyn loves Jacob.

A couple of Lexie's friends came over for an impromptu surprise Halloween party. The tiger cub is ours.

The kids had a lot of fun playing together.

David was a fireman but he refused to wear his costume.

Natalyn was Dora the Explorer, don't miss the backpack!

Dallin was a Ninja.

Ty was a pirate, he didn't get my hooker jokes and Lexie didn't like them. Naughty me.

Crafts at "Boo at the Zoo".

More crafts at "Boo at the Zoo".

Natalyn Dictation:

We had fun at Boo at the Zoo together. Mom also had fun with us. We got lots of candy, but dad didn't want a bag. All of us had fun at the zoo. What about me? Did I have fun?

Chasing Dreams

On Saturday (Oct. 25) the kids had a rehearsal for their upcoming primary program. I took the opportunity to go for a long run straight east. Running east here is my favorite because I get a view of the Grand Teton. I was disappointed that my knee started hurting as soon as it did because without the knee pain I am sure I could have run a lot farther. I don't want to exacerbate any problems I have in the knee so I am careful to walk after too many consecutive steps of pain. When considering my current venture one of my large motivators was that I wanted to get myself in shape. As I was running, I was mixed with feelings of excitement and frustration. I am sure I am a better runner than I was a year ago. I also know that I am not that much better. The feeling, I suppose, is like seeing something you really, really want in the store and then seeing the price tag you realize how much it is going to take to get it.

My game development has mirrored my running in that even though I have made great progress I am left feeling a little empty when I look at how far forward there is to go. In the end the choice becomes whether one is going to pursue something, or they aren't. Even though the price is higher than I had hoped it might be, I still believe the value of the reward exceeds the cost.

Work

I did some hiring for my game development off guru.com. We got the CD cover for the spelling game back from the artist, Micheal Graham. I think it looks really good. If you are curious you can get a peek at http://www.mindjump.net . Mike is now working on some clean up items for the interior art. We also hired a voice actor Ted Gray and his daughter to do voices. We gave them the first installment of the script yesterday. I am really excited to get their work back I really liked their auditions.

I blew most of my week on a guru.com project I took on. I developed the picture upload, shopping cart and pay pal interface for http://www.wallblazers.com a custom vinyl business. The project wound up stretching out a bit more than I would have liked, in that I was much more rusty with my javascript programming than I realized. It had also been a long time since I had worked with style sheets. In the end I was glad I did it. It was nice to get the cob webs brushed out and I am very excited to learn how the PayPal interface works so that I can write shopping carts now. I am not sure when my work will go live on the site.

Beds are for sleeping, roads are for driving, right dad?

Wednesday (Oct. 29) we got a call from my dad while we were in our marriage and family relations class. The caller ID showed a Wyoming number. When we asked my dad why he wasn't using his phone he wouldn't answer and just said "at least I am able to call you back". Lexie correctly surmised that he had been in a car accident. Details were much slower coming than we would have liked. Little by little things sounded better as EKG, and CAT scan test were coming back without indicating serious problems. I was much to tired to drive to Jackson that night. I was willing to leave at 3 in the morning, but an experiment in seeing how long I could stay awake driving to pick up a person in an accident from falling asleep driving really didn't resonate in my mind as a sound idea.

In the morning there was a lot of confusion about whether or not we should bring a trailer to bring home the wrecked vehicle. When I first heard that my dad wanted to bring home the wrecked truck I was aghast thinking "Are 7 junked vehicles not enough for the Thornton property, why does he need to bring home another souvenir?". My second thought was one of relief thinking, "Really, if dad hadn't wanted to bring home the junk vehicle we would have to worry about a personality altering concussion, its good he's the same old dad."

My client for the vinyl website needed his things ASAP so I spent the morning pulling some critical bugs out of my code while Mom gathered things to load the truck onto the trailer. After I had the most critical parts of my project delivered, I helped as well. It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon before we were ready to go. At two o'clock mom and dad finally called their insurance adjuster to find that, unlike what they had thought, the truck was covered with comprehensive insurance. The news brought some pause to the plan of the idea of picking up the truck. It just so happened that I was able to slip into parent teacher conference while I waited for my dad to make a decision as to whether or not to bring the trailer.

Ty and Dallin both got similar reports, they are both doing really well in school.

It was past three o'clock in the afternoon before we finally got going. I was relieved that the decision developed into not bringing the trailer. The ride to Jackson was quite nice. It seemed a waste to be in Jackson and not at least get to Jenny Lake. The sun was almost setting by the time we met up with Dad. He was very anxious because at the time of the accident, he had an envelope with $1500 in the truck with which he was planning to buy a tractor, which had not shown up in his things after the accident. We packed stuff as quickly as we could, making a very though investigation of the wrecked truck, pulling all of the inner panels and covers that we could. We still did not have any luck recovering the envelope. Returning to the crash seen, we were able to recover several other items, but had been looking through things for quite a while without finding the envelope. Every little piece of paper was a rise in hope followed by a fall in disappointment. Finally, I ventured up a very steep part of the hill and by flash light found the envelope in an unexpected place, as the other contents of the jockey box were much lower. It was definitely a personal record for most money ever found laying on the ground.

We gathered as much stuff as we could in the dark, dad was glad to see a lot of it still in useable condition. We were home by 9:30 PM, but I was still very exhausted. Dad's accident, of course, brought back some memories of my own accident last March. It is hard to say in a situation like that whether one is lucky or unlucky. For the circumstance Dad was extremely lucky in that he missed several trees, the river, and in general didn't get killed or paralyzed. The statistics are not good for people who take a dive down canyon ravines. He was also lucky in that his financial loss was minimized by the presence of full coverage insurance and finding his cash that had been laying outside all day. Of course, the overriding question is, "was he unlucky to be in the accident at all?" I have concluded that he was a lucky, unlucky person. Results were much better than they could have been.

That's the ravine where dad tanked it, Left of the guard rail the hill makes a 30-50 foot drop into a very steep slope. Dad was lucky not to become a permanent part of one of the trees.

Not everyone gets to walk out of these. Dad was truly lucky.

You voted for the wrong person for president!

I am officially cynical this year. I haven't voted yet, but I think I am going to vote for Ralph Nader, knowing that I too am voting for the wrong person for president. I am not sure I agree with Nader's position regarding unions, and I know I strongly disagree with his opposition to nuclear development. With that said, this year the hot issue with me is the economy and the balance of power. Of the major candidates, Ralph Nader seemed to express the most intelligence on this issue.

Next election I will be old enough to run for president. You can calm down, I am not planning on it. I too would be the wrong person to vote for president. People are so diverse that I don't think it really makes sense to vote for a person anyway. Issues are what concern people. I think it would make a lot more sense to let people choose their top 2 or 2000 issues and then vote on those instead of pigeon holing people into voting for a candidate who shares a position on a leading issue but then has all kinds of garbage behind that in other issues. An election does not give us a spectral reflection of the will of the populous. Honestly, I am not sure the populous knows the will of the populous. I am reasonably certain I don't know my own will and I am very frustrated this year not being more able to get a better reflection of what I think it is through the choice of candidates. I am not quite ready to accept virtual senators and presidents but it really is where I think the answer lies. If there were a way to make an honest computer... Anyway one more shot in the dark, Nader 08! "Fair Tax for America!"