January 25, 2009

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

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

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

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.