Two Pews in a Pod

30 Years Today

2011-12-19T11:57:00.002-07:00

Yes this is the first time I have posted on this Blog and I would like to do better but I had to blog today about being married 30 years. Erick is a spiritual, reliable, hard working, kind, patient, and talented man. He has been my right hand man and is the best friend I have. Those years have been full of wonderful peaks and low valleys typical of life and marriage, but looking at the whole picture I am so grateful to have married someone that has put up with all of my faults and failings and yet made me feel like a queen.He always tries to life me up and keep me going and he has spent countless hours listening to me spill out all of my frustrations and he still likes me. Yes I still do wish he liked fishing and golfing and a few other things I like to do, but then we can't like all the same things or life would be boring. For instance, I knew he liked music and singing, but who knew he would love acting soooo much and would be so good at it. All in all Erick is what I needed to become more than I could be alone and I am grateful for the 30 great years we have had together. I really can't believe how fast those 30 years went. Heres' to another 30!!

Weakly news

2010-06-13T17:39:00.001-06:00

Don't fall off your chair, but here's my second week in a row of posting.

This week I spent most of the week working late. I would come home for dinner, but then I would have to either go back to work or log in from home and ended up working until midnight most nights. That's getting old. I took a break Thursday night and participated in our first week of stake softball. Our team won.

Friday night was Music Theatre of Idaho's annual fund raising gala. They had a prime rib dinner and silent and live auctions. We didn't bid on anything, so we didn't buy anything. Well, they also have a dessert auction, so we did bid on that so that we could have dessert. It looked like they probably made some pretty good money on all the various goings-on.

Yesterday we worked most of the day: Liz in the yard, and me in the yard and in the house. What was I doing in the house? I was working on doing some wiring changes to our network and phone to accommodate our new phone system. We are now totally Qwest-free! A few weeks back I switched our internet to our local cable provider, and a little over a month ago I bought an Ooma Telo to provide our phone service. It took that many weeks to get our phone number ported over from Qwest to Ooma, partially because I forgot that 4 years ago I had Qwest put a freeze on our number to keep from having it slammed by some rogue phone company. What is Ooma, you might ask (at least you should ask)? It's a company that's offering voice-over-internet phone service for a very good monthly price: virtually free. You have to buy their hardware for around $200, but then all you have to pay on a monthly basis is the taxes and regulatory fees, which for us is around $3. For that you get unlimited nationwide long distance and local calling, including caller-id and call waiting. If you want a few other features like conference calling, etc. it's only $10/month. We're now going to start saving over $50 a month.

Today Liz and I both had unusual Sundays. Liz is currently serving as the Relief Society secretary in our ward. Yesterday she found out that both counselors in the presidency were out of town, and then last night the president called and said that she was sick (you could hardly hear her on the phone because her voice was so soft). The pianist and chorister were also both gone. Then, during Sunday School Liz realized that the teacher wasn't there, and found out that she was sick, too. They ended up combining with the High Priests for the lesson.

In the meantime, I was scheduled to speak in another ward. I arrived about 10 minutes before the meeting started, and was standing in the back of the chapel talking to the other high councilor who was my speaking companion, as well as one of the ward's bishopric counselors. We noticed that there was a brother sitting on the stand already that none of us recognized. I thought I had seen him before, but couldn't remember where. The other counselor in the bishopric eventually showed up on the stand and was talking to this person when my speaking partner and I went up to the stand. We still didn't know who he was until the counselor who was conducting started the meeting and announced that Elder Clark of the Seventy was presiding at the meeting. That's when I finally realized that it was Elder Kim Clark who is the president of BYU-I, where I had seen him conducting the commencement exercises last December when Anna graduated. Apparently he was in town for a wedding. So, I got to give my talk for a general authority. He didn't ask for any time to speak at the end of the meeting, and he didn't get up to correct anything, so apparently I didn't teach any false doctrine.

Well, hopefully you've recovered from the shock, and gotten back up off of the floor. Don't count on weekly posts, but I'll see if I can do better.

Adventures in Alaska

2010-06-05T23:08:00.012-06:00

Well, it's been a while since I took the time to post anything here. I guess I don't have a good excuse. Even though life's always busy, it seems like it's either not exciting enough to write about, or there's not enough time to write. We did have a big adventure last week, though, so I guess I should take the time to write about what happened before it fades from my memory to badly.

Earlier this year Liz started trying to plan a family vacation. We keep thinking that we are doing one last vacation together before one or the other or both of our daughters gets married. Turns out this time the thinking was right. Anyway, Liz has always wanted to cruise to Alaska, so she started checking to see if we could make that happen. She was originally looking at the end of August between when Erin finishes her internship and she starts back to school at BYU. Problem was it looked like it was too expensive then, but she discovered that the rates are quite a bit cheaper in May, so that's what she ended up booking for us. It turns out that was a good thing since Anna now plans to get married at the end of August. She ended up getting a good price on a mini-suite with a balcony on the Norwegian Pearl, leaving Seattle on Sunday the 23rd, cruising up through the Inside Passage, and returning to Seattle on Sunday the 30th.

Erin and Anna flew up from Salt Lake in the evening on Friday the 21st. Liz picked them up and they went almost directly to a friend's wedding reception that was happening that evening. I went to the reception from work and met them there. Unfortunately, I had to go back to work after the reception to try and finish up some stuff that was supposed to be done before we left on vacation. I ended up not getting home until after midnight, and found Liz still up packing. We probably didn't get to bed until 1:30 or so.

Saturday morning we headed out on the drive to Seattle. We had an uneventful trip and got to our hotel in Bellevue around 5:00 in the evening. Of course, it started raining around the time we got there. After checking in we headed on down to downtown Seattle and ate at a sushi restaurant there, and then road the elevator up to the top of the Space Needle to check out the sights. By then it was around dusk, so we got to watch all the lights coming on downtown. It was also apparently prom night for a bunch of Seattle high schools, so we were sharing the evening with hordes of teenagers all dressed up in their fancy dresses and tuxes.

Sunday morning we attended sacrament meeting at a ward close to our hotel, and then went back to the hotel to change and check out, and then it was back to downtown Seattle to the cruise port. We parked our car at a parking garage across the street that has a special area for cruise passengers, and they actually transported all of our luggage to the ship, which was nice. There was quite a line of people waiting to check in for the cruise, but it kept moving fairly quickly, so the wait wasn't too terrible. We got on the ship around 1:00, and headed up to the buffet for some lunch. One thing that was new this cruise that we hadn't experienced on our one other cruise experience (Disney Cruise many years ago) is that they are big on having everyone use hand sanitizer. We were greeted at the doors of the restaurant by a smiling young Phillipino man with a spray bottle of sanitizer saying "Washy, washy, happy, happy!" This got to be a familiar routine every time we went to eat, and also whenever we re-boarded the ship after being on shore. I think the ship finally left the dock around 4:00 and headed out into Puget Sound. We went out through the Juan de Fuca Strait and headed north up the west side of Vancouver Island. The weather alternated between blue skies and gray clouds as we headed up the coast. That evening we went to an event in the theater that they dubbed their welcome aboard show. They basically had short performances from several of the performers that would be performing throughout the week, so Liz and Erin and I went to see what was worth going to later on.

Most of the day Monday was spent cruising out in more open waters going up the Canadian coast, so it was the rocking-est day. That morning we were eating breakfast in the restaurant at the back of the ship, and had a table right by the windows at the stern. Before our food arrived, Anna spotted some dolphins swimming around in the wake of the ship. I never did see them, but Liz and Erin did. At one point later in the day the ship cut to the east of an island called Banks Island, so for that stretch the sea was quite a bit calmer, and it was fun to go up on deck and watch the scenery going by at a fairly close distance on both sides of the ship. It was mostly cloudy and drizzly all that day, but not too cold. Liz, Erin, and Anna all decided to splurge on a spa pass for the week, and they enjoyed spending time there in the sauna, hydrotherapy pools, and whatever. I think they made it there for at least a little time every day of the week. That night was "formal" night on the ship. Norwegian has this concept they call "Freestyle Cruising," which means you aren't assigned specific times to eat like on other cruises. Instead, they have 4 dining rooms that are open at various times during the day that you can go and eat at any time they are open. Then they have several specialty restaurants that they charge a "cover fee" to eat at. We avoided those for the rest of the cruise, but the girls wanted to dress up fancy that night, so we splurged a bit and went to the Italian restaurant, which had the smallest cover fee for dinner. The food was generally pretty good at all of the restaurants, but I didn't think it was quite as good as what we had on the Disney Cruise. After dinner we went to see a comedian named Buzz Sutherland in one of the lounges. The good thing about him is that he does clean humor. He apparently worked for Disney doing Donald Duck voice acting at some point, and he used that voice in his act some. He was pretty funny. After that we headed down to the theater for the main entertainment that night: four guys doing a "Franky Valli and the Four Seasons" tribute concert called "Oh What a Night." They were quite good and very energetic. Liz and I enjoyed the show, but the girls opted to hang out in the room instead.

Tuesday morning we were finally into the inside passage area of southeastern Alaska. I spent most of the morning up on the sundeck watching the scenery and taking pictures. The weather improved that morning, with only partly cloudy skies, and warmer temperatures. We pulled into Juneau right on time at 2:00. Before the trip, Liz and Erin did a lot of research on the internet regarding the various shore excursions available at each of our stops, both through the cruise line and otherwise. In Juneau we opted to rent a car from Rent-a-Wreck and drive ourselves out to the Mendenhall Glacier, less than 20 miles outside of Juneau. The Mendenhall Glacier comes down out of the mountains and ends at the edge of Mendenhall Lake (what a coincidence). There's also a waterfall, Nugget Falls, coming out of the mountains to the right of the Glacier. We took the short hike to the falls, and took lots of pictures of the glacier and the falls, and also went into the visitors center which is maintained by the U.S. Forest Service there. After that we headed back into town and had dinner at a place that Liz had read about on the internet. The girls all shared some king crab legs, and I had some seafood lasagna. We had a little time after that to do some shopping, and then had to be back on the ship by 9:30. Since we had an early morning the next day, we just went to bed at that point.

Wednesday morning we were already docked in Skagway by the time we woke up. We had to get up early that morning because we had booked a shore excursion that started with a 7:45 am train ride. Our tour guide, James, met us at the dock and took us on a little mini-bus to where we boarded the train -- the White Pass & Yukon line. The train route paralleled the route the gold miners took back in 1898 to get from Skagway up to the gold fields in the Yukon. It was a pretty amazing ride with lots of great scenery. We got off the train a little ways over the Canadian border in Fraser. Our guide had driven up to meet us there, and then took us on up the road into the Yukon Territory. Along the way we got to stop several times and watch bears eating dandelions. Who knew that bears love dandelions? This time of year the dandelion are plentiful right along the road, so it makes it easy to see bear. We drove up past some more amazing scenery to the town of Carcross, where we stopped for a yummy barbecue lunch at a place that is also a training camp for Alaskan Husky sled dogs. The girls had fun petting some of the puppies there. If you paid extra, you could take a ride on a sled (a wheeled cart really, since there was no snow there) pulled by the dogs. We didn't do that but we watched some other people do it. The amazing thing was when they were loading up the cart, all the dogs were going crazy barking. It was like they were all saying "Pick me! Pick me!" because all they want to do is run and pull heavy things. As soon as the cart left, all the dogs who were left behind stopped barking and settled down. From there our guide drove us all the way back down to Skagway. We had left the ship prepared for cold weather, but even up at the highest points of the trip it really wasn't that bad. By the time we got back to Skagway at around 3 in the afternoon it was close to 80 degrees and I ended up carrying all of our coats and stuff back to the ship because it was too hot to carry them around while we were shopping. I think all-aboard time was around 7:30 that night, so we had dinner back on the ship. The main entertainment that night was a comedy/juggling duo called Sharkbait. They both used to be Ringling Bros. clowns, and they put on a pretty entertaining show.

When we woke up Thursday morning we were just starting to head into Glacier Bay. I got up early and went up on the sun deck to take pictures and enjoy the scenery. The weather was great again. Every once in a while we hit places where the wind came up and it was a little chilly, but other than that it was sunny and not too cold. At one point we saw a bunch of seagulls on the water, and when we looked closer we could see that there was a seal swimming around amongst them. I got a new digital SLR camera for Christmas (well, actually after Christmas, but it was a Christmas present) and I got a second longer telephoto zoom lens with it. That came in handy for the bear pictures on Wednesday, as well as for trying to get shots of the marine wildlife. It also helped on many of the scenic shots as well. I was barely able to get a couple of pictures of the seal, even zoomed in all the way to 300 mm. Anyway, the scenery was amazing all the way through the Bay, but when we got up to the glaciers it was truly amazing. The first stop was Margerie Glacier way up at the end of the bay in Tarr Inlet. The ship spent quite a bit of time up there. We didn't get to see any huge pieces calve off, but we did see several small chunks come off, and they were all accompanied by huge cracking sounds, kind of like lightning sounds when it's close by. I wonder how it sounds when big chunks come off? After almost an hour there, we headed back south and then to the west up the Johns Hopkins inlet to the Johns Hopkins Glacier. This is the only glacier in the bay that is still advancing. We didn't spend as much time here, or get as close, but it was still amazing, then we passed the Lamplugh Glacier on the way out of the inlet. Also impressive. Right after we left the Johns Hopkins Inlet, the Park Ranger (one of several who came on board as we entered the bay, and who was making announcements over the ship's loudspeaker) announced that he had spotted a bear on the shore. He said to look in a certain place, and you would see bear tracks leading from the beach through the snow halfway up a hill, and the bear was at the edge of the snow. I found the tracks, but couldn't see the bear. I went ahead and took a picture anyway, and when I looked at it later, sure enough, there the bear was. Oh, we also saw some mountain goats on the way into the bay.

By the time we started heading out of the bay at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, it was warm enough that there were a lot of women in bikinis sunbathing on the sun deck. Crazy! Glaciers and bikinis -- never thought I'd see that combination. We spotted several whales later in the afternoon, and right after we got out of the bay we went through a stretch of water where there were tons of marine animals splashing around not too far from the ship. We thought they were dolphins, and maybe some of them were, but at dinner that night someone mentioned that the park rangers had told them they were baby orcas. I had tried to snap some pictures of all the action, but mostly just got the splashes, but I got lucky on one shot and you could definitely see what looked like a baby orca jumping above the water. Cool stuff!

That night after dinner we went and did Karaoke in one of the lounges. That was actually the first time I ever did that in public. After that we went to see Buzz Sutherland do a different routine in the Spinnaker Lounge, and then went to the big theater for a Second City comedy show, but we only lasted 10 or 15 minutes before we decided it wasn't our kind of humor. Nothing super terrible, but just a little iffy and not really very funny.

Friday morning we were docked in Ketchikan when we woke up. We had gotten tickets ahead of time to a Lumberjack show they do there. We had scheduled the 10:30 show, but wished we had have gone for the earlier show, because we had to be back on the ship at 12:30, so with the show plopped right in the middle of that we didn't have time to go to any of the other sights there that we wished we could have seen -- specifically a couple of totem pole exhibitions. Oh well, the lumberjack show was fun, and we spent the rest of the time shopping. It was a cute little town, so we wished we had more time there, but I guess we had to get started on the trip back down to the lower 48. That night we attended the big theater production, which in this case was put on by a dance company. It was called something like "The Journey of the Geisha," but it really only loosely followed any plot, and was mostly just some dances strung together. The amazing part of it was the two soloists who did these routines while hanging from various apparatus and flying around above the stage and the first few rows of the audience. It's pretty hard to describe, but they were pretty amazing.

Saturday we were at sea most of the day, and docked at Victoria on Vancouver Island around 6:00 in the evening. Because of that they did there big entertainment for that day in the afternoon, and it was a joint show bringing back Sharkbait, and the Oh What a Night guys. It was a good show. Later in the afternoon they did another show which was basically a talent show put on by some of the crew. Most of it was actually pretty good, but the finale was a group of about 10 of the crew, including the cruise director, dressed up in toga-like costumes, drinking swigs of water out of carafes they were carrying on their shoulders, and then artistically spitting the water at each other like they were fountains. It was actually pretty funny when you saw it.

When we got to Victoria, we weren't sure what we were going to do. We wanted to go to Butchart Gardens, but we didn't want to pay the big shore excursion prices to do it. We ended up hiring a taxi to drive us out there (about a 15 minute drive), wait for us, and bring us back. It wasn't cheap, but it it's an amazing place, so we decided to go ahead and do it. We had the taxi driver take us past the Empress Hotel and the Provincial Assembly building on the way back to the ship, so we got to see a little of downtown Victoria. After we got back to our room, it was time to start packing up. We had to have any luggage we wanted them to take off the ship packed, tagged, and out in the hall by 2:00 am. We just kept small bags to keep our overnight stuff in, and got the rest of it out for pickup and then went to bed.

Sunday morning we had breakfast and then disembarked. We found our luggage, and had a porter help us get it out to the street, and the parking garage had vans coming periodically to shuttle folks and their luggage back to their cars. We got back to our car fairly quickly, but we quickly discovered that we must have left a light on inside, because the battery was dead. We were able to flag down the van driver before he got away, and we were able to jump start the car and get headed out. Since we were in Washington, Liz couldn't resist trying to make it out to a tide pool, so she had reserved a hotel room (a suite actually) in Forks, Washington. For those who don't know (I didn't), that is the setting for the Twilight novels that are all the rage these days. It was pretty funny because they now have a company there with a fancy van that does Twilight tours showing you the sites mentioned in the books. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. On the way to Forks we took a ferry from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island, and from there crossed a bridge (or two) to get to the Olympic Peninsula. We stopped at the visitors center for Olympic National Park in Port Angeles, and they told us that the drive up Hurricane Ridge was probably not worth it due to foggy conditions, so we drove down the road a ways and took the road up to Sol Duc Hot Springs and past to the trail head for Sol Duc Falls. It was a nice hike through some beautiful woods and past several small waterfalls to get out to the main falls, which were very impressive. After that we headed on out to Forks.

Monday morning we took longer than we wanted to get on the road, and it was, of course, raining. We were hoping to get to the tide pool at the creatively named Beach 4 at low tide, but we missed it by a half an hour or so. Between the rain, having to go across a small creek that emptied into the ocean between the trail and the tide pools, and the waves at the tide pools, we were all pretty soaked by the time we got back to the car. That made for a fun drive for several hours until we got dried out. We took a route to go past Mt. Ranier on the way home, but it was covered by clouds (a not uncommon occurrence), so we didn't get to see much of it at all. We ended up not getting home until around midnight. Anna had to do some laundry after we got here, so it was early morning before we got to bed, and then the girls had to be at the airport around 6:30 on Tuesday to catch their flight back to Salt Lake.

All in all, it was an awesome trip. We wonder if our daughters will ever stop teasing each other so much (or at least not be so noisy about it), but we are glad that they enjoy being together, and we are glad that we got to enjoy some time with them as well.

If you want to see pictures, got to http://gallery.me.com/thepews and click on the two photo albums labelled Alaska Cruise.

I hope there aren't too many spelling or grammatical errors in this, because I'm too lazy to go back and proofread!

Some days are like that

2009-09-24T22:19:00.002-06:00

A couple of weeks ago Liz managed to run over some goat-heads on her bike and flattened both of her tires. We had put a "puncture-proof" tube in the rear tire, so we were frustrated that that didn't work out. Life has been really crazy lately, so I hadn't had time to work on fixing them for her. Monday night I got home from "Beauty and the Beast" practice around 8:30, so I decided to see if I could get them fixed.

Liz had tried pumping up the rear tire with a pump she got that plugs into the car cigarette lighter on Saturday, and it seemed to hold some air, but didn't stay all the way pumped up. I thought maybe I should let the rest of the air out of it and take it off the rim so that I could check the tire itself to make sure that it didn't have any stickers left in it. However, I discovered that the slime that's supposed to seal the punctures started blocking up the valve, so I couldn't get much air out of it.

Liz had bought a new puncture-proof tube for the front tire, so I decided to switch to the task of removing the punctured tube from the front tire and replacing it. That was going pretty well, until I started putting the tire back on the rim with a little plastic tool that is designed for that task. When I had the tire almost all the way on, the plastic tool snapped, and a piece of it stayed inside the tire somewhere. That same tool is also used to take the tire off the rim, but since it was broken I couldn't get the tire off to clear out the broken piece.

"Okay," thought I, "I'll have to buy another tool to finish the front tire, so I'll switch back to the rear tire." I read the instructions that came with the new puncture proof tube, and discovered that it said that after you get a hole in it you need to pump it up and ride it around a bit to get it to seal up well. So I decided to just pump the tire back up, have Liz ride it around a bit, and see what happened.

Erin's car was in the way so I couldn't use the power pump without moving cars around, so I decided to use a good old fashioned hand pump. I hooked the pump up to the tire, and proceeded to push down on the pump handle. What happened next was not a good thing. As I mentioned, the valve had gotten plugged up with the puncture-proofing slime, so when I pushed down on the pump handle, all I accomplished was to compress the air in the pump, since it couldn't force its way into the tire. Just when I hit the bottom of my push, to my surprise the pump handle snapped cleanly in two, leaving one half in each hand. This resulted in there no longer being any downward pressure on the pump rod. At this point, all that air I had so energetically compressed down in the bottom of the pump became a fine propellant to shoot the metal rod upward at great force, directly into my stomach. This did not feel really good.

At this point, even though I didn't really have any more tools to break, I decided to not work on repairing tires any more that night. What I have to show for my efforts is one partially pumped up rear tire with a clogged up valve, and a partially pumped up front tire that almost has the tire all the way on the rim, but that also has the broken off piece of plastic hidden in it somewhere. And a nice oval shaped gouge/welt in my stomach about an inch below and to the right of my belly button.

I had previously scheduled my annual checkup for Wednesday this week, so I waited until then to have the injury checked. The doctor didn't seem too worried about it, except that it was a little infected in spite of our putting Neosporin on it. He gave me a stronger anti-biotic for it, and it seems to be getting better. He also gave me a tetanus shot, since I couldn't remember when I had last had one, even thought the rod didn't tear my shirt so it actually never made contact with my skin.

Today, I started feeling a little achy. I don't know whether it is a reaction to the tetanus shot, or the flu. I stayed home from work after lunch, but I went out to play practice tonight. We'll see how I feel tomorrow. Erin had been down with a sinus infection for several days late last week and early this week, so hopefully I don't get that, and hopefully it's not the swine flu!

Happy Labor Day

2009-09-06T10:23:00.003-06:00

Hey, it's only been 4 weeks since my last post instead of 4 months. In that 4 weeks Liz and I have both turned 32 (hexadecimal) years old. Since our birthdays are only two weeks apart, Erin and Anna planned a party for us on Friday the 14th, which was close to halfway between the two dates. They invited friends from all three of the houses we've lived in, as well as friends from MTI (our theater company friends), and one couple that we met back in college that now live up in Idaho City. So, a lot of people there didn't know each other, but it was fun to see them all. Erin reserved a picnic shelter at a local park, and we had a pot luck dinner and cake. It was a bit windy, but that also kept it from being too hot. It was a lot of fun, but everyone went home too early. We like to party later into the night, even if we are old!

On Saturday the 22nd Liz and I drove up towards McCall and went on a short hike down to a small mountain lake called Blue Lake. The hike was a bit steep, but not too strenuous for us 32 year olds. It was a nice little Saturday getaway. I would post a picture or two, but they are on my computer back at home, and I am not there currently.

The reason I'm not there is because we are spending the Labor Day weekend in Utah. Anna and Liz drove down on Wednesday so that Anna could be at the wedding of her first mission companion on Thursday. Liz spent that day visiting with some friends from back when she lived in Provo while her mom was attending BYU. Erin and I drove down to Salt Lake on Thursday night, and stayed at a downtown hotel so that Erin could be at the Church Office Building early Friday morning for an interview for an internship with the Humanitarian Department. The brother she interviewed with wanted her to meet with the actual hiring manager, but apparently he was too busy that day to talk to her. It was a little frustrating that after she arranged to drive down for the interview they hadn't arranged to have everyone that needed to talk to her available to do so. It sounds like it would be a good opportunity for her, and I am sure she would do an excellent job at it, so hopefully they will get their act together and offer her a job soon.

I wandered around temple square taking pictures while she was interviewing. when she got done we had breakfast at the JB's next to temple square. They had told Erin that if they could get this other manager to schedule some time for her they would give her a call, so we wanted to hang around for a while. We went and toured the roof of the conference center, and then went to an organ recital in the Tabernacle. After that we took the shuttle bus over to the Humanitarian Center to take the tour there, and Anna and Liz met us there. It really is amazing all the Church has been able to do around the world. We went from there to the Hogle Zoo (we'd never been there before) and had a couple of hours to see the animals there before it closed. They had quite a few baby animals there, so the girls were all particularly excited about that.

We back south from there through some pretty heavy traffic and eventually made it to Amy's house where everyone from these parts was gathering for dinner. We enjoyed a fun evening of visiting.

Saturday noon we headed over to Edwin's to help celebrate Marie's birthday (she turned 3C hexadecimal). All of their kids came into town and surprised her Friday night, and then they had a barbecue on Saturday. Kathy and Becky came down from Logan, and Alicia and Ches and his wife came as well. It was fun to see all of Edwin's kids, some of whom we hadn't seen for quite a while. Edwin had gone through a bunch of old boxes of Marie's and framed a whole bunch of pictures, and made a scrapbook of letters and stuff, and wrapped them all up and gave them to her for her presents. She also got some pretty nice stuff from her kids.

Liz stayed there to visit for a while, but Erin and I headed back to Dad and Mom's to watch the BYU game. We missed the first two possessions in transit, but we heard them on the radio. Tim and most of his kids and Amy and Nate and their kids also came over to watch, and we enjoyed cheering the Cougars to victory together. Apparently Oklahoma has trouble beating teams that have a B and a U on either end of their names. First BSU in the Fiesta Bowl a few years back, and now BYU! We hope the Cougars can keep up the good work for the whole season. It would be nice to put some more pressure on the BCS to come up with a better method for determining the national championship.

For those who weren't there Friday night to hear in person, I should mention that in the 4 or 5 weeks that Anna has been home from school between terms, we have had two young men spend a week at our house (different weeks). The first was a guy she had met at school, and the second was an elder from her mission. Apparently the relationship with the first guy is now over, and Anna isn't sure what to do about the second guy. I think I might have mentioned in my last post that Erin was spending a lot of time with a young man whose family is in our ward, so I guess I should update you on that situation. They are now just friends, as he has returned to BYU and wanted to basically keep his options open. Erin went to visit him last night, so maybe someday he'll come to his senses and realize he won't find anything better than Erin out there. If not, it's his loss.

Now you have all the juicy details on our last 4 weeks.

Catching up

2009-08-09T20:37:00.002-06:00

Well, it's only been almost 4 months since I last posted on here, so I guess it's about time I caught you up on what we've been up to. The first two months since my last entry (May and June) were pretty much taken up, for me, by "The King and I." As I mentioned last time, I was the music director for the production, but for the first time in a while, I wasn't also cast in an on-stage role. It turned into a pretty good production. I was able to recruit the largest orchestra MTI has yet seen (28 musicians), and they sounded really good. I even got a harpist! You can see pictures of how it looked on stage here.

"King and I" finished on June 27th, and the following week I was required to take off from work because they decided to shut everything down for the 4th of July week to save money. Unfortunately, I would have rather taken the week off two weeks later when some of Liz's family was converging on Yellowstone that week -- but I wasn't given that choice. Rather than sit home all week, we were able to exchange our timeshare for a week in beautiful downtown Blanchard, Idaho, (well, there really isn't a downtown to Blanchard, but if there were this condo would be there) which you can see on the map below is in between a bunch of lakes in northern Idaho.

View Larger Map

Unfortunately, the condo's check-in date was on Friday, but because of the play we couldn't leave until Sunday, so we lost out on two days of the week. We went to an early ward on Sunday and then headed north, arriving around 9:30 that evening. Monday we played some racquetball at the resort, and just kind of hung around, but we did take a drive down to Spirit Lake in the evening. It was a very pretty mountain lake, but unfortunately there weren't too many places that you could drive down to the lake because the shoreline is mostly privately owned.

Tuesday we drove all the way around Priest Lake. A good portion of that trip was on mostly deserted dirt roads, and while on those dirt roads we actually saw a bear. We both saw it in a meadow off to the left maybe 100 yards away, but by the time I stopped the car and backed up to where we had seen it, it had disappeared.

Wednesday we drove across the state (which isn't very far up there) to the Montana state line where we rented some bicycles, which we then hauled to the beginning of the Trail of the Hiawatha, which is an old railroad route that has been converted to a biking trail. We rode around 15 miles through tunnels and over trestles through beautiful mountain territory. The thing that made this a great idea was that it was downhill all the way, and when we got to the end of the trail they had a shuttle bus that hauled us and our bikes back up to the beginning of the trail. It was really quite spectacular scenery, and was a very fun trip. They also had interpretive signs posted all along the trail describing various details about the history of the trail and the trains that used to travel over it. Kudos to my intrepid wife who came across information about this trail on the internet.

On the way back from the bike ride we spent some time at Coeur d'Alene Lake, and stopped off in the city of Coeur d'Alene for dinner.

Thursday was our Lake Pend Oreille day. We first went to Farragut State Park on the southern end of the lake, which used to be a US Navy training base. The lake is 1,150 feet deep in places, and they used to train submarine crews there. There was a really nice swimming area there, and Liz went swimming while I drove back to the condo to get the camera that I had forgotten when we left that morning. We did a little more driving around in that area before heading north to Sandpoint, where we had reserved a dinner cruise on the lake. They took us out to an island where some bald eagles are nesting, and we ate dinner while watching the eagles sitting around in the treetops.

Friday morning (the 3rd) we headed back to Boise. We had taken the interstate through Spokane going up, but we took the slower, more direct route down US 95 coming home. It was slower, but it was prettier. You can see pictures of our trip here. Our actual 4th of July was pretty boring. We watched the Boise fireworks on TV and saw a few neighbors lighting some stuff, but that was it.

As I mentioned, some of Liz's family got together a couple of weeks later in Yellowstone N.P. They stayed at cabins at Old Faithful Lodge. Erin and Liz spent the week over there while I slaved away here at work to pay for their adventures. I guess I'll leave it to Liz to fill in the details of that trip, if she ever gets around to it.

Anna finished up her semester at school the same week Liz and Erin were over there on that side of the state, and she returned home the day after they did (Sunday, July 19th I think). She brought with her a young man that she has been dating over there, Eric Anderson. He stayed through Thursday before flying home to his family in Texas. It remains to be seen what will come of all that. Apparently an elder from Anna's mission is also coming to spend a few days here in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, Erin has also been seen spending quite a bit of time with a young man, Joe Morton, whose family actually lives in our ward. They were in the Edinburgh ward but got moved into our ward the last time the boundaries got realigned. His dad was on the high council with me when I was first called, but he was released a couple of years ago. He goes back to school at BYU in a few weeks, so who knows what will come of that.

In between all of that, work has been pretty crazy. They have us trying to meet an absolutely insane schedule on our current project, but in the current economic situation, who can complain? Speaking of the current economic situation, who decided it was a good idea to take some of my money and use it to help some other people buy new cars? I can't afford a new car, why should I help other people buy one?

And with that, I will close this entry. Maybe I'll see if I can get around to posting again before the end of the year.

Spring has Sprung

2009-04-19T18:01:00.002-06:00

It definitely feels like spring today. We had some days that teased us with spring-like weather in the last few weeks, but then it went back to being gray and cooler the next day. Yesterday and today have been really nice.

The big news for the past week is that Anna has been home. She actually got here a week ago Thursday, and then just left a few hours ago to head back to Rexburg. Her friend, Mandy, who is from Virginia, also spent the week with us.

Anna's best friend, (and Mandy's cousin) Carrie, got married a week ago yesterday, so that took up most of our day. We were invited to the sealing ceremony, then the luncheon at Johnny Carino's, and then, of course, we went to the reception that night. Liz helped Carrie plan their honeymoon to DisneyWorld, and she made them up a detailed itinerary as part of their present (she knew they wouldn't have time to do it themselves while they were planning a wedding). Then we also gave them some Disney Dollars to spend while they were there for the rest of their wedding present.

We had our first couple of rehearsals for "King and I" this past week. I am music directing it, so I had to get all of the music entered into MIDI files, which has been occupying most of my free time over the last few weeks. The rehearsals were only the first three days of the week, because they had the final performances for their current production, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" on Thursday-Saturday. Liz, Anna, Mandy, and I went to see it on Thursday night. They did a good job -- lot's of energy and fun music. Tom was being played by a young man who we have been in several productions with, but this was really his first big role, so it was fun to see him do well.

This weekend we had stake conference. It was broadcast from Salt Lake. We had talks from Elder Richard Hinckley, Sis. Barbara Thompson, Bishop McMullen (can't remember his first name), and Elder Todd Christopherson. Our Saturday evening session was also very good. Erin and Anna sang a duet right before the stake president's concluding talk, and they did a great job. In some ways it would be nice if our stake conferences were not always so close to general conference, but they are always good anyway.

That's our exciting news for the week.

A Wicked Weekend

2009-04-05T13:43:00.003-06:00

My present from Erin this last Christmas was that she would pay for my ticket to go and see the musical "Wicked" in Portland. I still had to pay for the travel expenses, but she paid for her and my tickets. We ended up deciding to go last weekend. It took a while to figure out how to make it all work for the whole family without Anna missing too much school, but here's what we ended up doing.

Liz, Erin and I left on Thursday (March 26th) and drove up to Portland. We made a few short stops along the way to see Multnomah and a couple of the other nearby falls. We stayed at a hotel close to the airport, so that we could pick up Anna the next morning. She had a flight from Idaho Falls that left at 6:00 am and arrived in Portland around 10:30. We met up with her without incident, and then headed for the coast. Of course, we were in Oregon, so pretty soon it started raining. We got out to Cannon Beach around lunchtime, and after a little trip through Ecola State park, we eventually found our way to Mo's to get some lunch. There was a pretty big line there, but by agreeing to split up into two groups we got in quickly. Then it turned out there were two tables for two right next to each other, so we were pretty much together anyway. Ah, seafood on the beach.

After lunch we went back into town and hit a couple of kite shops (Erin and Liz bought kites at the second one), then an antique store, and a candy store. Then we found the same place to park that we did last time we were on the coast with Mom and Dad, and walked out on the beach by Haystack Rock. The weather was not nearly as nice as it was last time we were there! It was still drizzling, the wind was blowing, and it was cold! Erin, Anna, and I didn't last long and went back to wait in the warm car, while Liz continued to explore the sandy stretches.

She eventually returned, and we headed north to Seaside where we had a condo type place reserved for the night. It was fairly new, and pretty nice, but the room layout was not well thought out. We had dinner at a pretty good sushi restaurant that night.

Saturday morning we headed back to Portland. We made our way (through the rain again) into downtown Portland and found the Keller Auditorium where we were going to see the matinee performance of "Wicked, the Musical." After having fun negotiating all the one way streets, we found a place to park close by and had lunch at a Quiznos, finishing up just at the right time to head over to the theater. We had pretty good seats about 15 rows back on the main floor in the center section. As we entered the auditorium we were greeted with the sight of a map of Oz where the curtain would normally be, and a big animated dragon over the top of the proscenium.
They definitely know how to gear up the anticipation for the show. And it was a spectacular show.

For those who don't know, "Wicked" is the untold story of the witches of Oz. It turns out that the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North were roommates at sorcery school. I won't spoil the story for you, but it has quite a few twists and turns before you get to the end. For our performance, it turned out the understudy was playing the role of Glinda, but she and the rest of the actors were all wonderful. The really amazing thing, though, with professional productions is what they can do with the sets and lighting. We do a pretty good job on our sets at MTI, but when you have the amount of money they have on Broadway and with these touring productions, and professional set builders, they can pull off some pretty jaw-dropping stuff.

After the show we drove around town a bit and found Powell's Bookstore. A friend of Erin's told her about this place, and it is huge! Pretty much a whole city block with multiple levels and multiple rooms all filled with books. We spent a little over an hour there -- I found a book that was published a few years back that attempts to rank the best baseball players throughout history from 1 to 75 or so. So far I've made it through number 7, and it's pretty interesting.

Another place we heard about from a couple of people was Voodoo Doughnuts, so next we set out to try and find that. It wasn't too far from the bookstore, but more fun with the one way streets, and the fact that this place is pretty small, caused us to take a while to find it. When we did, there was no place to park. After we drove around in circles for a while we dropped Erin and Liz off and Anna and I continued to circle and picked them up when they got out. They have some pretty crazy flavors there.

We finally headed to our hotel for the evening, which wasn't too far away. We ordered in pizza, and Liz and Erin enjoyed the pool before we turned in for the night. Sunday morning we found a church not too far away, and attended Sacrament meeting before heading back to change and check-out of the hotel and head back home. We needed to get back to Boise for Anna to catch a 9:45 flight from here to Idaho Falls. The weather was pretty good until we got close to LeGrande, and then we hit some pretty good snow for a stretch, but it never really stuck to the roads so it wasn't too bad. We made it back in plenty of time, especially since her flight got delayed. She eventually made it back to a snow storm in Idaho Falls around 11:30. Her friend Carrie picked her up and they slowly made their way back up to Rexburg.

That was our Wicked weekend. If you get a chance to go see this show, do it!

Escorting David Archuleta

2009-04-05T13:03:00.002-06:00

I was sitting on the stand before Edinburgh Ward's sacrament meeting on Sunday the 22nd of March, when I heard the two counselors in the bishopric discussing an announcement that was to be made at the end of the meeting. I glanced over and saw that they were going to announce that David Archuleta was presenting a fireside for the youth of our stake that very evening. I knew he had performed a concert in town the night before, but I knew nothing about the fireside. Later I found out that no one knew about the fireside until about 9:00 Saturday night when David's father made contact with Pres. Cambron, the first counselor in our stake presidency, to see if we would be interested in hosting the fireside.

The announcement was very specific about who was invited to the fireside: the youth and youth leaders of our stake, and each youth was allowed to invite one youth not of our faith to attend with them. This was to keep the stake center from getting overwhelmed with people. So, I wasn't sure if I was even going to attend until I got a call later that morning that they wanted the high council to serve as ushers for the fireside.

In the afternoon, after our ward's meeting block, I was about to leave after helping set up chairs for the fireside when I saw Pres. Cambron in the foyer. He was looking for the assistant executive secretary, who had already left for home. I asked if I could help with anything, and he then asked me to give David's dad a call to finalize the arrangements for the evening. That's how I ended up sort of being his escort for the evening. I ended up not getting to go home for dinner until after everything was done later that night.

We had announced that the doors would open for the 7:00 fireside at 6:30 so that we wouldn't have people camping out in the chapel as soon as our ward finished at 4:00. We cleared the building and locked the doors at about 5:30. Right about then was when people started showing up and lining up at the doors. We ended up letting people in a few minutes early around 6:25. David, his pianist, and his dad showed up with some friends from the area at around 6:40. We had him come in and meet with the stake president to finalize what was going to happen at the actual fireside. Then he and his pianist went to the Relief Society room to work out what he was going to sing. Nothing like preparing ahead!

Shortly after 7:00 David entered the chapel for the fireside. After an opening hymn and prayer the time was turned over to him. He started out by singing "I am a Child of God," and then he started answering some of the questions we had had the youth write down on little slips of paper. He only ended up answering a couple of them. He said up front that he didn't feel that he was very good at public speaking, and that was definitely true. In spite of that, there was a great spirit as he shared his experiences on American Idol and shared how his testimony had helped him get through it all. He ended up by singing "Be Still My Soul," which he said was one of his favorite hymn, and then an a cappella rendition of "How Great Thou Art."

Afterward, we brought David down to the Relief Society room where David had graciously agreed to shake hands and greet those who wanted to meet him (which I think was pretty much everyone there). In order to help the traffic flow, we had them line up down the hall, and after they shook hands with David we had them go out the back door to the outside. I ended up getting the duty to man the back door and keep people moving outside (where it was quite nippy that night). It was pretty funny to stand there and watch the faces of many of the young women after they had just had the chance to shake hands (or, for those brave enough, hug) DAVID ARCHULETA! Some of them looked like they might faint, and some were practically in tears.

All in all the youth behaved very well, and David even commented afterward that he felt a special spirit being with the youth of our stake. We ended up only having the cultural hall filled about half way back, so the concerns of getting flooded with people didn't come about, which was a testament to the obedience (for the most part) of our youth who had been asked to NOT text all their friends or put anything on Facebook about it.

David appears to be just what he seems on TV, a humble, nice, clean young man with a very talented singing voice. I think it was a great opportunity for our youth to attend this fireside. Oh, and Pres. Cambron gave me permission to invite Liz and Erin to come sit with me (they're the real American Idol fans of the family), and they enjoyed it too.

What is the meaning?

2009-03-19T20:10:00.002-06:00

I don't remember why, but the subject of an essay I wrote back in high school came up recently. Erin told me I needed to post it to our blog, so here goes.

First, some background. We came into the first day of Mrs. Goforth's junior AP English class and sat down. The first words out of her mouth, after the bell rang, were "Take out a piece of paper and a pen." These words greatly offended the sense of justice of the entire class -- "We're not supposed to have to do real work on the first day of class, are we?" Once the rustling of papers and pens being retrieved settled down, Mrs. Goforth began talking. And kept on talking. She talked a little bit about current events, she talked about the school, and seemingly whatever other random thing popped into her mind.

Then, about halfway through the class period, she said, "Okay, start writing."

As I'm sure she expected, this command was met with blank stares.

She said, "What are you waiting for?"

Someone hestitantly asked, "What are we supposed to write about?"

"Would you like some suggested topics?" she asked back.

I think I was the one who said, "Sure, if we don't have to choose one of them," as I was starting to suspect that her topics might not be the easiest ones to write about.

She then began to write some topics on the blackboard, most of which didn't really make any sense. When she wrote the words, "What is the meaning" I thought maybe she was finally starting a concrete topic, but then she simply added a question mark after those four words, and moved on to the next suggested topic.

After a few minutes of pondering my options, I decided to write my essay on the topic: "Who or What is the Meaning?" Here are the results.

Who or What is the Meaning

The Meaning is the meanest ing ever known to man or ing. An ing, in case you didn't know, is a thing who left his th behind him somewhere. The Meaning likes to eat little ings, and things, and he also sings and wears rings, and unless he drinks the right kind of juice, he pings. The Meaning used to be a nice little ing; but when he started thinking about life, he decided there should be some Meaning to life, so he decided it was up to him to provide this service to the world.

Everyone should avoid the Meaning; for if you ever found out the Meaning, you would be in a mess. If you are a thing, I advise you to hold onto your th, because if the Meaning ever found out about a thing turning into an ing, he would grab an extra th plus an hy and turn the ing into a thinghy, which is related to a dinghy, which is usually all wet.

When the Meaning was found in the past, it was stuck in a dictionary, from which it quickly escaped. In the future, if the Meaning is ever found again, it should be reported to Mrs. Goforth, who would best know how to confuse it, and a confused Meaning is as good as no Meaning at all.

Oh, by the way, I'm sure you're wondering: I got an "A" on the paper.

We're still alive

2009-03-15T21:43:00.003-06:00

It's been a while, so I guess I should post so that you will know that we're still alive. Seussical has now been over for a couple of weeks. I think it turned out pretty good, and we had pretty full houses for all of the performances. It's always more fun to perform for full houses! You can see a few pictures of us on the MTI website at http://www.mtionline.org/showprod.php?season=2009&prod=sl.

Those of you in Utah know that we made a trip down there last weekend. The doctor's office Erin works at was closed a week ago Thursday for some doctor's meetings, so she decided to take Friday off as well. Her old BYU ward was also having a reunion last Saturday, to give her more incentive to want to go that weekend. Since we hadn't been down to visit for a while I decided to take those two days off as well and we all made the trek to good old Utah Valley. Liz's sister Kathy also drove down from Logan with her daughter, and we all met up at Edwin's house on Thursday afternoon to celebrate Edwin's birthday. You may ask, what did we do to celebrate. Well, you would only ask if you don't know Edwin. We played games, of course. We stayed the night with Mom and Dad, and then returned Friday morning for more games before Kathy had to head back to Logan. We got to play our new game "Settlers of Catan" (which we bought with the gift certificate we got from Ben's family for Christmas) for the first time. It was pretty fun, which I would say even if I hadn't won.

Friday evening we met up with Tim and went to a Jazz game for Izak's birthday. Nate, Jeremy, Juan, Giovanni, and Christian also went with us. It was a late game (8:30 start) because it was on ESPN. The Jazz started out terrible, and were down by 21 at one point in the first half, but they ended up winning by quite a bit in the end. It was fun!

Saturday we went to Lane and Marcia's house in the afternoon to catch up with them, and also got to play one hand of Ming. Later in the afternoon all the brothers and sisters and their clans came over to Mom and Dad's to visit and to watch BYU barely beat Air Force in basketball.

Sunday morning we went to Amy's sacrament meeting, since it was the earliest, and since she was speaking, and then had dinner with Mom and Dad before we headed back to Boise.

When I got back to work on Monday morning, I found out that on the previous Thursday they had laid off a bunch of people, and had announced that, in order to keep from laying of more people, those of us who were left (of which thankfully I was one of) were going to get a 10% pay cut. Pretty painful, but better than a 100% pay cut for sure.

Today I had a meeting at 6:30 am which was some welfare training using a DVD from Salt Lake that the stake was asked to hold. Then I had YM/YW committee meeting at 8:00, which I had to leave early to make it to the River Heights Ward sacrament meeting at 9:00, where I was speaking. It turned out that they had a baby blessing today, done by a father who had lots of blessings to give his son. Then the other high councilor who was my speaking companion gave a full 15 minute talk, followed by a 5 minute musical number. When I got up to speak it was exactly 10:00 -- 5 minutes before the time I should have been concluding. I cheated and spoke for 7 or 8 minutes, but still ended up leaving out about 60% of what I had prepared. Oh well. Then I had to go to priesthood meeting in Edinburgh ward to sustain a new assistant in their high priests group, then stay afterwards to set him apart. By the time I finished there wasn't time to go home before our ward's sacrament meeting. We had ward conference today, so we got to hear from the counselors in the stake presidency in all of the meetings. The stake president was out of town so we didn't get to hear from him, unfortunately. It was all very good. Our stake goal this year is to learn to feel, recognize, and follow the promptings of the spirit, so that was the theme of all the meetings.

The last couple of days I have had plugged up sinuses, so I guess I should try to get some sleep and see if I can get well.

A person's a person, no matter how small

2009-01-25T20:54:00.003-07:00

That's become my motto pretty much every night when I go out to practice and take on the role of Horton. We're now a couple of weeks into practices, and things are coming along pretty well. All the main roles are double cast, so I'm only Horton half the time. The rest of the time I'm just a creature in the Jungle of Nool. We've pretty much blocked out the whole show now, although we still have some dance numbers to learn. This week we will start going through the whole show once per night, so that will be fun to see it all coming together. We're taking reservations for anyone who wants to come up and see the show. Don't forget, I'll cook you an omelet too.

Life goes on otherwise. I'm still employed so far, and we're plenty busy, although they just announced that orders are down quite a bit. The company has a pretty good chunk of cash in the bank, so hopefully they will decide they can keep us all gainfully employed through the downturn.

Last night we had a Chinese New Year's party, at Erin's instigation. We invited Delmar Gray, who I served as counselor to in the bishopric of our old ward, and who is also a Taiwan return missionary and his family, and also Pres. Cambron, counselor in our stake presidency and who is another Taiwan return missionary, and his family. Then Erin invited a whole bunch of young single adults from her ward. The Cambrons had to cancel at the last minute, but we had a house full anyway. I was out building sets all afternoon, so I wasn't much help, but Erin and Liz worked hard and made lots of great food and put up some fun Chinese decorations. It was a lot of fun. We also set up the ping pong table in the garage and I schooled all the young adults.

We've also managed to squeeze in watching a few movies over the last month or so, so I thought I'd give a quick movie review. We watched "Wall-E" over Christmas vacation, and we all enjoyed that one. We also saw Get Smart a little while back. That was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, so I liked that one a lot, too. Then there was the movie about Emma Smith. It was fun to see that after having been in Nauvoo this past summer. They did a really good job on it. We also thought "Prince Caspian" was really well done, and we're disappointed that they've decided not to make the rest of the series. A couple of weeks ago we saw "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium." It was pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun. Then, this last Friday we watched "Horton Hears a Who." I had to watch that as research for my role in the play ;-). It was a good flick, and some of the lines were exactly the same as ones I have to say in the play, so that was fun. There's a pretty good list if you're looking for something to watch. Of course, we're always kind of behind on this stuff, so you've probably all watched all of these before.

Omelets and other stuff

2009-01-11T20:25:00.005-07:00

How many of you know that I am an omelet maker? Usually I make pretty standard omelets with ham, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, and cheese (oh, and eggs). Well, a couple of times over the last month or so I have been inspired by some leftovers to come up with new creations, so I thought I would share the yummy results.

First a month or two ago Liz made some fajitas, and we had some leftover meat and sauteed onions and peppers. A few mornings later, I decided to make a fajita omelet. I just heated up the leftovers in a pan with some oil, then added the eggs. After the eggs were mostly cooked, I added some diced tomatoes, salsa, and grated Mexican (cheddar and jack) cheese. Voila! A fajita omelet. It was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.

Then, just this morning I came up with another one. Liz had made some artichoke-spinach dip for a party we had the day after New Years (Erin found the recipe), and we had some of that left in the fridge. I sauteed some mushrooms, then added and cooked the eggs. I heated up the dip in the microwave and spread it on the cooked egg. I also added some diced tomatoes and grated Swiss cheese. This also turned out to be a pretty tasty concoction.

Okay, now I guess I should update you on our lives over the last few weeks. I had to take two weeks off from work over the holidays. We had planned to try and come down to Utah somewhere during that time, but the weather and Anna combined to foil that plan. Anna had a friend from her time working at Jacob Lake come to visit from the Saturday after Christmas until when she went back to school, so that meant she didn't want to travel down to Utah that week. Erin had to work Mon.-Wed. of both weeks, so that also limited our options for driving down. We were a little hesitant to leave and miss out on spending more time with Anna, and then when we kept having storms come through and dump snow all over, we decided to just stay home.

Anna had planned to head back to Rexburg on Monday 5th, but when I checked the weather last Sunday morning I encouraged her to leave that afternoon, which turned out to be a good choice. We got quite a bit of snow on Monday and Tuesday, and it would have been a nasty drive.

We really didn't do much over the holidays. We did have some friends over the day after New Years to play some games. Also, as Erin reported in her blog, we had two families from the cast of "Christmas Carol" who are Armenian come over on the Monday before Christmas. We had an Armenian dinner, and then looked at Anna's pictures from Armenia. Both of the fathers had a grandfather who came to America from Armenia in the early 1900's. Neither of them really knew too much what it was really like over there, so they were excited to see the pictures and ask Anna questions. They seemed to really enjoy their time here, and we enjoyed having them over.

Other than that we pretty much just hung out at home. This week it was back to normal life, which for me also meant the start of practices for another play. This one is "Seussical, the Musical." It's a composite of a bunch of Dr. Seuss stories with some really fun music. As I mentioned in the last post, I'm going to be playing Horton the Elephant, which means I have to hear a Who and hatch an egg. The performances are going to be the last two weekends in February, so you should all make plans to come up and visit us and see the show. I'll even cook you an omelet for breakfast!

A Christmas Carol

2008-12-20T08:50:00.006-07:00

So, I'm sure you've all been wondering where we've been. Well, most of you probably already know, but we've been busy participating in a production of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" that has pretty much consumed any "spare" time for the last almost two months. I was the music director for the show, and I also played the role of Jacob Marley's ghost (as well as a generic Londoner). Liz played Mrs. Mopps, Scrooge's housekeeper - a role that is not in the book, but was created for this version of the story. She also took on a general chorus role for parts of the play.

The version we did is a version for which the music was written by Alan Menken, of Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Little Shop of Horrors fame. It has been performed on Broadway every Christmas for the past 14 or so years, and was also made into a TV movie in 2004 with Kelsey Grammar taking on the role of Scrooge. It has a few aspects that are different from other versions of the story, but basically follows the original plot as written by Dickens, with many direct quotes from the book. The music is really fun and upbeat, and basically goes non-stop from the beginning to the end of the play.

We started rehearsals back in late October, and we had 10 performances between Dec. 6th and Dec. 13th. Here are some pictures of Liz and I in the show:

This is us in the opening scene as carolers.

Here I am as Marley trying to scare the heck out of Scrooge. This was a really fun scene with a song called "Link by Link." I even got to levitate!

Here we are dancing at "Mr. Fezziwig's Annual Christmas Ball."

Here's Liz as Mrs. Mopps selling Scrooge's shirt to the rags and bones man.

My biggest challenge for this show was make-up. Jean (the director) wanted me to sing with the carolers in the opening scene. Then I had about 5 minutes to change costumes and get my ghost make-up on for the "Link by Link" scene. Then I had just a few minutes to wipe that make-up off, put on normal stage make-up, and change costumes for the Fezziwig scene. Then it was back into the Marley costume and make-up for a brief appearance replacing my still alive self after he had a heart attack. Then it was back into normal make-up and costume to be a Londoner for the rest of the show. Whew!

Anyway, after a couple of very shaky dress rehearsals, the show turned out really well and the audiences seemed to enjoy it very much. At the end of the show after we took our bows the whole cast would go out and surround the audience and sing a last chorus of "God Bless Us Everyone," and that really had a profound effect on everyone who came. By the way, I sold 100 tickets to this show -- even more than I sold for Fiddler.

Anyway, that's why you haven't heard from us. In between all the rehearsals, we also had auditions for next season. Liz has decided to take next year off, but I will be playing Horton the Elephant in "Seussical, the Musical" in February, and Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast in October. In between, I will be music directing "The King and I" in June.

Anna's birthday (very late)

2008-12-20T07:43:00.006-07:00

Okay, this one is embarrassingly late, but again, better late than never. 23 years, one month, and one day ago, our 2nd daughter, Anna, joined our family. Life has never been the same! Although if you compare pictures of them at similar ages up through about 2 or 3 years old, Erin and Anna look strikingly similar, they couldn't be much more different personality-wise. Anna was always a happy baby, and was fun to be around. Then, she started to grow up.

While in the ensuing years she was not always fun to be around, she has always made life interesting. And even when she was being a bit "difficult" at home, we would often get reports from other adults about how much they enjoyed being around her. Thankfully, she eventually decided that she liked her family, and is back to being fun for us at home as well.

She is always looking for new adventures, new experiences, and unique opportunities. She has always been a very loyal friend, and often befriends and tries to help out those not as fortunate as she is. In many ways, she has been one to avoid anything that she perceived as being "hard," but has learned through several experiences, notably a youth pioneer handcart trek, and more recently her mission to Armenia, that she can do hard things, and that they are often actually worth doing. School is one thing that has not always been easy for her, but she has, with a little encouragement and prompting, worked through the challenges and gotten good grades.

She has always been very creative, especially in her writing, as everyone who read her mission e-mails knows. She, like her sister, is a talented singer, even though she hasn't always been eager to share this talent. We are glad that lately she has been more willing to develop and share this talent. We gave her a ukulele for her birthday (at her request), and she has attacked learning to play it with great enthusiasm.

We are so glad that Anna is a part of our family, and look forward to continuing to "hang on for the ride" as we experience life with her.

Happy very late Birthday, Anna!

Flying

2008-11-01T21:40:00.002-06:00

For my birthday (way back in August), Erin and Anna gave me a coupon to go on a "discovery flight" with a local company that teaches flying lessons. I finally got around to going last Saturday. They take you up in a little plane and let you do a little bit of flying on your own. The flight went very quickly -- basically we flew from the airport to our house, circled around a few times, and went back to the airport. The weather was great, and it was fun while it lasted. Here's a picture of me at the controls.

And here's a picture of our house from the air:

Halloween pics

2008-11-01T21:20:00.002-06:00

I don't want to get left out on the Halloween pictures.

At work we have traditionally opened up the office the afternoon of Halloween for employees' kids to come around and trick or treat at all the cubicles. This year, due to "security" reasons they decided we couldn't do that. Someone decided we should do a trunk or treat in the parking lot instead. For some reason, they decided to do it the day before Halloween. They decided they would give a prize for the best dressed trunk. Well, as any of you who read Erin's blog know, she and Liz decided to decorate my trunk -- and me as well. I ended up winning the prize, no thanks to any effort on my part. The prize was a Simpson's edition of the Sorry board game. Since I've never watched the Simpsons, that wasn't so exciting, but winning was nice anyway. Here's the winning trunk, in case you missed it on Erin's blog.

I have a co-worker who comes up with the wildest costumes every year. Last year he was George Jetson, complete with flying saucer. In past years he was Jack Sparrow, one of the Planet of the Apes apes, and Count Dooku from Star Wars. This year he went with a classic.

In this picture, he is standing next to our vice president, who is around 6'10" tall.

He didn't make it to work until around 1:00. It took him that long to put all the makeup on. Pretty amazing, eh?

Sun Valley Jazz Festival

2008-10-19T15:45:00.005-06:00

After not posting for a while, I guess I'm trying to make up for lost time.

Last Friday Erin, Liz, and I made the drive over to Sun Valley to take part in the Sun Valley Jazz Festival. Why did we decide, after living here for almost 20 years, to go this year? Well, that's a somewhat long story. But that's what you're here for, right? To read a long story? Okay, it's really not that long, so here goes.

Back in February I signed up with Facebook, partly because many of the cast members of Brigadoon said they wanted to keep in touch that way, and partly just to see what goes on there since my daughters have accounts there. A month or so after I signed up I got a friend request from Ed Wise. "Holy cow, " said I (I'm sure those were my exact words). Most of my family probably remembers the Wise family. We knew them back in Clear Lake, TX. Ed was the first one in his family to join the church. I think I was a sophomore or junior in high school at the time when we met, and he was a couple of years older so he had already graduated from high school. He was also already a very accomplished bass player, and he was instrumental (hmmm, appropriate word here) in starting a dance band to play at our stake dances. I got to be a part of that band playing trombone as well as singing, so we became friends. Ed left on his mission in April of 1976, a few months before I graduated from high school. By the time he got back from his mission, I was at BYU and the family had moved to Lancaster, so I hadn't seen him since then.

It turns out Ed married a woman from Philadelphia a few years ago and moved up there from New Orleans right after Katrina hit. After he got to Philadelphia he hooked up with a group called "The Midiri Brothers Sextet," and it just so happens that the Midiri Brothers have been coming to the Sun Valley Jazz Festival for several years. So when Ed found me on Facebook, and found out I live in Idaho, he sent me a message and said, "Hey, I'm going to be in Sun Valley in October. If you get a chance come on out to the Festival and we can hang out." Well, we weren't sure we were going to make it until the day before, but I decided to take the day off Friday and go.

It turned out to be a beautiful day weather wise. We got there about 11:00 and found the registration desk at the Sun Valley Lodge and then found out that the place the Midori Brothers were playing at 12:30 was across town (which is not that far) so we headed over there. We got there in time to hear a few songs from the group before them, which was a big band from the Netherlands. They were very good, and it was interesting that they spoke with fairly heavy accents, but their singing was pretty accent-free. Ed's group is headed up by twin brothers, Phil and Joe Midori (hence the name of the group). One of them plays clarinet and saxophone, and the other plays vibraphone, and some trombone. The rest of the group consists of a pianist, guitarist, a drummer, and Ed on bass. They were excellent. They play a lot of Bennie Goodman and Artie Shaw music.

Afterwards we got to talk to Ed finally. We decided to go ahead and head to the next venue his group was playing at and listen to the group before them, and then listen to their next set. Ed loaded his bass up in the group's van, and then rode the shuttle bus with us to the venue, which was back on the other side of town. In this case they were playing for a little dance competition, so that was fun to watch. After that we took the bus back to the original venue and listened to two more groups while visiting with Ed. The first group was Cornet Chop Suey from St. Louis, and the second was Louis Ford and his New Orleans Flairs. They were both fun to listen to as well.

With the almost three hours drive each way, it was a long day, but it was worth it. Great weather, great music, and chance to visit with a friend I hadn't seen for 32 years!

Erin's birthday

2008-10-19T14:29:00.003-06:00

I should have done this yesterday, but better late than never!

26 years ago from last night at around 11:45 pm, our 1st daughter, Erin, joined our family. The first few months with her were a little challenging -- I was going to school and working full-time, and she, due to colic or some other discomfort, felt compelled to start crying at 10:00 pm and continue until 1, or 2 in the morning. That made staying awake at work and in class a little challenging. Once we got past those first few months, though, she has been a joy to be around ever since.

She has always been a hard worker and a self-starter -- we never had to remind her to do her homework and she always got top grades in school. She has always been obedient and faithful in keeping the commandments. We never have had to worry about her choosing the right in her life. She always keeps herself busy with worthwhile projects, and is always learning and trying new things. She is always cheerful, and keeps up a positive attitude. I am absolutely positive that she will make a great wife and mother (as soon as some young man out there comes to his senses and recognizes her potential and marries her).

Now I know that probably everyone out there that reads this blog is a family member who already knows all these things about Erin, but I wanted to make sure everyone knows how I feel about her.

Yesterday probably won't go down as one of Erin's favorite birthdays of all time. Having, just this week, been laid off from her job that she had worked hard and faithfully at for 9 months or so, and over the past year dealing with some health challenges, an ornery health insurance company that doesn't want to pay for things that they should, also dealing with the apparent lack of young men who have any of the above mentioned sense that would cause them to have a desire to marry such a desirable young woman, and trying to figure out what her path to the future looks like have made it a challenging year. But, knowing Erin, I'm sure she will overcome all of these challenges with faith, cheerfulness, and a great attitude.

I know that there are great things in store for Erin, because I know that God rewards those who are faithful in serving Him and trying to do what's right. And Erin is that.

Happy Birthday, Erin (a day late)!

Pool pics

2008-10-18T13:13:00.003-06:00

Well, it's been a while since I posted anything -- life has been crazy. I thought I would post a before and after picture of our pool reconstruction.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

The before picture was a panoramic picture, where as the after is just a single shot, so it's a little hard to compare. Also the vegetation around the pool is definitely more mature than it was in the before picture. It is quite different now, and it turned out pretty nice, even if it took a lot longer than we hoped for it to get finished. We first were able to swim in it on Labor Day weekend, so we pretty much lost the whole summer. Thanks to a mild September we did get to swim a few more times in it, and we haven't closed it down yet so we may yet get a couple of more chances.

Well, what do you think? Can you tell much difference from these pictures?

The car curse

2008-09-13T08:40:00.003-06:00

Our car curse has struck again. Those who were reading our e-mails before we went to the blogs know that we bought a 1999 Honda Civic for Anna to use when she got back from her mission. Although it had 150,000 miles on it, it seemed to be in great shape and everyone told us that a Honda would easily go 250,000-300,000 miles. Well, not our Honda.

Anna left a week ago Thursday and drove to Rexburg to resume working on her degree at BYU-I. She made it there without any problems. A week ago today she left Rexburg to drive to Logan to attend a friend's wedding reception. Somewhere around noon she called me to inform me that her car had "died" about 10 miles north of Malad City, Idaho. One of her old roomates was from Malad, so she called her family and they came and rescued her. She got the car towed to into Malad, but the guy there told us that he wouldn't have time to look at the car until Monday.

An elder from Anna's mission who is trying to woo her was driving up from Salt Lake to spend the day with her in Logan, so he drove on up to Malad and brought Anna down to Logan so that she could still go to the reception. On Sunday morning he drove her part of the way back to Rexburg and another friend drove down to meet them and take her the rest of the way back.

Monday afternoon I called the guy in Malad. He hadn't really looked at the car yet, but he was convinced just from listening to it that it needed a new engine. He said there wasn't any oil in the engine, but the strange thing was there was no sign that it had leaked out anywhere. I talked to our mechanic here, and he wasn't convinced we should write it off just yet. He suggested a couple of things to try, but when I called the mechanic in Malad he insisted I would just be wasting time to try anything. Our mechanic then called the guy in Malad directly, after which our mechanic was somewhat convinced it was a lost cause, but still wasn't sure the guy really knew what he was doing. We decided we wanted a second opinion. We really would have liked to have gotten the car back to Boise so our mechanic could look at it, but we couldn't figure out a good way to make that happen.

Liz has a friend who lives in Pocatello, so she called her to get a recommendation for a mechanic there, and we had it towed to his shop. Thursday morning we got the word from him that the engine was indeed shot. This guy had taken the time to do some diagnosis, and determined that the 4th cylinder's rod bearings had failed, causing the rods to get mangled and doing damage to the crankshaft. I discussed what I was told with our mechanic here, and he felt like this was probably an accurate assessment of the problem. The guy in Pocatello had located an engine imported from Japan that only has 40,000 miles on it (evidently there are laws in Japan that make it very expensive to continue driving cars with more than around 40,000 miles on them, so companies have sprung into existance to take the engines out of these cars and ship them over here to sell to us less picky Americans), so that's what we are going to have put into it.

Hopefully the engine will reach Pocatello on Monday, they'll take a couple of days to get it installed, and by the middle of next week Anna will have to find a way to get back down to Pocatello to pick it up. In the meantime, it's footpower for Anna.

More medal pictures

2008-09-13T08:31:00.002-06:00

This is old news, but since I posted pictures of our encounter with an Olympic gold medal, I thought I should post a picture of my very own silver medal. Back in July Marvell held a "World-wide Ping Pong Tournament." In spite of the title, it was really just a bunch of tournaments held separately on each site. I managed to come in second on the Boise site.

Here's a picture of me with my medal, along with Thang, who beat me for the gold medal.

And here are a couple of pictures of me in action during the gold medal game.

As you can see in the background of the next picture, Anna and Liz came to cheer me on.

Haunted Pageant?

2008-09-02T20:09:00.004-06:00

So, we got back from our trip to Nauvoo, and I uploaded the pictures from my camera to iPhoto on my iMac. I had snapped a couple of shots at the very end of the pageant when the whole cast is on stage and they light up the temple in the background. I hadn't expected to get much of a picture because I didn't have a tripod and the lighting conditions were, of course, difficult. When I looked at the second of the two shots, I was surprised to see this:

Apparently, one of the former residents of Nauvoo decided to do a swan dive past the temple, right? We hadn't seen anything when we were there in person, so apparently the ghost was only visible to CCD sensors, eh?

I tried to figure out if it was a reflection of some kind, but until a co-worker who, as part of his job, does a lot of playing around with images did some tweaking in Photoshop, I couldn't come up with an explanation for the ghostly apparition.

It turns out that it is indeed a reflection, but because the cast in the photo is so washed out, the one person who is right in front with the brightest light on him is virtually invisible in the original photo. After darkening up the highlights in Photoshop, while he is still very washed out, you can see that he has his arms outstretched, and his shape matches the shape of the "ghost," flipped over. As further confirmation, by lightening up the shadows in the picture you can see that the rest of the cast is actually also reflected next to the "ghost" that was visible in the original picture.

The results of darkening the highlights and lightening the shadows is shown below:

So there you have it. Mystery solved!

A Trip to Remember, part II

2008-08-20T21:02:00.007-06:00

As promised, here comes the second part of the trip report. We left off at the end of the day Sunday.

Monday morning it was time to check out of our bed and breakfast and leave Nauvoo. We headed south and then across the Mississippi at Hannibal back into Missouri. You may (or may not) remember that I mentioned in the first half of the report that there was one more birthday surprise coming up. Well to explain that, we have to back up a few weeks to when we were planning our trip. I was figuring out the route we would be taking across Missouri, and noticed that we would be going right past the town of Marceline, MO. Being the Disney fan that I am, I remembered that that was the town where Walt Disney spent some of his growing up years, and that he used as his model for Main Street when he decided to build Disneyland. I also seemed to remember that there was some sort of Disney museum there, so I went to Google, and, sure enough, found the Walt Disney Hometown Museum website. It looked like it would be a pretty fun place to visit, until I went to the page that listed their hours: Closed on Mondays! Arghhh! There was no way to change our plans to be there on a different day, so I had resigned myself to just driving through the town and seeing "Main Street," and the museum from outside. Now, back to a week ago Monday. A few hours before we got to Marceline I was getting tired, so Liz took over driving. As we drove into Marceline, we followed the signs to the museum, which is housed in the former train depot of the town. As we drove up outside the wrought iron gate, I said, "Hey, it looks like the door is open!" To which Liz replied, "Surprise, Happy Birthday!" She had called the museum and arranged for them to open just for us!

The museum is run entirely by volunteers, and the lady who came to meet us was really nice. It turns out she had hosted Walt Disney in her home when he came back to Marceline to help dedicate their park and pool. It was a pretty funny story. She said she and her husband had just moved to Marceline shortly after they married, and they had bought the newest house in town, but didn't have any money left to buy any nice furniture. About that time the city was planning a ceremony to dedicate the new park and pool and decided to invite Walt for the heck of it. They were surprised when he accepted the invitation. But they were worried that their hotel was too run down, so they didn't know where to have Walt stay. They came to our hostess and said, "You have the nicest house in town, we need to have Walt stay with you." She pointed out that she didn't have any nice furniture, to which they replied, "Don't worry, we'll move all your furniture out and we'll all move in our nicest stuff for the few days he will be here." So that's what they did. And our hostess and her husband remained good friends with Walt until he died. She told us he was a really nice, down to earth man. Anyway, the museum had a nice collection of stuff, including a bunch of letters that were donated by Walt's sister, Ruth. It was really fun, and a great birthday surprise.

From the museum we drove down main street to the park, and saw where at one point Walt had moved an early version of the Autopia track and cars from Disneyland to their park. Then we drove back to Walt's boyhood home, and saw his "tree of dreams" that he used to sit under and dream. They have also reconstructed a barn that was behind the house that he used to play in. Disney fans who have visited have written messages to Walt on the walls and beams inside the barn, so we added ours. The funnest one was a drawing of Jason Fox wearing Mickey ears that was done by Bill Amend, the artist who draws the Foxtrot comic strip.

We finally got back on the road heading west with our next stop being Jamesport, which is the largest Amish community in Missouri. The ladies had to do some shopping there, but thankfully didn't take too long. From there we headed northwest to Adam ondi Ahman. The church has markers there at either end of a gravel road that curves around to two different viewpoints of the valley, which is very beautiful. It's amazing to think that there was once a whole community here, but now it's just open farmland. It's also mind boggling to think what has happened there, and what will happen there in the future. Liz had printed out some quotes from Bruce McConkie's "Millennial Messiah" about those events to read while we sat there.

From there it was south to Far West. Another place where once 1500 cabins and homes stood, and now there is pretty much nothing. The church has enclosed the 4 temple cornerstones there in a nice wrought iron fence and has a nice stone monument with several quotes from the D&C on it. There's a Community of Christ church across the road from the temple site and a farmhouse here and there, but that's about it now. We had read that they had found the original cabin of Charles Rich in the area, and we succeeded in finding it. It turned out that the cabin and land around it is know owned by an older lady who we met at the site. She told us the story of how she and her husband had come across it a year or two ago and decided they wanted to buy the land and try to restore the cabin. After a series of events they did succeed in purchasing the property, but then her husband passed away some months ago, and now she is living in an RV there working on getting a home built and trying to get the cabin restored. She's out there in the middle of nowhere all by herself! She has a lot more faith than I do.

The sun was going down by now, so we headed on south to the outskirts of Kansas City where we had reservations to stay at the Worlds of Fun Village. Worlds of Fun is an amusement park that is conveniently located right between Liberty and Independence, and they have a little RV park with some cottages and cabins. We stayed in one of the cottages Monday and Tuesday nights. We hadn't had any TV in Nauvoo, so that night was the first time we got to see any of the Olympics. The cottage had a front room with a mini kitchen and a futon, a bathroom and a bedroom with a double bed and a bunk bed, so we were able to spread out a bit again.

Tuesday morning we slept in a little and then headed out for the Liberty Jail visitors center. The church has done a really nice job there, and we were given a tour, along with one other family, by a nice sister missionary who treated us to a verse of a hymn at the end of the presentation. After that I wanted to head out to Richmond to see some of the historic sites out there, but the rest of the family was more interested in going back and enjoying the swimming pool at the village, so I dropped them off back there and headed out on my own. I was able to see the statue of Alexander Doniphan, who helped the Saints in many ways when they were being driven around the state of Missouri. I also found both Richmond cemeteries. The first one is an older small one that the church actually maintains, and which is the final resting spot of Oliver Cowdery. The church has placed a monument to the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon where they believe he is buried. Most of the tombstones there were illegible, but there were a few Whitmers' whose names were visible. In the larger cemetery I found David Whitmer's tombstone.

On the way back to Kansas City I stopped in Excelsior Springs, which is supposed to be close to the site where Zion's Camp were saved by a big storm, to get some lunch at a little barbecue place that our guide book mentioned. It was very good, but not what I would call exceptional. I met back up with the family at the cottage, and then we headed over to the amusement park to take advantage of their afternoon special price.

Worlds of Fun is owned by the same company that owns Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio, which is known for having the most big roller coasters of any park. Worlds of Fun isn't in that league, but it had a few fun coasters. The first coaster we rode was not so fun. It was their only wooden coaster, the Timber Wolf, and it was one of the bounciest things we've ever been on. If you like driving on washboardy roads at 60 mph, you would like this roller coaster. Not so much fun. The second coaster we hit was their newest one, which is an inverted coaster called the Patriot. We enjoyed that one a lot, and went back to ride it a second time later on. Right next door was the Spinning Dragons coaster, which is like a tilt-a-whirl combined with a wild mouse coaster. Then we hit the Boomerang, which is a coaster that a lot of parks have versions of. Finally we made it over to the biggest coaster, the Mamba, which is a big hypercoaster with a 205 foot first drop. Now that was fun! Anna and I rode it a second time right away (in the next to last row, this time) and then we all came back and rode it one more time right before the park closed. Anna and I got the very back row that time, which was the best. After the park closed we headed back to the cottage and watched some more Olympics before hitting the sack.

Wednesday morning we headed out to see the sites in Independence. We started out heading downtown to get tickets to tour Harry Truman's house, and from there we followed the Missouri Mormon walking tour in our car to see several sites from church history around the downtown area. We interrupted that to go on our tour of Harry's house at the appointed hour. The park ranger that gave the tour did a good job, so it was an interesting, but brief tour. The park ranger convinced us that we should go see the Truman Presidential Library, so later that afternoon we made that our last stop before heading for the airport. After the tour we went and had lunch at Clinton's Soda Fountain, where Pres. Truman had his first job as a youngster.

After lunch we finished up the sites on the walking (er, driving) tour, and then went to the LDS visitor's center. Another really well done visitor's center. The upstairs focuses on church doctrines, and the downstairs is more about the church history in the area. They have some replicas of log cabins down there where they do the presentations about what it was like for church members in Missouri back in the 1800's. We had a sister missionary who was pretty new give us the tour, and she did a good job. After we left there we went over to the Community of Christ temple and spent some time in the museum they have there. There have some interesting artifacts from Joseph and Emma, so that was worthwhile. Then we stopped for a few minutes at the Church of the Temple Lot, and saw one of the cornerstones of the temple. Liz and I went into their little visitor's center for a few minutes and the gentlemen their explained to us the differences between their church and the Community of Christ and others, so that was interesting. As we drove from there we passed a church that had a sign that said it was the "Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." I checked it out on Wikipedia and found out that it is one of quite a few branches that have broken off from the RLDS/Community of Christ church. Interesting.

As I mentioned before, our last stop before heading to the airport was the Truman Presidential Library. We got there around 4:00 and they close at 5:00 (we had to leave around then anyway to catch our flight), so we asked if they had a latecomers discount. They didn't, but she gave Erin and Anna student discounts (they're both getting ready to go back to school, so that was appropriate), and then she gave Liz and I senior citizen discounts! Well, my birthday was the previous Sunday, and Liz's was coming up in another week, but we're not quite that old. But hey, it was a discount. Our time was limited, but we still enjoyed the time we had there. It was interesting to see some of the debate still on-going about whether or not dropping the atomic bombs was really necessary. They presented several viewpoints on both sides of the argument. They also had a traveling exhibition about Pres. Lincoln on display, so we zipped through that as well.

After we left the library, we had one more mission to accomplish before arriving at the airport. We wanted to make a foray into Kansas just to say we had been there (we missed a chance to do the same into Iowa while we were in Nauvoo -- just forgot to do it). The route we initially planned to cut through Kansas on the way to the Kansas City airport (which is in the Missouri side of Kansas City) turned out to be a bad choice due to some major construction on an interstate, so we ended up going all the way around Kansas City on the belt route, but we still made it to the airport in plenty of time. We got to watch more of the Olympics on the way home (Frontier airlines has TV's at every seat), and they didn't even lose any of our luggage. Our friend, Kevin Sylvester, came to pick us up (at 11:30 pm -- thanks, Kevin!), and we found all more or less in order when we got home.

Well, it took a while to get this all done, but there you have it. A trip to remember our heritage, and our history. And what an amazing history it is!

An Olympic Interruption

2008-08-20T17:25:00.012-06:00

We interrupt the regularly scheduled next post (the second half of our Nauvoo trip) for a news flash.

Yes, that is my very own hand holding a genuine Beijing Olympics gold medal.

Here's what the other side looks like:

The white inset circle is actually white jade.

And here is Liz holding the medal:

You may ask how this came about. Well, even if you don't ask, I'm going to tell you.

The winner of the gold medal in the women's cycling time trial this year is Kristin Armstrong. It just so happens that Kristin's husband is Joe Savola, who just happens to work with me here at the little ol' Boise office of Marvell Semiconductor.

Every week we have a little employee sponsored barbecue in the parking lot, and today Joe brought Kristin's medal in to show it off.

So there you have it! Liz and I can now both say that we have held an actual Olympic gold medal in our very own hands.

Erick

A Trip to Remember

2008-08-17T22:17:00.006-06:00

The rest of the family is going to the blogs, so I guess we will give in and do the same. And what better time to start than to tell about our vacation last week?

We left the from the Boise airport on Wednesday morning (8/6) en route to St. Louis. We had an almost three hour layover in Denver, but all the flights were on time. We arrived in St. Louis at around 6:30, and had planned to hustle to our hotel (right across the river from the Gateway Arch in Illinois) and drop off our luggage, and then take the Metro back across the river to the Cardinals-Dodgers game that started at 7:15. We knew we would miss an inning or two, but thanks to a lost reservation, we ended up taking a long time getting our room (and we had to take a smoking room at that), so we didn't get to the game until the 7th inning. We missed home runs by Manny Ramirez, Albert Pujols (a grand slam, no less), and Jason Ludwick! Oh well, it was fun to see the new Busch Stadium, and to see the Dodgers go down to defeat.

The next morning we got up and had breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and headed over to the Gateway Arch. That is a pretty impressive structure! We had pre-purchased tickets to ride the tram to the top at around 9:00, and we made it in plenty of time to do that. We spent a little time in the Museum of Western Expansion underneath the arch (and, of course, a little money at the gift shop -- I was traveling with three women after all), and then piled back into the car to head north towards Nauvoo. By the way, we had reserved a standard size rental car, but when we arrived in St. Louis they gave us a Ford Explorer. Not so good for gas mileage, but it was nice to have the extra room.

We got to Hannibal, Missouri, birthplace of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain, but you knew that, right?), around noon, so we stopped at the Mark Twain Family Diner for lunch. Not the best food we've ever had, but it was edible. We spent some time looking around the town, but we decided we didn't have enough time to make it worth spending the money to pay for the tour through the museum and his boyhood home, so we just walked around outside and took pictures. Anna and I walked down to the river while Erin and Liz hit some stores.

From Hannibal we crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois and headed on north towards Nauvoo. We had reservations to stay at the 1850s Guest House bed and breakfast about 10 miles north of Nauvoo, so we drove on through Nauvoo to check in. Liz had talked to the owner on the phone when she made the reservations, and the lady had told her that she had just taken ownership of the place. Well, when we arrived at the house the lady we found there informed us that the person Liz had talked to had backed out of the sale and was gone. This lady was the previous (and now current again) owner. Luckily she still intended to honor our reservation, although she did ask us to take a room upstairs instead of the downstairs room Liz had reserved. She said she had an older woman and her daughter coming the second night we were there who couldn't climb the stairs, so she wanted to give them the downstairs room. To compensate she actually gave us two rooms upstairs, so Erin and Anna got their own room. It turns out those other two women were the only other guests they had the whole time we were there, so we pretty much had this huge house to ourselves. The breakfasts we had there were all excellent -- the only downside was they had some problems with the water heater, and the first morning we all got to take cold showers.

After getting checked in, we made the short drive back to Nauvoo and met up with Uncle Lee and Aunt Diane at their apartment. They fed us some dinner and then they headed over to get ready for their performance in "Rendezvous in Old Nauvoo," which they had gotten tickets for us to watch. It was very entertaining, and Lee and Diane did a great job on their part. From there we headed over to the seats Diane had staked out for us for the pageant. When we got there we ran into someone from our ward who was out there with his family to perform in the pageant. Its a small world! This was the next to last performance of the pageant for this year, and they did a great job. It really is an amazing production that really puts into perspective what an amazing church we belong to!

I should also mention here that we had really nice weather the whole week we were out there. Diane told us that the heat index on the Monday before we got there hit 115 degrees! While we were there the highs were in the lower 80's with nice breezes most days. Most days were also pretty sunny, with the only exception being Saturday when we had clouds in the morning and just a few drops of rain.

Friday morning we started our touring at the Nauvoo Visitor's Center, where we had to pick up our tickets to the performance of "Just Plain Anna Amanda" later that morning. We also had hoped to get a reservation for a carriage ride, but they were already booked up. We spent some time in the Monument to Women garden before heading over to the old Nauvoo Cultural Hall for the performance. This show is put on by the young performing missionaries that serve in Nauvoo for the summer. It's mostly geared towards young kids, but it was very entertaining. After the performance we had Diane take us on a tour of the Cultural Hall. Her shift ended about then so she went with us over to the Brickyard where Lee was just finishing up his shift. He gave us the demonstration there, and then we all went to the Schoolhouse. I think we also visited Lucy Mack Smith's house somewhere in there. Then we went to the Webb Brother's Blacksmith and Wainwright shop, and the missionaries on duty there let Lee do the demonstrations there for us (and the other visitors who happened to be there at the time). I had the closest birthday, so I won the little mini horseshoe he made.

We dropped off Lee and Diane at their house and then had a late lunch in town before going back and visiting the Joseph Smith sites that are owned by the Community of Christ church. While the LDS presented stuff in Nauvoo is all free, the Community of Christ charges a small fee to take a guided tour of the sites they have, which include the original homestead that Joseph Smith first lived in in Nauvoo, the Nauvoo House, the Mansion House, and a reconstructed Red Brick Store. I think we also saw the Brigham Young home, the Post Office, John Taylor's home, and the Printing Office that afternoon.

After that we met back up with Lee and Diane and they were kind enough to take us out to dinner at the Hotel Nauvoo. They put on a big buffet there, which was definitely the best meal in town from what we experienced. After we stuffed ourselves we drove down to the end of Parley Street to watch and take pictures of the sunset over the Mississippi River. After the sun went down there was still enough light for us to walk back up Parley Street and read all the quotes on the "Trail of Hope" that Pres. Hinckley once said he hoped everyone would take the time to walk.

Saturday morning we had made reservations in advance to attend the 11:00 session at the Nauvoo temple, so we had to get dressed up before we left the house. We stopped off at the visitor's center again to pick up tickets for the "High Hopes and Riverboats" show in the afternoon and try unsuccessfully again to get signed up for a carriage ride. We had a little less than an hour before we had to be at the temple, so we went to the Lands and Records office and looked up a bunch of our ancestors and found out where they had lived in Nauvoo and left with a CD full of information about them. The temple was beautiful, of course, and it was great to have our whole family there together. I think it's the first time we've all been in the temple together since before Anna went on her mission. We took some pictures together at the temple afterwards, and then went and had some lunch at a deli kitty corner across the street. The ladies did a little shopping after that while I waited in the car, and then we went and changed clothes at Lee and Diane's house before visiting a couple of other sites. First we went to the Family Living center where Uncle Lee showed us how to make a rope, and we also learned about candle making, baking, and coopering. We had time after that to make a quick stop at the Scovill Bakery, and then it was back to the visitor's center to see the young performing missionaries put on "High Hopes and Riverboats." Aunt Diane joined us there. There was some really neat music in that show, with our favorite being an a cappella song about Joseph. We headed into town after that to grab some dinner and then came back to the outdoor theater next to the visitor's center to see the performance of "Sunset on the Mississippi." This one is basically a variety show that's put on by the senior missionaries (including Lee and Diane) and the young performing missionaries. It was immensely entertaining, but the bugs that feasted on my ankles all night were not so entertaining.

Sunday morning we had to get up early to be to church before 8:00. Lee and Diane saved us seats, so we didn't have to get there too much earlier than that. This is a meeting for the missionaries and visitors, and they only do sacrament meeting. After the meeting we did a little driving around to find some of the places our ancestors had lived in town, and then went to Lee and Diane's so that Anna could e-mail her missionary friends (we didn't have internet at our bed and breakfast). We had some lunch and then Lee and Diane had to work a shift giving tours, and we went out to visit some of the sites we hadn't seen yet. We made it to the Browning Gunsmith shop, the Stoddard Tin Shop, and the Sarah Granger Kimball, Heber C. Kimball, and Wilford Woodruff homes. Lee and Diane got off their shifts at 2:30, and we met back up with them at 3:00 and then drove out to Carthage to visit the Jail and visitor's center there. The Explorer came in handy here because it had two fold up seats in the cargo area that allowed us to all ride in the same car. After Carthage we went exploring in the area where Ramus used to be, where Benjamin F. Johnson had his home in the Nauvoo area. We had the map from the Lands and Records office, and we think we located it. We were driving down a gravel road that runs north-south right through the middle of where BFJ's property was supposed to be, and all of a sudden we came across an Interstate 90 sign attached to a pole on the side of the road. Obviously someone had "borrowed" the sign from its rightful location. It was pretty funny. There's not much out in that part of the country, so it's hard to imagine that there was once a whole community out there. We eventually found our way back into Nauvoo, and went back to Lee and Diane's for dinner and birthday cake.

Oh yeah, it was my birthday that day! My kids gave me a certificate to go take a flying lesson (thankfully it wasn't a certificate to go take a flying leap!). I don't know where they came up with that, but evidently there's a company here in Boise that does an introductory lesson in a special airplane for a reasonable price. Liz gave me gift certificates for iTunes and and Red Robin, but there was one more surprise yet to come. After some final visiting, we bade farewell to Lee and Diane and headed back to our home away from home. It was a lot of fun to spend time with them, and it was nice to have them to help us navigate all the stuff to do there. The church has really done amazing job of making Nauvoo a great place to visit. As you can see there is a ton of stuff to do there. In four days we still didn't quite manage to fit everything in.

Well, this post is already pretty long, so I think I'm going to go ahead and post it and finish the rest of the trip in a second post.

Till then,
Erick

Oh yeah, here's a link to the pictures, if you haven't seen them yet.