I’m certain the ski resorts are ecstatic about this sudden change in weather. Resorts all over the mountain west will be opening this coming week in time for the Thanksgiving skiers. I was just thankful for a warm, dry car and reasonably dry roads as I made my way 45 minutes south of Pocatello to the Arbon Branch for a speaking assignment this morning.
I must say, though, that it was a pretty drive. The first real snow for this season is a significant change from the gray-brown colors we’ve been seeing for the past couple of months and the change is pleasant.
My new iPhone 4 has the ability to take movie clips in pretty nice definition. So, for grins and giggles, I’ve been playing around with that capability. Uploading these movie clips to YouTube is a snap. So, I’ve taken a couple of shorter movies and uploaded them. Here’s the links:
Finally: the drive up the hill and home in the snow. WARNING: I’m driving with one hand and holding the camera with the other … those prone to motion sickness may get more of a ride than they planned….
Meanwhile, I’ve taken the Salt Lake Express bus up to my work in Idaho Falls. I was the only passenger last Thursday. It was an easy, pleasant ride with a very competent driver. I was quite pleased with the process so I’ll do it again tomorrow. It’s cheaper than driving and a whole lot more relaxing.
I’ve had an interesting time getting re-acclimated to the daily working grind. For the past three years I’ve been pretty much in charge of my own very flexible schedule. Today, however, my schedule is now quite rigid!
For the past couple of weeks, I’m up at 5:15 a.m. and out the door by 6:30 a.m. and in the office by 7:30 a.m. My last meeting of the day starts at 4:00 p.m. and often runs until 6 p.m. or even later. That puts me back home between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Those are very long days!
I’m tired of doing the driving, though. It’s right at one hour each way. I can make two round trips and one one-way trip on a tank of gasoline. I’m being very well paid for this contract, but I’m putting lots of miles on my little car! I’m going to start looking for a van pool or something like that where I don’t have to drive and can use the time in a much more productive way.
So, what am I doing? I’ve had several folks ask that question. I’m managing a project to transform their current email system into something that is close to a collaboration suite. What that is hasn’t been determined, yet. The whole project will take at least a year, but I’ll also have periods where other people are working and I can take some time off. I’m having a LOT of fun. It’s delightful being back in a familiar environment working with smart people who value my experience and opinion.
The question of “Where Have I Been” has a number of answers, some more interesting than others. So, for starters:
(1) I’ve started a new employment contract which is definitely more than full time at present…
(2) I spent the weekend in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.
I think I’ll start with (2) first … the last shall be first and the first last and all that. A few weeks ago we received an invitation to a 50th wedding anniversary celebration for two of the finest people on the face of the earth: Zane and Cheryl Lee. The celebration was to be a surprise for them (and it actually came off as a surprise!). Knowing that a number of people would be there whom we haven’t seen in about 25 years, this event went onto the calendar as a “must do” kind of a thing. However, that was further complicated by Nina’s need to go to Chandler, Arizona and spend a couple of weeks with our daughter Jaelene and her kids. We worked out the schedule that we’d take two cars down for the anniversary celebration, spend Saturday night at Heather’s and then I’d come home on Sunday to take care of my responsibilities here. Nina would spend Sunday night at Heather’s and leave for Arizona early Monday morning.
Then my favorite brother called. He was to be ordained a High Priest and wanted me to come over to do that ordination. So, I put everything else for Sunday on hold, cancelled it, or gave it away to someone else and bright and early Sunday morning (leaving Heather’s at 6 a.m.), I drove to Green River, Wyoming to spend a significant part of the day with Perry and his crew. Perry also wanted mother to be there, so he drove over to Soda Springs on Saturday, picked her up, and brought her back to Green River. When I left on Sunday afternoon to come back home, I brought mother with me and dropped her off in Soda Springs on my way through.
The anniversary party was just plain delightful. We visited with many of our good friends from back in the 1980’s when we lived in Chardon, Ohio. It seems like good friends just take up where they left off. I rather think the Celestial Kingdom will be like that after we die!
The time with Perry on Sunday was again just outright delightful. I was honored to have the opportunity to ordain my brother a High Priest and then accompany him into the High Priest Group Meeting. He has lived in his Ward and Stake in Green River, Wyoming for many years and is well liked there.
So, I made the circle … Pocatello to North Salt Lake to Green River, Wyoming, to Soda Springs, Idaho, and back to Pocatello over the weekend. It was definitely worth it.
Now to (1). The Idaho National Laboratories in Idaho Falls (their website is here), Idaho offered me a one-year contract starting at the beginning of October to manage a project to change out their email and messaging systems for a set of much newer capability. This is a big undertaking for them. Getting the contract actually started was the usual exercise in working through the government bureaucracy to get all of the right paperwork issued. It will be a very interesting (and occasionally very frustrating) task … too good an opportunity to pass up. So, for the past few weeks I’ve pretty much been heads down on getting that project underway and cleaning up the remaining things here at home that needed to get done (and there’s still a lot of that to do!).
It’s an hour’s commute up and an hour’s commute back each day. My schedule there is still quite unpredictable from day to day, so getting into a car pool isn’t going to be possible for a little while. I’m having fun, though! I’ve gotten my ham radio stuff arranged so it can be set up in the car and used while I’m driving up and back. Tonight I had a nice conversation on the radio with a fellow in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, among several other contacts.
Life is good. Life is currently very busy. Life is also centered around getting used to working a full time job once again!
The WordPress app on the iPhone has been updated and actually works well enough again to be used. It’s LDS General Conference Sunday and time for “Music and the Spoken Word”. I’m sitting in front of the TV, feet up, enjoying the music. It’s a good morning!
I probably spoke too soon about this updated iPhone app. It’s crashed twice, now, and won’t work properly in landscape mode. But I need to get back into recording my thoughts on a more regular basis. Buggy app and all.
Around the middle part of August I decided that we either had to schedule some kind of a camping trip, or else the motor home would stay winterized for the rest of the year. We had made a couple of trips for a few days each to North Salt Lake, but that was the extent of our travels for this year.
It looked like Labor Day weekend would be a good time to go somewhere. The criteria were simple: close and inexpensive. We’ve gone to Yellowstone quite often over Labor Day weekend and have enjoyed those visits. Since most of the kids are in school, the Park is much less congested and more congenial. Besides, the bison seem to start migrating around the park about that time of the year.
However, the last time we were in the Stanley, Idaho area was before we went to Japan fifteen years ago. It’s a pretty area, is about a five hour drive from the house, and pretty much met the criteria. Further, if we took the motor home up to the Idaho Falls Temple for our Friday morning shift and left from there, we would already be an hour closer to Stanley. So that’s what we’ve done.
We packed up the motor home during the early part of the week, hitched the Tracker on the back on Thursday evening, and drove away at 4:15 a.m. on Friday, September 3rd. We worked our shift at the Temple, ate lunch in the motor home, and headed west on US Route 20 towards Arco, Idaho. From there we drove up to Challis, Idaho and then followed the Salmon River into Stanley.
Much has changed since our last visit at least 18 years ago. The town itself is pretty much the same, but a number of new Forest Service campgrounds have been opened along the Salmon River. I kind of wanted easy camping (that means electricity and WIFI), so I pushed for staying in a private campground. We settled on the Elk Mountain RV Resort four miles northwest of Stanley. It’s just OK. We have electricity and fairly slow WIFI (that makes it possible to write this blog entry). The spots are close together. There are no fire rings, and there’s no table at our campsite. After seeing the nice Forest Service campgrounds along the way, I wouldn’t choose to stay at the Elk Mountain RV Resort (quite a stretch of imagination to call this a “resort”) again. When we come up here again in a few years, we’ll stay along the river somewhere. Further, the State of Idaho is putting WIFI into the State Parks!! A $29 per year fee gains access to the internet at selected state parks. The fee is used to pay for installations at more parks across the state.
So far we’ve mostly just driven around the area, stopping here and there for photography opportunities. We went to Church this morning at the Stanley Branch. I enjoy Church here a lot … helped by the fact that Church is 2 hours long and they meet in a building with huge glass windows looking out over the Sawtooth Mountains. There’s nothing boring about a church meeting in Stanley, Idaho!
Tomorrow we’ll visit the Yankee Fork gold mine area. Plenty of old buildings and equipment to keep both Nina and me happy photographing stuff. Then it’s back home on Tuesday. And we’ll be done playing around for a while.
Two grandkids had procedures recently. Michael had all his wisdom teeth removed and Stephanie had some fairly important surgery on her left ankle (which has left the doctor a bit dumbfounded as he didn’t find what he expected). So, Nina and I made a trip down to North Salt Lake to visit with the recuperating kids.
On the way we stopped in Layton to watch another grandchild Danielle (aka Speedy) and her team play in their championship soccor tournament round. They played very well, as did the other team, and the game ended with a 4-4 tie. I was impressed at how well her team has improved over the season.
It was DANG HOT in the Salt Lake valley today. I was glad we were able to spend most of the time indoors.
Meanwhile, my cousin Merrill Gillette called and he’s having some computer problems. I wasn’t able to help him out very much over the phone. He’ll probably end up having to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. My favorite brother Perry over in Green River has two (2) computers infected with a virus that won’t go away. Those may well have to suffer the same fate. Since things come in threes, that should be all the computer problems for a while (knocking on wood).
About 3 p.m. on Tuesday, August 10th the phone rang. Caller ID said the caller was “Bannock County”. I answered the phone and an automated message started to play telling us that there was a fast-moving wildfire near our area and that we should prepare to evacuate.
Preparing the evacuate isn’t the same as actually evacuating. I was experiencing the Enhanced 911 Reverse Calling system that the county installed several years ago. But, I’d been seeing on Twitter that there was a fire not too far from our house so the advice to prepare to evacuate was good advice.
Some time ago Nina and I had decided that if we needed to evacuate, the motor home would be our evacuation method. We could put whatever we needed in there and hook on the Chevy Tracker so it could be towed. I’d drive the motor home and Nina would drive the Toyota Avalon and we’d be on our way. We’d have a place to sleep and whatever we needed for a couple of days.
However, we were actually singularly unprepared to prepare to evacuate! I went out and got the motor home ready to drive away and noticed that we had only about a third of a tank of gas. That wasn’t going to get us very far! It also hadn’t been cleaned up since our last use of the vehicle … which was last year!
I put the equipment on the front of the Chevy Tracker so it could be hooked onto the motor home and towed. Nina gathered up some of the “absolutely must be saved” items. We both got some clothes together. I turned on the sprinkler system to wet down the yard (with no idea whether that would make a difference). And then settled down to wait for the next step.
About 4:45 pm we got the next call to say that the fire had been contained and the need to prepare to evacuate had been cancelled.
This morning’s paper said that the fire had been knocked down quickly as the fire department had been notified almost as soon as the fire started. Some children playing with matches and burning toilet paper were the source of the fire. It came close to a couple of residences, but never got closer than a half-mile or so of our house.
I’ve no idea how much time we’d have from the time that the “evacuate” phone call came and when we’d need to be on our way. In this instance we “kind of prepared” but I think it would have taken a bit of time to really be ready to go. So, with this experience in mind, we’ve made a few decisions.
The motor home needs to be always ready to go. That means full of gasoline, cleaned up, stocked with sheets, towels, and sundry other items. The vehicle spends about half the year winterized … and that’s it’s condition now. Rather than wait for the first use to un-winterize the motor home, I need to do that as soon as the threat of freezing is past. With the anti-freeze still in the holding tanks, I couldn’t load up with water before leaving. By the end of this week, the motor home will be ready should we need it.
All of the “must take with us” stuff is scattered around the house and much of it is downstairs. We’ve decided to gather all of that stuff into our bedroom closet so that if we have to evacuate, we know what we’re going to take with us.
It’s not a certainty that if we need to evacuate that we’ll both be at home. We have busy lives and quite often one or both of us are not here. I’m not sure what the alternate plan is (we’ll have to work that out), but which ever of us is not here may not be able to get back here before the evacuation order happens.
Several years ago a wildfire came over the hills to the west of us and did some pretty incredible damage. It was before we moved here, and there’s been a LOT of new housing built since then. I think we’ve become a bit complacent!
Kudos and props to the fire departments in the area for quickly knocking down this fire. I’m glad we have the reverse 911 system in place and to know that it works. While there’s no need to go overboard on this preparedness bit, we can certainly be better prepared!
Nina woke up Sunday morning (the 18th) with a sore arm. She said it felt kind of like a very sore nerve running down her left arm.
It kind of got worse during the day and by the time we went to bed she was having difficulty finding a comfortable and somewhat pain-free position to get some sleep. I woke up about 1 a.m. Monday morning as she was coming back into the bedroom in obvious serious pain. We talked about the situation a bit and decided we needed to make a trip into the Emergency Room and get it looked at just in case it was something serious. Further, they might be able to give her a pain killer that would let her get some sleep.
Nina doesn’t have much in the way of medical insurance, so trips to the ER are carefully rationed … this one was important. Besides, I got to drive way too fast through the 20mph park and almost needed to run a red light. The last time I got to do that was back in 1973 in Germany when our daughter Traci was being born.
After a bunch of tests, heart problems were ruled out along with a number of other potential ailments. What was left was a musculature / skeletal problem commonly known as “tennis elbow”. A couple of good doses of morphine and a prescription for Lortab took most of the edge off the pain. Problem was, however, we had to stay in the ER for an hour after the last dose of morphine. Around 5 a.m. she was finally discharged and we picked up the prescription at the 24-hour Walgreens and went home to bed.
I drove the speed limits going home. I didn’t have an excuse to do anything else!
