Nina’s sister Pamela has been visiting here for a couple of days. She’s a lot of fun to have around and the two of them thoroughly enjoy each other’s company. Goodbyes are always hard. I’m of the opinion, however, that I should leave when people are happy I came and not stay so long that they’re happy I’ve left.
One thing that could go away with no regrets is this cold that I have. It’s kind of settled in the chest bringing with it a deep, hacking cough. Getting a reasonable cough suppressant in the United States is nearly impossible. There are no over-the-counter drugs that’ll do anything for a cough. Getting a prescription takes long enough that the cold is over.
On the other hand, the good stuff is available over-the-counter in many other countries. The last time we were in Canada I stocked up on Calmylyn which contains codeine, a very effective cough suppressant for me. I’m almost out, the cold and cough isn’t gone, and that’s gonna be a problem!
At the beginning of the year when all the tax forms come in, we put them in a basket in the kitchen. When I finally get around to doing the taxes, I go through the basket and sort out all the various pieces of paper. There’s plenty of pieces of paper and I’m hoping we have indeed received all of them because tomorrow morning I’ll prepare the tax returns. We will definitely owe money to the State of Idaho because no state taxes have been withheld from any of the money we’ve received over the past year. I’m hoping we won’t owe the Feds anything … but that remains to be seen.
I belong to one of four Rotary Clubs here in Pocatello, the Portneuf Rotary Club. We hold our meetings on Tuesday afternoons from 5:15 p.m. until about 6:15 p.m., one of the few “evening” Rotary clubs in the United States. My role in the club is to arrange for the weekly program. Most weeks that works out just fine. Occasionally the program is not so very interesting. And, every once in a while, the presenter cancels. Today was a cancellation day. That also worked out since we used the time to discuss some items of Club business. Rotary has been very interesting and I’ve enjoyed being a part of the organization. The programs for the next month have been setup, but it’s now time to begin working on the programs for June.
Sunset On the Eastern Hills
Entrance into the LDS Temples is by recommend which is obtained by passing a worthiness interview. The recommend is issued for two years when it has to be renewed through another worthiness interview. Of all LDS adults, about half have at one time or another been to the Temple and about 35-40% currently qualify for a recommend. Nina and my recommends expire at the end of April. The renewal process is a two-stage interview, first with the Bishop of my local congregation and then with a member of the Stake Presidency. The questions are very straightforward. There are a few about basic Church doctrine, a couple related to integrity and my relationship with my family, and a couple about moral cleanliness. I suspect the main issues that hinders LDS members are two questions: Do you pay an honest tithe? Do you keep the Word of Wisdom?
An honest tithe means 10% of my income annually. We have been full tithe payers for most of our adult lives, meaning that we have learned to live on 90% of what me make. Something that the Federal Government certainly could take a lesson from.
Keeping the Word of Wisdom specifically means no tobacco, alcohol, coffee, or tea. That health code sets the LDS Church apart from most other religions.
I had my interview with our Bishop on Sunday and then met with a member of the Stake Presidency this evening for the second interview. I’ve been issued a new recommend good for the next two years. It feels good.
Today is my last day of doing some work for the Census Bureau for the time being. As I understand the situation, the Tribes out on the Ft. Hall Indian Reservation originally wanted the Census Bureau to do the census on the Reservation because then the labor and expense money would come out of the Fed’s budget and not out of the Tribe’s budget. The expectation was that the Census Bureau would hire as many native Americans as would apply and qualify to do the work. Some did apply and some of those did qualify, but of the thirty or so people working on the Census out on the Reservation, only a handful were native Americans.
Apparently last week the political pot boiled over and last Thursday the Census Bureau was ordered by the Tribes to pull all of their workers off the reservation. Somehow the Tribes came up with people to do the work and a training class was cobbled together over the weekend and the early part of this week. Today I updated, verified, and turned in all of my binders and starting sometime tomorrow they’ll get distributed to the new teams.
Meanwhile, the other people on my team and I are all on hiatus. Supposedly, the Bureau plans to move us onto a different set of work called NORFU … non-respondent follow up … visiting folks who have not mailed back the census forms they received in the mail. That’ll require an additional three days of training which may be happening around the end of the month. I think that the Bureau was allowing time through the end of April for people to mail back their forms. When (and if) there’s further word, I’ll probably have something to say about it….
I have come down with a cold. It’s not the raging, crappy cold, but an almost-enough-to-stay-in-bed kind of a cold. I’m seriously looking forward to a day when science finally figures out how to cure a cold!
I’ve spent the day nursing this cold and doing pretty much nothing after turning in my time sheet and binders. Nina and her sister Pamela drove the 3 1/2 hours over to Boise to visit with a relative over there and a few minutes ago started their 3 1/2 hour drive back. It’ll be early tomorrow before they’re home. I’m not waiting up … bed is calling!
Sundays are usually my busiest day of the week and this one was no exception. On the 2nd and 4th Sundays my meetings start at 7:00 a.m. at the Stake Center for a High Council meeting. If the LDS Church were a business, the Stake Presidency would be the CEO and President of the local corporation and the High Councilors would be the Directors over the various functions performed by the Stake. My responsibilities include music, the single adults (unmarrieds, divorced, or widowed over the age of 31), emergency preparedness, and liaison to the Cedar Hills Ward.
At High Council meetings we report on our areas of responsibility and receive assignments to be carried out. These meetings usually last about 90 minutes. From there I go to the Cedar Hills Ward and join their Bishopric meeting in progress. That’s followed by a Priesthood Executive Committee Meeting, which is usually followed by either a Ward Welfare Committee Meeting or a Ward Council meeting. These meetings usually end about 10:30 a.m.
The Cedar Hills Ward meeting block starts at 11 a.m. with Sacrament Meeting first. On Fast Sundays, which normally is the first Sunday of the month but this month it’s the second Sunday because General Conference was on the first Sunday, I then go to my home ward, the Juniper Hills Ward, to attend meetings with my wife Nina. The Juniper Hills Ward begins their block of meetings at 1 p.m. and finish at 4 p.m.
On Sundays other than Fast Sunday, I attend the meeting block in the Cedar Hills Ward which ends about 2 p.m.
Sometimes that’s the end of the meetings for the day. Sometimes there are other meetings to attend in the evening. Today was a special Stake Fireside on protecting families from the bad Internet while taking advantage of the good Internet.
Now it’s about 10 p.m. and I’m really finished for this Sabbath Day!
There’s no further information on the Census issue and I expect that I’ll not hear anything definitive. I’d originally planned to use this beautiful Saturday to do call backs and follow ups. Instead, Nina and I drove (she drove, I snoozed) up to Rexburg, Idaho for the BYU-Idaho graduation ceremonies. Nina’s niece and her husband were both graduating. Further, Nina’s sister Pamela along with Pamela’s oldest daughter Vanessa had flown out for the Big Event. That meant a fairly large group of Nettletons all together in the same place.
Like most Universities, there’s a main convocation and then all the graduates split up into their individual colleges to walk across the stage and pick up their “official diploma holder”. The actual diploma comes in the mail in a few weeks after it’s been verified that all necessary work has indeed been completed with satisfactory outcomes.
Today was the nicest day so far this year. The temperatures were up around 60° with light winds and fairly clear skies. Tomorrow is supposed to be even better. Maybe getting the snow tires off the car helped bring in the real Spring (one can only hope!).
Tonight was an Ice Cream Social for our Stake (the LDS equivalent of a Catholic Diocese). I talked Nina into going, fearing that not many would be there. This is not necessarily the time of year when on thinks of ice cream. Further, we didn’t have any meetings of our local congregations last Sunday because of the Church’s General Conference, so no reminders were given out. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the 75 or so people who were there. The Century High School Singers provided some very nice musical renditions for us. They sounded really nice.
So the day is done. I’m feeling like I’m catching something.
Nina and I go to the Idaho Falls LDS Temple every Friday morning to work as Ordinance Workers. Last night our Shift Coordinator called and asked if I could be there a half-hour earlier than usual. That meant getting up at 3:30 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. That further meant a very poor night’s sleep! I did get in a short nap, but way too short!
On the Census front, my supervisor feels that our work on the Reservation is done. If it goes any further, someone else will do the work. That’s a bummer for sure! Meanwhile, starting on Monday we’re meeting in a conference room out at the Airport that I arranged for (I’m on the Airport Commission, so have a bit of an “in” out there) wrapping up what’s been done and getting everything ready to turn back in. There’s another area we can work, but there’s not a whole bunch of work available there, he told me. But, so far they’ve paid me close to a thousand dollars (gross, before taxes and such), and that’s all goodness.
This afternoon the snow tires came off the Avalon and new tires went on. I called all the tire places around town and got quotes ranging from $890 down to $425. Most were in the $500 range. All were for comparable tires. Of course, the $425 tires were the most appealing. The snow tires are now stored in the garage waiting for next winter. Nina says the car is much quieter.
But, with all that, I didn’t take a single picture today. Consequently, for the second time since January 21st, I’ve no daily photo. Dang!
Each day I meet with my supervisor or one of his designated assistants to turn in the completed Enumerator Questionnaires and my daily time sheet for the previous working day. The meeting times are between 8 am and 10 am on one end of the reservation or between 11 am and 1 pm on the other end of the reservation.
Since working out on the Reservation during the day has been very non-productive, and being a bit cognizant that tax dollars are paying my meager $10.50 per hour wage, I’ve been shifting my hours more towards the evenings.
On the 7th I was out on the Reservation until it was getting dark (I’m supposed to leave at sundown) and in the time from 6 pm until 8:30 pm I was getting 3 out of 4 houses with someone home. During the day, however, it was running about 1 out of 6 homes had someone home. So, my plan for today (the 8th) was to meet with my supervisor about 12:30 p.m., go back home until about 5, and work again until about 8:30 pm. I’ve completed the initial canvassing of my assigned areas, meaning that I’ve stopped at every house and at most of them left a “Notice of Visit” because no one was home. So now my task was to complete the call-backs.
As I was meeting with the assistant person, a next-level supervisor came driving up with the instruction that all the Census workers were to leave the Reservation immediately. So, I was done for the day!
With that I decided to go over to Soda Springs and see what was the matter with mother’s new phone. It had suddenly stopped working and she couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I drove over and found that the phone was definitely broken. Pushing the little “talk” button did nothing. I talked with customer service and tried the few suggestions they had to no avail. The solution was to send the phone back and get a replacement.
This phone is a special cordless phone with volume and amplification features designed for people who are hard of hearing. The phone had been working very well for mother, but in the meantime she has to fall back to the old phone in the house. Most people she can’t hear on that phone. I talked with the audiologist in Pocatello where she had bought the phone and they said they’d expedite the process. Hopefully mid-week next week she’ll have a replacement phone. She gets two or three phone calls a day that are very important to her from different family members.
The second Thursday of each month is the Pocatello Amateur Radio Club meeting. Because Census was on hiatus, I went to the meeting. The discussion was about the various digital modes available to ham radio operators. These provide a way to connect a computer to the radio and transmit digital data. This seems very interesting to me and now it’s time to do some experimentation.
I did my first interview for the Census in Spanish. Two fellows were living in a trailer (there are hundreds of trailers on the Reservation being lived in with perhaps that many more abandoned) and when they answered the door, they told me in Spanish that they didn’t speak English.
No problem. With my handy-dandy Spanish cue card and my limited Spanish ability, we got through the interview. In a couple of cases, though, they’d get into quite the discussion with each other about what the question actually meant. Then they’d be speaking so fast (literally machine-gun-Spanish) that I couldn’t understand a bit of what they were discussing. Never-the-less, we got through the process and they are now counted in the 2010 census.
The question that always gets the most discussion is the question about race. In training we got a lot of instruction about how to handle questions about that question. Interestingly enough, none of the situations covered in training have come up. Most of the comments are,
Why is it “white” and not “caucasian”?
I’m just “American”. Why isn’t that listed as a race?
Can I list any race I want? If they can be African-American, can I be (English-American, White-American, German-American, …)?
Our instructions are to list whatever they say and to make no assumptions. I’ve had one person test me on that and had me mark “Other” and put in the comments “Albanian”. He was surprised when I did that and continued on with the interview. At the end of the interview he had me erase his flippant response and mark “white”.
The 7th was the first nice weather day in about a week and I took advantage of it. Today looks nice, but a cold front will literally blow through here this afternoon with high winds. That’s not a lot of fun.
The big event yesterday was a ruined tire. I turned around in a driveway at a house where no one answered the door and by the time I got turned around, I had a flat tire. I changed the tire with a great deal of effort. I’ve never had to change a tire on this Chevy Tracker I’m driving. The jack wouldn’t lift the car high enough to get an inflated tire onto the car. I had to find a large, flat rock to put under the jack. Of course, I discovered the problem after I already had the flat tire off the car.
The tire shop found that the tire was ruined. It’d been cut through the sidewall on something as I was turning around. So, all my earnings on Monday and Tuesday went into a new tire for the car. That plus spending almost 3 hours at the tire store while all this happened made for a somewhat frustrating middle-of-the-day.
The irony of this was that while I sat in this tire store, I was making arrangements with another tire store at the other end of town to put four new tires on the Avalon to replace the snow tires that are on the car now. The price for four tires at the store fixing my ruined tire was almost double the price at the other store.
