Ft. Hall Tribal Courts AdministrationFt. Hall was originally established as a trading post at the point where the Oregon Trail and the California Trail divided. It moved locations a couple of times, finally becoming an Army post before being turned over to the Shoshoni-Bannock Indian tribes ensconced in the Ft. Hall Indian Reservation.
Most of the buildings are in a state of serious disrepair. A few, however, are used by the Tribes for various official functions. This building is the Tribal Courts Administration building. The court house itself is a block east of here. The building outside looks to be in pretty good shape. The inside is a different story, but no pictures were allowed inside the building.
I had a bit of a run-in while trying to fill out a 2010 census questionnaire with a fellow who was rather unhappy with anything associated with the government. I ended up being sent by my supervisor to a member of the Tribal Council who sent me to this building to fill out a report on the incident.
Meanwhile, the process of posting the picture from my iPhone to the blog doesn’t work very well. I’m poking around in the blog software to see if I can make a small change or two that will make this process work so very much more nicely. In the meantime, it’s still much easier to download the pictures into iPhoto and then do the blog entry from my Macbook.
This process doesn’t work as well as I’d like. Perhaps as I do it more I’ll get the process worked out better. Essentially, I take the picture with my iPhone, use the Photoshop app for the iPhone to crop and otherwise fix up the picture. Then I use the Project365 app to upload the photo with the caption to Facebook. Finally, I use the WordPress app to write this post and attach the picture.
The main problem is that the WordPress app attaches the picture in the wrong size which causes me to have to edit the post on my laptop to fix the picture. So, this is a other app that’s almost good enough.
Today was a long day of Church meetings starting at 7 this morning and going through until 7 this evening. I had no good opportunities to take any pictures. So, when I got home I had Nina take a picture of me looking tired. That will have to do for today!
I have an application on my iPhone to take a daily photograph. I’ve been uploading them to Facebook with a brief caption. Today, as I was driving around the Resevation doing Census stuff (for which I’m being paid a bit a over minimum wage) I thought I should also put them on my blog.
Two reasons:
First, I haven’t been doing much blogging lately and this might get that restarted,
Two, why should Facebook get all the honors, particularly because it’s impossible to get stuff back out of Facebook.
So, here’s today’s photo. It was taken out the deck window of the table out on the deck. About 7 pm last night the skies opened up and a near blizzard started dropping copious amounts of snow. After about a half inch or so, the storm seemed to abate.
But, it must have stuck around because about 3 inches were there this morning.
The best part about these Spring squalls is the snow doesn’t last very long. By noon the temperature was about 50 and by 2 pm it was all melted.
This morning I took the opportunity to go to the local Headstart school and read a story to a group of four-year-old kids.
The service project was presented to my Rotary Club and I signed up not really knowing what to expect. They were recruiting readers for all of their classes this week.
I arrived 5 minutes early, checked in, and was taken to a nearby classroom. The book (about 15 illustrated pages long with a couple of sentences at the bottom of each page) had already been selected. The teachers gathered the kids and I read the story. The whole process took maybe 15 minutes and I was finished.
The classroom had a teacher, two teen-age volunteers, and two other adults to assist. There were about fifteen kids in the class. One of them refused to come over for the story and hid behind a bookcase. I told the story (instead of reading it) in a loud voice so he could hear. About halfway through the story he emerged and moved into his assigned place so he could hear the rest of the story.
The story itself, for an adult, was very inane. It told about a Saturday when it rained and how grumpy everyone got until the rain stopped and the sun came out. The teacher told me after I finished the story that the kids were next going to finger paint pictures of “happy” and “sad” based on the story I had just read. As I left they were setting up the finger paints for the kids, most of whom seemed quite excited to make a picture from the story.
For most of my life I’ve kind of used the excuse that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grow up. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the Caribou County Sun, the local Soda Springs and Caribou County, Idaho newspaper, and saw my name in the “Pages From the Past” section, under “50 Years Ago.”
I remember the circumstances quite clearly. After a number of years of a less-than-mediocre music department, the Soda Springs school district hired Brent Covington in the fall of 1959 as the music director for the high school. He was young, energetic, and exciting (I think this was his first teaching contract after graduating from college). He was also strict and had very high standards. We knew something great was happening when, at our first band practice in the old high school band room, he wrote on the blackboard a trumpet obligato for the school’s fight song and had the trumpets each try to play it. Then he got out his trumpet and showed them what he wanted. It was just plain spectacular.
We actually started doing the things that high school bands in that day did: march and play in parades and football games. He formed a pep band to play at the basketball games and even got the school district to pay for a bus to go to the away basketball games. In the fall of 1959 I was a Freshman in high school and played the drums in the band and in the pep band.
He told us that we’d have elections and a real band government. At the beginning of the second semester in January, 1960 we held elections and I was elected as a band manager over a part of the band along with two other Freshman classmates, Duane Beins and Barry Bingham.
Band was a very important part of my high school experience all due to Brent Covington’s enthusiasm, discipline, and standards. A couple of years after I graduated, Brent’s father died and Brent left teaching to go run his father’s farm near Idaho Falls. He was killed in an automobile accident a couple of years ago.
I wonder if he ever knew how much of an impact he had on a small group of backwater band members?
However, I guess when I finally show up in the “50 Years Ago” column in the newspaper, I’m no longer really able to ask what I want to do when I grow up. Maturity (at least from a chronological standpoint) has arrived.
We pulled into the garage about 5:20 pm this afternoon. Within about ten minutes Nina was in her pajamas, a very good indication that she wasn’t going back out again, no matter what. I was in agreement with that thought as well.
We had some fairly dicey roads as we left Laramie and passed a couple of pretty serious-looking accidents as we left the city. Nina was the driver this morning from Laramie to Green River and handled the roads very well. One interesting note from the drive, though. As we were getting close to Rock Springs, Wyoming, we were listening to the weather from the National Weather Service on my ham radio. The car sensor said the outside temperature was 16° but the weather report said the temperature in Rock Springs at the airport was 30°. We both commented on the interesting discrepancy because our car temperature sensor is usually pretty close. However, over the next couple of miles, we watched the outside temperature increase rapidly to 36°. We definitely were driving through a weather front and found that both the car and the weather report were correct!
No further weather on the rest of the drive. We stopped at my favorite brother‘s place in Green River for a couple of hours then drove to Soda Springs and visited with mother for a bit and then drove home. The tracking process worked as expected. Our daughter Dawnmarie texted us as we visited with mother that she saw we were in Soda Springs and to say hello to her grandmother.
We’ve spent the night in Laramie, Wyoming and are up getting ready to leave for the final push home. The radar weather map from about a half-hour ago shows pretty clear sailing, except that the storm in northwest Wyoming is kind of dropping south and east. We may get some of that as we make our way towards Rawlings and then Green River.
We’ll stop in Green River for a short visit with my favorite brother and then again in Soda Springs so my mother will know for sure that we’re back in the area. She’s anxious for us to get home safe and sound.
The tracking process works quite well, so long as I have cell phone connections and don’t mess up the settings. Yesterday we had lunch in Lincoln, Nebraska and I accidentally changed a setting and tracking stopped working. Our daughter Dawnmarie later in the afternoon told us that we were stuck in Lincoln and needed to get something fixed. I figured it out and got us back on track.
Earlier yesterday morning she sent me a text message:
If I had nefarious intentions I would be landing at Seward Municipal Aiport and zipping down county rd 280 to accost you.
I got that just as we crossed under County Road 280! Pretty near real-time tracking.
The application, however, requires almost exclusive use of the iPhone and, if the display is on, it uses power faster than the charger can supply it, draining the battery in about six hours when plugged in and in about two hours running on battery alone.
Today we’ll be crossing most of western Wyoming where cell connection is fairly spotty. I’ll have the application on and see how it performs when it can’t make an internet connection.
We’re leaving in the morning to begin the Big Trip West … a Return to Pocatello. The weather map is much calmer than it was last night at this time. I can only describe that as “goodness”!
I’ve discovered a new capability now that I have a ham radio license. It’s an ability to post regular position reports which can be viewed on the Internet.
You can track us as we move westward. That is, position reports will be posted while we’re driving, most of the time (except when I’m using my iPhone for something else). These reports are sent by way of my iPhone to a system that then transmits the report over the airwaves to the system that plugs the position report into a database and makes it available for viewing anywhere in the world.
