It’s Ten Things Tuesday once again. A week passes by rather quickly it seems. So, here we go:

1. Last week was lots of fun with visiting family. Our daughter Jaelene from Chandler, Arizona brought her three sons up for a week during their Spring Break. They got here on Tuesday and left to go back home on Friday. Our son Jared from Seattle, Washington flew in on Wednesday evening and stayed until Sunday morning when he flew back to Seattle. On Friday our daughter Heather from North Salt Lake brought her husband and four children up to Soda Springs.

The purpose of all this visiting was to spend some time with my father who is in the nursing home in Soda Springs, Idaho. We all descended on the nursing home on Friday the 13th of March and spent about four hours with him and mother at the nursing home. We had a great visit.

2. Saturday, March 14th got some media attention as being “pi day“. High school geometry students and others might recognize Ï€ as ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The first few digits in the value of Ï€ is 3.1415926…. Ï€ is an irrational number, meaning that no matter how many decimal places are calculated, there is still a remainder. The date of March 14th (3rd month, 14th day) is one of the dates during the year which kind of approximates the value of Ï€. Wikipedia lists a number of dates which can also be characterized as “pi day”. For instance, March 4th can also be considered a Ï€ Approximation Day as that is when Ï€% of the month has elapsed (as a result, each month of the year has a Ï€ approximation date). There are many more Ï€ approximation dates based on the earth’s orbit and other arcane number combination. So, why is July 22nd another of these “Ï€ Approximation Days”?

3. We are now officially car shopping. The insurance company reported Nina’s Camry as a total loss and have given her a check for the value of the car, which is substantially less than what will be needed to appropriately replace the car. Ugh.

4. Have we reached the point where the stock market truly begins to recover? Economists suggest that when enough stockholders have just had enough of the hemoraging of the value of their stock, they just sell out and flock to the sidelines. They call this “capitulation“. I capitulated early last week and moved our 401(k) into the safest possible investments after watching more than 35% of the portfolio value evaporate. Then starting on Wednesday, the stock market started climbing and so far has grown by 9%. If that was truly the turn around point, you can thank me. If I capitulated, many others did as well as I’ve found I’m generally in the mainstream.

5. This week Nina and I both celebrate birthdays. I’m 64 on March 19th, she’s 63 on March 8th. When I write that, it seems old. I certainly don’t feel old. Consequently, I also think my dad doesn’t feel old, either. Sure would be nice if the body kept up with the mind.

6. The space shuttle Discovery launch on Sunday evening was, as always, exciting. I never get tired of watching a launch. When I was working for Systemation in Cleveland, Ohio and on a business trip to Florida, I had the opportunity to watch a launch of an unmanned Delta rocket. Our Stake President at the time worked for NASA and made arrangements for us to be at the Cape for the launch. Even though the viewing area was a mile and a half away from the launch pad, the sight was spectacular and I could feel the noise in my bones. A few years later when working for Thiokol, I made two business trips to the Cape and had the chance to go out to the launch pad where the shuttle is launched and to tour most of the facilities at the Cape. Perhaps in the lifetime of our grandchildren space flight will become commonplace. I hope they’ll occasionally think about us folks who would have done anything to get into space and never had an opportunity.

7. The hot pools at Lava Hot Springs are a lot of fun and we spent a delightful couple of hours soaking in them last Saturday. We’ll definitely go back … and I’ll take my water shoes with me next time.

8. It seems that Nina and her roll-over were topics of discussion at Church last Sunday. No one seemed to know what really happened. That resulted in an assignment given to our Home Teacher to call and make sure Nina was OK. She was and is. She’s also not very excited by all the attention.

9. I’m happy that I registered my full name as a domain name a few months ago … rolandksmith.com … there’s nothing there under that domain name (yet). But there’s now some kind of a music thing in MySpace named “Roland K. Smith & the Sinners”. They have no relationship with me, except that they wanted to buy the domain name from me. No sale. Besides, their offer was only a thousand dollars. Make that a million and I might consider.

10. Spring seems to be arriving in Pocatello. I can see green showing up under the thatch in the grass. I think it’s kind of early for spring and we don’t quite have enough snow in the mountains. Maybe a wet, rainy spring is coming?