We spend just about every Friday morning at the Idaho Falls Temple where Nina and I are ordinance workers on the first shift. What that means is arriving at the Temple in enough time to change into our white clothes and be in Prayer Meeting at 6 a.m.

To do that, I get up at 4 a.m., eat breakfast while Nina is using the bathroom, then shower and get dressed while she’s getting her breakfast. We pull out of the garage by 4:45 a.m. and usually arrive at the Temple about 5:40 a.m. Nina drives and I snooze on the way up. She must do a great job of driving because I never wake up on the way up there!

Our work at the temple is scheduled two months at a time. That is, I’ll have the same set of assignments for the months of April and May and they’ll change for June and July. We finish up our assignments by noon, change back into our street clothes, and head for home.

Now that I’m also working on the Census, our drive home includes stopping at the Trading Post at Ft. Hall to meet with my supervisor or his assistant to turn in my daily time sheet along with the completed interviews from Thursday.

Great Harvest bakes a type of bread that Nina really likes on Fridays, so we usually stop there so she can pick up a loaf … and I can get something I like, such as the Pumpkin Bread – Cream Cheese rollup pictured. Click on the picture for more.

TTFN!

Our instructions about doing the Census on the Ft. Hall Indian Reservation is that we are to be off the reservation by sundown. The problem with that for me is most people aren’t home during the day and I’m finding that I need to call on them after about 6 p.m. in the evening to get people home. So, I’ve been going back out to the Reservation after dinner and making as many calls as I can before heading home. The daylight hours are increasing, but that still means heading for the border by about 8:15 p.m.

I took this picture just past the Reservation border as I was heading home. It was actually quite a pretty sunset for which my iPhone cannot do any justice.

While I was working on the Census out on the Ft. Hall Indian Reservation I drove down a road and saw this very interesting house with quite an antenna array! There are at least six antennas all with different purposes. One antenna on the roof of the house is specifically for communicating by way of the amateur radio satellites in orbit. Most of these satellites receive on one amateur radio frequency and re-transmit the received signal on a different frequency. These are very high frequencies that have only line-of-sight capability … that is, they don’t bounce off the ionosphere like shortwave frequencies do. However, they do allow communications to occur over very long distances. This fellow’s setup is a fully-automated array. That means the system automatically tracks the satellite as it passes somewhere overhead. It also means he’s got a LOT of money invested!

It is an axiomatic truth that the ham radio operator’s radio is no better than the antenna to which it is connected. This guy has some excellent antennas and looks to be a very dedicated ham radio operator!

This is also catch-up day. I’ve got several days worth of pictures that need to be uploaded. TTFN!

My first assigned Census area was on the airport itself where there is a small trailer park. After completing that assignment, my next area was just to the north of the airport. This area had a number of homes to be canvassed. If no one is home, I’m to come back on different days at different times during the day. If I still can’t find anyone, then I need to talk to a neighbor to determine if the house is occupied or if the resident(s) are away on vacation, snowbirding, or similar.

I had this area complete for a couple of days, except for one house. I had just stopped by there to find no one home and pulled off to the side of the road to update my records when I saw a light plane on final approach to the airport. The wind was blowing VERY hard and the airplane was flying almost straight into the wind. The result was that the airplane’s speed across the ground was probably only about 30 mph! That had to be a very bumpy approach, but it looked like he put the airplane on the ground in good enough shape to use it again on another day.

Ft. 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!

TTFN!

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.

Spring won this one.

TTFN!

Reading to Kids

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.

That was definitely a good experience!