These are some of my favorite pictures from the past year.

Click on the pictures for additional information!

Ta ta for now!

If there is food involved, I’m generally there. If it’s good food, I want to be all over it. When we go to potluck kinds of events, I like to know who prepared what just to check out their creative cooking skills.

On the other hand,  it’s pretty clear that I’ve not missed many meals in my lifetime. I often use a favorite joke:

I’m in shape! Round IS a shape, ya know…

Or, another favorite:

I have the shape of a god: Buddha!

I also put food into a few generic categories:

• Food that’s good for you (and generally has that “taste” to it)
• Breakfast foods
• Foods eaten at mealtimes
• Desserts and snacks

I haven’t found much that I would put into the “favorite” category that also fits in the “good for you” category. Usually, if something is good for you, they’ve taken out the stuff that makes it satisfying, such as fat and sugar. There’s a Roland Smith Minimum Daily Requirement that the “good for you” foods seldom meet.

I really like breakfast foods and quite often when Nina and I are fending for ourselves for dinner, I’ll make something requiring syrup or something requiring milk and sugar.

I’m not so fond of lunch foods. Most sandwiches aren’t interesting to me at all.

I enjoy eating out for either breakfast or dinner (and will occasionally have breakfast for dinner if the restaurant offers that option). Usually I’ll have either a steak or will have pasta of some sort.

Two of my daughters make absolutely fabulous caramels and those rank very high on my favorite list. Nina is also an excellent cook and my favorite restaurant is at our dining table. I’m pretty much a meat and potatoes person, but my favorite Nina-prepared food includes salmon, chicken casserole, and spaghetti. Nina likes to have a wide variety of foods. I’m quite content to eat pretty much the same things over and over again.

But, in the end, I will have to confess that Nina’s chocolate chip cookies are by far my favorite. They must be food … they have all the important food groups represented: flour, eggs, milk, chocolate…. And my favorite batch of cookies will be the next batch that comes out of the oven. Umm, good!

Ta ta for now!

This is one of those wide open topics. For instance, one could argue that my favorite place is in our computer room in front of the computer, and that would be correct. I certainly spend a lot of time there!

As far as destinations go, Yellowstone National Park is certainly a favorite. We’re less than four hours from the center of the park and we go over there a couple of times a year. Our trip this past September was particularly fun and relaxing.

We’ve had the good fortune to have traveled pretty far and wide throughout the world, but haven’t been outside of North America since 2007 when we were on a cruise in Scandinavia. I have a number of favorite places that we’ve visited overseas and many, many more that I’d like to visit.

For the past several months Nina and I have been working each Friday morning at the Idaho Falls Temple. We get up at 3 a.m., leave the house at 3:45 a.m., and arrive at the Temple about 4:45 to begin our shift at 5 a.m. We’re usually finished around 11 to 11:30 a.m. We both thoroughly enjoy or service at the Temple and definitely arrange our lives around Friday morning so that we can always be there for our assignment.

We generally don’t talk a lot about what goes on inside the Temple, not that it’s particularly secret, but that the ordinances performed there are sacred and only become meaningful to members of the Church who have put themselves in a position to be qualified to be in the Temple. What I will say, however, is that the time we spend there on Friday mornings is some of the most satisfying  and rewarding time of the week.

My favorite place to be right now, above all others, is at the Idaho Falls Temple on a Friday morning.

Ta ta for now!

We here in Pocatello, Idaho are blessed with a world-class venue for the performing arts, the L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center. Every group that comes through Pocatello and performs there comments on how magnificent the facility is. As a result, we’ve gotten some great performances during this past year.

The facility has two performance areas (with a third planned when enough money is raised), a theater and a grand performance hall. There are two subscription series, The Season of Note and The Idaho State Civic Symphony. We buy tickets to both of them and are particularly impressed with the Symphony. This fall we’ve been to see the 5 Browns and Rockapella along with two Symphony performances. The last event we attended there was the 25th Annual Messiah Sing. This event was previously held in the Highland Stake Center but had pretty much outgrown the facility. This time there were more than 700 people singing in the chorus plus another 900 there to listen. We had a fabulous time.

The best performance (the link is to my blog post about this performance), however, was last April with the Symphony along with the Camarata Singers. That was one fabulous concert. It just gets better and better here in Pocatello!

Ta ta for now!

Social Networks has taken on a new dimension in the past couple of years with the advent of several sites on the Internet. I’ve dabbled in several of them and still have accounts on a few of these sites, some of which I use and most of which I don’t use. I think Friendster was the first of these sites that I created an account on a couple of years ago, primarily because it was very popular in the Philippines and several of the people I worked with over there encouraged me to sign up. After “leaving” my job at AMI Semiconductor, and because the Friendster website really sucked, I pretty much stopped using it and haven’t logged in for probably a year. Perhaps my account is now dead?

Facebook, Seesmic, and Twitter next captured my attention. Seesmic was oriented around video. I recorded a few, but even though handling the video was easy and straightforward, I found I much preferred to write rather than be a talking head. With the written word I can think about it, work on it, revise it, and eventually either delete or publish. Video editing is incredibly time consuming and until someone builds some software to dramatically reduce the complexity, I’ll just leave video alone for the most part.

In January of this year, however, Facebook almost overnight became really useful. I had reached some kind of a critical mass of people on my friends list, and more importantly, a critical mass of people on my friends list that I actually was interested in what they were saying and doing. I have currently 148 friends on Facebook, but only about half of them everupdate their status. A couple only play games (and I have those games hidden, so I don’t see much from them either). I check Facebook often. I have the iPhone Facebook app loaded and use it when I’m away from my computer. Facebook is definitely the 2009 Social Network application.

Twitter continues to be my other major social network site. I have it open all the time on my computer and when I’m away from home I check it rather often. I currently follow 310 people and 460 people are following me on Twitter. I’m thinking it’s about time to trim the Twitter follow list down a bit as it sometimes takes up a lot of time.

Facebook has become the primary means for keeping up on what’s happening with a lot of my extended family. Twitter is the place to keep up with what’s happening with friends and colleagues, but more importantly Twitter is how I get my news. When anything happens, it seems to show up on Twitter almost immediately.

I suspect we’re just at the leading edge of online social networking. This year has proven that it works and is useful. I’m really looking forward to what will come in the next year or two.

Ta ta for now!

The holidays in 2009 have been enjoyable and rather quiet.

New Years: We spent this holiday at home. The Pocatello Stake had a family New Years party on New Years Eve. We stayed there until about 10 p.m. and then made our way home and to bed. New Years Day itself was spent watching football games and just being lazy around the house. We both remembered to say “Rabbit, rabbit,” making a very good start to the year.

Memorial Day: Nina and I went down to Heather’s in North Salt Lake for Memorial Day. Her pool was open and we had a fun time swimming, although the weather was a bit cool. We also spent some time at Wasatch Lawn Cemetery, cleaning Trevor’s headstone and leaving some flowers. It was a good start to the summer and we left a couple of weeks later on our Big Trip East.

July 4th: We arrived home from our Big Trip East mid-day on the 4th of July. We unpacked the motor home and put everything away. Nina made some potato salad and baked beans, we grilled some chicken on the grill, and went to bed before the fireworks started. We were very happy to be home!

Labor Day: The week before Labor Day we went to Yellowstone National Park for a week and had a delightful time there. We spent Labor Day at home catching up on things around the house and the yard. It was essentially a completely uneventful holiday.

Thanksgiving: We drove down to Heather’s on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and stayed until Thanksgiving afternoon. We needed to get home and to bed as we had to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Friday for our normal shift at the Idaho Falls Temple. We always enjoy the time we spend with Heather and her family.

Christmas: At the moment I can only say what we plan to do for Christmas, as it hasn’t arrived yet. We’ll leave Pocatello on Sunday afternoon, December 20th for another Big Trip East and hope to arrive at Dawnmarie’s place in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon. We’ll spend Christmas with Dawnmarie and her family. We’ve not been there for Christmas and it’ll be fun to be with the grandkids on Christmas Day. We’ll probably spend New Years Day with Nina’s sister Pam before heading back home to Pocatello. All of this planning depends on the weather! If mother nature cooperates, that’s what we’ll be doing.

Ta ta for now!

Customer Service has a deservedly bad connotation and usually leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Few companies know how to use customer service well and even fewer understand how to use customer service to drive new business and up-sell current business.

Qwest rules the roost, so to speak in both bad and good customer service. It so very much depends on how I contacted Qwest and more importantly, who was on the other end. Usually, however, it’s just plain bad service. They’ve recently started using Twitter and are watching for comments on that social media service that mention Qwest. They’re online about seven hours or during normal business days. Contacting them through Twitter usually yields a quick and thorough response. Contacting them on chat is the next best thing. Any other method just yields frustration.

Nina recently bought a new Macbook computer from MacMall and along with it we ordered a new all-in-one printer to replace the seven-year-old fax / copier / scanner / printer she’s been using. We placed the order over the phone because of some specific requirements on the Macbook. The printer arrived and it was the wrong printer.

I called MacMall and talked to our assigned “account representative” who quickly and efficiently went about correcting the problem. No hassle, no hoops to jump through. If customer service is required, that’s the way it needs to be done.

Moving from the digital world to the brick-and-morter world, customer service takes on a different aspect. I’ve had very good service from Best Buy. I’ve always had my receipt, though, and that probably makes a difference.

On the other hand, the mechanic shop we have work on our cars does pretty good work, but we always end up calling them to determine if the car is ready to be picked up (and when we call, it always is done). They always say that they were just going to call us, but it never seems to happen that they call us first.

Earlier this year we had an auto body shop do some work on our new(er) Avalon after I crunched the passenger side door. We took the car back three times to have them adjust the door because of excessive road noise. They were able to reduce the noise, but never got it back to where it was before the accident. I finally gave up. A couple of weeks ago I temporarily put a magnetic mount ham radio antenna on the roof of the car and strung the cable in through the passenger side door. The road noise completely stopped with the cable running through the door, and returned when I took the antenna off the car roof. Strange.

After dad died, I spent a lot of time working through issues with life insurance, medicare, and the veterans administration. All of the life insurance companies were straight forward and easy to work with. Surprisingly, the VA was also fairly easy to work with. Medicare, however, was a complete opposite. Somehow I felt like I was a criminal each time I had to talk with them. The wait times were horrendous and while on hold I was bombarded with voice-overs telling me to go to the Internet to resolve my issue. Then when I finally talked with someone, she kept interrupting me, then would go silent for minutes at a time. When I’d ask if she was still there, she’d just grunt. I guess she was putting information into the computer. I came away with a conviction that I never wanted to talk to her again.

I had to call back twice on some issues and each time talked with someone else. We eventually got to the right outcomes, but I kept adding to my mental list of people I never wanted to talk to again.

The Medicare people definitely took the award for worst customer service for the year. I don’t thing there was a “best”, but MacMall probably came the closest.

Ta ta for now!

It’s only fit that this post should be on the 13th of December. The only thing that would be more fitting would be if the 13th of December was a Friday. In ancient times, the number 12 was considered to be a “complete” number. The twelve months of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, twelve tribes, twelve hours on the clock, twelve disciples, twelve gods of Olympus, and such all represent the “completeness” of the number 12. The number 13, however, somehow transgresses the idea of completeness and because it’s also a prime number, it thus becomes irregular and unlucky.

For the incumbent (and generally well liked) mayor of Pocatello, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 was an unlucky day. He lost the election! And it all happened because of a dog named Balou.

It’s amazing how easy it is to roll a car. Earlier this year Nina and her niece Ashlyn were on their way to the fitness club on a morning where we had a little skiff of snow. Going down the hill, the car slid, Nina aimed it as best as possible at the hillside, and the car went up the hill and rolled over on the top. End of the Toyota Camry which led to the buying of another car. This time we decided to upgrade a bit. We really liked the Camry and decided to go up one model to an Avalon. We got a great deal, bought the car, and I swear it’s been jinxed every since. Three accidents later, it’ll be going back into the garage once again to get a part of the car replaced. Why is it that we can go years with no accidents, tickets, or car issues and within a few months we total a car, bang up the new(er) car, get rear-ended by an uninsured fraudster, and then get hit in a parking lot by someone who just drove off with no other information. Definitely strange.

We’ve been hearing about global warming and the rhetoric has been getting louder and more strident. That is, until a few weeks ago when somehow a bunch of emails from a European government-sponsored entity responsible for figuring out how warm things actually were in the year 1000 suddenly showed up on the Internet and were no longer private. They showed that not only were scientists cooking the temperature books (pun intended), but that the supposedly 2,000 scientists for whom global warming was a “foregone conclusions, end of debate,” was no where close to 2,000 and even most of those were in heated disagreement about the the data even before it was altered to better fit the hypothesis.

At question, of course, is whether the run-up in temperature in the past hundred years or so (even though the temperatures stopped going up a few years ago) is out of the normal high and low temperature ranges over the past two thousand years. The unaltered data suggests (although the data is very sparse) that our temperature profile is completely within the ranges experienced in the past. The truth always comes out. The strange part about all this is that the scientists thought they could get away with it.

Ta ta for now!