Tag Archives: snow

Sliding Into Spring

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May DayMay first is a major holiday in most parts of the world, somewhat akin to our Labor Day in September. Our May First dawned with about three inches of snow on the ground seriously interrupting a number of local events, none of which had anything to do with the real May Day. I’m reminded of a May 1st in Pamplona, Spain where a demonstration turned into a riot causing me (and the shop owner) to take refuge in a nearby building. Someday I’ll need to get my journal out and post the story of that day.

Never-the-less, May Day here dawned cold and white. I spent the day doing some work, catching up on blogs and email, and then upgrading the blog software on all the blogs on my server. I then made a short video about the upgraded blogging software and sent everyone who has a blog on my server an email with a link to the video. A couple of people have already used the new software and seem to have survived. It is actually a very nice upgrade and I like the new features. However, the software has gotten so sophisticated that I can no longer easily modify the code to fit my taste. There’s one really urgent change I want to make and I haven’t yet found the place to make the change!

By early afternoon the sun was out and the snow was gone giving the grass a small drink of water. Today will be a nice, sunny, chilly day … more like the first day of May should be.

Last Sunday we took a drive looking for possible pictures. It was a nice drive through gray farmland and hills. The canyon I wanted to drive through was closed by snow and fallen trees about half-way through so we turned around and took the long way home. Up to that point the only wildlife had been one frightened doe. Driving back towards Inkom, Idaho on the west side of the valley, we came across a farmer’s field being flooded by irrigation water where a huge flock of fairly large birds had gathered. Looking out into the field, I spotted this group of black birds with one white bird. While the white bird may have been a pigeon, I don’t think so as the bird is far too big for that. And that was our wildlife for the Sunday drive. In a couple of weeks everything here will be green. The trees will be in bloom. Flowers (particularly wild flowers) will make their appearance, and another Sunday drive will be in order.

Princesses and Snow

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DanielleGranddaughter Danielle sings in the International Children’s Choir and had a concert tonight. She gave me a quick pose after her mom finished fixing up her costume. She’s definitely Princess Picture Perfect!

I’m finishing up a couple of days in Utah. I took Chris with me to the OpenSocial Hackathon last night sponsored by Bungee Labs with great participation by Google. We enjoyed learning a bit more about the process for developing applications using Google’s OpenSocial specification. Orkut wasn’t working and my MySpace developer account hadn’t been approved yet (the approval came in today), so we did a lot of watching and not much hacking. The food was good, the event was fun, and we got back home about 11:30 p.m.

This morning I was planning to be in Provo for the monthly CTO Breakfast. But, my alarm clock didn’t work correctly (possible operator malfunction, though) and I woke up a half-hour later than I had planned. I hustled through the shower, dressed, and went outside to find that there was a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the snow was coming down rather furiously. In spite of that, I arrived only a half-hour late for the gathering in Provo. That was another very interesting and invigorating meeting with some really fun folks. Tonight I’m taking Chris with me to the monthly Geek / Blogger dinner at the Taj restaurant in Salt Lake City. After that fun event, I’ll drop him off back at home and then drive north to Pocatello. I’ll actually sleep in my own bed tonight. That should be a fun experience! (Isn’t there a Beach Boys song about ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’?) The visit here in Utah has been a lot of fun. Heather has really gone out of her way to make things comfortable, including a generous dish of Easter Chocolate in the bedroom, all of which will be gone by the time I leave tonight!

So, Where’s the Snow?

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Big storm forecast for Saturday … then Saturday night … then Sunday … and now Sunday night to Monday afternoon. Maybe 3-5 inches of snow. Stay tuned to see if it really happens.

It has been almost axiomatic that if the weatherman forecasts a storm, it won’t happen around here. They go north … or they go south … and bypass Pocatello entirely. There’s some kind of a weather phenomenon happening and I’m sure there are good scientific explanations. Regardless, we may get some much-needed snow but then again, we may not. The winter so far has been pretty good to us in terms of snowpack. In our watershed area we’re currently slightly above normal with a significant part of the winter still to come. From my own experience I’ve had much more time behind the snowblower this year than last year!

Most of the work on the new release of the Picture Album software is now complete. It’s working quite well (at least for me). The next step is to put together some instructions for the software. I think I’ll make several “screencast” videos demonstrating the system. I’ve also been doing some testing using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a place to park videos rather than putting them on my home system. Videos put on that storage system serve up much faster than they do from here which should make it a more useful experience.

The weekend has been very pleasant. This was Stake Conference weekend so I attended a leadership meeting yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. Nina and I then went to the adult session with some good friends at 7 p.m. This morning the general session was from 10 a.m. to noon. I always enjoy Stake Conference and this one was quite good. It’s been nice to be at home for the entire last week. Except for the aborted trip to the dentist the week has been quiet.

It has also been somewhat introspective as well. Friday the 18th was the seventh anniversary of Trevor’s death. I miss him terribly. Tuesday the 15th Traci would have been 34 years old. What does she look like? Does she know Trevor? I hope so. It’s easy to get maudlin (definition #2 when you look it up in Websters) thinking about them. Happy birthday Traci. I miss you, Trevor.

Fall and Winter

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Snow

We seem to have hardly had a fall! Or at least, it must have happened while we were somewhere else. Yesterday’s snow is just about gone here at the house, but the hills still have a pretty good covering. The scrub oak is still showing a fair amount of red color even in the midst of the snow. It’s a beautiful day outside.

I learned today that my first cousin once removed Rulon Dean Burton died last Friday evening. He had been in failing health for a few years. His funeral will be on Wednesday with burial in the Cleveland Cemetery. He was seventy-three.