This is the most amazing thing. We’re driving across Missouri (just going through Columbia on I-70), Nina is driving, I’m in the passenger seat, connected to the internet through my Sprint PCS 3G wireless card, posting to my web log. It wasn’t all that long ago that my connection to the internet was a dial-up connection to a BBS turned Internet Service Provider in Salt Lake City. After connecting, I’d fire up a terminal session and run Pine to read and send e-mail. That was in 1989. We’ve come a long way and I’m looking forward to seeing what all of this looks like in another 14 years.

We’re headed for New Wilmington, PA. We’ll arrive there sometime late tomorrow afternoon. It’s about 2:15 p.m. local time. We’re about two hours from St. Louis and another three hours from the Indiana border. We should get into Indiana without difficulty before stopping for the night. We’re pulling the trailer and have Kendra, Trevor’s daughter, with us. She’s got the back seat all to herself along with the small TV and has been watching videos non-stop.

The trailer is heavy. The front is filled with the furniture and stuff for Dawnmarie, the stuff we went to Spokane to pick up a couple of months ago. So far it’s stayed in position and we’ve got the rest of the trailer available to us. We left Colorado Springs around 1:15 p.m. on Thursday and drove as far as Russell, Kansas. We pulled into a campground, put the feet on the camper down, hooked up water and electricity, and spent the night. We didn’t even unhook from the Suburban. Dinner was at Pizza Hut, Kendra’s favorite food.

We got away this morning about 7 a.m. local time and have been driving pretty much ever since. We stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch and are hoping to be able to drive until 7 or 8 p.m. tonight. That’ll put us at Dawnmarie’s house mid-afternoon on Saturday. It sure is a long ways across country!

It sure is green out here in Missouri. We’ve started getting into the country where trees are growing, although not nearly like Pennsylvania. The wheat fields in Kansas were being harvested. Here in Missouri they’ve still got several weeks left before the harvest. It’s dang hot — only 85 degrees, but quite humid. I’m glad to be in an air-conditioned car. I’m also happy that we’re not in Kansas any more…!

I’ve been scanning more slides into the computer. Some of these are quite interesting! One of them
was taken when we stopped by Mt. Rushmore sometime around August, 1972. We had been in Idaho visiting my family and were in our Volkswagen camper. On the way back we drove through Yellowstone and camped in a national forest campground where a huge thunderstorm raged for several hours in the middle of the night. All the kids slept through the storm — that’s how tired everyone was. We pulled into a campground near Mt. Rushmore the next night where it was very cold and raining. We were literally freezing in our little camper. A pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer pulled in next to us, was set up within minutes, and they were cooking fried chicken within a half hour of arriving. We had a bit of envy that night.

The next morning we drove up to Mt. Rushmore. It was very cloudy and dark, but when we arrived the clouds parted for about a half hour during which time this picture was taken. You probably also need to know that the sweater I’m wearing is still hanging in my closet. It was a high school graduation gift from my parents.

The only other news is that my sister-in-law Christine is in the hospital in Salt Lake City with some pretty serious problems. Things are beginning to get better, however. She had a couple of heart attacks and threw off some blood clots which lodged in her legs cutting off circulation. She has diabetes which further complicated the situation. The medical staff has been able to break up and dissolve the clots and blood is now flowing properly in the legs. Tomorrow they’ll do a heart catheterization to determine what they can do about the heart attack. We’re quite concerned and hopefully things will continue to improve.

The picture shows Jim in the tiger-colored sweater, Dawnmarie, Heather, and me holding Trevor who would have been about 11 months old.

It has been a long time since the last post! Probably far too long. If I don’t do this regularly, the habit goes away and there’s no reason for anyone to ever look at the blog. I promise to do better in the future… (grin). I’ve received a new toy — a film scanner. I have some slides and pictures from when we lived in Japan from 1966 to 1968 and some of these pictures have really deteriorated. I’ve scanned a bunch of them into the computer and am getting them onto CD’s so that we can preserve them better than the film is being preserved. One of them is a picture of James and Heather along with Momo, our dog of that era. Heather was born in the fall of 1966 and she’s probably around six months old, so this picture would have been taken in the spring of 1967. We were living near a housing area called "Hyde Park Annex" just off base at Johnson AFB. At that time, Johnson was a shared base with the Japanese Self Defense Forces. The USAF used it as a housing area and as an emergency airfield. A few years later the base was turned over to the JSDF completely and the Hyde Park Annex is now a city park. A couple of the base housing buildings remain as offices. Just on base the Base Exchange and Commissary buildings are visible, but almost falling down. That part of the base isn’t being used by the Japanese at the current time. The base is open for visitors on the first Saturday of each month, but we’ve never been in the area at that time. I’d like to do that some day….

The house we lived in when this photo was taken still exists. During Heather’s visit to Japan a few years ago we went looking for the house and found it. A Japanese family lives there (of course). The roads have been rerouted and not much of the neighborhood looks the same, but the house was still there. The picture shows a patio area just outside a sliding door that lead into the living room. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house and a small bathroom. The kitchen and living room were essentially one large room with a small divider.

Momo means "peach" in Japanese. It’s also the main character in a famous Japanese fairytale. When we got the dog, a Japanese Spitz, it was just the tiniest fur ball and earned the name Momo. We gave the dog to another Air Force family with a number of kids when we left Japan in 1968.

The deck is finished once again for another year. I’ve also mounted some flower boxes along the deck railing and we now have flowers planted there. It looks quite nice. As part of this project I bought a new table saw and had fun building the mountings. I’m now ready to tackle a larger project. I think the next project will be a gate for the deck to keep Bradica on the deck and the deer off the deck. I just need to decide how best to build the gate. A swinging gate is easier, but a sliding gate, kind of like a pocket door, would be much more practical. After that I need to build a set of nice-looking shelves to go alongside the desk in the computer room so I can get this tangle of cords and computers out from under the desk.

In about ten days we’re headed east on vacation. We always manage to make life busy and complicated for us! We’d like for our granddaughter Kendra to go with us so she can be with some of her cousins. So Heather will be driving up to Boise and Wendy (Kendra’s mother) will meet her there with Kendra. A couple of days later, Nina will meet Heather halfway between here and Orem, Utah and get Kendra from Heather. Then Kendra will go with us out east. On the way back, we’ll go north into Montana, meet Wendy, and give Kendra back. Quite a shuttle! Hopefully Kendra won’t get too homesick while all of this is going on.

We had a major catastrophe in the corporate data center last Saturday evening. It was one of our maintenance weekends and a lot of work was going on in the data center. Part of that work included the semi-annual preventative maintenance on the battery-backed universal power supply. This device provides a couple of minutes of battery power should we loose city power to keep things running while the generator comes online. When the preventative maintenance was finished, the maintenance man switched the UPS from maintenance mode to normal mode and the device completely failed. We lost all power to the front half of the data center, where about two-thirds of the servers and disk arrays are located. Of course, they all went down immediately. Realizing that there was a problem, without thinking, the maintenance man switched the UPS back to maintenance mode, which put power back into the room from the standby generator. Everything started trying to power up again, all 180 computer systems. Doing that did a fair amount of damage to a number of systems. When power went down, he needed to have left the system in that state so that we could go turn off all the power switches. Then we could figure out what was wrong with the UPS, get that fixed, and then start bringing systems back up again. However, that wasn’t the case. All of my folks supporting the data center in Colorado Springs were called in to work and most of the production systems were back to normal around 6:30 Sunday morning. One of the large disk arrays failed entirely, so we still have some systems (primarily supporting the development and software testing functions) that have yet to come back into service. The disk array was finally repaired late this afternoon and hopefully sometime tomorrow afternoon we’ll have the data restored and those systems will start coming back online. This was as bad a disaster as I ever want to see!

We’re back home and the busy life has consumed us once again. Does that sound melodramatic enough??? Good thing it’s not entirely true! The trip to Mueller State Park was lovely and very refreshing and very tiring!

We had a total of two days at the park. We arrived around noon on Monday (Memorial Day) and left the park just before noon and Wednesday. I spent Monday and Tuesday morning around the campsite unwinding and shooting some film (nothing much to show for it, however). Tuesday afternoon we decided to take a bike ride on one of the trails near the campsite. The trail map suggested that the trail was about 2.7 miles long of moderate difficulty. It turned out that the trail we wanted to take wasn’t open all the way for bicycles and the trail we took was definitely more than "moderate!" As we went along, it continued to go down and down and down hill — all of which we had to go back up. It was impossible to ride back up, so we had to walk the bikes back up. I was absolutely dead tired when we got back to the campsite. I’m definitely not in any shape for that kind of a trek. The next morning we decided to just ride around the campground on the blacktop. I started to mount the bike and the chain broke! Oh dang.

We did drive to another trail which was rated as "easy" and 1.8 miles long. It wasn’t too bad a hike and the views were quite spectacular, but if that was an "easy" trail, then I’m not interested in anything more difficult.

What is it about this time of year when everything gets very busy? Perhaps it’s because winter is over, the days have turned warm, and everyone is suddenly on the go. The traffic on the freeway last Saturday was dramatically worse than it’s been all winter long. People seem to be trying to get everything done all at once. I’m hopeful that this won’t last very long and by the end of August we’re getting back to something much closer to normal. Meanwhile, we’ve got a very busy summer ahead of us that is turning out to be somewhat complicated. Normal, if it ever happens, is really looking good.