We made a quick trip to Soda Springs over the weekend to visit with my mom and dad. We drove up Saturday morning and drove back Sunday late afternoon. It was a good visit in the middle of a business trip to California.

I needed to be in California on Friday, January 30th for meetings with AT&T and then be back in California on Wednesday for a dinner I’m hosting for a number of LSI Logic employees who are attending training in San Francisco. Since the Denver Temple was also closed for winter break at that same time, we decided to make a bigger trip out of the business trip. Nina and I drove to Orem on Saturday, January 24th. She stayed here during the week while I went out to California. I flew back after the AT&T meeting on Friday. That made it possible to drive up to Soda Springs on Saturday. Our granddaughter Stephanie went up with us and we really enjoyed her company and it was good for her to spend some time with my mother and father. After lunch on Sunday we drove back down to Heather’s to catch Michael’s tenth birthday party and the end of the Super Bowl. I’ll work from Heather’s on Monday and Tuesday morning and then fly back out to San Francisco. Nina will pick me up at the airport on Thursday morning and we’ll drive home. It’s been a busy, but good trip.

Mom and Dad are doing very well. The picture was taken with the camera on my phone while they were slicing the roast for lunch. The camera on the phone is only marginally useful. It has no flash and little capability. But, the picture is a keeper. Mother will turn eighty this year; dad will be eighty-three. They’re doing well, are in reasonable health, and are very active. We’ll go on the cruise to Alaska in a couple of months together and I’m really looking forward to the trip!

The week in California was most interesting. On Monday afternoon the fastest spreading virus yet to hit the Internet started coming into the company through e-mail. The vast majority of our employees didn’t click on the virus attachment and thus didn’t get infected. However, the virus did seriously affect our e-mail systems. The attachment was about 22k bytes in size which dramatically increased the average size of e-mail coming into the company. Every one of them had to be scanned for spam and have their attachments stripped. We had to bring on additional computer horsepower so we could begin to catch up and then rewicker the e-mail infrastructure to get ahead of the curve. We’ll be making major changes Real Soon Now. This one cost us, once again, real money.

Late last week my best friend’s mother-in-law passed away. She had been living with them for several years after her husband died in an apartment in their downstairs area. Her funeral will be this Tuesday and we won’t be able to attend. Meryl, I’m sure you are much happier now — no more oxygen tanks, being short of breath, pneumonia bouts, and all the other ailments. And, you’re back together with your husband. God Speed! We miss you, however. It’s a sad time for family and friends.

Today is the third anniversary of Trevor’s untimely death. He was killed in an autombile accident sometime during the early morning hours of January 18, 2001. We continued a small tradition this afternoon. Nina inflated ten helium balloons, put an inscription on each of the balloons, and we took them outside for release. We let them go one at a time. There was a breeze blowing towards the northwest which took the balloons past our neighbor’s house and out towards the ridge of mountains in the distance. According to the internet, latex balloons will rise to equilibrium altitude of around 7,000 feet and then travel with the wind until the helium leaks out and they descend. They generally don’t burst (whereas mylar balloons almost always burst). As best as I can figure, the balloons will travel fifty miles or more before coming to the ground. That means these balloons will come down somewhere around Deckers, Colorado. Trevor would like that the balloons will come down in the mountain wilderness.

We miss Trevor immensely. His death has left a big hole in our lives that will take many years to begin to fill. I’m sure that he wasn’t thinking about any of that when he and John were driving drunk and high on that fateful night. Sometime in the next life we’ll meet again and I’m looking forward to that delightful reunion. King Theoden, King of the Rohan, in the film The Lord of the Ring, The Two Towers grieves for the loss of his son saying, "No father should have to bury his son." I understand that feeling. Our kids are supposed to bury us, not the other way around.

We actually remember two deaths at about the same time. Our daughter Traci died shortly after her emergency birth on January 15, 1974, just after we arrived in Germany. Sometime in the next life we’ll meet her for the first time and it will be a joyous meeting. Greetings, Trevor and Traci. I hope that your lives are pleasant and happy!

We’d sure like to get some winter weather! The last snow in our neighborhood was on January 2nd. A fair amount of snow has fallen in the mountains, but not nearly enough. There’s still time, however, so long as it doesn’t snow this coming weekend! I have to go to California a week from Monday. It’s been a long time since we’ve been up to Soda Springs to see mom and dad. So, we’ll try to get this all together. We’ll drive to Utah. I’ll fly out to California and come back on the following Friday. We’ll go up to Soda Springs for the weekend and then go back down to Utah. I’ll fly back out to California for two days, and then we’ll drive back to Colorado Springs. The temple is closed for two weeks, so this allows us the time to make the trip. The weather can wait until we’re finished with this trip!

At the end of our stay in Chandler, Arizona, we drove down to Tucson and spent some of the day at the Pima Air and Space Museum along with a bus tour of the airplane boneyard at Davis Monthan AFB.

The Pima museum is a fantastic place. There were a couple of Mig 17’s and a (Polish) Mig 21 on display.

When I was in the Air Force (late 1960’s) I was a Chinese linguist. I generally didn’t fly reconnaissance missions where we’d see these airplanes. If a People’s Republic of China MIG came over water within 50 miles of our mission aircraft, we went home. However, I was sent as analyst on a late afternoon Russian reconnaissance mission up towards Vladivostok one day in 1967 as a replacement for a guy who fell getting on the bus to the flight line. Since I was handy, my manager said it’d be good for me, the Airborne Mission Supervisor agreed, so off I went. I do not remember much else about the mission other than we did get some company and I spent several minutes at the porthole watching in amazement. I think the escort was a Mig 17, but age has erased the specifics of that memory. I just remember being furious that I’d left my camera behind.

This was about the time that we on the Chinese side of the shop were paying a lot of attention to the Chinese Mig 21’s. For a long time what few Mig 21’s the Chinese had were quite a ways inland, west of Beijing. Surprisingly, a handful of them showed up one day on the coast at an airfield on the Shantung Peninsula and started practicing zoom climbs. Shortly after that one of our reconnaissance missions caught the action as one of these guys took out a Chinese National U-2.

All of the pictures from the museum have been developed. In the next few days, I’ll put together some pictures and commentary. Meanwhile, we’re enjoying the nice winter weather here in Colorado Springs!

We arrived safely back in Colorado Springs about 7:30 p.m. last night. The last three hours of the drive were pretty bad. Just north of Trinidad we drove into a snowstorm and were in the storm the rest of the way home. While we had no issues at all, several other cars and trucks were off the road. In one case just north of Pueblo, we were in the right lane going about 50 mph on snow-packed roads. We were coming up on a pickup truck in the left lane which had recently been plowed. I don’t like to be in recently plowed lanes if the snow is packed in the other lane as plowed lanes get pretty slippery. This proved to be the case. Just as we came up on the right rear of the truck, he lost control. The backend slid to the right, the truck did a 180 degree turn and went off the road into the median. Somehow he managed to come up the other side of the median and end up on the bearm of the southbound left lane, pointed south. He drove away…. Several others weren’t nearly so lucky.

I’ve put some pictures from our trip to Jaelene’s in the picture collection. Click on "Pictures" on the right sidebar and select "Samsal1203" from the list of pictures and enjoy. Happy New Year!