I’m at the Colorado Springs airport waiting for my flight to Salt Lake
City to board. That’ll happen in about twenty minutes if all goes well.
The airport is actually pretty busy with many folks flying home and some
business men headed out for appointments tomorrow morning. Delta’s
flight to Cincinnatti is seriously delayed this evening due to some kind
of a problem with the inbound flight which is putting a lot of people in
problems of getting to work tomorrow morning. My flight is supposed to
be on time for which I’m happy.

As it is, I don’t get in until 10:44 p.m. tonight and I’ve got meetings
starting at 7:15 tomorrow morning. It’ll be a short night! It has been a
good weekend. I’m glad I was able to work things out to be here. We got
quite a few things done Saturday. I enjoyed “visiting” our home ward
church on Sunday and got this small addition to the weblog finished
(the proof will be if this post shows up on the weblog!). Today was more
small things, including fishing a dead mouse out of the sump pump area in
the basement. We also cleaned out a bunch of stuff in the garage, hauled
books up from the basement that are going to Goodwill, washed off the
deck, and stopped by the next-door-neighbor’s BBQ party. Things in
Colorado Springs are really winding down. Both of us are ready to be
moved — and ready to be on the cruise ship! Meanwhile, I’ll get on an
airplane to go back to work tomorrow. That’s also exciting.

Well, I think I’ve got everything working the way it should be. E-mailed
entries appear in the weblog as expected. It now sends out the e-mail
notices to subscribers, but will only send one notice per day. Since I’m
leaving tomorrow to go back to Pocatello, there isn’t much more
opportunity to test and do further verification.

Today has been a nice afternoon at home. I’m looking forward to the time
in the near future when we’re in our new home and things have settled
down to a reasonable pace. The biggest question that I need to get
solved is what to do with the home network while we’re in temporary
housing in Pocatello. Cable One has digital cable service with 4mb
download speed and 400k upload speed along with all the small office
services I need for right at $100 a month. Meanwhile, Teton Wireless
also has wireless service, 1mb up and down, for $60 a month. Wireless
seems to have more latency and some of the services I need aren’t
available from Teton Wireless. Further, we’ll be in an apartment for up
to a couple of months then moving to the new house and I’ll want that
service to move with us. The current owners of that new house are using
Cable One as their provider and it’s working very well for them. I think
I’ll probably start with Cable One and see how the service works out.
While the price difference is about $500 a year, it might be worth it.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. We’ll go over to the neighbor’s house in the
afternoon for a BBQ and then I’ll head for the airport about 4:30 in the
afternoon. I’ve got meetings VERY early Tuesday morning, so that will be
a long day. I’ve enjoyed the weekend at home and one week from
yesterday, we’ll be on a cruise ship headed up the Inside Passage
towards Juneau. Now that should be FUN!

With some time on my hands on this lovely Sunday afternoon, I've been 
working on some new code for the weblog to allow me to send a post in by 
way of e-mail. So far it's working pretty well. A program periodically 
looks to see if there's a new e-mail in a specific folder, to see if it 
has certain keywords in the message, and if so, then loads the e-mail 
into the weblog.

The e-mail posting doesn't allow any HTML formatting since that could 
potentially contain malicious code if someone figured out the security. 
Consequently, it is formatted a little differently than the other posts 
and contains a different category name to differentiate it as well.

I've got just about everything working correctly. The next piece is to 
get the e-mail notifications working that a new post has been added to 
the weblog. Since it might be a lot easier to post stuff to the weblog 
through e-mail, it is possible (at least until the newness wears off) 
that occasionally more than one post will happen in a day. As part of 
this upgrade, I plan to modify the e-mail notification process first so 
that only one notification can be sent on one day. No reason to spam 
everyone with a bunch of "Roland's weblog has been updated" messages!

I flew back to Colorado Springs last night for the holiday weekend. I’ll return to Pocatello on Monday evening and back to work on Tuesday. Since most of my normal day-to-day things are in the RV in Pocatello, I kind of feel like I’m "visiting", rather than returning "home". It’s kind of a strange feeling!

The trip was somewhat eventful. A strong storm was moving through southeastern Idaho on Friday and it had rained off and on for most of the day. The flight out of Pocatello was delayed by about 20 minutes and was a very bumpy ride into Salt Lake City. The airplane is a small twin-engined turboprop that holds less than 30 people. There were five of us brave souls on the flight. In Salt Lake City, only one runway was open for business and all departures and arrivals had to use that one runway. Consequently, everything was running late. My flight to Colorado Springs was delayed by an hour, meaning that I didn’t get here until after 11 p.m. The flight to Colorado Springs was completely full as an earlier flight had cancelled. Once we got east of the Wasatch Front, the weather cleared up and the ride was uneventful for the rest of the trip.

We spent this morning doing errands and small things. We met up with our next door neighbors, Pam and Gary, for an early dinner at an Italian restaurant on the east side of town. We’ve eaten there once before and found the food to be very good. Our second visit confirmed our first time there. The food was very good and the conversation was lovely. It just may happen that we’ll arrange to do a Mediterranean cruise with them in a year or so. They’re very fun people to be with and have very good standards.

Meanwhile, I’m very tired. I was hoping to spend some time in the hot tub before going to bed tonight, but I think it’s too windy to be comfortable out there. I’ll check it out in a half hour to make sure. In the meantime, I’m going to visit the family room!

Nina is back in Colorado Springs and I’m in Pocatello. She’s getting the last few items done in Colorado Springs and I’m getting things ready for us to take up a life in Pocatello. The home-away-from-home is our little RV parked at a campground near my office. The Cowboy RV Park is a part of a nice mobile home park and seems to do a very good business. A month’s stay isn’t very expensive and the overnight rates are also very reasonable. The park has a very nice laundry and is clean and quiet. Most people stay overnight and are gone the next day but there are about ten units that have been at the campground at least as long as I have.

Pocatello is a nice, small town. It’s bisected right down the middle by the railroad and there aren’t may roads connecting the west side with the east side. Most of the shopping and stores are on the north side of town, and of course, we’ll be living in the far south side. While it probably isn’t as far from our new house to the Home Depot on the north side of Pocatello than it is from our Colorado Springs house to the Home Depot there, it seems long for the size of town. There is a small mall (which I haven’t visited, yet), a Super WallMart, a super Fred Meyers (similar to a WalMart), along with a ShopKo and a Home Depot in town. There are a number of small restaurants, none of which we’ve patronized, yet. The town is long and narrow along a north-south axis. The near southside is dominated by Idaho State University. The center of town is pretty much dominated by the Union Pacific Railroad, which was for many years the lifeblood of the city. The Interstate runs along the east side of the city and then divides with I-15 continuing north through Idaho Falls to Missoula, Montana, and I-86 branching off on the north side of Pocatello going west to Boise. I-86 divides Pocatello from the neighboring town of Chubbuck.

Idaho Falls is the next large city north of Pocatello about 55 miles. The Temple is located in Idaho Falls. I did a session at the Temple last night, the first time I’ve been in that temple since Nina and I were sealed there 37 years ago. It is a beautiful temple inside and I had a nice, enjoyable session.

Tomorrow night I’ll fly to Colorado Springs for the weekend holiday. It’s supposed to rain and be pretty lousy weather the entire weekend in Pocatello, so I think I’m getting the best part of this deal. I’ll fly back on Monday evening with meetings starting EARLY in the morning on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the RV has been a nice place to stay. It is small (perhaps "cozy" is a better word) but is more than adequate for my needs. It makes a very good home away from home!

The move to Pocatello is much closer today. Our house in Colorado Springs is under contract with a solid backup offer from another party. We made an offer today on a house and will learn tomorrow morning if the offer is acceptable. It’s a lovely home. The current owner has been in the house for just a few months and is being transferred out of town. As soon as we walked into the house, Nina knew it was the right place. We did look at one other house which is a beautiful home but on a poor piece of property. That house is right now the "backup house".

Nina’s been looking at houses all week. Last night we were pretty disappointed with what she’s been able to find. Just as we thought the options were very limited, our Realtor came up two excellent properties.

Land is relatively inexpensive in Pocatello when compared to Colorado Springs. House prices reflect that difference. However, when the land is subtracted from the price of property in both locations, it appears that building a house is more expensive by a couple of dollars per square foot. We did find what seems to be close to the perfect house.

The yard isn’t finished, but the current owner has scheduled the grass to be put in, which would finish that work. If all goes well, we’ll be moved in about June 24th or so. The house in Colorado Springs will close on June 17th. The movers will arrive on the 14th, pack for two days, and load on the 16th. We’ll close the next day and head for Pocatello. We’ll close on the new house the following Monday, and then move in over the next couple of days. Then the Colorado Chapter will be completely closed. It’s a bit nostalgic. Trading Houses — a good thing to do occasionally.