Today was one of those perfect weather days of which we get all too few. Clear skies, only a slight breeze, and temperatures in the upper 60’s. Just the kind of a day for working outside in the yard.

Nina worked one of the raised garden beds. She was busy loosening up the soil, pulling out the weeds, and getting the bed ready to be planted.

Meanwhile, I mowed the back yard. One time as I came by she looked up and said, “I thought this was Adam’s curse, not mine!” I offered to get out the little rototiller but she declined the offer. This bed did get planted this afternoon. The other raised bed pictured behind her will have to wait for another day.

Last year the tomato plants took up a huge amount of space in the raised beds. This year she’s decided to hang the plants upside down so I spent much of the afternoon making the apparatus to do that. I didn’t quite get finished before I had to shower and get cleaned up to to go a wedding reception. Pictures will have to wait until Monday when I get it finished.

As I left the Novell cafeteria yesterday I noticed this sign on the door into the credit union. It was big enough to call attention to itself. After reading the sign I decided to take a picture as it was definitely blog material. It got me thinking about the semantics of the sign and the phrase definition difference between “removing” some item of clothing and “taking off” some item of clothing. I have tried to do some searches on the Internet to no avail. After looking up both words on InfoPlease, I’ve pretty much decided that the slight difference between the two words isn’t very big.

The real heart of the matter is that, after reading the sign, walking into the credit union wearing a ski mask will probably result in the police being called. That’s a good thing. If I was in the lobby of a bank or credit union and someone came in wearing a ski mask, I’d probably dive for cover.

So why is the sign on the door? Inquiring minds want to know. Did they have an issue in one of their branches where someone came in wearing a ski mask, the police were called, and the person was just going skiing somewhere and needed to transact some normal customer business first? It still doesn’t compute in my brain. I’d think all normal people would know that wearing a ski mask into a bank might be received with some unwelcome police attention.

Our busy day was to end with us going to a wedding reception. We decided to first go to Applebees for dinner and then go to the reception for desert. That turned out to be a very good plan. We got to Applebees about 5 p.m. and had a nice dinner. We were finished and out of there by 5:45 p.m. The reception was not far from the restaurant and was scheduled from 6 – 8 p.m. We arrived in the Church parking lot with plenty of time to spare.

“Let me play a game,” Nina asked. Normally when I’m just sitting around waiting, I’ll pull out my Treo phone which has a set of Solitare games installed. At the restaurant Nina asked me if I was going to play FreeCell. I told her no, that if I was to play anything, it would be Yukon. She had never played that game before, so I gave her my cell phone and she did fairly well on the game before losing. She wanted to know if there were other games. I told her there were, along with a couple that I’ve never won. She switched over to Pyramid and lost. We had dinner, arrived at the Church with time to spare, and she wanted to try Pyramid once again. Several tries later, she still hadn’t won. The perfect losing record remains intact. I think I need to get a Solitare game pack installed on her phone so I can have mine back when we’re just sitting around and waiting….

Today was the monthly CTO Breakfast in Provo. Due to a scheduling conflict I wasn’t able to attend last month so I was looking forward to this morning’s event and I definitely was not disappointed. We had quite a discussion on Google’s Android phone, Twitter’s architecture, startups, funding, technology in schools, and much more. These are always quite invigorating sessions for me.

That meant I needed to be in Provo at 8 a.m. this morning. So, I left yesterday afternoon and went to our daughter Heather’s place in North Salt Lake and then went the rest of the way to Provo this morning. I decided to ride my motorcycle down which turned out to be a lot of fun. I managed to dodge all the thunderstorms on the way down yesterday, including waiting an hour in a McDonald’s Restaurant in Pleasant View, Utah for a storm to pass. I did get caught in one this afternoon on the way back, and spent a bit over a half hour under a bridge.

Motorcycles are allowed to travel in the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes in the Salt Lake area. That’s actually a good thing because the regular traffic lanes are dangerous! The HOV lane going into Salt Lake City doesn’t start on southbound I-15 until I am almost to the city center. I left Heather’s at 7 a.m. and the traffic was very heavy … and very fast. The posted speed limit is 65 mph. I pulled on going 70 and was getting honked at and a couple of drivers demonstrated their middle-finger IQ as they went around me. The honking pretty much went away at 75, but the traffic generally was moving ten to twenty miles an hour faster than that.

Eventually the HOV lane started and I moved into that lane. There is almost no traffic in the HOV lanes and what traffic there is moves between 65 and 70. I set the cruise control on 70 (that’s right … my bike has cruise control) and only got passed by one car coming behind me in the HOV lanes. Maybe there’s something about two or more people in the car that causes people to slow down?

Because the traffic is moving so fast, if anything goes wrong around me (that is, some other driver does something stupid), I’m dead. That isn’t my idea of a good day, so I try to keep some clear space around me. Rush Hour traffic, however, abhors empty space and it immediately fills up. The lack of traffic in the HOV lanes allows me to ride at a more reasonable speed and keep some clear space around me. I like HOV lanes specifically for that reason.

Whenever possible I don’t ride on the freeway when there’s traffic. Going down last evening I got off the freeway at the Pleasant View / North Ogden exit and went the rest of the way through town on US-89. That was a very pleasant ride. Coming back today I took US-89 through Logan, then up through Preston, Swan Valley, and back on I-15 south of McCammon. Again a very pleasant ride. My rear end was complaining about the amount of time in the motorcycle seat, though, by the time I got home this afternoon. It was a pleasant trip and a great meeting. Tomorrow will be much less interesting. I’ve got to fix the lawnmower (drive belt came off), mow the back yard, do some garden construction, and then go with Nina to a ward member’s home to rototill their gardens. The evening will be capped off by a wedding reception. Time for bed!

Thursday morning … mostly cloudy with big thunder predicted for the afternoon. I’m up earlier than usual as I have to be at Deseret Industries for a Church assignment at 8 a.m. this morning. In order to maintain their tax status, Deseret Industries needs a certain number of volunteer hours. So each Stake in the region gets an assignment, that gets passed down to wards, and then passed down again to people who “aren’t working”. The latter happens because the assignments are always during the normal work week, so normal people can’t do this assignment, only abnormal ones. Because I’m now officially retired, I fall into the abnormal class. I was kind of carping about it this morning in the bathroom. “All in all,” Nina said, “I’d rather go to jail.”

It’s Thursday morning. She goes every Thursday morning down to the Bannock County Jail to visit an inmate who is awaiting transfer back to the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. Once that happens, the Thursday morning visits (along with the Saturday morning visits and the occasional Friday morning visits) goes away and Nina will see the inmate in the normal course of Nina’s volunteer work at the prison. So, we joke a bit about her going to jail two or three times a week. And it’s not just the Bannock County Jail … she also goes up to Idaho Falls to visit an inmate incarcerated up there. The State Prisons don’t have enough beds, so inmates get farmed out to the County Jails, some of which have built jails larger than needed so they can be paid by the State of Idaho to house inmates.

Nina will be home from jail about 9:30 a.m. I’ll still be at DI, doing whatever, so they can rack up the volunteer hours. For me that’s still preferable to going to jail….

Some of the unofficial Idaho Primary Election results have been posted. Here in Bannock County, out of 38,839 registered voters, a total of 7,103 ballots were cast yesterday (18.3% turnout). I’m a bit surprised at how low the turnout was. Of the ballots cast, 4,183 were Democrats.

Judd the Convict garnered 115 votes (2.91% of the votes cast) in Bannock County. Statewide (still unofficial) he picked up 734 votes meaning that 15.3% of the votes he received came from Bannock County voters. I’m not sure what that means….

In Idaho we can also vote for “None of the Above” for the presidential nomination. 7.7% of the Democratic ballots cast were for none of Ms. Clintion, Mr. Obama, or Judd the Convict. Mr. Obama garnered 49.1% of the votes and Ms. Clinton received 40.3% of the votes.

On the Republican side, “None of the Above” got 3.6% of the votes, John McCain received 71.5% and Ron Paul 24.9%.

I’ve noticed, however, of all the counties in Southeastern Idaho, most do not have any place online where election results are posted. There are seven counties that make up this part of the state and four of the seven have no election information online, one has sparse data, and two have reasonably complete data. I think my new website needs to also include election results as well. The only source is the local newspaper which today only reported on a few of the races in the area, probably because of the difficulty in getting election information.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Judd the Convict, being held in a Texas prison, who applied in 14 states to be on the ballot for the Democratic nomination for President. Idaho only requires an application form plus a thousand dollars application fee to be on the ballot. Idaho alone put Judd the Convict on the ballot…. He’s getting more fame and notice than he’s worth!

The Idaho Primary Elections were today. The turnout was expected to be very light because it’s the day after a three-day holiday weekend and there aren’t many contested races. Idaho’s primary elections are partisan … that is, you vote either the Republican ballot or the Democratic ballot. On the Republican side the only contested race was for United States Senator to replace the infamous Senator Craig of Minneapolis Airport bathroom fame. On the Democratic side the only contested race was for County Commissioner. The Democrats held their caucuses in February to cast their vote for the Democratic Presidential Nominee, so although both Hillary and Barrack were on the ballot, It was only a popularity contest. There was one other person on the Democratic ballot for president … a convict in prison who filled out the form and paid the fee to be put on the ballot. He’ll get a percentage of the vote, I’m sure.

All states seem to have their election foibles; some just get more press than others. Recently Idaho’s Senator Larry Craig has garnered more than enough coverage. Because Idaho usually votes Republican on a state-wide basis (Pocatello generally votes Democratic), whomever wins the Republican nomination for Senator Craig’s seat will probably be the winner in November … that is, unless Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee and he brings long coat tails to Idaho (fairly slim possibility, actually).

Information about the candidates here in this area is also pretty sparse. To that end I’ve decided to try and put together a website covering all the candidates for the general election in November. It’s been a lot of work already and there’s a huge amount of work left to do to actually get a website for this built followed by a lot of work to get the data populated. But, I’m pretty sure that most people in Idaho have no idea who Keith Russell Judd is, but because he’s on the ballot for the nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate running against Hillary Clinton (intensely disliked in Idaho) and Barack Obama (liked well enough, but perceived to be inexperienced and not a friend of farmers), Judd the Convict will get a number of votes. Question is, how many people will vote for him just because he isn’t Hillary and isn’t Obama? I’ll blog about this again tomorrow.

The planned website will make that kind of information, plus a whole lot more, much more available. For instance, Karen Cordell is running for County Commissioner against the incumbent Len Whitworth. I was at a Rotary luncheon today and asked the seven other people at the table (a decidedly non-scientific sample) if they knew which of the two was the incumbent and no one knew. No one knew who Karen Cordell was or why she was running, even though she’s got signs all over town and has had some local press coverage.
Further, two people at the table didn’t even know that the Primary Election was being held today. I certainly can’t make a difference for today’s election, and might not be able to do much for next November’s election, but by then I should have the mechanics of the website worked out and be ready for all future elections in the area.

I voted, though, as did Nina. It’ll be a strange and unusual election day when we don’t get to the polls on election day!

I put a few pictures in the picture album from after the baptism last Saturday. Click on Pictures above and follow the link to the picture album.

While we were driving to Boise on Friday, I posted a blog entry about a fellow in Salt Lake City who’s daughter, during the course of the day, was diagnosed with leukemia. Phil (known as phil801 on twitter) is in the beginning stages of putting together a start-up company and the expenses of the course of treatment for his daughter are sure to be well north of a hundred grand. Phil has been blogging about everything that has been happening over the past few days and I’ve certainly appreciated being able to stay current with the situation.

A friend of Phil’s and a mutual acquaintance Jesse Stay put together a ChipIn donation page for anyone who might want to contribute towards their medical expenses. I’ve made donation and have put the donation widget in the far right column of my blog just under the SpyCam picture. Feel free to click and add your contribution. It’s a very worthy cause.

We spent a delightful day in the Boise area on Saturday. We stayed Friday night in a Hilton Garden Inn on the west side of Boise. The hotel turned out to be across the Interestate from the Boise Temple.

Whenever we’re traveling, we like to do a session in the temple in the area if at all possible and we’d definitely planned to do a session here. We were able to attend the 9:30 a.m. endowment session and afterwards had the opportunity to do some sealings. It’s a lovely temple and we enjoyed our time there.

After the temple (and a delicious ice cream cone at a drive through hamburger shop), we went over to my cousin’s house for the real reason that we were in the area. Her husband Sean was being baptized after having seriously investigated the Church for several years. He and his wife Cheryl along with their three boys are a class act and just wonderful people. When Cheryl told me about the impending baptism, I told her we would love to be there. They arranged the date such that we were available and then Sean invited me to be one of the speakers at the baptism.

The event was well attended from their ward. The baptism went off without a hitch. Afterwards we gathered back at their home for a backed-potato dinner and some delicious chocolate cake. Even though Cheryl made the cake especially for Sean, we didn’t leave much of it behind for him….

It was good to see my Aunt Nelma, Cheryl’s mother. A couple of months ago we made a sad trip to Las Cruces, New Mexico for her husband and my uncle Delon’s funeral. She is doing well as can be expected, but lonely as expected.

We had a great time and all too soon we had to leave to drive back to Pocatello as both Nina and I had obligations this morning in Church. I was substituting on the organ and Nina had to be at the Prison. We made it into bed about 11 p.m. last night and both found that the night passed all too quickly.

Thanks, Cheryl and Sean for a very nice weekend!