We finally made the furniture switch in the living room. We took the loveseat and the big easy chair downstairs and brought up these two recliners in the place of the loveseat. These are very comfortable chairs and it’s quite easy to take an inadvertent nap. The change also seems to open up the room some more as well. Next we need to get a floor lamp so we don’t have to turn on the lights over the dining table in order to read. Nina is in the middle of what must be a very funny book — somehow featuring a dog. Every once in a while (actually, more often than that), she’ll burst out laughing and then reread a page or so. She’s pretty sure that I’ll want to read the book as well. But, I’ll let her talk about the book in her blog if she wants.

There seems to be some political change going on as well. I went to vote right about 5 p.m. and the polling place was pretty busy. There was no line and only a short wait before I could get into a booth and cast my ballot. The ballot was two pages on both sides with several important state issues up for a vote. By the time I left the polling place about twenty minutes later, the line to vote snaked down the hallway to the front door. There were probably more than thirty people standing in line to vote. I think, at least here in Bannock County, Idaho, the turnout has been pretty good. That kind of a turnout usually means some kind of a political change — many people only go out to vote when they are stirred up about something.

There were a couple of fairly controversial items on the ballot. One had to do with the definition of marriage. Even though same-gender marriage is already prohibited in Idaho law, the proponents want this to become a constitutional ammendment and less subject to the whims of the legislature. Another issue purports to be a property rights protection but has folks on both sides hotly debating the issue. Finally, an item on the ballot has to do with school funding. If passed, it would mandate a certain level of school funding and require the legislature to meet those levels regardless of any other spending. The controversy about this one is that the Acting Governor (our governor was appointed to a federal cabinet post earlier this year by President Bush) called the legislature into special session to pass a bill significantly reducing property taxes and upping the sales tax by a penny (actually, making a temporary one cent tax permanent). I suspect that the school funding bill will pass which will hand the new legislature a real conundrum.

My stand on these issues? I voted for the marriage ammendment, against the so-called property rights initiative, and in favor of the school funding proposition. My expectation is that all three of them will pass. I’ll try to remember to post my score on this prognostication. Change is inevitable!

When we were at the Performing Arts Center last night, I took three very short movie segments with my little Sony point-and-shoot. Tonight I strung them together into a short movie segment which should work if you click on this link. The performance was very good and the drum segments were quite spectacular. The performance kind of told the story of the early groups settling Nova Scotia. We enjoyed ourselves. We also kind of have the process of getting in and out of the facility pretty well figured out. We have lovely seats which are also close the exit. We can park just outside the door and that makes for a quick exit.

Today was an interesting Church day. Our Bishop has taken a job in Salt Lake and moved this past week. Today a new Bishopric was installed. The new Bishop is a wonderful, very humble man who’s wife is the Relief Society President up at the Women’s Prison and Nina is one of her counselors. As the new Bishop was bearing his testimony, he said, “I’m not sure that I’m the best person to be Bishop — there have been some very good Bishops in this ward — but I’m sure than none of them have surprised as many people by being called as I have.” He will be one of the great Bishops. However, that definitely means some changes in Nina’s world. His wife will be released as the Kinport Branch Relief Society President (that’s the name of the branch that serves at the prison). When she’s released, her counselors will be released as well. Only time will tell what will happen as that Relief Society Presidency is reorganized.

We’ve had a good Sunday. The day is coming to an end and another workweek starts.

I’ve run out of candy (except for the “small stash” I kept for myself) and it’s 8:30 p.m. so the front lights are off and I’ve stopped answering the doorbell. We’ve had quite a few trick-or-treaters come by this very chilly evening. The weatherbug says that it’s about 26 degrees outside, but no wind which is a blessing for the kids outside. The doorbell just rang again…. at this time of the night it’s all teenagers on the prowl for candy. The little kids that started showing up around 5 p.m. were way cute in their Spiderman, Superman, and PowerRanger costumes, being shadowed by a parent, of course.

Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows Even, the evening before All Hallows Day. The tradition of Halloween comes from Ireland and is spreading throughout the world. It actually kind of makes sense when put into context with the other holy feast days. November 1st was designated by Pope Gregory III in the late 700’s as All Hallows Day — the day to celebrate a high mass for the saints. Hallows means “saints” so the name of the day eventually became “All Saints Day”. November 2nd is named All Souls Day based on the idea that those who died without being cleansed (through the ceremony of last rites) may be saved through the prayers (and for centuries the donations) of the faithful. Consequently, the night before All Hallows Day was the time when all of the devils and other churlish creatures emerged from the darkness only to be banished by church bells ringing across the land at dawn.

November 1st is a holiday throughout Europe and most of the rest of the Catholic world. For some reason, it is not here in the US and Canada. But we do have Halloween! Mmmmm! Chocolate!

I suppose that the Halloween still has it’s share of shenanigans. While I won’t claim any responsibility or involvement, I do remember a couple alleged pranks from my youth, such as painting a huge black devil on a sheet, climbing high on the roof of the Junior High School where the flagpole was situated, pulling the rope up out of the hole in the roof where it went down into the principal’s office, hoisting the sheet, and then clambering up the pole to tie off the rope so that the “flag” couldn’t be lowered. The sheet stayed up a couple of days until the fire department got a ladder properly situated to untie the rope.

The sheriff at the time I was in High School was not well liked by the teens in town. He had a practice of tailing a teenage driver around town until they did something wrong and then giving them a ticket. If the sheriff got behind you, the safest course was to turn on the right blinker, pull into a parking place, and turn off the car.

There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in town, except the time-honored tradition of “dragging main”. In our case it was to drive east on the highway to the Junior High School, make a U turn back to the only stoplight in town, then a right turn on Main Street to the railroad tracks, make another U turn back to the stoplight, then right to the bowling alley. Another U turn and do it all over again … at about 15 mph or so. Sometime during the night, particularly on a Friday or Saturday night, everyone who had a car or could get their dad’s car was out making the circuit, stopping and talking, and just dragging main. The Idaho Cafe was at the corner at the stoplight and on a Friday or Saturday night it was also full of high schoolers having a coke or a malt and doing what youth today call “hanging out”.

Well, the sheriff didn’t like all the kids dragging main and making all the illegal U turns (and occasionally drag racing on the four-lane highway going through town). He usually handed out a half-dozen tickets over a summer or fall weekend. So, some kids with whom I was quite closely acquainted decided to have a little revenge.

The sheriff’s daughter worked in the bar at the back of the Idaho Cafe. Sometime late in the evening he would stop, park his cruiser in the alley beside the cafe, and go in for a cup of coffee and a visit that would last about a half hour. When it was really cold outside, he’d lock the car and leave the engine running. That was the opportunity.

Halloween was on a Wednesday night. It was bitter cold. While the cruiser was parked in the alleyway it didn’t take long for a group of boys to mask off the chrome around the windows and spray paint the windows black along with the light bar on top of the car. With the heater going in the car, the windows were warm enough that the paint dried off well enough. Then somehow some keys were broken off in the door locks making it hard to unlock the car (keyless door locks hadn’t been invented, yet), and everyone disappeared. The car sat in the alley all night and eventually ran out of gas. The next morning it was towed over to the parking lot behind the County Court House — paint smeared all over the windows and onto the car in a few places.

The guilty were never apprehended. For some reason the sheriff and the local police department didn’t think that the debate club at school might be the culprits but concentrated on the “smokers” who had no idea who had done the deed. It was kind of fun seeing the guys who had been picked up over Halloween out scraping the paint off the windows of the sheriff’s cruiser the following Saturday morning. It never did look the same after that, however. When I came back home on leave after Air Force Basic Training the following September, the county had traded the almost-new Chrysler Cruiser for a new Ford — and a new light bar.

A few weeks ago I posted a couple of videos on YouTube and linked to them from my blog. One of them I called “Pocatello Overview” which was a pretty poor video taken from my little handheld Sony point-and-shoot camera. After processing and downsizing to fit YouTube, the video quality was pretty poor. Since it was a learning experience, I put it up on YouTube and blogged about it.

Surprisingly enough, that little piece of video has been viewed 147 times and been commented on five times (four were pretty negative, one wanted to contact other members of a women’s track team from about 27 years ago). The couple of segments on the Garden of the Gods have been viewed about fifty times and the first segment I did from inside the camper in the campground in Colorado Springs has been viewed over a hundred times.

In order to link to these little video pieces on my blog I had to set them up as “public”. The other options (private or by invitation) wouldn’t play in my blog unless the viewer had a YouTube account and logged in. I don’t know what these statistics mean, except that there are a lot of people with plenty of time on their hands and nothing to do. I’ve found some pretty good content on YouTube. For instance, a recent posting is “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (see the Entertainment category) and is very well done. I’ve found two or three pianists playing classical music and find them to be very good. I found one video of an artist who took a picture of her face every day for three years and then strung them into a video giving each picture less than a second of airtime. That was quite fascinating. There is also a lot of junk and I’d put my short videos into that category as well. I think it’d be fun to do something that would be at least interesting … but I don’t know yet what that would be. Meanwhile, I’m just ignoring the comments on my meager contribution.

We’ve had some visitors in the past couple of weeks. Last Saturday morning mom and dad along with my sister Eileen and her husband Phil came over for a few hours. While mom, Nina and Eileen went to a quilt show in town, dad, Phil, and I did some shopping. I wanted to get a couple of bicycles off the garage floor for the winter and Phil suggested we go to a bicycle shop. We did and I found exactly what I was looking for! http://www.hoister.com/ is the company. The bicycle shop only had one of the devices and I needed three. The other two are on their way (thanks to Internet shopping!).

Last night our niece Ashlyn and her girlfriend came down from BYU-Idaho for a couple of days of R&R (they’re out getting a video… or two or three… from Blockbuster to watch tonight). Our daughter Dawnmarie’s in-laws also came over this morning on their way to Idaho Falls. We enjoy Boyd and Jo a lot and we had a very good time visiting. We took them on a short tour of Pocatello and had lunch at a local eatery. Then I was on my way to a Church meeting and they left for Idaho Falls. We like visitors!

For the past several weeks Nina has been looking for an automatic food dispenser for Bradica (the dog). She finally found one that she liked and it is now set up. Getting the thing programmed wasn’t all that easy. The instructions were singularly incomplete and quite incomprehensible. It was like they had originally been written in Chinese or something and then translated by someone who had no idea what the machine did. So, the first night the feeder kept Bradica (the dog) well fed. She learned real quickly to wait around the machine because food came out of it! She can see the food in the holder, but can’t figure out how to get at it. The top comes off so the holder can be filled up. But the top doesn’t seem to be attached very tightly. That’s something I need to fix because sooner or later (and probably sooner) she’ll try to tip it over and might succeed! I’ve figured out the programming and it is now only dispensing food when it is supposed to. It is quite the magical time machine! No more hurrying home to make sure Bradica (the dog) gets fed on time. Very nice.

Somehow it just doesn’t seem possible … strange how your kids quickly become as old as you think you still are. But, time moves pretty relentlessly! We were invited to go down to Heather’s to help celebrate this milestone event and we had a very nice time. We had a grand time playing with grandkids and there certainly was no lack of food and laughter. Thanks, Heather for a very nice day. Fortunately for me, you don’t look like you’re forty … so I can still suggest that I can’t be old enough to have a forty year-old daughter (let alone a forty-two year-old son!).

I was reading online a while back about a study that said in a rather complicated way that in 1995 the probability of a person aged 60 living to be 90 years old had doubled in the twenty-five years since 1970. Then it had doubled again in the ten years from 1995 to 2005. I don’t remember what the probability numbers were, but I liked the direction they were going. Is this another type of a Moore’s Law? Right now 90 seems a long time away, but in reality it’s only half again as long as I’ve already lived. Maybe the odds are in my favor. Now let’s hope the quality of life is improving at the same rate.

Happy birthday, Heather. I took a few pictures and a few videos and posted them in my picture album.

After some searching on the Apple website, I found that iMovie cannot work directly with mpeg files. Apparently these files have the audio interlaced with the video rather than as a separate track. I needed another piece of software ($40) to convert the files into a format that iMovie can use. So, the files have been converted, mashed together with iMovie, made into a Quicktime format, and uploaded to YouTube. The link below should have both video and audio…. Also, embedding doesn’t work (yet). So, you’ll have to make do with the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1XoTyO-Hs

I’ve also been doing some other work the past couple of days. The picture album software needed a small update to warn about picture file names that are too long. The picture filename itself can be any length, but the database was set to 35 characters. If the filename was longer than that, it got truncated and then the picture wouldn’t show. I first thought I could check in Javascript after the files were selected and before they were uploaded, however, because of security reasons (a malicious person could intervene and cause a buffer overflow), that capability has been removed from Javascript. So, I can only check after the file has actually been uploaded. But, that’s better than no check at all.

I’ve also wanted approved comments to appear in-line with the post. That took about an hour this evening to figure out on my blog. Unfortunately, making that work is theme dependent. Figuring it out once should make it easier to plug into any of the other themes. So, if anyone wants that capability, let me know. I think it should be a configuration option and built into standard WordPress, but so far that hasn’t happened.

Three posts in one day. “That ain’t natural….”