The video segment that didn’t work was to show some fall colors in Pocatello. For some reason, each individual segment shows just fine, sound and all. However, when I use iMovie on the Mac to combine them, the audio disappears. Very strange and a problem for a different day.

So, I’ll just show the fall colors in a still picture. This was taken from my back deck and is the hillside to the west of us. The fall colors are in full glory….

The Sunday morning session of the 176 Semiannual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has just concluded. Nina will be home from the prison in a few minutes. It’s a lovely day outside, partly cloudy with very pleasant temperatures. All added up, it’s a great day to be living.

Yesterday between sessions of conference I put some weed killer down on the front yard. In the coming few days I’ll do the same in the back yard and then put fertilizer down for the winter. I’m hoping to have a much more weed-free yard next year.

I’m writing this post on my iMac Mini computer. I put together a little video piece — four snippets of video — looking out over Pocatello, Idaho from the east side and from the west side. Using the Mac and iVideo, I made them up into a single segment and uploaded that to YouTube. I wanted to try using imbedded video to see how that works. Essentially, the plan is that you can click on the link and the movie will play…. There’s not a good way to test this, so here is the video segment!

Well, it didn’t work out so well…. There’s no sound!

I have a little Sony digital camera. In addition to being a great point-and-shoot camera, it can also take short video segments. So, I signed up for a YouTube account (they’re free), shot four really short segments of video while we were in Colorado Springs, and have uploaded them to YouTube. I’ve said that they’re private, so I don’t know how that exactly works. Anyhow, here’s the URL’s. Let me know if you can see anything or if I have to change the security settings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLBc0sT1BaU 1:18 in the RV in Colorado Springs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HH6sD84-fw 0:48 in the Garden of the Gods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL06Xypj4t0 0:20 in the Garden of the Gods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q700-t7dxZQ 0:36 in the Garden of the Gods

We left last Thursday to drive to Colorado Springs at about 10 a.m. We arrived in Green River, Wyoming, to spend a few minutes with my brother Perry and his wife Chris at about 1:30 p.m. Perry let me know that the blog server was down. So, it was down the entire weekend. We got home about 8:30 p.m. tonight and I’ve reset the confounded Qwest DSL modem. It’s been locking up fairly regularly the past couple of weeks and, of course, according to the logs it locked up about an hour after we left on Thursday. Something has got to be done about this! More on the trip tomorrow.

Nina and Pam drove to Salt Lake to spend the night at Heather’s house before Pam gets on the airplane back to Cleveland, Ohio tomorrow morning. So it’s just Bradica (the dog) and me tonight. She’s not much company — in fact, she’s sound asleep on her bed in the family room. I expect in about a half-hour she’ll be in here with me, prancing around in hopes of getting her night-time biscuits. She doesn’t get them until about 10 pm when she gets put to bed, but she’s always hoping that we’ll get around to it sooner rather than later.

It’s been a very busy week and weekend. Last night Nina and I went to the first event of the season at the Performing Arts Center. George Winston put on quite a show on the stage — mostly with the piano but also including two guitar pieces and one on the harmonica. His ten-minute fantasy on “The Saints Go Marching In” left us both breathless and tired. I’ve never in my life seen anyone play the piano so fast and all over the keyboard. It was definitely the hightlight of the program! We enjoyed last year’s programs so much that we purchased season tickets for all the events at the center. Unfortunately we’ll miss the concert next Friday evening featuring the Orchestra At Temple Square. We’ll be in Colorado Springs but the tickets will get good use by some friends.

Nina will be back tomorrow evening and we will have one or two days of normality. Then we’ll leave on Thursday for Colorado Springs where some very good friends are celebrating (in a big way) their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’ll take the motorhome and stay at the Garden Of The Gods Campground for the weekend. That just might be our last trip in the motorhome this year.

I had a few pictures from the past couple of weeks which are posted in the picture album.

Today was about 40 degrees cooler than two days ago. The clouds came in last night. The rain started mid-morning this morning. More rain is forecast for tomorrow as well. As I drove home from work, I looked east through the Portneuf Gap and first saw the clouds draped over the mountains and then I saw that there was –SNOW– on the tops of the mountains. Summer is finished. Winter is not far away.  I’m not ready for snow. Perhaps tomorrow I need to dig out the snow blower and make sure it’s ready for the season to come. I’ve just gotten used to summer and now it’s over. Dang!

Sometimes e-mail inbox includes a lovely surprise! This is one of them:

The accompanying note said:

It occured to me on my drive to Salt Lake that you were not using your camper to its fullest potential. I felt that this picture might give you an idea or two on how better utilize your camper. I firmly believe that it also offers an alternative to retirement….

Now that’s something worth thinking about!

Every Thursday evening, as long as the weather holds, folks meet down at the Corner Market on their motorcycles at 6 p.m. and head off somewhere for a few hours of riding. I haven’t been able to go the past couple of weeks, so tonight was the night. Now the school has started, the weather has cooled down, and the days are much shorter, the number of bikes has decreased markedly. Tonight we had four bikes, but that doesn’t matter much as I was ready to go anywhere. We took the old highway east towards Soda Springs and down through some canyons I haven’t ever been through. Two hours and fifteen minutes later I was back home, feeling good. I really enjoy these Thursday night rides. I’m also kind of surprised at how many people in our neighborhood have motorcycles! Every Thursday night someone new (to me) shows up to go on the ride. My little car has been in the shop for the past week getting a sensor replace for the air conditioning, so I’ve been riding the motorcycle everywhere I’ve needed to go. That has also been fun. We should have decent weather for another month or more, so there should be several more Thursday night rides.

Grandson Michael has started up his blog. He’s put in two posts and I’ve enjoyed reading what he has had to say. Nina told me today that Stephanie also would like to have her own blog as well, so I’ll probably build that for her tomorrow night. The more the better. Life is good!