Jaelene is celebrating her thirtieth birthday in Las Vegas and a couple of her siblings and friends are also there to help Jaelene slide into her fourth decade of life. Daryl had his 29th birthday a couple of days ago as well. January is the month of birthdays, anniversaries, and memorials. Nina put an entry on her weblog about all the events in the month of January. So, Nina and I are in Orem visiting and playing with the grandkids while Heather and Ty are celebrating in Las Vegas. I need to be back in Pocatello for an early Sunday morning meeting, so we drove down here in separate cars. Nina will stay until later Sunday afternoon. I’ll drive back tomorrow evening.

I am quite incensed with our government and military right now. We have become no better than the folks we are trying to defeat. Over the past couple of days the news has reported that we have been arresting women in Iraq and putting them in prison in an attempt to ferret out their husbands. No wonder the militants kidnapped a woman reporter in a demand for the US to release women from prison. I have become more and more agitated at our government’s lying and deceit in Iraq and this only adds to my furor. We are not this kind of people. We are supposed to live by the rule of law. The fact that those who oppose us do not live by rule of law or that they are mired in the muck and mud of lying and deceit does not in any way give us permission to do the same. It’s time to start doing something more than just write letters. However, I have no confidence that the Democrats are any better. It’s time to throw the whole bunch out. Pardon me while I go throw up.

A Picture Share!

Originally uploaded by Roland K Smith.

Daniel is a master at Mario on the GameCube! I just keep getting killed.

I came home from work today to a wonderful smell in the house. Nina was baking bread. There are few things that smell as good as bread baking in the oven! It was ready to come out shortly after I got home so I feasted on a large, hot piece of bread slathered in butter. That sure was delicious. Nina has made bread the past couple of weeks and home-made bread is just so much better than the stuff from the store. Great stuff.

I did manage to get quite a bit of stuff cleared away off my desk and put away somewhere else. I was noticing in my web server logs that a couple of files in the William P Smith collection were missing and fixed those broken links. That got me back into the genealogy mood once again. It’s time to redo the William P Smith web site and make it a lot more user friendly. There is more genealogy information available now than there was about eight years ago and all of that information needs to get into the website. It’d work a lot better served up from a database and generated on the fly rather than being static web pages that take a lot of manual maintenance. I think this could keep me busy for several weeks getting everything ready to be put into a new web look. And, of course, I’ve got all of the other family history stories that need refreshing as well. This could be fun. I haven’t visited with Becky Porter, the woman who put together the original collection in several years and I probably should get together with her once again and see what she’s found in the meantime. This will also be quite fun … and good!

I’m sitting in Stake Conference trying out my new Treo phone’s web browser and the ability to get directly into my weblog. We’ll see how well this works. the technology just keeps moving forward!

A few weeks ago the Second Counselor in the Stake Presidency called and asked me to talk in the Saturday evening session of Stake Conference. That was tonight and I’ve accomplished my assignment. It was a good meeting and worth being in attendance, even if I was one of the speakers. Tomorrow morning will be the Sunday morning session and we’ll be finished with conference until November when our Stake will be part of a multi-stake conference and a video broadcast from Salt Lake City.

We got more snow over night which I moved off the driveway and sidewalks this morning before going over to the Stake Center to help set up chairs. Throughout the morning we had several snow squalls and by afternoon all of the weather had moved eastward. The people who go up in the mountains to measure the snowpack say that all of the zones measured in southeastern Idaho and western Wyoming are 125% or more of normal. While the drought probably isn’t over, this should make a good dent in it.

Our day was pretty quiet. I spent much of the day cleaning off my computer desk and reorganizing drawers. I think I’m about halfway finished with what I need to get done. I’ll spend time on this over the next week during the evening and see if I can’t get more working space as well as make much better use of the storage spaces on the desk. Nina has been sorting through letters and papers and has made all kinds of lovely finds (including finding a $100 bill … money that we had forgotten about!). It’ll soon be the case that the only boxes left downstairs will be my boxes and my junk. The truly daunting task will be sorting through the thousands of pictures we’ve taken in the past ten or fifteen years, most of which have no redeeming value. The rest will need to be organized and some put on the computer. So, I’ve ordered a new flatbed scanner that we can use for this activity. We’ll be able to plug it into any of our computers, meaning Nina will be able to convert some of her photography into digital images.

Speaking of digital images, the company that makes my really nice digital camera, Konica Minolta, announced this week that they were exiting the digital camera and film making business and selling the digital imaging business to Sony. I’ve used Minolta cameras for many years and have really liked my new Minolta digital camera. However, it’s the last one in that line. Not necessarily comforting. Meanwhile, Nikon announced that they were exiting the film camera business and were going to focus on digital imaging going forward. It kind of sounds like my next digital camera will be a Nikon camera….

A Picture Share!

Originally uploaded by Roland K Smith.

Weather that even ducks won't fly in! Near our house is a small pond popular with aquatic birds. There are several hundred ducks waiting for better weather!

I’ve had a couple of people ask about the fellow that went to the emergency room. Roy is fine — a bit battered and bruised — and fortunate that he was wearing his seatbelt. He would be in much worse shape otherwise. The hill he went down was very steep and the drop was about 50 feet. His vehicle was totaled, but that is completely replaceable.

I’ve been using my iMac Mini much more often. I’m finding I really like many of the things that this computer and operating system do — except that javascript isn’t running well in the Safari web browser. That I need to fix or else get the Firefox browser and use that instead. So, what do I like about this computer?

• The user interface is very nice. It’s easy to find capability and the interface is more intuitive than most on a Windows machine. It’s been hard getting used to the window controls being on the upper left (minimize, maximize, and close) rather than on the upper right of the window
• The iLife products — in particular the photograph and dvd programs. They are very easy to use and the result looks quite professional.
• The widgets!! There are dozens of little funky widgets that can be put on the desktop. The two that I use a lot are a little window with the current weather conditions and another that has the latest news headlines. There are many, many more
• The interaction with the other servers on the network. The Mac operating system is quite similar to Linux and Unix operating systems, so getting to my other computers and administering them is actually easier on the Mac than it is using Windows.
• Its fast! I can only imagine how much faster the Macintosh computers will be on the new Intel chipset

My brother Perry had another chemo treatment yesterday afternoon in Salt Lake City. About 3 in the afternoon his icon popped up on Instant Messenger, so I pinged him. He was siting in "the chair" getting infused. Since there is WiFi in the treatment room, he had his laptop computer running and we chatted through IM for the rest of the afternoon. It’s kind of a wierd sensation chatting over the internet with someone important to me while he is getting a chemo treatment. Technology is an amazing thing.

Five years ago I was in San Jose in a meeting when my cell phone rang. Daryl called to tell me that Trevor had been killed in a car accident. The words "Dad, he didn’t make it…." are etched in my brain. A good friend and collegue left the meeting and began making arrangements for me to fly to Salt Lake City. The only flight available was about an hour later from San Francisco, meaning I had to leave immediately. That good friend also got for me the phone number of the Denver Temple. Nina was working at the temple at that time. Somehow, the receptionist at the temple was able to sense that something was terribly wrong when I called, so she arranged for Nina to be able to take the phone call in a private room. Five years later and it’s very hard to write about that evening. Trevor, I miss you and am looking forward to the day when we’ll see you once again. All of our children are wonderful, keepers, delightful people, and dear to my heart. I love them and love hearing about what they are doing and what’s happening in their lives. Trevor’s mortal clock stopped five years ago and sometimes I think about what might have been. I truly miss the association with him. And I appreciate my association with our other children even more. Thank you all, scattered across the county, for being there, for living good lives, for being part of our family. I love you all.