Danielle’s baptism was at 1:30 this afternoon. She looked like a little princess all dressed in white. I took some 70 pictures before and after the baptism. One of the wonderful things about digital images is they are so very easy to delete!

Heather arranged the entire program which included almost the entire family. She lead the music, Grandmother Husky played the piano. I said the opening prayer and Ritch said the closing prayer. Stephanie sang a song, Michael read a scripture, Nina and Christopher gave talks. Of course, Ty did the baptising and confirming. It was a lovely afternoon.

We’re now eating, visiting, and watching TV. Ty’s mother and stepfather just left to drive part way home to northern California. The weather their direction is forecast to turn badly tomorrow afternoon. There’s plenty of good food. I’m enjoying life!

Congratulations, Danielle!

It’s a lovely Saturday morning in Orem, Utah. I flew back last night and the flight was early! It was snowing. I’m sure those two facts didn’t have anything to do with each other, however. There isn’t a lot of snow on the ground, the snow is very fluffy, and the ground isn’t cold enough yet for it to stick anywhere except on trees and grass.

We’ll leave tomorrow morning early in order to get through the mountains in daylight. It’s supposed to warm up tomorrow — into the mid 50’s.

We’ve enjoyed our time here in Utah. Nina feels that we haven’t been here nearly long enough. She’s enjoyed the opportunity to visit with the grandchildren and with old friends. Being here in the RV has also worked out quite well. Nina has figured out the best sleeping arrangement for her. It’s been cold enough that the furnace is getting a good workout. Hopefully there’s enough propane to get through the night tonight. We won’t need it again until we go on the next trip. As it looks right now, that trip won’t be until next year.

We’re headed to Arizona for Christmas. No RV on that trip as there’s no place to put it while we’re there. The company has decided to shut down during the holiday. I’ve already scheduled all of the days off except one. No problem — we’ll just take another day of vacation! I’m sure we can find something to do with that day. However, having to take that time off is a bit ominous … revenue must not be coming in as expected. Third quarter was just OK and that’s usually our best quarter of the year. I’d like for business to get a whole bunch better as I’m looking for a $25 stock price!!

Today is a busy day and the reason that we’re here. Danielle is being baptized this afternoon (pictures to come). All the grandparents are here for the event. She’s the last of Heather’s family to be baptized. Stephanie played in a piano recital this morning. She played two duets with her piano teacher and played very well. She has a lovely talent — and not just at the piano. She’ll be singing a song at Danielle’s baptism this afternoon. Stephanie just seems to excel at everything she does. Stephanie is on the right and her piano teacher is in the red dress. Recitals are a bit different here than I’m used to. Students not only play, but get evaluated by other teachers. It’s hard enough to play well and adding the judging to it must really add to the stress.

Every once in a while a little snow shower breaks out, but the snow is melting faster than it comes down from the sky. It’s a lovely day in Utah!

Greetings from Milpitas, California. As I write this I’m sitting in my cubicle in the middle of the office building in not-quite-downtown Milpitas. Where is Milpitas, you ask? It’s situated between San Jose, Santa Clara, and Fremont. Squeezed between them is probably a better description. It’s not much of a place as size or influence goes. The section of the 880 freeway that goes through Milpitas has long been the major bottleneck. Everywhere else the freeway is 4-5 lanes wide except through Milpitas where it was 2 lanes wide. So, for the past two years (and well into the foreseeable future) they’ve been widening the freeway. It’s now four lanes wide each direction, but only two lanes each way are open. There is no conceivable reason why…. Perhaps there haven’t been enough accidents on this stretch this year?

In the news of the day, a hearse travelling along a motorway near Duesseldorf, Germany, overturned ejecting the coffin, ejecting the corpse from the coffin, and scattering coffin nails along a stretch of the highway, closing the road for more than four hours while police cleaned up the scene. The driver of the hearse fell asleep, woke up startled, and jerked the steering wheel causing the accident. What a wild ride for the corpse and those following behind! Look, mommy, it’s Halloween!

Southern California seems to be burning up. Huge wildfires stretching from the Mexico border to Los Angeles are causing massive damage. More than a thousand homes have been destroyed and many more will be lost until the weather begins to cooperate with the firefighting efforts. One lady interviewed on TV this morning talked about what she had taken from her house. She had gathered up her “computer hard drives and a couple of pictures.” Sounds like someone with the right priorities…!

Today is a day of meetings. One down already and three to go. Life is good — and even though there are billboards everywhere touting California Cheese, I still haven’t seen any. Just lots and lots of crazy drivers.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in Orem, Utah. We arrived early this morning for a short “vacation.” I’ll fly out tomorrow morning early for San Jose and Nina will stay the week. I’ll fly back on Friday evening (Halloween) and we’ll drive back to Colorado Springs on Sunday, November 2nd. The reason for the trip is that our granddaughter Danielle will be baptized next Saturday. The trip over here is part of the business trip. Sure saves money to do the trip in this fashion.

We drove over in the new toy! We finished loading up about 10 on Saturday morning and drove to the temple. We worked there until about 3 p.m. and by 3:30 we were on our way to Utah. The RV is now parked alongside our daughter Heather’s house where it’ll stay the rest of the week. Everything worked very well and the vehicle made the trip with no issues. It took about 9 hours to make the trip from the Denver Temple, including a short stop in Glenwood Springs for dinner. That last couple of hours from Green River, Utah, through Price, up and over the pass and into the valley seems to take a very long time. We were very happy to get here.

Heather had a nice family dinner this afternoon after church — turkey, stuffing, and all the extras that make up a wonderful Sunday dinner. It was almost like a Thanksgiving dinner. Heather sets a lovely table, so it was worth a picture of the table before we all sat down and had dinner. Daryl drove down from Salt Lake City to join us for dinner as well.

We attended church meetings with our daughter’s family. The featured speaker was a recently returned missionary from South America. He had just started speaking when he said that he needed to sit down as he was feeling light headed. An instant later he had passed out at the pulpit. A couple of folks helped him to the floor and a member of the bishopric stepped to the pulpit and began speaking as though nothing had happened!! It turns out the young man has an occasional problem with blood pressure dropping rapidly, generally when he’s speaking in Church! After the meeting, my son-in-law Ty asked when the last time was I’d seen someone pass out in church. I told him it wasn’t since yesterday…. We have a couple of medical emergencies a month on our shift in the temple, including one yesterday. Both Nina and I were sitting there quite flabergasted as the response was quite different than happens with the EMT’s in the temple!

The meal is done and things are being cleaned up. We’re getting a lot of unwanted help from Bradica (the dog). She’s discovered Heather’s Halloween candy and was just now scolded for climbing into the dishwasher and trying to clean off some plates. Fortunately Heather wasn’t around to see… It might have been too much! After I finish posting this, I’ll finish up getting things ready to go tomorrow. The airport shuttle driver should pick me up between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. so it’ll be a fairly short night’s sleep.

The week in San Jose will be, as usual, quite busy. There are a lot of meetings scheduled and I hope to get up to the temple for at least one session.

I’m enjoying the RV and the time here in Utah. I’m looking forward to getting back here in a few days!

Today was one of those drop-dead gorgeous fall days in this part of the country. The skies were clear blue — not a cloud in sight anywhere — no wind, and temperatures in the mid-70’s. We’ve had several days like this and the trend is forecast to continue for several more. To take some advantage of the day, we took a short drive after church to the Garden of the Gods.

The Garden of the Gods is a city park about five minutes from our house. Spencer Penrose, one of the city founders and fathers, donated the park to the city with an endowment fund so that it could be free forever. Because it was such a lovely day, there was a lot of traffic in the park and lots of people enjoying the day. This picture is probably the most popular picture taken from the most popular picture taking location. There are walking trails, bike paths, horseback trails, and one-way roads through the park. We enjoy driving through the park and have even ventured there with bicycles. The rocks are also available for climbing (technical climbing only) with the appropriate permit. We saw several people climbing on this drive. The fire department regularly has to rescue people who have climbed beyond their ability, or more often, who have climbed without the proper equipment and can’t negotiate up or down from their now perilous perch.

As I write this I’m also kind of watching the second game of the World Series. Neither of the teams I wanted to watch made it into the series — the Cubs lost to the Marlins and the Red Sox lost to the New York Yankees. The Florida Marlins handily won the first game last night. Tonight the Yankees seem to be in command with a 6-0 lead in the sixth inning. As I was growing up in Soda Springs, Idaho, the World Series always happened on the same weekend as General Conference. The radio station that broadcast conference was also the station that broadcast the World Series. I was more interested in the series than in conference in those days, and couldn’t wait for conference to be over so I could listen to the ballgames. Roger Marris and Mickey Mantle were the home run kings in those days and the Yankees and the Dodgers seemed to be perennial foes in the big game. The game of baseball has certainly changed since those days!

The Marlins will likely lose this game. However, it won’t make any difference other than to a few rabid fans. Little children in India will neither be fed nor starve over the outcome. No one’s celestial salvation will be affected. And I certainly won’t lose any sleep over the game, either. I’m just enjoying the absolutely lovely weather!

I’ve been scanning in a number of slides that were taken many years ago. These pictures start with when I was studying Chinese at Yale University up through 1973. I’ve probably got another fifty slides to scan. Many of the pictures bring back great memories, so I’ve loaded them onto the web page. Click on the Pictures link on the right side of the page, then on Picture Topic Index, and then select the AncientHistory — Pictures From the Past link. Hopefully you’ll also find some of these pictures interesting!

Over the 4th of July holiday in 1964 we went to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. It was an interesting trip, somewhat memorialized in the Caribou County Sun newspaper.

We had been in San Angelo, Texas, stationed at Goodfellow Air Force base for less than a month after finishing Chinese Language School and getting married. I was in a training program to teach me how to use the language skills I had learned in Connecticut. A bit of information about the training program is documented on the Goodfellow AFB web page. See www.goodfellow.af.mil/~ho17/ho/basehist.htm
for more information. A black-and-white picture in the middle of the page shows the equipment we were being trained on.

July 4th was the first holiday after starting school. Because the 4th was on a Saturday that year, we had Monday as a holiday and decided to take a short trip to Carlsbad and tour the caverns.

Our good friends Jim and Winnie Coursey had a Volkswagen beatle and we planned to drive that to New Mexico and back. We left early Saturday morning thinking it was only a few hours of driving (we’ve since become much better at map reading!). We arrived late in the afternoon in enough time to catch the last tour of the day.

The tour was very interesting and we thoroughly enjoyed the time in the caverns. We came out of the caverns just about the time that the bats made their exodus for their nightly search for food. The sight was quite amazing!

There wasn’t much around the caverns in 1964. I understand the area is quite commercialized now, but back then motels and other accomodations were quite limited. We had literally no money, so our plan was to camp in the National Park Campground and do some more sightseeing the next day. Texas had been beyond hot. Consequently, we didn’t bring much sleeping gear with us. Southeastern New Mexico, on the other hand, was not hot. In fact, it got uncomfortably cold that night. We were sleeping on a blanket on the ground with a blanket over us and were freezing. Then then ants came out — red ants with a vicious bite. After being stung several times, we got up to inspect the area and found we were sleeping on top of an anthill. They were coming out by the hundreds. The blankets were full of ants. We weren’t alone in this plight, either. Jim and Winnie were also up and had moved into the VW because of the ants. We had no trouble deciding we’d had enough and pointed the car back towards San Angelo.

The ride was pretty uneventful for the first hundred miles or so, and then the engine started running very rough. Inspection proved that a spark plug wire was broken. The carbon filament was broken right at the connection to the spark plug and we had no tools to fix the problem. Our attempts only made the problem worse — the wire became completely unrepairable. It was early Sunday morning so open gas stations were few and far between and none had a mechanic unless we were willing to pay an emergency fee. We continued driving but with the car running on three cylinders, we couldn’t drive very fast and the car was guzzling gasoline with wild abandon. We couldn’t afford to continue and we couldn’t afford to pay the emergency charges to get the spark plug wire fixed.

The car had belonged to Winnie before she and Jim were married (I was the best man at their wedding). Winnie had an automobile club membership so we finally called to see how that would work. We would still have to pay the charges, but they would send Winnie a bill rather than us having to pay on the spot. We were ecstatic! The repairman arrived around 4 a.m., fixed the spark plug wire, and we drove uneventfully back to San Angelo, Texas.

While we were at Carlsbad, we registered our name and address in the guest book. Wonder of wonders, a couple of weeks later, the Soda Springs newspaper published a short article about us visiting the caverns. Anything like this makes news in Soda Springs, Idaho! Of course, the proofreading was also par for the newspaper. The grammar mistake is quite noticable.

At the end of our initial training program, I was selected to go to airborne training. Jim Coursey was assigned to a intercept station on Taiwan. He elected to do an unaccompanied tour so that he would only be gone for fifteen months. Winnie went back home to Connecticut to wait for Jim to come back home. At that point we lost contact. A few months ago I got a short e-mail from Jim, but he hasn’t responded to my e-mail back to him.

Colorado has a license plates for honorably discharged veterans. Since we’ve bought the RV and need to put plates on it, I dug out my discharge paperwork so that I could prove that I qualified for these plates. In the folder was the 3×5 card with the short newspaper blurb and my comments. Sometime in the past I had put this card together! The card brought back the memories and they’re now recorded for posterity.

For the past two weeks we’ve had a little wooden guy in our family room. He’s called Aaron and is named after one of the Sons of Mosiah. The Sons of Mosiah were Book of Mormon missionaires who, rather than becoming king on the death of their father Mosiah, went on a seventeen-year mission to the Lamanites. The four sons were named Ammon, Aaron, Omner, and Himni. Our Ward has four of these wooden figures, one representing each of the four sons. Aaron has been in our home for the past two weeks as a reminder to seek out opportunities to tell people about the Church. He’s "transferred" by the missionaries assigned to our Ward. The transfers happen on Sunday. Aaron came with a bag of missionary goodies (the bag can be seen at his feet). One item was an outline for a Family Home Evening to be held at the beginning of Aaron’s stay. Other items included videos, tracts, pass-along cards, and a Book of Mormon. Finally, the bag contained a small booklet for us to record our missionary experiences so that Aaron would have a missionary journal at the end if his missionary experience.

We were quite interested in having one of these guys. We’ve several folks who have expressed some interest in information about the Church but don’t really want to talk to the missionaries. That material is slowly being distributed. The missionaries came by this evening to pick Aaron up and transfer him to his new family.

This is a kind of a novel program put together by the Stake. Each ward was given a set of four figures representing the Sons of Mosiah along with instructions and training. The guys are to move around the Ward until everyone in the Ward has had an opportunity. I’ve found it to be a good experience. In thinking about it, I’ve a few observations:

1. We always call it "the Church." Perhaps it’s because the name of the Church is so long: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps it’s because we consider the Church to be the only true church. Perhaps it’s just some ego, but never-the-less, that’s the name used by most members: the Church.
2. Telling other people about the Church is important to us. If the Church is indeed the only true church, then it’s important for other people to know about it. The issue is, lots of other folks think they’ve already found "the true church." They want to tell me about it. They want me to become "a Christian." Consequently, it’s not easy for me to do much proselyting!
3. The whole "Christian" idea is itself quite interesting. We certainly feel very strongly that we are Christian. Others certainly feel very strongly that we are not. It’s all a question of definition. We define a "Christian" as someone who believes that Jesus is the Christ and is trying to conform his life to Jesus’ teachings. Others have a much more narrow definition which rather than trying to be inclusive, is quite exclusive and we don’t fit their definition.
4. The Church is very geographic. Each congregation (called a "Ward") has a specific geographic description. Living within the boundaries of a Ward means being a member of that Ward. Moving outside those boundaries automatically means becoming a member of a different Ward. Since there is no paid ministry, a Ward depends on its members for everything: Sunday School teachers, youth organizations, childrens organzations, and everything in between. Our recruiting is done by introducing people to the Church. In mature Wards, that is, Wards in an area without much turnover in residents, recruiting (read missionary work) is difficult. People have selected and settled into their own church and aren’t much interested in changing. New residents, however, haven’t yet settled in and are more interested in finding a church that meets their needs. We have very little turnover in our neighborhood, so our missionary opportunities are somewhat limited. Is that a good enough excuse?

Well, Aaron is off to a new missionary experience. Bradica (the dog) sniffed all around the space where Aaron used to be and decided that all was still well in Zion. It’s time for bed after a busy Sunday. Good Night!