It’s about 6:30 p.m. Central Time and I’m on a flight from Austin, Texas, to Denver and eventually home. We’re climbing through some clouds with a fair amount of turbulence making typing this pretty interesting. We’ll be above the clouds Real Soon Now as it’s gotten quite bright outside the window. That should end the turblence (perhaps!). This is a small Regional Jet. There are two (narrow) seats on each side of the aisle. It looks like there are seats for about fifty people and all but two seats are occupied. Fortunately, one of those seats is right next to me. On this airplane I want to either sit in the first row or in the exit row. That way no one in front of me can recline their seatback. There isn’t much room between the seats (this distance is called "pitch" in airplane speak) so if the person in front reclines their
seat, there’s no room at all available. The seats just before the exit row can’t be reclined and of course there are now seats in front of the first row. There was a fellow sitting next to me (I’m in the window seat on the left side of the airplane in row 8), but since the two seats in the last row of the airplane were empty, he moved there. He’s at least six feet tall and was quite uncomfortable sitting next to me and scrunched up against the seat in front of us. Even though an exit row has about four inches of pitch than the other rows,
he was not fitting well into the seat. He was quite unhappy with his travel department for having booked him on this type of airplane ("They know better!" he fumed). That gives him an empty seat next to him and I’ve got an extra seat next to me. There are a couple of ladies sitting behind me that met at a conference in Austin for the first time. Yack, yack, yack, yada, yada, yada. I’ve got some noise cancelling headsets and am glad of it. At least this way they’re fairly faint background noise. We’re through the clouds, the sun is
out, and the skies above us are clear blue. It’s finally a fairly smooth light.

Three of my managers and I flew over to Austin, Texas, yesterday for meetings with Dell Computer. We got in about 2 p.m. and went on a plant tour followed by dinner at a pretty exclusive restaurant. There were four of us and five of them at dinner. I’m sure it was a healthy bill at the end. I’m spending about a million dollars a year on Dell products and the rest of the company is spending another milion dollars. For that price they should spring for dinner every once in a while. The factory tour was very interesting. The Dell plants are well automated and the automation looks to be working incredibly well. Our guide worked as a supervisor and then a line manager in the plant before moving into Information Technology (IT) managing the factory support systems. That’s an interesting transition. She certainly knew the plant very well. As we walked through the plant she would step right into a work area and literally take it over. I was very impressed and would like to have several folks like her on my staff.

After dinner we stopped at a sports bar (a glass of Sprite was $4.50!) to watch the last couple of innings of the Chicago Cubs vs the Florida Marlins playoff baseball game. The Cubs finally lost the game in the eleventh inning by a score of 9-8. It was a great game and a worthy baseball playoff game. This is the first post-season appearance for the Cubs in more than fifty years. The last time they were in the World Series was in 1918! Is this finally the year? The Cub fans certainly hope so. But, they’ve got to do better than they did last night to make that dream come true.

Today was spent in the Dell Briefing Center with a flurry of presentations by different groups within Dell. We talked about support services, the server roadmap, the Linux roadmap, the support software tools available, took a tour of the customer support center, and had a great lunch. The Briefing Center is very well equipped and is a showcase of Dell products. The trip was well worth the time. It’s been several years since I’ve been to see Dell in Austin but I think we need to do it much more often — at least once a year. It was also good to have the three managers most invoved with Dell products be there as well. It was a great interaction and more than sufficiently informative.

Tomorrow at 7:30 I’ll be sitting in the dentist’s chair. The bridge in the front left of my mouth has become "mobile," to use a word from the dental industry vocabulary. That means the bridge is moving like it isn’t quite tied down. That’s not anything near what I’d really want to be doing tomorrow morning. Hopefully this is easily fixed with little discomfort. Not very likely!

The new (to us) RV is still in the driveway. It’s been cleaned and drained of all fluids likely to freeze. Some of the stuff from the trailer has been loaded into the RV. There’s quite a bit of stuff that doesn’t have a home in the RV which has significantly less storage space than the trailer. We’re having to decide what we really need to have in the RV! We usually take lots and lots of stuff with us, most of which doesn’t get used while we’re travelling. We’ve decided to drive it to Utah the last week of the month. I’ll then fly to
California on business and back on the following Friday. We’ll stay for Danielle’s baptism on Saturday, November 1st, and then drive back home on Sunday. It should give us a good chance to use the vehicle and work out the best way for us to use it. When we get back, it’ll probably go into storage. The storage bill is paid through the end of December. In the meantime I want to find a place much closer to the house even though it’ll cost a bit more. I think we’d be much more likely to use it if we had better access to it. Where
we’re storing it now takes about an hour to get there and back.

If all goes well, we’ll be on the ground in about a half-hour. It’s been another uneventful flight. It still astounds me that United is losing so much money. Every flight is full!! There’s got to be some major overhaul required in management ranks. It is also interesting that with their reduced flight schedule (about 30% of their flights were taken out of service over the past couple of years), the airline has become on-time. It’s now rare that a flight is late or leaves late. In spite of the dentist, it’ll be good to get back home
once again.

Well, we’ve done the deal and bought an RV. We’ve traded in the trailer and purchased a small Tioga Class C RV. It’s in the driveway for a day or so before being taken to the storage lot. It is 24 feet long, just slightly longer than the Suburban. It is reasonably well equipped — a slide-out to provide more room when parked, a generator, standard kitchen, air conditioning, etc. It’s on a Ford chassis with a V10 engine which seems to climb hills quite well. It’s a 2001 model with low milage and seems ready and raring to go. Now we just need somewhere to take it and the time to go. Meanwhile, I’m sure enjoying the new toy!

The only other news of the day is that the garage door on the double side broke. The spring which provides the assist in lifting and lowering the door broke with quite a racket. Nina was on the phone with a friend when it broke and thought we were having an earthquake! The door is so heavy that we can’t lift it, so the Camery is now being held hostage in the garage until the repairman can get here on Friday. Good thing the Suburban was out of the garage when the spring broke!

Last Wednesday evening Nina and I went to the last Rockies’ night game of the season. While this hasn’t been a very good year for the Colorado Rockies, we both enjoy baseball and like to go to their games. Our daughter Jaelene gave us a gift certificate for the Rockies which we redeemed for some excellent seats at the game. Because Jaelene lives in Arizona Diamondback country, we decided to attend when the Rockies were playing the Diamondbacks. The last three home games of the Rockies’ season were against Arizona. On Tuesday night, the Rockies won 20-9. Wednesday night the Rockies faced Arizona’s Big Unit, Randy Johnson who pitched seven innings of pretty good baseball. The Rockies lost that game 6-3. However, we had a great time.

We’re in some of the loveliest weather of the year. The days are warm but not hot and the nights cool down into the low 50’s. Lots of sunshine, no clouds, and no rain. This type of weather lasts for about a month before the really cold nights start happening. The weather for the ballgame was ideal. I took a leather jacket and Nina took a light jacket. She was a bit chilly as the evening progressed. The seats were great — big seats — and we didn’t feel at all crowded. We were on the second level, the Club Level, so we didn’t have the beer and peanut salesmen going up and down the aisles. We did, however, have the ability to place an order for food or drinks and have it delivered to our seats. We splurged (stuff is very expensive in the ballpark) and refilled our cholesterol tanks…. It did taste good (Thanks, Jaelene!). Why is it that the best tasting stuff is the worst for you? There ought to be a law! The drive up and back were completely uneventful and we’ve decided that we’ll do more games next year in this same seating area because it was so pleasant. A day game in that area would be very nice as the sun would be shaded there as well.

Life is just too busy. There seems to be no time to do fun things anymore. The evening out at the ballgame kind of pointed that out to both of us. I think that Nina is busier than I am and right now I feel like I’ve no time to claim for my own. I need to simplify my life and get rid of some things that take up time. However, there isn’t much variability available! I’m not sure how to reach this happy medium. I’m beginning to understand folks who have said after retirement that they didn’t know how they ever had time to work. The stock market is pretty key to our ability to retire and that has been going the wrong direction once again during the past week. The magic number is $25 per share — we could retire and live OK on that amount. $30 a share would put us in a very comfortable situation. We almost got up to $12 a week ago, but now have slipped back to about $9.50. I’m stuck working for another 3-5 years at a minimum. So, because I still have to work and my life is too busy, it’s time to figure out what can go. I’m afraid it isn’t very much…!!

I’m on an airplane somewhere over eastern Nevada headed towards Utah. In about ninety minutes I’ll be in
the Denver Airport waiting for a connecting flight to Colorado Springs. The flight is full — it is always full on
the flights between San Jose and Denver in both directions. I’ve got a window seat just over the wing on
the left side of the airplane. The flight has been smooth with no issues. We left the gate on time and will
arrive in Denver about fifteen minutes early. It’s amazing to me how much the on-time performance at
United changed when they took about thirty percent of their flights out of the schedule. But, they’re still
loosing money in a very big way, in bankruptcy, and there’s a lot of bleeding left to do. I have a hard
time understanding how it is they can’t make money! There’s something very wrong with this company.

The weather outside is lovely. Clear, not much haze, a few clouds on the horizon. Isabel, the first major
hurricane of this season to come ashore in the US should be up in Canada now and largely disapated.
We generally get a couple of days of fabulous weather across most of the country following a hurricane.
Perhaps all the weather energy has been wrapped up in that storm and gives the rest of the region a respite.

This was a very busy week in California. I flew in on Monday arriving around 2:30 p.m. The flight was
marginally eventful; the first officer’s seat wouldn’t adjust properly and the maintenance folks had to
disassemble part of the seat and replace a bolt. That delayed the flight by about 45 minutes. Meetings
filled most of the time during the week. This is my second trip out since February and I’ll make at least
three more yet this year to California along with one to Austin, Texas early next month. There’s also a
possibility of making a trip in mid-October to Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, Boston,
Massachusetts, and Minneapolis, Minnesota along with my boss Bruce and another director Michael
who has responsibility for the engineering systems. Coupled with the birth of a couple of grandchildren
and spending Christmas in Phoenix, the rest of the year will be very busy.

Monday night I stopped by Fry’s in San Jose. A trip to California isn’t much of a trip without a stop at
Fry’s toy shop. I didn’t buy much, but had a good time looking at all the electronic stuff there. I didn’t
have much time, either. I wanted to get back later in the week but there was no time. Tuesday night
I went up to the Oakland Temple for a session. I got there for the 6:30 session which was held in a
smaller session room (only seats 70 people instead of 220). There were five sisters and three brothers.
Since there were no couples there, I was asked to be part of the witness couple with another sister.
Haven’t had that opportunity for a long time, either. The fellow officiating was doing it for the first time.
He sure was nervous! It was kind of fun watching him.

Wednesday night I had dinner with one of my managers and his fiance. We went to a Japanese
restaurant in Sunnyvale run by a Japanese woman I knew in Japan. It was fun to see her and the food was
very good (but expensive). I will definitely eat there again. (An Aside: just to the left and above my airplane,
another jet just came zooming by going the other direction. The combined speed must have been about
700 mph. Quite spectacular!) Thursday night (last night) I had dinner at the home of a fellow who works
for me in California. He and his wife are from Turkey and she had worked most of the day to prepare a
fairly traditional Turkish meal for their home region. The both grew up in Istanbul and both majored in
mathematics at a university in Istanbul. They met while at college. I had a delightful time, the food was
delicious, and I’m sure I overstayed my welcome by not leaving until 11 p.m.!

Meetings generally define my life at work. I’ve remarked to people that meetings are how I get my work
done. Sometimes they’re big meetings, sometimes a one-on-one meeting, mostly they’re scheduled
meetings but occasionally they’re ad-hoc meetings. (It’s now very cloudy outside.) Monday after I arrived
I was in a meeting at disaster recovery followed by a one-on-one meeting with one of my managers.
Tuesday I was in an all-morning e-business working council meeting which was one of the most useless
meetings I’ve attended in a very long time. That afternoon was a meeting on the hardware architecture
being planned for the Channel Management project. Wednesday morning was a meeting on the new
Microsoft vulnerability and the patch that needs to be applied to all the personal computers in the company.
I also had my boss’s staff meeting which lasts about two and a half hours, followed by a meeting in
another building on spam e-mail and how to do a better job of helping our employees manage the amount
of spam that they get. Thursday started with an 8 a.m. meeting on monitoring in the data center, a
meeting with SGI on their new Linux servers, a meeting with Neoteris on their proxied secure sockets
product, a disaster recovery meeting for our Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, and a
ninety-minute meeting with IBM to review thier product families certified for Linux. Today I only had one
meeting — a two hour IT Working Council meeting where we discussed in detail our going-forward
strategy for our collaboration sites, managing consultants and such who need to connect their own
computers to our network. Right after that meeting I packed up and headed for the airport. Sometimes
I wonder where the time went until I go back and review the week to see what meetings I suffered through!

With the new church calling comes lots of other church things I have to be at. Tonight I was supposed to
be at the Black Forest Ward building for a BBQ social for the Stake and Ward Young Men Presidencies
and their spouses. I arrive in the Colorado Springs airport well after the social starts, so I won’t be there.
Tomorrow night is a regional youth dance at the Broadmoor building and I’ll have to go as a chaperone.
That’s after a full day at the Denver Temple. I think I’m tired already!

In my boss’s staff meeting we discussed what things we might need to do to better manage outsourced
development. We’ve gone through a couple of projects where the programming work was being done in
India and they haven’t gone very well. Some other companies are putting one of the senior IT executives
in India to manage these relationships. I volunteered to go. That would be an outstanding assignment.
It’ll never happen, but I can dream a bit, I think. I can hear our daughter Jaelene’s passionate comments
now should that ever happen….

The clouds are gone, it’s gotten a bit bumpy, and we’re over Utah southeast of Salt Lake City. We’ll be
on the ground in Denver in about 40 minutes. The trip to California is coming to a close!

Last Tuesday would have been Trevor’s thirty-second birthday, except that Trevor was killed in an automobile accident on January 18, 2001, meaning he’ll be "Forever 29." Our son Daryl (Trevor’s younger brother) visited Trevor’s grave on Tuesday, put a dozen roses on the grave, scattered the rose petals around, took this picture, and e-mailed it to us. It makes me rather nostalgic…. Thanks, Daryl. His sister Heather took some flowers to the grave later that same day and was quite surprised to see that "someone had been there first." I’m pretty sure it’s still a mystery to her who left the roses!

We were living in Otterbein, Ohio, when Trevor was born on September 9, 1971. Six months later we moved to Mentor On the Lake, Ohio, when I was transferred by TRW to Clevleand, Ohio. We sure do miss you, Trevor. On my website is some information about his death and funeral (see the sidebar).

The weather has changed dramatically in the past few days. Summer is definitely over and winter can’t be far behind. Perhaps we’ll have one of those legendary Colorado winters??? We’ve been here almost five years and all the winters have been very mild. We’ve been in a drought for the past three years and a major winter would be welcome. Tonight another cold front will come storming through with rain here and snow in the mountains (Pikes Peak is already covered with snow). The good part is that I’ve been able to turn off the sprinklers as we’re getting plenty of rain.

Our lives are full and very busy. I’ve been lately lamenting how little free time I have to work on things that I’d like to do. I’ve been called as the Young Men’s President in the ward which will require a major investment of time. More on that in some future blog. Meanwhile, "Happy birthday, Trevor. Hope you’re celebrating with a lot of friends!"

The Labor Day vacation is finished, we’re home again, and we’re back to the normal hectic. We actually came home a day early. By Monday mid-day we’d done everything we really wanted to do in that area and found that what we would do the rest of the day and evening were the same things we’d be doing at home. So, we packed up in the late afternoon and headed home. Even though it was Labor Day, we had an easy drive home with relatively little traffic. We were home about 5:30. Beckenridge is only about two and a half hours away. A whole different world is only that far away. We’ve decided to look around to see what other opportunities might be within a 150 minute drive.

Church on Sunday at the Frisco Ward was very interesting. The Sacrament Meeting was given to the young men and women of the Ward who had attended Especially for Youth or The Best of Especially for Youth. It was a very good meeting. Later we learned that they had record attendance at Sacrament Meeting — 258 people. Most of them were visitors and most of them left after Sacrament Meeting! We stayed for the full block and didn’t even have to change seats. Sunday School was in the Chapel followed by joint Relief Society and Priesthood, also in the Chapel. After Church and lunch we drove around Dillon Lake and around the area. We checked out the State Forest campgrounds, some of which are very primitive and others were better appointed. At any rate, they would have been more interesting than the resort we were staying at! Being able to have a fire would have been a real treat.

Monday morning we rode the bikes up to Breckenridge and back. It was a little over four miles up which took about 33 minutes. The ride back was much faster — 16 minutes! I thoroughly enjoyed the ride, even though I was also thoroughly tired when we got back to the camper. We then drove down to Copper Mountain to see what that resort looked like. The bicycle trails go all the way to Vail. It would be a lovely ride down, a heck of a ride back up (at least in my current physical condition).

Being home a day early made it possible to get a whole bunch of things done on Tuesday. We were able to thoroughly clean the camper, winterize it, and put it away in the storage yard. We got the Suburban an emission test so I can finish the registration, had the oil changed in the Camry, and ran a number of errands. We wrapped up the short holiday by having dinner together with our good friends, Bobby and Duane.

But, now we’re back home and back to normal. It was a very busy day at work and I need to be down to the chapel in 10 minutes for a PPI with the Bishop. Things could certainly slow back down again!

It’s a lovely Sunday morning in the high mountains. Today we’ve got a mixture of clouds and sun, but no rain. That’ll be good as it rained a lot yesterday. We went into Breckenridge just as it started to rain so we drove around near the ski area looking at homes. There’s a lot of money in those hills, let me tell you! A number of them are for sale. Condo’s for $975,000, homes for $2,500,000…. all of them gorgous homes in gorgous locations. We decided to wait to see if the market will improve.

When the sun came back out we walked through the downtown arts festival. There were a lot of very unique things on sale there. Sometimes I see these things and think, “I can do that.” Then I decide that while I could do that, I don’t want to. We spent the afternoon and evening at the camper watching foootball and just doing small things we’d brought with us. We spent an hour at the pool and hot tubs before crashing for the night. It was a very relaxing day.

The camper looks like we’ve settled in. Stuff is finding places to be, the computers are set up, towels are hanging on the window curtains…. We’ll be here two more nights and then it’ll be time to clean things up so we can go home and put the trailer away for the winter.

We’ve located the church on the map and will be leaving in about 20 minutes for Frisco, Colorado, and church. We worked for a while in the temple with a couple from Silverthorne and perhaps they are part of the Frisco Ward.

We’re ensconced in a campground north of Breckenridge, Colorado. With the long weekend available, I’ve taken Friday and Tuesday as vacation days so we can get a five-day stay in this ski-resort area. We left Colorado Springs just before 10 a.m. today and arrived at the campground about 12:30. We drove west out of Colorado Springs on US Route 24 to Hartsel and then took Colorado Route 9 northwest to the campground. It was a lovely drive through some beautiful territory. This was a much better drive than coming on the freeway.

To call this a campground is like calling a Boeing 747 just an airplane. This is a so-called "Resort Campground" — no tents, popup campers or junky-looking rigs allowed. It’s also fairly expensive compared to normal campgrounds, but then how many normal campgrounds have an indoor heated pool and two hot tubs? We were intrigued enough with the writeup to make reservations, take the time off from work, and drive up here (is is UP — Breckenridge is at 9,600 feet compared to 6,400 feet of altitude in Colorado Springs).

While I’m not sure what I was expecting, this place has turned out to be different. There are many, many sites. All of them are privately owned and the vast majority have small cottages on them. The camp office keeps some part of the camping fee and the lot owner gets the rest. Some of the cottages are also available for rent. Many of them are quite elegant! Lots of money in some of these sites. I think that these are used during the winter when folks come skiing as well as during the summer as summer cottages. Several have the owner’s name and city displayed. Many of those owners are in Florida! Perhaps they spend the summer here and the winter there?

We walked through a part of the business district in Breckenridge this afternoon. Many stores were closed or closing because the summer is over. Skiing doesn’t really start until around Thanksgiving so it looks like there aren’t many tourists between now and then. The area is very pretty. We’re in a valley in the middle of a bunch of very tall mountains, most around 14,000 feet. However, I don’t think I’m a good candidate for buying a lot in a place like this. I’m content to rent one from someone else once in a while.