This is the most amazing thing. We’re driving across Missouri (just going through Columbia on I-70), Nina is driving, I’m in the passenger seat, connected to the internet through my Sprint PCS 3G wireless card, posting to my web log. It wasn’t all that long ago that my connection to the internet was a dial-up connection to a BBS turned Internet Service Provider in Salt Lake City. After connecting, I’d fire up a terminal session and run Pine to read and send e-mail. That was in 1989. We’ve come a long way and I’m looking forward to seeing what all of this looks like in another 14 years.

We’re headed for New Wilmington, PA. We’ll arrive there sometime late tomorrow afternoon. It’s about 2:15 p.m. local time. We’re about two hours from St. Louis and another three hours from the Indiana border. We should get into Indiana without difficulty before stopping for the night. We’re pulling the trailer and have Kendra, Trevor’s daughter, with us. She’s got the back seat all to herself along with the small TV and has been watching videos non-stop.

The trailer is heavy. The front is filled with the furniture and stuff for Dawnmarie, the stuff we went to Spokane to pick up a couple of months ago. So far it’s stayed in position and we’ve got the rest of the trailer available to us. We left Colorado Springs around 1:15 p.m. on Thursday and drove as far as Russell, Kansas. We pulled into a campground, put the feet on the camper down, hooked up water and electricity, and spent the night. We didn’t even unhook from the Suburban. Dinner was at Pizza Hut, Kendra’s favorite food.

We got away this morning about 7 a.m. local time and have been driving pretty much ever since. We stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch and are hoping to be able to drive until 7 or 8 p.m. tonight. That’ll put us at Dawnmarie’s house mid-afternoon on Saturday. It sure is a long ways across country!

It sure is green out here in Missouri. We’ve started getting into the country where trees are growing, although not nearly like Pennsylvania. The wheat fields in Kansas were being harvested. Here in Missouri they’ve still got several weeks left before the harvest. It’s dang hot — only 85 degrees, but quite humid. I’m glad to be in an air-conditioned car. I’m also happy that we’re not in Kansas any more…!

I’ve been scanning more slides into the computer. Some of these are quite interesting! One of them
was taken when we stopped by Mt. Rushmore sometime around August, 1972. We had been in Idaho visiting my family and were in our Volkswagen camper. On the way back we drove through Yellowstone and camped in a national forest campground where a huge thunderstorm raged for several hours in the middle of the night. All the kids slept through the storm — that’s how tired everyone was. We pulled into a campground near Mt. Rushmore the next night where it was very cold and raining. We were literally freezing in our little camper. A pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer pulled in next to us, was set up within minutes, and they were cooking fried chicken within a half hour of arriving. We had a bit of envy that night.

The next morning we drove up to Mt. Rushmore. It was very cloudy and dark, but when we arrived the clouds parted for about a half hour during which time this picture was taken. You probably also need to know that the sweater I’m wearing is still hanging in my closet. It was a high school graduation gift from my parents.

The only other news is that my sister-in-law Christine is in the hospital in Salt Lake City with some pretty serious problems. Things are beginning to get better, however. She had a couple of heart attacks and threw off some blood clots which lodged in her legs cutting off circulation. She has diabetes which further complicated the situation. The medical staff has been able to break up and dissolve the clots and blood is now flowing properly in the legs. Tomorrow they’ll do a heart catheterization to determine what they can do about the heart attack. We’re quite concerned and hopefully things will continue to improve.

The picture shows Jim in the tiger-colored sweater, Dawnmarie, Heather, and me holding Trevor who would have been about 11 months old.

It has been a long time since the last post! Probably far too long. If I don’t do this regularly, the habit goes away and there’s no reason for anyone to ever look at the blog. I promise to do better in the future… (grin). I’ve received a new toy — a film scanner. I have some slides and pictures from when we lived in Japan from 1966 to 1968 and some of these pictures have really deteriorated. I’ve scanned a bunch of them into the computer and am getting them onto CD’s so that we can preserve them better than the film is being preserved. One of them is a picture of James and Heather along with Momo, our dog of that era. Heather was born in the fall of 1966 and she’s probably around six months old, so this picture would have been taken in the spring of 1967. We were living near a housing area called "Hyde Park Annex" just off base at Johnson AFB. At that time, Johnson was a shared base with the Japanese Self Defense Forces. The USAF used it as a housing area and as an emergency airfield. A few years later the base was turned over to the JSDF completely and the Hyde Park Annex is now a city park. A couple of the base housing buildings remain as offices. Just on base the Base Exchange and Commissary buildings are visible, but almost falling down. That part of the base isn’t being used by the Japanese at the current time. The base is open for visitors on the first Saturday of each month, but we’ve never been in the area at that time. I’d like to do that some day….

The house we lived in when this photo was taken still exists. During Heather’s visit to Japan a few years ago we went looking for the house and found it. A Japanese family lives there (of course). The roads have been rerouted and not much of the neighborhood looks the same, but the house was still there. The picture shows a patio area just outside a sliding door that lead into the living room. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house and a small bathroom. The kitchen and living room were essentially one large room with a small divider.

Momo means "peach" in Japanese. It’s also the main character in a famous Japanese fairytale. When we got the dog, a Japanese Spitz, it was just the tiniest fur ball and earned the name Momo. We gave the dog to another Air Force family with a number of kids when we left Japan in 1968.

The deck is finished once again for another year. I’ve also mounted some flower boxes along the deck railing and we now have flowers planted there. It looks quite nice. As part of this project I bought a new table saw and had fun building the mountings. I’m now ready to tackle a larger project. I think the next project will be a gate for the deck to keep Bradica on the deck and the deer off the deck. I just need to decide how best to build the gate. A swinging gate is easier, but a sliding gate, kind of like a pocket door, would be much more practical. After that I need to build a set of nice-looking shelves to go alongside the desk in the computer room so I can get this tangle of cords and computers out from under the desk.

In about ten days we’re headed east on vacation. We always manage to make life busy and complicated for us! We’d like for our granddaughter Kendra to go with us so she can be with some of her cousins. So Heather will be driving up to Boise and Wendy (Kendra’s mother) will meet her there with Kendra. A couple of days later, Nina will meet Heather halfway between here and Orem, Utah and get Kendra from Heather. Then Kendra will go with us out east. On the way back, we’ll go north into Montana, meet Wendy, and give Kendra back. Quite a shuttle! Hopefully Kendra won’t get too homesick while all of this is going on.

We had a major catastrophe in the corporate data center last Saturday evening. It was one of our maintenance weekends and a lot of work was going on in the data center. Part of that work included the semi-annual preventative maintenance on the battery-backed universal power supply. This device provides a couple of minutes of battery power should we loose city power to keep things running while the generator comes online. When the preventative maintenance was finished, the maintenance man switched the UPS from maintenance mode to normal mode and the device completely failed. We lost all power to the front half of the data center, where about two-thirds of the servers and disk arrays are located. Of course, they all went down immediately. Realizing that there was a problem, without thinking, the maintenance man switched the UPS back to maintenance mode, which put power back into the room from the standby generator. Everything started trying to power up again, all 180 computer systems. Doing that did a fair amount of damage to a number of systems. When power went down, he needed to have left the system in that state so that we could go turn off all the power switches. Then we could figure out what was wrong with the UPS, get that fixed, and then start bringing systems back up again. However, that wasn’t the case. All of my folks supporting the data center in Colorado Springs were called in to work and most of the production systems were back to normal around 6:30 Sunday morning. One of the large disk arrays failed entirely, so we still have some systems (primarily supporting the development and software testing functions) that have yet to come back into service. The disk array was finally repaired late this afternoon and hopefully sometime tomorrow afternoon we’ll have the data restored and those systems will start coming back online. This was as bad a disaster as I ever want to see!

We’re back home and the busy life has consumed us once again. Does that sound melodramatic enough??? Good thing it’s not entirely true! The trip to Mueller State Park was lovely and very refreshing and very tiring!

We had a total of two days at the park. We arrived around noon on Monday (Memorial Day) and left the park just before noon and Wednesday. I spent Monday and Tuesday morning around the campsite unwinding and shooting some film (nothing much to show for it, however). Tuesday afternoon we decided to take a bike ride on one of the trails near the campsite. The trail map suggested that the trail was about 2.7 miles long of moderate difficulty. It turned out that the trail we wanted to take wasn’t open all the way for bicycles and the trail we took was definitely more than "moderate!" As we went along, it continued to go down and down and down hill — all of which we had to go back up. It was impossible to ride back up, so we had to walk the bikes back up. I was absolutely dead tired when we got back to the campsite. I’m definitely not in any shape for that kind of a trek. The next morning we decided to just ride around the campground on the blacktop. I started to mount the bike and the chain broke! Oh dang.

We did drive to another trail which was rated as "easy" and 1.8 miles long. It wasn’t too bad a hike and the views were quite spectacular, but if that was an "easy" trail, then I’m not interested in anything more difficult.

What is it about this time of year when everything gets very busy? Perhaps it’s because winter is over, the days have turned warm, and everyone is suddenly on the go. The traffic on the freeway last Saturday was dramatically worse than it’s been all winter long. People seem to be trying to get everything done all at once. I’m hopeful that this won’t last very long and by the end of August we’re getting back to something much closer to normal. Meanwhile, we’ve got a very busy summer ahead of us that is turning out to be somewhat complicated. Normal, if it ever happens, is really looking good.

I’m on vacation! I’ve got a connection to the Internet! The weather is delightful! I’m lounging in the shade! At least for today, I’m not sure how life could get much better.

We’re at Mueller State Park, altitude 9,500 feet. We’re in the furthest camping spot from the entrance in the park. There is a wild turkey a little ways off calling for a mate, there are several birds in the trees, and it’s perhaps as quiet as nature can get, me thinks. We got here a little after noon yesterday and found that we’ve made a very good choice for a campsite. It’s a pull-through site with electricity. Water is a community spout on the other side of the road but within hose distance, so we could fill up the water tank in the trailer. We’ve got trees on all sides so there is a lot of shade. With the awning out on the trailer, we’re in a very nice spot.

Jared came up on Sunday and spent the evening. He came up here to the park and left about 7 p.m. last night to drive back to Denver. He and Nina took a 6-mile bike ride which, at this altitude, is a pretty strenuous ride. Nina and I will take a much less strenuous ride this afternoon. We’ve been out with the cameras taking a lot of pictures and are now back at the campsite taking life pretty easy for a while.

I discovered last night that my Sprint PCS Wireless Card had signal up here. It isn’t a very strong signal, but enough to make an internet connection fairly reliably. I was able to log into work and dispose of all the weekend Spam that came through. The connection is good enough that I could get some work done here if needed. I left my cell phone at home, so this won’t be the trip. But, we may come up here over Labor Day weekend and this would give me the ability to spend an extra day here without having to take vacation.

The Ward breakfast went well. The day dawned bright and sunny with no wind, so the turnout was more than I had expected. We had enough pancakes and eggs for everyone, but ran out of sausage and bacon. No one seemed to be complaining. It did cloud over yesterday afternoon after we got to the park and we had a couple of thunderstorms. It didn’t stay clouded up very long and the sun came back out after each storm.

We’re here today and tomorrow morning. Checkout time is noon. We’ll take the trailer home, unload it, and go to The Lord of the Dance downtown tomorrow night. I’ve got an assignment at the Bishop’s Storehouse on Thursday morning, but that is turning out to be a possible problem. I may have to cut that assignment short because of a work meeting. We’ll see. But, by Thursday we’re back into the real world once again, so I’m really enjoying life right now.

We’ve experienced four Memorial Day Weekends in Colorado Springs. Every one of them have been chilly, if not downright cold, and it rained at least part of every weekend. This weekend is no different. Saturday morning dawned bright and clear, but by 10 a.m. the clouds had moved in and haven’t left since. There hasn’t been much wind, but there’s been a lot of very heavy rain showers. We’re hoping that the back side of Pikes Peak has different weather than we’re having here!

Tomorrow morning is the annual Ward Memorial Day Breakfast. We’ll finish packing the trailer and head for Mueller State Park right after that event. I’m looking forward to a couple of days of peace and quiet. Nina and I got the trailer out of the storage lot last night and it’s sitting in front of the house. Since we’re only going to be gone for a couple of days, we don’t need to put much in the trailer. It’ll be a nice dry run for July when we’re going to be out east for two and a half weeks.

Jared came up this morning from Denver and will go up the park with us tomorrow. He has to work on Tuesday and will come back up to the park after he’s finished with his work. We’re looking forward to vegetating with Jared for a couple of days! I sure hope to use up a whole bunch of film while we’re up there.

What we now call Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day. That’s how I grew up remembering the holiday. It was always on May 30th — no matter what day of the week that day fell on. Lyndon Johnson changed the name and the date of the holiday in 1971. The change was intended to provide federal workers with a three-day weekend; I’ve always believed the change was made so that the Indianapolis 500 could be run on Sunday, the middle day of a three-day weekend. The day is intended as a remembrance of those soldiers who gave everything they had in defense of our country and our freedom. Thank you all.

It’s Wednesday on what is proving to be a busy week following an extremely busy week last week. But, my brain cells seem to be leaking!

Last night I went over to a church member’s home to help them load up a U-Haul truck as they’re moving to Utah. The loading went pretty well, but as the truck was almost full, it suddenly started down the fairly steep driveway. The parking brake along with the automatic transmission’s Park system had given way. As the truck got to the bottom of the driveway and started out on the street, the front of the truck had reached level ground, driving the back of the truck into the driveway. The truck was definitely "Low Centered" and unable to move under it’s own power in either direction. The drive wheels just spun … no traction.

We went through a whole bunch of options

• try to jack up the truck and get something underneath the wheels, but we didn’t have a strong enough jack.
• Let most of the air out of the front tires to lower the front end and possibly get the back bumper of the truck off the driveway.
• Finally we had to begin unloading the truck.

After unloading about half the truck, it looked like the bumper had a little "wiggle room." But the drive wheels still spun without gaining traction. So I pulled our Suburban nose to nose with the U-Haul truck, put it into four-wheel-drive-low, and pushed. Bingo! The U-Haul was able to back up the driveway and was free! For the fellow going to drive the truck to Utah, he had some issues to resolve — like getting the brakes fixed and air back into the front tires and then driving down the driveway at such an angle that the truck wouldn’t get hung up once again on the way out!

My issues were a little different. I couldn’t get the Suburban to go back into normal two-wheel drive. So, I didn’t say anything to anyone there (I didn’t want them to feel responsible for my damaging the transmission on my Suburban) and drove home in this configuration (top speed: 25 mph).

This morning I got up, got ready for work, and drove the Surburban to the local Chevy dealership and got there a few minutes before the service center opened. When they opened up the center, I drove in and told the service guy my problem. He got in, started the engine, put the transmission in neutral, and pushed the button to shift to two-wheel drive. It immediately shifted. The change had to be made in Neutral, not in Park. Then he showed me where that was written in the user manual. Now, I had checked the user manual under the index entries for four-wheel-drive and it didn’t say anything about that. It was clearly described under a different section about how to drive the vehicle. Needless to say, I had very mixed emotions! I was very happy that I didn’t have to put in a new transmission; I was also quite embarrassed….

We are planning to take the camper up to Mueller State Park on Memorial Day afternoon and stay a couple of days. I was worried that the Suburban would not be fixed in time to make the trip and we’d have to cancel. I guess that concern went away in a real hurry!

Our lives are very busy, it seems. Last week we had something major happening every day or evening. Sunday (Mother’s Day) we had a Stake Choir practice to get ready for Stake Conference a week later. Monday evening I mowed the grass. Tuesday we left about 3:30 to drive up to the Temple where Nina and I were substituting for someone else. Wednesday night we had the missionaries along with another couple over for dinner and then I picked up the trailer and brought it back to the house. Thursday morning I took the trailer to the service center to have the wheel bearings repacked and the brakes checked. That evening our Home Teacher came over (and delivered a wonderful lesson), following which we took the trailer back to the storage lot. Friday night we had a special meeting of Stake Conference oriented to couples. That meeting started at 7:00 p.m. and went until 9:30 p.m. (Nina got another church calling assignment after the meeting). Saturday we drove down to a field near the house to spend a half-hour taking pictures of wild flowers, ran a couple of errands, and then went to Denver to work at the Temple.

Another family in the Ward was also in Denver staying at the Children’s Hospital with their son who had open heart surgery earlier in the week. They had been given tickets to Les Miserables and needed someone to stay with their eighteen-month-old son. We (of course) volunteered, having had some experience with hospitals and heart surgery. We were there until about 11:30 p.m. and got into bed about 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning after driving back to Colorado Springs. A very few hours later we were up and headed to the Stake Center for choir practice at 8:30 a.m. That was followed by a conference session from 10:00 to noon. After a quick trip back to the house for lunch and to let Bradica out, we were back at the Stake Center for the afternoon session from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. (which was pretty much a mirror repeat of the morning session). Another quick trip home, feed the dog, grab a bite to eat, and we were off once again back up to Denver for the annual Denver Temple Worker’s Fireside. When we fell into bed about 11:00 p.m. Sunday evening, we were pooped!

Nina’s life was further complicated as she was taking a training class on tutoring English as a second language. She has volunteered to be a tutor for adults trying to learn English or to become literate in English. The class was in downtown Colorado Springs, started at 9:00 a.m. and ended around 1:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. She starts tutoring sometime this week.

This week is supposed to be less busy. We’ll see…. It’d sure be nice!

We were very impressed with the Denver Children’s Hospital. It is very well set up for children with lots of well-equiped play centers with a play center manager whose job is to help the kids have some fun. The snack lady comes by a couple of times a day with free snacks for all the patients (of course, regulated by what the child was able to eat). The cafeteria is open around the clock and is well stocked. The decor is very pleasant. If a child has to have a serious medical problem, this is a good place to receive care.

The Temple Worker’s Fireside happens once a year and all the ordinance workers and temple volunteers are invited. Elder Bills, our Area General Authority Seventy was the main speaker. It was well worth our time to be there and we came away with a new insight. He talked about the three levels of membership and leadership in the Church:

1. Newly called / baptised, excited, learning about what we are to do
2. Handbook and Manual level, using these to bring consistency and order into our service
3. Obedience level, where we are willing to listen to the Spirit and then do what is asked of us.

He told a story about his first assignment as a General Authority. He was to meet with a number of Stake Presidents, a couple of members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and a couple of other Seventies in an instruction meeting. His assignment was to prepare a ten minute talk on revelation. Elder Bradford suggested that he should write out the talk and read it. The talk was to be ten minutes long, not eleven or nine. Like most experienced Church leaders, Elder Bills didn’t write out his talks anymore. He would prepare an outline, but definitely wouldn’t read the talk. He discussed it with his wife who’s counsel was, “Bob, do what you’re told.”

So, he wrote out a talk and practiced it so that it was a few seconds short of 10 minutes long. The fateful day arrived and he was surprised at how nervous he was. The meeting started and he learned that he was the first speaker! He stood up and read his talk. He worried the rest of the day that the talk was not as good as it would have been had he delivered rather than read the talk. Later that evening, after dinner, Elder Bradford came to his hotel room and thanked him for his talk. It had been exactly what was wanted and needed. Further, Elder Bills learned, this was a small test. Could he follow instructions? Would he do precisely what was outlined? He had passed the test. Many assignments followed, as he had proven that he would be obedient. He noted as how many members needed to learn this basic obedience. How many times does someone have an assignment for a ten-minute Sacrament meeting talk and then go on and on and on, not understanding that other people have assignments in that same meeting as well. So, I did come away with a little different insight to the concept of obedience, even in the smallest things.

Well, the Suburban is done. As long as it was already at the garage, I had the front brakes redone and the transmission flushed and refilled. We’re ready to head for the mountains — in standard two-wheel drive.

Apologies to those who looked at the video on the last post — or had the patience to wait for it to download. The file turned out to be 18 megabytes large and the entire file had to be downloaded before anything would start playing. I made another, smaller file by using the smallest picture size available and going for about 37 seconds. That file turned out to be 1.8 megabytes long. That file is located here. On a fairly fast connection, this file took about 4 minutes to download and start playing.

Obviously, this isn’t the right final technology. I’ve been looking at streaming video servers — that would be a significant improvement. The file also must be able to be compressed — mpeg2 at a minimum rather than .avi! So, stay tuned, there will be changes!