The refurbishment of the deck continues. What I thought would take three
or four days at the most is now well over two weeks and it might not get
done before I have to leave for California next Monday morning! This has
turned out to be a substantial piece of work. I started staining the hot
tub today thinking it would take about an hour or so. Two hours later I
only had two side done and had to quit as it was getting too dark to
see. It’s quite tedious and the wood is really soaking up the stain.
I’ve still got quite a bit of sanding to do (tomorrow morning?) before I
can start the deck itself. I was hoping to start on the deck tomorrow
night after work, but the hot tub will need to get finished first. The
two sides I’ve finished are the easy part — the other two sides I have
to do through the railing on the deck and not get the railing stained.

We are in a major drought. Lots of clouds overhead but no moisture
falling to the ground. It’s currently 66 degrees with 44% humidity and
the barometer is rising. There are thunderstorms forecast for tomorrow
which would, of course, further delay getting the deck finished.

Today was a work-from-home day. Spent the morning in phone meetings. At
lunch Nina and I retrieved the camping trailer from its current storage
lot and transferred it to a new home out by Petersen AFB. The place
where it was raised their rates once again, now charging $67 a month.
The new place is about twenty-minutes further away, but charges $30 a
month for a pull-through slot. That is quite a bonus! The slot is a
straight shot from the entrance as well. Much easier to put the camper
away. We’ll use the camper over the 4th of July weekend when we go up to
Soda Springs for my class reunion.

There isn’t very much news! Looking ahead, I’ll be in California all of
next week. Leave Monday the 20th and return on Friday the 24th. That
Saturday I’m the substitute for the substitute shift coordinator at the
temple. Well leave on Sunday to go to Utah for the week, returning that
Friday. We’ll spend Monday and Tuesday in Orem and then go up to Soda
Springs for a couple of days. Dad had another stent put into his heart a
couple of weeks ago so we want to visit up there as often as possible.

My normal assignment at the temple is the shift trainer. My job is to
help folks get qualified to work at different assignments they can
receive. We have two new brothers on the shift so they keep me busy.
We’re also very short staffed, so there isn’t much of an opportunity for
brothers to work in the initiatory and learn that dialog. There are
quite a few assignments:

Patron Guide: This person sits in the lobby near clothing and provides
directions and assistance to patrons coming into the temple. We almost
never have enough staff to give this assignment to someone.

Locker Guide: This person rotates folks through the lockers so that we
don’t have too many people waiting for someone to get finished with
their locker. This is another position that we almost never staff. In
the Oakland Temple, the lockers are out in a common area with dressing
rooms along the walls. It’s a better system, I think.

Initiatory: There are three assignments working in the initiatory —
washing, annointing, and clothing. There is also an Initiatory
Coordinator who often also fills one of the three assignments as well.
We so short of staff that we only have the initiatory working when
someone comes for their own endowment or someone shows up with family
file work to be done. Then we really have to scramble to provide at
least two workers for the initiatory.

Name Issue: This person slices off proxy names if the patron doesn’t
have a family file name to do. He also scans the name into the computer
and stamps it. Quite often this position isn’t staffed and the New Name
person does both jobs.

New Name: This person performs the new name ceremony and directs the
patron into the chapel to wait for the endowment session to start.

Sealing Guide: This person assists a brother who is coming to the temple
to be sealed / married. The major task here is to get the brother
properly clothed and looking sharp for his bride.

Own Endowment Guide: This person assists a brother who is coming to the
temple for the first time to take out his own endowment. The assignment
takes about an hour and a half and consists of getting the brother to
the Recorder, then through the initiatory, and finally to the President
for instruction prior to going on an endowment session. This assignment
is very enjoyable and all the brothers look forward to this assignment.

Session Follower: When there are more than 12 brothers on the session,
or the session is an own-endowment session, then a brother follower is
assigned to be on the session. When there is a brother follower, then
that person conducts the prayer circle as well. We also use this
assignment as a way to train a brother to officiate a session.

Session Officiator: This person directs an endowment session. It starts
with opening the room fifteen minutes before the start of the session
and preparing it for the session. Quite often the officiator will work
New Name for a half-hour prior to opening up the session room. After the
session, the Officiator straightens up the room and closes the room.

Veil Presentor: This person works on the patron’s side of the veil and
assists the patron as needed. Some of the veil positions are for sisters
and will have a sister presentor. The others are for brothers and will
have a brother presentor.

Veil Receiver: This person works on the other side of the veil and
received the patron into the Celestial Room. The temple has four
endowment rooms, two on the north side and two on the south side. There
are 11 veil positions on the north side and another 11 on the south
side. Up to 11 presentors and receivers will be assigned to work on a
session. The actual number assigned depends on the number of patrons on
the session. Sometimes we really scramble to have enough people to work
on the veil when a session ends with a lot of patrons on the session.

Veil Assistant Coordinator: This person assists in staffing the
receivers on the veil and then supervises the operation on the back side
of the veil at the end of each session.

Veil Coordinator: This person staffs the presentors and manages the
front side of the veil. Quite often the two veil coordinators will
switch off the assignments.

Shift Trainer: Responsible for training the brethren on each of the
assigments and verifying that they can perform the assignments given to
them. Also conducts the weekly training session which is part of prayer
meeting at the beginning of each shift.

Shift Assistant Coordinator: This person is responsible for loading
endowment session, assigning the witness couples, and getting the
session ready to start. He also assists the Shift Coordinator and
substitutes when the coordinator can’t be there. The Assistant
Coordinator is responsible for closing up the back of the temple — all
the endowment rooms, sealing rooms, and Celestial Room.

Shift Coordinator: This person supervises the brethren and makes the
assignments for the shift. The job starts with making up the schedule of
assignments, preparing the agenda for the prayer meeting, and then
managing the work on the shift. It’s a very busy assignment and includes
a monthly meeting in the temple with the Temple Presidency.

We generally need about 25 brothers on our Saturday afternoon shift to
be able to handle all of the assignments. Right now we are staffed with
18 brothers and a few of them don’t show up on occasion.

Our first endowment session starts at 1:00 p.m. and a session is
scheduled for each half hour. The last session starts at 4:00 p.m. A
session takes about 90 minutes, so our first veil is also at 1:00 p.m.
The last veil is at 5:30 p.m. It is a very busy afternoon — but very
enjoyable. I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than working at
the temple on a Saturday afternoon.

This entry was transferred from an older journalling system to this program on 29 November 2002.

It’s coming up on time to head for bed. I’ve been getting up early and
working on the deck for about an hour or so before spending a few
minutes in the hot tub, and then cleaning up to go to work. The deck
hasn’t been refinished, stained, or sealed since it was built about 5
years ago. It was getting into sorry shape. So, since Monday morning
I’ve been working on cleaning the wood so that it can be stained and
sealed. I’ve got at least two more days of work to complete the cleaning
process, and maybe three days. The railing around the deck is taking the
most time and by the time I spend an hour or so, I’m pretty sore. I
still need to finish the railing, do the hot tub, and then do the deck
floor one more time. Then after it dries for at least 24 hours, I can
begin doing the actual staining and sealing. Hopefully when I’m done
it’ll be looking like a deck that has been somewhat maintained.

It has been extremely dry here in Colorado. Some have referred to this
as the hundred-year drought. Today was the first rain in a very long
time, and it only lasted for about a half hour. We’ve had a number of
wildfires around the area, and it will probably get worse as spring
turns into summer. But with the rain today a cold front has moved
through making the evening very cool. We even turned the furnace on to
warm up the house a little bit. It’ll likely be too cold tomorrow to use
the cleaning solution. If so, then I’ll use the morning to do some
repair work on the deck. I need to fix a board on the steps and tighten
up a number of screws.

It’s a Wednesday evening. The noise on the TV is the Colorado Avalanche
in hockey playoffs against the San Jose Sharks. Just at the end of the
2nd period Colorado leads this game 2-1. San Jose leads the series 2-1.

Today the Chairman and CEO of LSI Logic, Wilf Corrigan, visited the
office. He conducted a briefing on the current company situation for
about an hour or so and then took questions. LSI Logic was severely
impacted by the high-tech implosion last year and is just now starting
to recover. He says that we’ll be cash-flow positive by the end of the
2nd quarter (end of June) and will return to profitability in September
to October. Meanwhile our stock has tanked. It got down to below $10 a
share yesterday but last night’s announcements from Cisco and GE caused
a pretty good market bounce. The stock recovered to just over $14 today.
It can stay down around these numbers for another week, however, since
the Employee Stock Savings Program will do their stock buy on May 14th.
The cheaper the better as that sets the buying price for the next year.
Further, I should have been granted a number of stock options last week,
again at a very favorable price. I’ll be retiring in five to seven years
and these options are a key component of our retirement savings program.

I’m headed for bed in a few minutes. I’m worn out and Nina has already
headed that direction. Perhaps more later this week!

This entry was copied from an older journal into this system on 29 November, 2002.

I’m watching “Star Trek — Return of the Jedi” on TV, checking e-mail, and
wrapping things up for the night. I’d like to get to bed by about 9:30.
Tomorrow after some meetings in the morning I’m headed back home to Colorado
Springs. It’s been a pretty busy week. Lots of meetings. This morning was
the annual shareholders meeting. It was an interesting meeting. Wilf
declared the recession over and said that our book to bill ratio had climbed
above 1 (that is, we were getting more bookings that we were shipping
product. That means the backlog is starting to build). I’d sure like for the
stock price to start moving upward again. Our retirement depends on the
stock options having some reasonable value.

I went up to Oakland to the temple last night. I left work about 4:30. The
traffic was reasonable and I got to the temple a little after 6:00 p.m. I
had dinner in the cafeteria before going on the 7:00 p.m. session. The
session was sparsely attended — 5 sisters and 8 brothers. It’s interesting
to me that the attendance at the Denver Temple is better than at the Oakland
Temple, which is about 5 times the size of the Denver Temple in a district
at least five times the population.

It has been very cold here this week. It rained on Tuesday and was cloudy
most of Wednesday. The sun was out today, but it was still chilly. I’ll
leave tomorrow just as the weather warms up. I could easily have used my
leather jacket here this week. I keep cranking up the heat in the room
trying to keep reasonably warm. It’ll be good to get back to warmer country.

This entry was copied from an older journal system into this program on November 29, 2002.

We’re about 15 minutes west of Denver and have just flown into some clouds
at our assigned altitude. It is occasionally quite bumpy! If I were writing
this by hand in my regular journal, this would be quite unintelligible. At
least this way, the words can be read; whether or not they make any sense is
up to someone else to decide.

I left the house at about 6:30 for an 8:00 a.m. flight. That’s a bit late,
actually, that I would have preferred, but that’s how things worked out. If
there are a lot of folks going through security, I possibly could have had a
problem. However, the airport was relatively quiet. The flight from Colorado
Springs to Denver was full — and this flight from Denver to San Jose is
completely full. No empty seats on the flight at all.

Airport security is quite a bit different than it was a year ago. It’s no
better (and in fact may be worse) but is definitely different. One of the
changes is “random” searches of people before boarding the flight. As an
aside, it’s quite amazing to me the things that are found in this random
search that the screening at the concourse didn’t pick up. The folks doing
the screening usually pick someone in the first two or three people to board
the plane. That person is taken aside and thoroughly searched, including
removing shoes and belts. It takes up to ten minutes to do this screening,
so as soon as someone is picked out of line, then the folks behind move
through the boarding process quite rapidly.

The general process is to board First Class and higher-level frequent fliers
first. If you’re a frequent flier, you have to have been asleep not to
notice how the “random” search candidates are selected. Today as we were
getting ready to board this flight, the agent called for First Class, 1K and
Premier Executive frequent fliers. No one approached the agent to present a
boarding pass!! A second call went out and more folks gathered, but no one
approached to board. Finally one soul went up, and headed through to
board — he wasn’t selected! Another wait. Then a fellow, part of a group of
people traveling together, ordered one of his subordinates to go “volunteer”
to be searched so that the boarding process could begin. As soon as he got
there, everyone lined up. The agent joked with the screening person, “See,
everyone knows!” Well, we sure do. Hence the observation that security,
while different, is not necessarily better.

We’re approaching western Colorado and Eastern Utah. Grand Junction,
Colorado, is on the left front of the airplane. We’re flying a bit more
northerly than in the past few months. Because of the flight restrictions
associated with the Winter Olympics that were held in Utah in February, the
airlines had adjusted their routes to fly through Central Utah rather than
over Provo as they head into the San Francisco area. The routes are just
this month being adjusted back to normal patterns. But, it’s quite cloudy
and there’s only an occasional view of the ground. I’m in a window seat. The
guy next to me in the middle seat is a young fellow with the most beat-up CD
player I’ve seen in many years. It’s held together with Duct Tape! There
isn’t much room on the table, partially because I’m quite wide front to back
and that the seats are pretty close together. I’ve got to keep kind of an
eye on the guy in front of me because if he decides to recline his seat, it
could possible break the display on the laptop computer I’m using. So far
he’s been quite content to visit with his wife seated next to him in the
middle and hasn’t made a move to recline the seat. I’m of the opinion that
with these seats as close together as they are, none of them should be
allowed to recline.

Yesterday was a pleasant Sunday. I had Priesthood Executive Committee
meeting at 7:30 a.m. in the Bishop’s office. That was followed by the
meeting block. The High Councilor assigned to our ward, Peter Burnett, came
over to the house around 3:45 in the afternoon to conduct his monthly PPI
with me. Then at 8:00 p.m. we went over to Duane Slocum’s to give him a
blessing. He’s going to have cataract surgery on Wednesday and wanted a
blessing before he went in for the procedure.

PEC is held generally on the 2nd and 4th Sundays. The 3rd Sunday is Welfare
Meeting at 7:00 a.m. followed by Ward Correlated Council at 7:30. There are
a lot of folks attending PEC — and the Bishop keeps adding folks to the
fray. We can barely all fit into his office. If he adds anyone else, we’ll
have to find another room. The major activities going on right now are:

1. Aaron’s Camp for the young men 14 years old and up. This is a camp held
instead of a scout camp or other young men super activity every other year
to help prepare the young men to be ready to go on a mission. It’s a fairly
expensive affair, costing about $175 per boy. So there’s a lot of fund
raising activity going on to finance these boys.

2. Young Women’s Camp. This is put on by the Ward on alternate years with
the Stake putting it on. This year the cost will be about $100 per girl. So,
that requires some fund raising as well.

3. Getting a sister’s house ready for sale. She is a single mother having a
lot of difficulty maintaining the house and yard. She’s decided to sell the
house and move into something that would be maintenance free for her. So,
there’s a lot of work needed to make the house ready for sale. This Friday
evening and Saturday morning there’s a work project to paint the front of
the house and trim the weeds and bushes. It’s one of about 3 or 4 work
details needed. The house has been listed for sale and it’d be good to get
the work done soon.

We’ve also got several people out of work with slim prospects of work in the
near future. There’s not much that can be done other than making sure that
we’re being generous with our Fast Offerings.

We’re flying over some mountains covered with snow — so we must be
somewhere in the Salt Lake area. It’s still very cloudy so not a lot of
opportunities to see what’s going on down below. I very seldom sit in a
window seat — I usually want to be in an aisle seat so that I’m not hemmed
in. There weren’t many options on this flight, however.

I’ll be in San Jose for the week, flying back on Friday afternoon. I’ll get
home around 7:30 p.m. on Friday. Other than being available to the folks in
California who work for me, there isn’t a lot of requirement to fly out
there. I go at least once a month. It is a good way to build frequent flier
miles, however! We’re definitely in the building mode, since all of our
Saturday’s are busy at the Temple. That limits our ability to go anywhere
that would require an airplane. I think the next time will be in September
when we fly to Vancouver, Canada, to board the cruise ship for the trip up
the Inside Passage. We will do a few things this summer. We’d like to go
somewhere for Memorial Day if we can work out how to do that without taking
much vacation. We may decide to take the vacation time anyway. The Temple
shuts down for the first two weeks of July and that is when Soda Springs is
holding a multi-class reunion. We will go over that way for the week. The
reunion is on the 4th of July. Wendy is getting married in August and Nina
would like to be in attendance, so we’ll take a week to pull the trailer
over to Oregon for the wedding and back. I’ll try to put a business trip to
Gresham in the equation to give us some additional time on vacation and get
some of the expenses paid.

Dad is in the hospital in Idaho Falls. He had a rough night Saturday night
and was transported by ambulance to the hospital on Sunday morning. The
doctor’s don’t know what is the matter, exactly, just that something is the
matter with his heart. They are doing a catheterization this morning,
probably as I’m writing this, and we hopefully will know more as the day
progresses. Mother called yesterday afternoon with the news. She feels that
things are generally OK, now that he’s at the hospital. She’s sleeping right
in the room with him, so she isn’t getting much rest, either.

The Temple on Saturday was very hectic. We were very short of ordinance
workers, both brothers and sisters. So it was a scramble all day long to
meet the assignment schedules. We have a prayer meeting at 12:05 p.m. which
consists of a hymn (I play the organ and Nina conducts the singing),
followed by a prayer and a spiritual thought. Then the Matron or Assistant
Matron (depends on which member of the presidency is on duty that
afternoon), presents the confidential information for the sisters. They all
leave the chapel and the duty member of the presidency presents the
brother’s confidential information. We then go to our training meeting.
That’s where the assignments are handed out and we have a (hopefully) short
training lesson. I’m currently assigned to be the shift training, so I
present this material. We then go to our assignments. Saturday’s instruction
is the longest lesson in the book and was on officiating an endowment
session. It took 20 minutes to go through the material.

We had a new brother assigned to our shift, so I spent a few minutes getting
him oriented and we tossed him into the fray receiving patrons at the veil.
He had a good afternoon, I think! No question about his feeling needed. I
filled in wherever we were short and then officiated on the 4 p.m. session.
It was a busy, but fun day. I certainly enjoy the afternoons we spend at the
temple. It’s a major time commitment, but one of the more enjoyable things I
do each week. Afterwards we went out for tacos with the shift supervisor and
his wife, Br. and Sister Stott. We learned that he was in Japan in the Air
Force the same time we were at Yokota AFB. He wasn’t a member of the Church
at that time, so we wouldn’t have had an opportunity to meet. Small world!

We’re over western Nevada and I think we’ve begun our descent. We’re out of
the clouds right now, but it is partly cloudy below us. A lot of clouds
ahead, which usually means the Cascade Mountains. So we’ll be on the ground
in about 45 minutes, I think.

So that’s all for today.

This entry was copied from a older journal system into this program on 29 November 2002.

It’s a lovely Friday evening. Today in Germany, a young man took a
handgun and a shotgun into a school from which he had been recently
suspended. He shot and killed 14 teachers, 2 students, and a policeman
before taking his own life. Dressed completely in black, he sought out
the people he wanted to target and calmly shot them to death. Germany
now joins the ranks of countries now needing to re-examine their
cavelier attitude towards school safety. This morning a lady living
somewhere near the Colorado College campus was found beaten and killed
on the campus. Not a good news day.

However, tonight we’re going to the SkySox baseball game. The SkySox are
a minor league club, part of the the Colorado Rockies Farm Club system.
They’ll be playing a club in the Arizona Diamondbacks system from
Tuscon, Arizona. LSI Logic (my cost center, actually) is paying for the
tickets for the LSI Logic employees who are encouraged to bring family
or friends with them. They are responsible for all other costs except
for their own tickets. It’s kind of a employee morale activity. We’ll
have about 30 people there for the festivities. It’s partly cloudy with
occasional thundershowers, so hopefully we’ll be able to stay dry! It
should be a lot of fun.

Eighteen employees are attending out of about 40 possible. So, I’m
missing quite a few people. I think I’ll look at taking everyone to the
movie after Star Wars debuts. Not sure how we’ll work that out, but I
think it’d be a good thing. In a time when we’re not giving pay raises,
promotions, or bonuses, and are laying off people, increasing workloads,
and restricting training, I need to be doing something for folks to have
a good time. In Japan we always had one social event each month to help
relieve stress and to help folks get to know each other so that they
would work together better. That much work-social activity wouldn’t work
here, but we can do something at least once a quarter.

So, that’s the news for today!

This entry was copied from an older journaling system into this program on 29 November 2002.

The system has been set up to automatically process journal entries at
10 minutes after 10 every evening. So, I’m putting this entry into the
system so I can check tomorrow morning to see if the automatic process
has worked correctly. Good night!

This entry was copied from an older journal system into this program on 29 November 2002.

How about this! Three journal entries in the new system. I’m still
working out the process where the entry is taken from the e-mail and put
in the database. I think I’ve got it working correctly. A couple more
entries should show that everything is working correctly. Fortunately,
these e-mail journal entries are also in the “sent” folder on the
computer I sent them from, so they’re easily recreated and resent should
there be a problem.

It’s a Wednesday night. I’ve been working from home today. The time has
been quite productive. Most of the day on Wednesday is spent on the
phone in meetings. Today was no exception. It started with the weekly
Change Control Meeting at 10:00 a.m. where we review the changes planned
to production systems. At 10:15 I went into the weekly Autonomy Meeting.
This meeting has to do with the project to implement the new search
engine for the LSI Logic intranet. This project is moving along quite
smoothly and is yielding some very nice results.

At noon I was on the phone about the strategy to finish off the AT&T
contract for North America voice and data services. At 2 p.m. was a
phone meeting about the problems we had with the network in Milpitas
yesterday afternoon and evening. 3:00 p.m. was the final phone meeting
on hardware needed for the new disaster recovery site. In the meantime I
built a web page to explain to Bruce Decock, my boss, how we would go
about reducing the amount of spam e-mail that’s coming into the company.

I was supposed to meet at the Church this evening for a Home Teaching
Rescue Night. However, I’ve still got a major cough and get coughing
fits that literally double me over. I’ve also broken out in a rash! No
idea what the cause of the rash is, hopefully it doesn’t have anything
to do with the cough which I believe is left over from the cold I had
last week. I’d sure like to get rid of the cough and be finished with
the cold. My belly is sore enough from coughing!!

This entry was moved from an older journal into this program on 29 November 2002.

This is the second entry to get into the database. I’m still testing the
functionality and verifying that everything gets into the database
correctly. Nina wanted to know what I was doing and was somewhat
incredulous that I’d spend the time doing this rather than just writing
on a piece of paper. It’s fun and interesting, that’s why!

Got up this morning and rather than going down to the club, decided to
work in the yard. With the schedule at the Temple each Saturday, getting
things done in the yard has been rather difficult. So, I’ve decided for
the next several weeks to spend the time in the yard rather than at the
exercise club. I suspect this will be some reasonable exercise, anyway.
So this morning I raked the front yard. I thought it would take about a
half-hour. Wrong. An hour later I was still at it and starting the
cleanup. My arms are quite tired and a bit sore. That was a lot of
workout those muscles haven’t had for quite a while.

With that work, the front yard looks quite a bit better. Much more work
is required!! We’ll go over to Home Depot tonight to pick up some wood
chips / bark to put down in the flower beds in the front yard. We
haven’t done anything with these beds since we got here, so I guess it’s
high time that we upgraded them. I’m sure the neighbors will be relieved
that we’re doing something with the yard!

This entry was transferred from an older journal into this program on 20 November 2002