At a little after 9 p.m. on a Sunday evening I’m sitting in my easy chair in the family room. Game 7 of the American League Championship Series is on the TV, but Cleveland is trailing 5-2 to Boston. I’ve been kind of reading my book, but until the end of the game, I’m not sure I’ll get much else read, so I’ll blog instead.

It’s been a fairly full week. I’ve been talking with a company in Idaho Falls about doing some business development for them and we’ve come to an agreement. It’s a commission-only position which suites me just fine. I start to get quite busy with this new adventure starting tomorrow. I spent the past Monday and Wednesday in Idaho Falls. I was told that I needed to be at a Church Regional Training meeting on Wednesday evening, but that turned out to be incorrect … it was for the Primary, Young Women, and Relief Society leaders and not for the Sunday School. As a result, I missed an Idaho State Symphony concert. Nina took good care of that, though. She took her friend Cathy with her to the concert and they had a grand time. I came back home and finished my preparation for my Thursday evening assignment.

Thursday morning, very early, we were on our way to Soda Springs to pick up mother and dad and take them to do a temple session in Logan. Dad needs some assistance now in the temple so Nina and I will take them once a month. Thursday was the first time. We were there for the 10 a.m. session, then made stops at Sams Club, Deseret Book, and the Pepperidge Farm outlet store. We left the house at 6:30 a.m. and were back at 4:30 p.m. Enough time for both of us to have dinner and be off to our other assignments: Nina went to the prison and I was off to the Stake Center for Stake Auxilliary Training. I was running the session for the Sunday School.

Turnout for the Sunday School training session was actually quite good. We got home in enough time to see the end of the baseball game won by the Red Sox. Friday was a day for errands and putting Nina’s car in the garage. It’s leaking something and smells like oil is burning. The garage said that the problem was between the engine and the transmission and they would be pulling the transmission out to figure out the problem … which will be at least $700 to fix and most likely much more than that. In any event, it’s cheaper than buying a new car! Both of our cars are paid for and we’d like to drive them several more years.

Saturday evening was the Kinport Branch party. The Kinport Branch serves at the prison and is where Nina is the Relief Society President. The party was a potluck dinner followed by playing games. We had a lot of fun, but came home to find that Cleveland had lost again and Boston had tied the series at three games apiece. I was able to take some solace, however as Notre Dame got clobbered 41-0.

Today I had a speaking assignment at the prison and at our home Juniper Hills ward. I spoke twice this morning, once in the high-security area of the prison and once in the minimum-security area. That’s the first time I’ve been up there on a Sunday and it was good to see Nina in action and to meet some of the women she talks about. The assignment in the Juniper Hills Ward also went well.

Tonight has been very quiet at home other than my shouts at the TV screen. Unfortunately, they can’t hear me. It’s now the bottom of the 8th and Boston has scored and scored again. The score is now 11-2 and the inning isn’t over. It has been fun watching Twitter during tonight’s ballgame. All of the folks I follow who are paying attention to the game are rooting for Boston.

Cleveland is making it easy for me to know who to cheer for in the World Series that starts on Wednesday. Go Rockies!!

Dean Burton’s funeral was last Wednesday at the Thatcher Chapel. Nina and I took mother and dad with us to go to the funeral. His will be the last funeral in that building as the Thatcher Ward is moving into a new building in Niter that they’ll share with the Niter ward. At one time in the area now covered by the Thatcher Ward there used to be a Thatcher First, Thatcher Second, Cleveland, and Mound Valley Wards. Over in the Niter area there also used to be a Lago Ward. They’re all casualties of the farm consolidation and people moving off the farms into the cities. A person used to be able to make a living on a 150-acre farm. Definitely not the case anymore. Further most of the farm land that’s not in the Bear River valley is in the soil bank … not being farmed at all. Very strange.

Dean was my First Cousin Once Removed. That is, my grandmother Mary Burton Smith and Dean’s father, Rulon Burton, were brothers and sisters (making him and my dad First Cousins). Uncle Rulon and Aunt Ann lived in Cleveland and ran a farm. They also ran the Cleveland Telephone Company where Aunt Ann was the operator and the switchboard was in their living room. We lived in a small building on their farm for several months when I was about four years old. Dean would have been about 15, but I don’t remember him or his twin sister Dorothy from that time.

My earliest memory of Dean is in about 1955 when Uncle Rulon was involved in a very serious automobile accident and nearly didn’t survive. He lost his right leg in that accident and spent a very long time in the hospital. My mother, who was a licensed practical nurse, spent a lot of time taking care of him at the hospital and during his recovery. Uncle Rulon was an alcoholic and the recovery was extremely difficult and painful for him because of the alcohol addiction. Dean came home from the Army to run the farm while Uncle Rulon was out of commission. He looked pretty dashing in his Army uniform. He got married shortly after that and then bought his own farm down the road from Uncle Rulon and they both ran the farms together after that.

Dean was skinny and I mean lean as a toothpick, but he was also very strong. He was one of the hardest working people I knew as I was growing up. Dean was five minutes older than his twin sister Dorothy. She married Don Workman from Treasureton. I worked for Don Workman during the summers of my twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years. Don and Dean did some of the heavier farming helping each other out … that would be putting up the hay and harvesting the wheat. During haying season, after the hay was mowed, raked, and bailed, Uncle Rulon and Dean (along with their wives) would come over to help put up the hay. Uncle Rulon would drive the truck which had an attachment that would “catch” the hay bale and lift it onto the truck. Don Workman would be in the back of the truck and stack the bales until the truck was full. Uncle Rulon would drive the truck using his cane on the gas pedal, his artificial leg to work the clutch, and his good leg to work the brake. He drove like a crazy man out there!

Once the truck was full, it’d come over to the hay stack which was by a large wooden derrick. My job was to drive the jeep for the derrick and the big hay rake on the derrick. I’d back up one direction and the hay rake would go up and over to the truck. I’d then drive forward to let the hay rake down where Don would stick the rake into four bales of hay. I’d go further back, the bales would be picked up, then go forward to the right and they were moved over to the haystack where Dean would position them about where they were to be placed. I’d back up, pulling the rake out of the bales, and the operation would get repeated. Dean would then put the bales into the final position, making sure to tie in the corners. He worked tirelessly! I always had a heavy case of hay fever (which is why I was assigned to drive the derrick jeep) and was always amazed at how much weight that tiny guy could heft around the haystack. Once Don’s hay was up, we’d move the whole operation from Treasureton to Cleveland and put up Uncle Rulon’s hay.

The summer of my fifteenth year I worked for Uncle Rulon and Dean. In addition to milking the cows (my primary job that year), I also did babysitting for Dean and Lois’s children. Dean was a great guy to work for as a teenager. He was pretty much a kid at heart and we had a lot of fun. But, he was always up and going before daybreak and worked late into the evening. He loved to dance, as did his wife Lois, so they often went dancing at night, coming home quite late, but that didn’t change the fact that he was up early the next morning.

Dean was a heavy smoker. When I was working for him, he was smoking a couple of packs a day of Chesterfield cigarettes. No sissy filters for him. The smoking finally caught up with him and he spent the last several years on oxygen and eventually even that wasn’t enough. He became more and more limited as to what he could do until he was confined to bed and finally his body shut down because it couldn’t get enough oxygen.

He was a great husband, father, and grandfather. He was loved by all his family. He was an avid hunter and fisherman. He loved to water ski. Many Sundays when I was working for Don and then for him, I would go to Church (by myself) in the morning and then drive over to the Oneida Reservoir (on the Bear River just south of Cleveland) where they were all out on the water in Uncle Rulon’s boat and spend the afternoon with them water skiing and swimming. Uncle Rulon was just a much a maniac driving the boat as he was the hay truck! Goodbye, Dean. You’ll be missed, but we’ll see you again on the other side!

We are still getting snow … now at least 6 inches of very heavy snow. Nina has been out to shake the snow out of the trees (and even so there are some broken branches). About 5 minutes before Conference was to start, she discovered that the Dish Satellite dishes were snow covered and we had no signal. I climbed up on top of the motor home so I could get a broom up to the satellite dishes and sweep out the snow. That has restored the signal (for now). We’ve also had one short power outage and there will likely be more as the snow is very heavy on the power lines and on the trees around the power lines. No more mice caught, though.

The rain switched to snow about 6 a.m. this morning and since then we’ve gotten about four inches of very wet, heavy snow. It looks to continue snowing for a while as well. The question of the hour is whether or not I go dig out the snow blower from the back of the garage or trust that this will melt quickly???? For some reason the weather bug says a high of 43 today and a high of 59 tomorrow, getting up to 67 by Wednesday. I think I’ll wait on the snowblower.

Nina doesn’t scream very often. When she does, it’s usually a critter of some sort. Last night it was a brace of mice. Somehow they had taken up residence in the house while we were gone (that’s an entrance I’ll need to find and seal). I brought in a trap from the garage, set it, turned away, and “bang”, one of the mice was now dead. I reset the trap and another one bit the dust overnight. Where there’s two mice there are probably a dozen, so I’m now a trapper for the next while.  My cold is still hanging in there and won’t go away. Maybe I should just go back to bed!

We are back in Pocatello safely at home from the trip to the northwest. As a fitting end to the trip, it was raining when we got to the house. In fact, we are supposed to get between one and three inches of snow tonight! It did snow a week ago here while we were gone, but since we weren’t here, that snow doesn’t count. The drive from Baker City, Oregon to Pocatello was completely uneventful. The trip went well despite being down with a cold. It was very good to spend time with Jared and Arlene and to see Wendy, Kendra, and family. Our next trip will be south, into much warmer territory. But that won’t be for a few more weeks. We need to get some things done around the house!