It’s been a very quiet Sunday evening. Nina has been out with one of her counselors visiting former inmates and I’ve been holding down the homefront while she’s out. Bradica (the dog) has been pacing back and forth through the house looking for Nina. Some nights Bradica will probably walk a couple of miles as she goes back and forth through the house when Nina’s gone.

Yesterday was yard work day. I started by cleaning out the area beside the front door. I cut back the plants so they could start doing their thing for this year and cleaned out all the garbage. The area is a magnet for anything blowing by in the wind which kind of swirls around in that area dumping whatever the wind is carrying. There’s a large window well there which also accumulates a lot of rubbish.

I decided I wanted a window well cover. I checked online at both Home Depot and Lowes to see what they might have available. I couldn’t find what I wanted at the Home Depot online store, but Lowes indicated that they had window well covers and that they were in stock.

I finished up the yard work I wanted to do and headed downtown. That was the start of a frustrating afternoon! I got to the credit union about ten minutes too late to drop off the weblog backup. I got to Lowes to find that the window well covers they usually carried would not be large enough and the only one they had in stock (even though it was too small), was broken. I also wanted a couple of bolts for my motorcycle gas tank cover, but couldn’t find anything that would fit. I went over the motorcycle shop to find that the parts department closed at noon on Saturdays and service wasn’t open at all, so I couldn’t make an appointment to have the oil changed and do the spring cleaning on the bike. Ace Hardware didn’t have the bolts I needed, either. Both Home Depot and Lowes were sold out of the fertilizer I need to put on the yard (“come back on Tuesday,” they both said). There was one bag available at the garden shop, but that wasn’t enough to do even the front yard. The only thing I did get done on my errands was to drop off shirts at the laundry and pick up clean ones. I’m at least set for shirts for the week.

I’m already tired of the presidential nomination campaigns. The first primary is still nine months away and by the time we can actually vote on something, I think most of us are going to be completely turned off by the whole mess. This needs to change. Plenty of people are going to spend far too much money far too soon. When I went through weapon training in the Air Force before my first trip to Vietnam, a very important part of the training was patience … don’t shoot up your ammo until you actually have something in range to shoot at.

A while later I was in Danang, Vietnam, for the first time. We were flying reconnaissance missions out of Bangkok, Thailand … ten hours orbiting in the Gulf of Tonkin keeping track of the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans. We would land in Danang and drop off the package of tapes recorded during the mission along with one person who would stay the night to provide any assistance in processing the tapes and then would catch the airplane the next evening back to Bangkok. We were on a standard rotation schedule … 21 days in Thailand, 14 days back in Japan, and repeat. Of the ten people on the flight crew, six were on rotation for the stay in Danang, meaning that on a rotation to Bangkok, I would stay three nights in Danang.

My first night turned out to be more exciting than planned. I was dropped off along with the mission “take” about 7:30 p.m. and sat alongside the runway for about a half hour waiting to be picked up. I was “armed” with a .45 and five bullets, which were not in the gun — the clip had to be out of the gun while we were on the airplane. My ride finally arrived and we headed to the security compound where the tapes would be processed. That processing consisted of listening to the tapes and transcribing them onto six-ply paper. Analysts would then go through the collected information and write up activity summaries which were sent by teletype to several different places. Usually it would take eight hours or more to process the information and then head for bed. That was a very long day for me which had started at 1 a.m. Danang time to board the bus out to the airplane.

As I arrived at the compound, the Duty Airman (quite disdainfully, by the way) gave me a 2-minute tour, part of which consisted of pointing out the rack of M-16 guns by the door, the locker where the ammunition and helmets were stored, and the instructions to “follow that guy and do whatever he tells you if we have an alert.” The guy I was to follow (and I cannot remember his name) was a Vietnamese linguist, married with three kids in the states, on his second tour to Vietnam, and had been there ten months on this tour with three months left. He was a very likable guy.

We did have an alert. About midnight the sirens went off. I followed my mentor, was issued an M-16 with two clips of ammo (I still had my trusty .45 with five bullets), a helmet, and out the door we went to a sandbag emplacement on the perimeter of the security fence. The sirens were blaring, search lights were shining out into the darkness, and there were a couple of helicopters up tossing out parachute flares for illumination. In spite of all that, it seemed to be pitch black looking out through the security compound fence towards the fence that went around the base.

Within seconds we started hearing shots being fired … kind of like firecrackers … off to the left and getting louder. My emplacement companion was getting pretty anxious — bobbing up and down, swearing, and voicing threats about what he was going to do if the commies got any closer. Well, the firefight was definitely moving closer! A few minutes later he was up and began shooting. I had no idea what he was shooting at! There wasn’t anything out there to see. For all I knew, he could be shooting at our own Marines who might be backing up towards our compound. But there he was, shooting his gun and hollering for me to cover him.

Two clips of ammunition isn’t much. It didn’t take very long for him to empty both clips and then he wanted my ammo because I hadn’t taken a shot, yet. I didn’t give him my ammo, even though he was pretty insistent. Meanwhile, the firefight was once again moving away from us. We were there another two hours — him with a rifle and no ammo, me with a rifle and two clips of ammo and a .45 with five bullets, still not in the gun. When the all-clear finally sounded (but not before several big explosions in the direction of the flight line where Viet Cong sappers managed to blow up several airplanes), we went back into the building. We stripped and cleaned the rifles and turned them in. He took quite a ribbing for having shot up all his ammo on ghosts. I was quite happy, however, that the firefight had gone somewhere else because the 22 bullets for my M-16 and the 5 bullets for the .45 that I had left would not have been much protection.

So, the politicos are out there shooting up all their ammo at each other, but unlike my emplacement companion that night some 41 years ago, they aren’t shooting at ghosts. It’s too soon for that kind of blood letting to be going on in this campaign.

We had a very nice visit with Aunt Marj yesterday in the nursing home in Salt Lake City. She was quite perky! We arrived to find her in her wheel chair in the common room with my cousin Kathy. My sister Eileen came a few minutes later. Shortly after that my cousin Merrill and his wife Jean arrived. A few minutes later my cousin Perry and his wife Linda came in. It was almost a family reunion! Aunt Marj enjoyed the company which literally wore her out. She’s very frail as the picture of mother and her shows. She had been sleeping for the past couple of days without eating or drinking anything. She did eat a little yesterday afternoon but I’m sure that she slept through until sometime today after all the visitor’s yesterday. I took quite a few pictures, some of which will eventually go onto the picture album, but this was a very nice picture of the two sisters together.

One thing about Salt Lake that I do not miss is the traffic. We left the nursing home about 4:45 p.m. to drive to North Salt Lake to Heather’s house for dinner. We finally got there at 6:35 p.m. It literally took longer to drive the fifteen miles from the nursing home to Heather’s house than it took to drive the hundred and ten miles from Heather’s house to our home in Pocatello later yesterday evening.  We were quite happy to get home!

A few pictures made it into the picture album from the weekend. Tomorrow afternoon Nina and I will take mother and dad with us to Salt Lake to visit with Aunt Marj. This may be the last time to visit with her before she dies. The nursing home says that it won’t be very long.

Aunt Mildred looked pretty much as I remembered her and, unfortunately, there aren’t very many memories. According to my genealogy, she was the ninth of thirteen children. Of the ten children who survived childhood, she’s the only one who never married. My only memories of her are from my early childhood shortly after the farmhouse burned down in Cleveland and we were living in the small house on Uncle Rulon and Aunt Ann’s property. At the bottom of the hill stands another very small house. I think it’s empty today, but it’s hard to tell. Aunt Mildred lived in that small house with her mother, my great grandmother Burton. I remember visiting with them a couple of times and that’s pretty much all I remember.

From the talks at the funeral, however, I learned that she was an interesting woman. She loved sports of all types and particularly BYU football. She would get very involved in the games that she attended and was very partisan. She also never drove a car. She lived with her mother until her mother died in 1964. Then she lived with some other brothers over the next 32 years in northern Utah. She spent her last eleven years living with her kid brother (six years younger than her), my uncle Willis Burton and his wife Virginia in Salt Lake City. She died from breast cancer at the age of 93. She served a mission sometime after her father (my great grandfather) died in 1944. She was always very active in the Church and as part of the eulogy, her niece read Aunt Mildred’s testimony from her journal. The funeral was very nice (the mortuary was very warm). The day was sunny and lovely. I think that the temperatures were in the mid 70’s at the Cleveland Cemetery with no wind.

The Cleveland Cemetery is a very nice rural cemetery sitting on a hillside overlooking the Bear River and Mound Valley below (named for some Indian burial grounds along the river). Mom and dad’s headstone is in place … needing only to have their death dates carved into the stone. A short distance away, Uncle Nate and Aunt Sharon have put their headstone in place where they’ll be buried whenever they pass away. My cousin Dean Burton and his wife Lois have their headstone in place awaiting their departure. One of the young ladies (early twenties, I’d guess) remarked to me how weird it was that undead people already had their headstones in place. I told her that it wasn’t very weird at all … the Cleveland Cemetery was a very popular cemetery and plots are going fast because people are just dying to get in there. It took about 10 seconds for this very old joke to take hold and she let loose with a very long groan. Score!

I thought as how the Burton / Smith family is a pretty prolific and a quite long-lived family. Generations have crossed a couple of times. For instance, great-grandmother Burton’s oldest daughter Ethel Burton was pregnant with her first child at the same time as great-grandmother Burton was pregnant with her penultimate child. Ethel’s second child was almost two years old when great-grandmother became pregnant with her last child.

Great-grandmother’s second child, my grandmother Mary Burton Smith, was pregnant with her first child (my father) at the same time her sister Ethel was pregnant with Ethel’s second child, which occurred before great-grandmother became pregnant for the last time.

My mother was pregnant with me, her first child, at the same time my grandmother Smith was pregnant with her last child, my uncle Delon.

So, I’ve got an uncle younger than me. My dad had an aunt younger than him. A truly Mormon family where mother and daughter-in-law are pregnant at the same time. So far, however, that hasn’t proliferated any further.

And how about being long lived?

• Great Grandfather George Burton lived 69 years, dying in 1944
• Great Grandmother Mary Ransom Burton lived 84 years, dying in 1964
• Daughter Ethel lived 91 years, dying in 1991
• Son George lived 78 years, dying in 1980
• Daughter Mary (my grandmother) lived 59 years, dying of stomach cancer in 1963 (almost a year before her mother died)
• Son James lived 63 years, dying in 1969
• Son William only lived 3 years, dying in 1910
• Daughter Vera lived 84 years, dying in 1994
• Daughter Orella lived 11 years, dying in 1922
• Son Rulon … I don’t know when he died! It wasn’t all that long ago, however. He lost a leg in an automobile accident when I was about seven years old. I worked for him on his farm one summer and was amazed at how much he could do with a wooden leg.
• Daughter Mildred lived 93 years, dying this past week
• Daughter Elvina … she was at the funeral and is about 91
• Son Willis … also at the funeral and is about 89
• Daughter Delma lived less than a month

So, those be pretty good genes. I didn’t know very many people at the funeral. I sat next to a cousin Marianne Smith, daughter of my uncle Ross Smith. I haven’t seen or talked to her since Grandfather Smith’s funeral, although we’ve exchanged a couple of emails about a possible Smith Family Reunion. There were a few others that I kind of knew, but as Nina remarked, it was almost like picking some funeral at random and walking in off the street! Sometime a few pictures will make it to the picture album.

People generally live long on dad’s side of the family and Aunt Mildred was no exception. Dad called this evening to let me know that she had died (probably yesterday) at the age of 94. Mildred is my Grand Aunt. She was a (ten year) younger sister to my dad’s mother Mary Burton. Her funeral will be on Saturday in Preston so Nina and I will pick mother and dad up in Soda Springs on Saturday and go with them to Preston for the funeral. There’ll be a lot of family there who I haven’t seen in many, many years. That part should be interesting.

The colds are getting better, just not fast enough! I get downright tired of having a cold long before I’ve worn the germs out. Nina hasn’t been sleeping well and feels that she’s getting pretty grumpy, but so far I haven’t seen that side of her. A good night’s sleep would be very beneficial for both of us. She’s at the prison tonight and should be getting home in the next half hour. Then it’s off to bed and I’ll try to remember what Aunt Mildred looked like! I don’t think I’ve seen her in more than thirty years.

Both Nina and I went to bed on Saturday night telling each other that we were coming down with a cold. Sure enough, Sunday dawned with both of us sporting a full-blown cold. I stayed home from work today but do need to be there tomorrow if possible. There are a couple of meetings that I should attend. Nina took Bradica (the dog) to the veterinarian because of a possible eye infection, so that meant Nina had to get dressed and actually go out of the house. The vet didn’t have much good news. Bradica didn’t have an eye infection (the only good news) but rather some kind of an irritation. She can’t see much out of one eye and the other isn’t doing much good, either. Her heart is close to the end of it’s useful life as well. It’s beating too slowly and without a lot of force. She’s getting old! Meanwhile, Nina says that when she catches cold she only gets half as sick as I do and recovers twice as fast. That may be true … but it’s probably because she just can’t stand being sick. When I’m sick, I just want to have everything stop until I get better. This is the second cold of this new year! I’m not happy about that, either.

Travel schedules are starting to firm up. Nina and I will be making a very fast trip to Pennsylvania for Rachel’s baptism which will be on the 31st of March. We’ll fly in on Friday and back on Monday. Kirk’s parents will also be there as part of the big tour-the-country vacation they are taking with their fifth-wheel trailer.

I’ll be back home for a few days before heading for Manila. The travel agent says he’ll have the possible itineraries for me in the morning. I’ll be leaving sometime Easter weekend and coming back around the 20th or 21st of April — a two-week trip. The company I work for is making some serious investment again this year in our facility in Manila and that’s the reason for the trip. I’ll be glad to get this cold over with before I leave on either of these two trips.

The new web server is working reasonably well. The couple of issues that have been brought to my attention aren’t due to the new web server … they were problems that were already there and I’ve been able to fix a couple of them. The server certainly is faster. I even have some commitments from people who haven’t written in their blogs for a very long time to possibly, maybe, take finger to keyboard and post something. That would definitely be nice.

We’ve had continuing unseasonably warm weather. The southwest is in a serious drought and we may not be far behind. Today the temperatures were in the mid 60’s and similar temps forecast for the  remainder of the week. Time to get the motorcycle running!