Dinner Out

General

This was a Wednesday evening with not much needing to be done at home. So we went out to Applebees for dinner. The restaurant was very busy! We got there about 6:30 pm and waited for a half-hour before being seated. This is one of the better restaurants in town and we both enjoy the food. As usual, I ate too much (no room for dessert!) and waddled out of the restaurant.

Happy Twelfth Birthday, Michael! Congratulations, James, on the new job! Rabbit Rabbit, everyone.

I’ve been arranging for a business trip to Manila, Philippines. Originally I was going to leave next week on the 8th and return on the 18th. However, one of the key people that I need to work with over there had an urgent matter come up and would not be there during that time. So the schedule now is that I’ll leave on February 20th and return on March 1st. I have had a very nice pair of Bose noise cancelling headsets. These headsets have literally been used and abused for tens of thousands of airline miles. They are almost essential when flying (or when running the snowblower) to reduce all of the surrounding noise and make it possible to listen to music or movies at a reasonable sound level. They’ve broken a couple of times and have been glued and patched back together, with glue on top of glue and patch on top of patch. Well, last week after finishing up blowing the snow out of the driveway and walks, I managed to hook the cord from the headsets to my iPod and yanked the headphones off so they fell just right onto the cement and broke. This attempt to glue them back together ended up cementing too much stuff together, and the headsets finally bit the dust. With the impending trip, I ended up ordering online a new headset and shipped it 2nd day air so it would be here for the trip. It arrived safely yesterday, and now in plenty of time for the upcoming trip. I’ve also gotten my dental sleep apnea device as well. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some sleep on the flight over and back this time. The Manila trip is a long trip. My flight leaves Pocatello at 6:40 a.m. MST and I arrive in Manila at 10:20 p.m. the following day Manila time (or 7:20 a.m. the following day Pocatello time). In real time, I get up about 4 a.m. MST on the 20th and will arrive at my hotel in Manila 9:00 a.m. MST on the 21st for a total time of 29 hours from arising to collapsing. Getting a few hours of real sleep on the trip would be a great benefit. So, most everything is ready for a now-delayed trip. The routing this time will be Pocatello to Salt Lake City to Portland, Oregon, to Tokyo’s Narita Airport, to Manila and then back the same way.

We’re in a pattern of snow, melt, snow, melt. We’ve gotten what seems to be twice as much snow this winter as last winter. A really good storm that closed schools and businesses would be very nice! It’s been a long time since we’ve been snowed in!

Back Home

E-Mail Musings

The drive home from Orem last night was quite a drive. We’ve driven through some bad storms before. Perhaps the worst one was when we drove to California to clean out Trevor’s apartment after his death. The roads were being closed behind us that day. Another was coming home from Arizona a few years before. We lost part of the car and at times thought we might not get through. Many, many years ago we were driving to Connecticut for Christmas as it began to snow on the New York Expressway. The roads were very slick and we spun out in the middle if the roadway — miraculously missing all the cars around us. Then there was the time as we were on our way home from Church in Ohio and rolled our VW camper-bus onto its side. Everyone came out with no problems and we were able to drive away once the wrecker got the van back on all 4 tires. Last night’s drive probably wasn’t in the top 10 of lousy drives, but it was nevertheless a long and difficult drive. I was quite happy to be home.

The reason for coming home yesterday was so I could attend Stake Council meeting this morning. It was a good meeting and worth the drive. One of the items discussed was the attendance at Stake Conference last week. About 29 percent of the Stake attended. This was considered good. It was a good conference and I was glad to have been there. I’m also glad to be home. Nina will make the drive today — hopefully in the daylight — and I’ll be really glad to have her home!

Visiting and Playing With the Grandkids

General

Jaelene is celebrating her thirtieth birthday in Las Vegas and a couple of her siblings and friends are also there to help Jaelene slide into her fourth decade of life. Daryl had his 29th birthday a couple of days ago as well. January is the month of birthdays, anniversaries, and memorials. Nina put an entry on her weblog about all the events in the month of January. So, Nina and I are in Orem visiting and playing with the grandkids while Heather and Ty are celebrating in Las Vegas. I need to be back in Pocatello for an early Sunday morning meeting, so we drove down here in separate cars. Nina will stay until later Sunday afternoon. I’ll drive back tomorrow evening.

I am quite incensed with our government and military right now. We have become no better than the folks we are trying to defeat. Over the past couple of days the news has reported that we have been arresting women in Iraq and putting them in prison in an attempt to ferret out their husbands. No wonder the militants kidnapped a woman reporter in a demand for the US to release women from prison. I have become more and more agitated at our government’s lying and deceit in Iraq and this only adds to my furor. We are not this kind of people. We are supposed to live by the rule of law. The fact that those who oppose us do not live by rule of law or that they are mired in the muck and mud of lying and deceit does not in any way give us permission to do the same. It’s time to start doing something more than just write letters. However, I have no confidence that the Democrats are any better. It’s time to throw the whole bunch out. Pardon me while I go throw up.

MM.. MM.. Good!

General

I came home from work today to a wonderful smell in the house. Nina was baking bread. There are few things that smell as good as bread baking in the oven! It was ready to come out shortly after I got home so I feasted on a large, hot piece of bread slathered in butter. That sure was delicious. Nina has made bread the past couple of weeks and home-made bread is just so much better than the stuff from the store. Great stuff.

I did manage to get quite a bit of stuff cleared away off my desk and put away somewhere else. I was noticing in my web server logs that a couple of files in the William P Smith collection were missing and fixed those broken links. That got me back into the genealogy mood once again. It’s time to redo the William P Smith web site and make it a lot more user friendly. There is more genealogy information available now than there was about eight years ago and all of that information needs to get into the website. It’d work a lot better served up from a database and generated on the fly rather than being static web pages that take a lot of manual maintenance. I think this could keep me busy for several weeks getting everything ready to be put into a new web look. And, of course, I’ve got all of the other family history stories that need refreshing as well. This could be fun. I haven’t visited with Becky Porter, the woman who put together the original collection in several years and I probably should get together with her once again and see what she’s found in the meantime. This will also be quite fun … and good!

In Stake Conference

General

I’m sitting in Stake Conference trying out my new Treo phone’s web browser and the ability to get directly into my weblog. We’ll see how well this works. the technology just keeps moving forward!