LONG, LONG TIME...

Okay, It's been almost a year. I've had the mistaken idea that I need to post photos with everything. Sad to say, I don't take that many photos. I'll do better.

Thought I'd catch everybody up on what happened over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Only had to work half a day on Wednesday. Got home around 2pm and decided to help Janet with a little bit of laundry. Found the clothes still wet so I turned the dryer back on and let them fluff. While we were waiting for that I mentioned that RC Willey was having a sale on beds so Janet and I went to the store to see if there was a bed we might want to buy. Janet has been putting up with my extra firm bed for years, so I thought it was time that she get a softer bed for her hip. It took a couple of hours but we found one that we both like.

Back to the laundry. Went back a couple of hours later and they're still wet. Did it once more, just in case I did something wrong. OOPS!! By this time it's almost 7pm and we've contacted the neighbors to play Nertz. Have you heard about our Nertz games? I'll tell you sometime. Anyway, I called the neighbors back and asked them if we could use their dryer to do a couple of loads. They are so nice. Well, we played cards 'til almost 11pm and I retreived our last load of clothes from their house. Thanks again Dave and Nancy.

Thanksgiving morning...I don't remember...I slept through it. Not really. Got up around 9am and watched a little tv and got ready for the day while Janet slaved away in the kitchen. Sarah and I went to the grocery store to use the "turkey bucks" that we had. It was the last day they were valid and we had $11.50 worth. Janet and Sarah and I are gonna use the turkey as the main portion of a Christmas dinner box to leave on someones doorstep here in the next couple of weeks. I heard that someone nearby lost their job just recently.

So, after getting things ready we loaded up the car and raced Eric and Britnee up the freeway to Grandma and Grandpa Schmalz's home. We had Eric and Britnee, Jessica and Josh, Sarah, DeAnn and her family and Karen and Tim there. Two long tables and lots of food. DeAnn brought stuffin' muffins. You bake the stuffing in muffin pans. I thought that was a pretty neat little trick. All the food was great and I overdid it, of course. Then while I slept it off the kids helped their mother put things away. I didn't get to say goodbye to anyone.

Friday morning we woke up and started cleaning our bedroom to make room for the new bed. Forgot all about the dryer not working. Well, I was hesitant to call out a repairman at the prices I was sure they would charge on a holiday weekend. I happened to be talking to the Bishop and asked him who he uses to fix appliances. He suggested one of our neighbors down the road and he came over to "take a look" with his tool bag in tow. We tore the thing apart and tested everything you can imagine. It came down to the heat sensor on the exhaust port. One inch long, quarter inch wide, plastic part that costs $10.00. And they had one at the parts store, in stock. I ran over and picked it up and put it in and the dryer is working great now. Could you imagine the cost of having a repairman out to do that? I figure well over a hundred dollars. We're gonna get a gift certificated for our neighbor and give it to him because he wouldn't take our money.

Saturday was the "BIG GAME." For those of you who don't live in Utah, that's the BYU vs Utah football game. Some have come to calling it the holy war. I don't subscribe to that because their are plenty of Mormons at the University of Utah. Heck, even the president of BYU is a graduate of Utah. What's even more ironic is that the president of Utah is a graduate of BYU. Huh? That's right. Anyway...The only thing that counts is that BYU won this particular game on Saturday. We went to our other neighbors house and they hosted us to a brunch and their 106 inch screen tv to watch the game. We had fun and food and plenty of it. Well, maybe not enough fun, because we wound up playing for Nertz at our house later that evening.

All in all it was a fun holiday and I'm looking forward to the Christmas season coming up. I hope all my family was happy and full of turkey. Here's wishing all of you a Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas.

Frosty Mornings at American Fork Boat Harbor

I work for American Fork City. We have a boat harbor on Utah Lake. We leave the gates open all winter for the ice fishermen to access the lake. I drive down there a few times each winter to check out the icebergs that are driven up on the jetty or skip rocks on the ice to see how far I can get one out there (it sounds really cool on thin ice.) Once or twice a winter an inversion occurs and the air just over the lake is super cold while the mountain benches are warmer. Here are some pictures that I took this morning while down at the harbor.

8:30 am and the fog is still obscuring the sun.

The fog creates a coat of frost on the twigs of bushes and trees and continues to build each day as long as the weather doesn't get too high. This morning it was 5 to 10 degrees. It probably won't get above 25 degrees today.

You can see the tracks of the ice fishermen out across the ice. They'll disappear in the next storm. The ice here is probably 10 to 12 inches thick.

This is our "lighthouse" or marker. You can see this piece of pipe for miles out on the lake. It's about 10 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter and painted yellow. The street lamp is the light part of the lighthouse.

Very beautiful frost on barbed wire.

A few weeks ago I took a picture of this elk with my camera phone. You coudn't really see him all that well. Well, he hasn't come up to the fence since then so I can get a better photo of him. You can also see the frost on the fence and bullrush in the foreground.

Christmas...FINALLY!!

Sorry it's taken so long to get photo's of Christmas on here. This is from just my camera. I need to download photo's from Janet's camera and add them. Enjoy the photo's...

Janet really enjoyed our time with G'ma and G'pa locked in the house because of the snowstorms that were pounding Utah during the holidays.

We spent most of our time playing games like domino's and...

push the dummy (thanks Donna and family.)

Christmas dinner was delicious, but it wasn't the same without Linda and her family. We were prepared and looking forward to their visits.

We had over a foot of snow by Christmas day. Add another foot a week later and we're still driving on snow packed roads today.

Sign of the times? Both G'ma and G'pa were playing with their new digital cameras.

Sarah was quite happy with all her new games and clothes...

Mandy really enjoyed her wrapping paper...

Merry Christmas little one.

Gas Prices

Wouldn't you know. We decide to park the Suburban for the winter and the price of gas drops like a rock. We were paying over $100.00 to fill the thing up this past summer. Now I could fill it up for less than $50.00.

I was driving around town here and saw a sign advertising gas for $1.33 a gallon. I investigated a little further and discovered you had to buy a deluxe carwash to get the discounted gas. The price at the pump it currently $1.49!!!!! Can you remember that price? It's been 6 or 7 years. Back in the olden days.

I don't get it. 2 or 3 years ago the price of oil was about $20.00 a barrel and gas was about $2.00 a gallon. Right now oil is about $50.00 a barrel and the price of gas is $1.50. That doesn't make sense in my little brain. Guess that's why it took three attempts for me to pass my statistics class in college.

DEC 11, 2008...
UPDATE: I was driving through town this morning and the discounted price for gas with a deluxe carwash is now....$1.25!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you believe it? I gotta get my car washed.

I'm just glad to see the price come down. Hopefully it will be this low (or lower) next summer when I go camping with the scouts and young women of the ward. Yea, low prices!!!!

Trailing A Lemon

So, I went to get my morning soda at the local gas station. After I'd paid I turned around and look what this guy pulled in....

I realize that it's a little dark. It's cloudy today and I was using my phone. But it's about 10' long and 6' tall and may 5' wide. It's rounded on the front and comes to a fin on the back. The sleeping quarters are in the front and the back end lifts up to create a galley. It's home made from plans the guy got off the internet. Tin over a wooden frame. He even insulated it with the foam-in-a-can that you can buy at WalMart. It took about 25 cans of the stuff to do the whole thing. I talked to him for a few minutes and he showed me around and in it. He's on his way to Florida to see his Dad. Don't know where he's from. But I wish him luck. What an adventure!

My Buddy, Bruce, dubbed it The Lemon. Put some black stripes on it and a smile on the front and it could be The Bee.

Happy Thanksgiving...

So, it's a week before Thanksgiving and the temperature yesterday was 70 degrees. The same for today. So Brian and I are going golfing this afternoon. What wonderful weather. It's supposed to be warm next week too. Think we can convince our wives that we need to go golfing on Thanksgiving morning? HA!

I was reading Donna's blog and had some thoughts of my own.

I do remember lots of pets on the farm. We had cats, dogs, cows, horses, goats, chickens, pigs, hamsters, gerbils, snakes...you name it, we had it. I lost the snake in my room and Mom had a fit and threatened me if I didn't find it before she came back from the grocery store. I found it and was promptly escorted out of the house with my 'pet' and told to let it go!

Cats. We had cats galore. Mom and we adopted Sleepy and she did have a ton of kittens. Dad calculated that she had at least 60 in her lifetime. The one that stayed the longest was Simon the part Siamese that went to California with us. He had an eventful life. When he was a kitten he and Sleepy went to sleep in the back of Dad's truck. He jumped in and went to work before they could bail out. They rode all the way to work with Dad. He called Mom from work and told her that she should come and get "HER" cat. When we got to Dad's truck there was only Sleepy. We couldn't find Simon for days. Mom and Donna knocked on doors down our road and low and behold they found Simon under the trailer of a little old lady. Simon had jumped out of the truck a couple hundred yards from the house. We figured that he'd jumped out while the truck was traveling at approximately 40mph. He lost a tooth and ripped his lip badly, but survived. He did drool when sound asleep for the rest of his life. YUCK!! Drool spots on your pillow!

Cows. I was a cow person. Still am. I'd rather have a cow for a pet anyday. Does that make me a redneck? I'm asked all the time what my favorite pet is and I respond, "Cow." Think about it. If the world is coming to an end people still have a hard time thinking of eating their cats, dogs and horses. No one thinks twice about eating a cow. Plus I just like bovine. Always have, always will. Wish I could keep on in my backyard, but the neighbors might not like that.

My memories of the cows on our farm are many. Butterball was a great cow. She was mild mannered and bore healthy calves. We ate most of them. I think she only had two or three heifers the rest were bulls. I don't think we ever named here but we had a black angus that was a hoot. She loved watermelon. If you stood by the fence and held up a watermelon rind and whistled she'd run to you. Full out run, not trot, not lope, run! She wanted to be the first there to get the most watermelon. Duke was my pet brahma. He was so tame. We had to get rid of him when we started buying registered stock. I remember the day still. It was foggy and cold. We herded all the cows into the front pasture to put them in the trailer. I was lagging behind and tried to cut Duke out and let him 'escape' to the back woods and we'd have to let him stay. Dad saw me and what I was trying to do and stopped me. I cried when I said goodbye. We replaced those cows with Buddy, Perla, and I can't remember all the names. We then had to get rid of them after a couple of years when we moved to CA. I tried to talk Dad into taking them with us, to no avail.

Dogs. Jack was our faithful mutt that we got off of the Pope family. We had a Jill too, but she got sick and had to be put down. Jack stayed with us for a few years. Probably 5 or 6 years. He was a wanderer. He wandered up into town one time and was 'adopted' by a family. Donna happened to be playing in town with some friends when she spotted him on a leash attached to a little boy. Donna called him and he tried to come, but the little boy dragged him back to his house. Don't know how but Mom and Donna went to the house and retrieved Jack. He still couldn't be stopped from wandering. He wandered into town and went through peoples trash cans and did it once too often. Someone shot him in the leg and he hopped home on three legs that fall. All winter long he stayed in his house/box and Donna and I fed him and watered him and put fresh hay in his house/box until he emerged in the spring with a limp and a large wound on his hind leg. He stayed a little closer to home after that. Too bad. He followed Mom into the woods when she went to visit Dad while he cut firewood. Jack bit into a cyanide trap meant for coyotes and died. Mom felt bad and didn't tell me about that until 5 years later when I was just home off my mission. I'd always thought that he'd been 'adopted' or shot again.

Seeing as it's Thanksgiving I'll tell the story of the Tom turkey. We had a Tom and a few hens that we kept for fun and the eggs. Big eggs! It was one of my chores to feed the chickens and the turkeys when I got home from school. The Tom was a mean one and tried to flog you when you entered his territory (the pen where he and his harem were kept.) Dad showed me how to push the Tom away with a stick to keep him at a distance. One day I guess I'd had a bad day at school. I don't know why. When I entered the turkey pen the Tom came at me and I reared back and baseball swung right at his head. WHACK!!!! And he fell over. I panicked and collected the eggs and headed back into the house to contemplate my punishment. When Dad got home I was too afraid to face him so I avoided him. About 30 minutes later Dad called me into the back yard. With fear and trepidation I dragged my feet into the backyard. Dad asked what was "wrong with the Tom?" I had only knocked him out and not knocked him off. I feined ignorace and considered it a boon. I did tell Dad at a later date exactly what had happened. But that Tom didn't bother me when I went into the pen after that.

We've had a few pets here in Provo too. Cats and a dog and some fish. Not the menagerie we had in Texas. But with luck we'll be able to find some land one day and have a few cows and chickens.

Halloween 2008

Last Wednesday Janet and Sarah picked out 4 very large and pretty pumpkins. They were HUGE!

Mandy struggled taming her pumpkin...

Sarah dispatched hers with ease...

Mine was scrumptious...

I wasn't very inspired while carving mine...

Sarah wanted to do the pumpkins barfing, but it doesn't translate very well in the dark...

I think this one is Janet's...

Amanda's...

A nighttime shot of our front yard. I'll get a daytime shot that's clearer. Our's was referred to as the Scooby House or the Twinkling House (because of the blinking lights hanging from the trees.)

Halloween morning was gorgeous and red as the sun came up under the clouds...how does the saying go? Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. Sunday it rained all day.

Riley, Sarah, Sara, and Heather

Amanda and her boyfriend, Alec, dressed up as Jack Skellington and Sally from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" Amanda made both of their costumes from scratch.

Don't know if he looks better with or without the hat.
Pretty happy for a girl held together with stitches...

Thought you might be interested in what Janet has been up to the past week and a half. She's been putting up apple jelly and apple syrup. We had a bumper crop of red delicious apples. I think she said we'll have 12 quarts of syrup and I'll bet three times as much jelly. A lot of the jelly we'll put in the little half pints and give them away to co-workers for Christmas. This picture is just the first days product...