The local cats

Along with the javelina that have made our house part of their routine stops, we've been seeing this bobcat frequently making trips along our back wall. I'm sure he's well fed with all of the bunnies roaming the neighborhood. The latest sighting was on Martin Luther King weekend when I got this picture. I was talking to Carol while she was making breakfast and noticed it moving along the wall. Doug (who was staying with us for the weekend) told us we could get $359 for the pelt. I'm pretty sure the gunshot would raise a few eyebrows among our neighbors though.

Our Backyard Friends

This is a continuation of Carol's post.

So last night I watched the end of the new Indiana Jones movie after everyone else had gone to bed. There is an awful lot of stupid fighting in the show (like you would really continue to drive your Jeep just as fast as the bad guys and jump back and forth between vehicles for no reason). During one of those extraneous fight scenes, I thought the surround sound was a little too good for our TV and paused the show while I took a look for the cause of some extra noises from the back patio. Mother and baby Javalina were enjoying a little snack on some forgotten garbage. They stuck around licking an empty ice cream container long enough for me to go find the camera and get this shot. Seems our yard is coming back on their list of regularly scheduled stops. It's true we do have food stuff (discarded suckers, fallen bits and pieces) strewn around the yard pretty regularly, so I imagine they don't go hungry much. I wonder if garbage fed pig is as good as corn fed beef.

Birthday Trauma

This picture may be worth a thousand words. For any parent who has ever had a three year-old, this may remind you of about 365 days in addition to those 1000 words. Grace was really happy until we sang Happy Birthday and lit 3 candles--she only wanted to be two, not three. And a three year-old wants to choose EVERYTHING!

Hot Water - An underappreciated utility

We added to the list of things we are thankful for last week. Hot water came to the top of the list after a few days of delay getting the gas hooked up to the water heater.





I found there are a few reasons why hot water is important:

1) Your dishwasher runs only from the hot water tap. Carol found it too much trouble to unload after all the dishes were already in there, so they just had to wait for hot water. Besides, washing dishes in the sink with cold water is not exactly easy either. Would be easy to heat a pot of water on the stove to make the sink water warm, right? Unless, of course, your stove is a gas stove like ours.

2) Hygiene. Showers and baths just aren't quite as needed when you know the water is cold. Lindsey decided to go to school early and shower to maintain her hygiene. I still wonder what the teachers must think about the girl who comes to school 30 minutes early just to shower. The authorities may be here to visit us soon, but at least we didn't post evidence like Nicole.

3) Post-traumatic Stress Disorder - After maintaining my minimal hygeine by showering at work after sham workouts, I decided to brave the shower on Thursday morning. As I splashed in the frigid water I had vivid flashbacks to mornings in Santo Tome, Argentina where I would pull a disc of ice off the top of an outdoor water basin to get a bucket of water to "shower" with in the little outhouse like enclosure in the backyard. The key was to get all the key areas just wet enough to soap, lather up good, then rinse with urgency and race back inside to the small space heater and blanket. If you were really fast you could do it with only mild hypothermia. This experience explains why we later rigged up 220 volt shower heads in our next apartment which regularly shocked us, but we found it an acceptable alternative.

4) The Ward Relief Society Progressive Dinner was at our house on Thursday night. You might, like me, think there are a lot of homes in the ward which are not under threat of having walls knocked in at any moment that might serve to host the Progressive Dinner this year. But apparently the Lord works in mysterious ways. Fortunately, we were the last stop and we only needed to fit 50 chairs in the living area (no small feat) and serve desert. Carol plead with David and the other workers and managed to get them to delay knocking in the wall from the garage until Friday morning. So aside from the 30 yard dumpster everyone had to shuffle around to get in the front door, it was like there was no construction at all. Plus all those people managed to create quite a bit of heat over the hour they were here--a free benefit that is appreciated when your furnace is also not operable. See-- didn't even need the hot water. . . .

5) Compassion - It must be an awful thing to have to work for the gas company and shut people's gas off in the middle of winter. It must really take a toll on the workers. When Carol called on Friday to make sure they were coming to hook up the gas, they told her they couldn't make it out until Monday or Tuesday. Carol says she told them, "that's just not going to work." (Add a persistent and persuasive wife to the list of things I'm grateful for.) Somehow she persuaded the gas workers and they found a way to squeeze hooking a gas meter up for a pregnant woman and her now slightly stinky family.




When Lindsey got home from school on Friday and found out the hot water was working she had the same reaction as if we said her homework was cancelled for a week and we were going on vacation to a waterpark. Maybe next November we'll turn off the water or power for a week.

Shoes--not just an accessory

Perhaps it was spending two years on Guam that got our girls in the habit of not wearing shoes. Our Salt Lake neighbors always gave us puzzled looks as our girls continued to venture outside in the chilly weather without shoes on. The habit has continued even into Arizona, despite the fact that it is like walking on a frying pan in the summer and there are a few other hazards here. Yesterday Lindsey "went for a walk down the street" and came whimpering home for this picture.

I remember my Mom painting my fingernails with some kind of putrid material to get me to stop biting them. Maybe cactus can have a similar function--

Challenges, t-shirts and a turtle

Some of you may have heard about the race that Mark and I ran last week. To set the stage for the race, you must understand the idea for running the race came from my brother Robert, who along with Mark, decided that we should enter a marathon and try to qualify for Boston. Our lack of planning eliminated the St.George marathon as a possibility, since it had filled up long before. So Mark looked around for another Boston qualifying marathon and stumbled onto the Ridge to Bridge Marathon in Morgantown, NC. It seemed to be pretty, on Saturday, and at least somewhat downhill.

Robert emailed us:

"Man and boys (in other words, Daniel and Mark/Bryce), The time to decide is now- are we going to do this marathon or not. I’m in! They cap the race at 150 runners. Rob"

Apparently, what he meant to say was "I'm in for now." Robert was all about training and seemed to be in great shape. He showed us a book on marathon training recommended to him by Ed Eyestone who was teaching his running class at BYU. We all began training. About 8 weeks before the marathon, the race has a final deadline for backing out. Robert decides that his "knee hurts" (he tried running and it hurt so he just stopped). He announced that he was backing out of the race.

About a week later, I got sick (probably influenza) and spent 3 weeks coughing and not running much at all. I did try two long runs toward the end of my training. The first was 16 miles, and while I kept a really good pace the first 8 miles of this run, I became really tired and ended up really slowing down the last two miles. It was during this time that my mind became semi-delirious (Carol would argue that delirium is the only thing that makes people run) that I came up with an idea to wear T-shirts and dedicate the race to Robert in a sort of mockery.

Mark helped me fine tune the wording, and they were ordered and turned out great. Here they are at the finish.

The best part of the race was seeing the transition people would make from the "how wonderful that they are remembering their dead brother" stage to yelling "Tell Bob he's a wuss" as they read the back of the shirts.

Of course the race wasn't all fun. Maybe if I'd done more of those 16 or 18 mile runs before hand it would have been better. But running in Tucson in July and August is not really fun at any time of the day. So qualifying for Boston did not happen.

During the race, Carol would wait for me every few miles, hand me Gatorade and say, "You know, you don't ever have to do this again."

Of course she doesn't know the power my brothers have. . . .

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This last picture is when Nicole mistakenly thought Bryce (my brother-in-law) had entered the race.

Teenagers---anyone want to go to Nebraska?

Lindsey is a really great 12 year old, but it never hurts to have a backup plan if things go south. . . . I found this on CNN today.




updated 33 minutes ago
Frustrated parents dump teens at hospitals
Frustrated parents are dumping their teenagers at Nebraska hospitals -- even crossing state lines to do it -- and the state Legislature has scheduled a special hearing to try to stem the tide. Nebraska's "safe haven" law, intended to allow parents to anonymously hand over an infant to a hospital without being prosecuted, isn't working out as planned. full story