No regrets

A friend of mine did a post about regrets today.

She had some funny regrets on there that made me consider what regrets I might have. Also, she ended the post by saying "How about you guys?" So I had to think about it. It was, like, homework.

Going down her list, I was surprised at the list of her regrets, because so many of them were things I considered regretting or did regret, at one time. Like study abroad. I always wanted to study abroad, but I also wanted to finish school, and not go into too much debt during school. I accomplished those other goals by sacrificing any opportunity to study abroad. Also, she regrets not practicing the piano enough. I used to wish I could play the piano better, and I still do a little, but I did not like piano lessons, and I still maintain that I was tricked into it. In third grade, I wanted to join a soccer team. My mom said I could if I started piano lessons, and I thought that was ok. So I started both. I played soccer for one year, and I took piano lessons for 8 years. I think I plateaued around year 5 or so, but I was never really into it. I can play the piano well enough for me, and I'm ok with that.

I have no real big regrets. I wish I had learned how to better interact with people. I think I do an ok job, but I'm very timid. In the past I have come across as someone who needs help, or someone threatening. (I never understood how I would be perceived as threatening.) So, after a while of not talking much, if at all, people would become curious, and start a conversation. I was rarely the initiator. Some people think I'm a good listener, and maybe I am, now, but I've mostly always been a bad talker.

I do have one oddly specific regret. When I was young (8 or 10) I had a crush on a girl in my ward, who had been in my school classes too. So at a Pioneer Day party one year, there were handcarts that some people were supposed to ride in, and others could help push. I managed to hop into the same cart as this girl, and we were riding along and she said we should go faster. So, in my child-like attempt at chivalry, I hopped out of the cart to help push faster. But I fell. And I was dumb enough to jump off the front edge, so I had to try a backwards somersault to avoid getting run over. I almost made it out of the way, but the wheel ran over my rear end. (I remember it being almost like a pinch between the wheel and the road, but thinking back, I don't know if that makes sense.) So I had to sort of waddle over to the grass to recover. I still wish I hadn't done that.

Trip pictures

Ok, here are the best of the pictures I took on my trip to Elko. Most of them aren't actually from Elko since I was working while I was there. I'll keep the captions short and sweet, and below the pictures.
This made me laugh: the display of an irrigated garden with sprinklers right down the middle.

Salt Lake temple, as seen from the top of the conference center

Sunset in Tooele. (Alternate caption: Choose the Right.)

My hotel room in Elko. The decor had the right feel.

Me, not smiling.

The hotel pool; it was probably frozen.

A view of a mountain with an E on it, and the trailer park that was adjacent to my hotel.

My rental car.

Deeth Star Valley, which I assume is where they invented and/or built the Deeth Star.

Me, at Bonneville Salt Flats, contemplating the salty flat expanse.

Me and Jay, sleeping after a long trip. Jay didn't go on the trip, but he was as tired as I was.

Elko

Last week, I went to Elko.

I keep meaning to do a comprehensive story of my trip, with pictures, but I get motivated at times when my camera is not handy. So now I'm going to do a shorter version, no pictures, to be hopefully supplemented by a picture post of the scenic high desert west, at a later time.

First of all, if you have no idea where Elko is, you are not alone. Airplanes don't know where it is either. At least no airplanes that leave Las Vegas. And those that can be persuaded to find it charge greatly for their services. Thus, I flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, and drove due west (on I-80) for about 3 hours to get there. Oddly enough, once you leave Salt Lake, there are only about 4 towns along that stretch.

Anyway, I had to get to Elko for some depositions I was taking on Monday, so I flew to Salt Lake on the early flight and met my old pal Joey Schmutz in Salt Lake, and we went to temple square. It was a pretty quiet morning on temple square, and we did the tours of the Beehive (or Lion?) House and the Conference Center. It was cool to wander around and see that stuff. I've been to Salt Lake just the right number of times, I think. It's always interesting to me.

After that, I dropped Joey off, cause he had to work, and I went to visit my grandma. My grandma recently moved to Syracuse, which is west of Layton. I had never been there, and I got lost twice along the way. Fortunately, I made it. My grandma currently has a basement apartment in my aunt and uncle's house. It was nice to see her. I gave her a copy of Holly's recent school picture. She asked me questions about people's recent Facebook statuses. That's right. My grandma is on Facebook. And though she doesn't update her page, she monitors mine. And my brothers and sisters. She was amazingly up to date. Don't underestimate your grandparents.

About that time, and thanks to getting lost along the way, I had to backtrack to I-80 and head to Elko. I got out of the city by dark and enjoyed singing at the top of my lungs across the desert. I even honked my rental car's horn a few times, just for fun. The highway was very empty. Much of the time I couldn't see any lights at all. I also searched the AM radio for Sunday night football, and remarkably found clear stations based in Albuquerque, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Salt Lake, but not Elko, Reno, or Las Vegas.

I got to the Gold Country Inn at about 7, if I remember right, and watched the rest of the game. For those of you who travel across state lines occasionally, you know the adjustments that requires. It was doubly odd to travel to Utah, then back to Nevada, but not home, in the same day. Two time changes, and I had to coordinate Utah time with people in Utah, so I couldn't just ignore it.

I had depositions in Elko all day Monday. I had a great breakfast at my hotel's cafe, and an interesting lunch at a Basque restaurant. By the end of the day, I had a headache and was not feeling well, so I got takeout from the hotel restaurant and watched TV. The blackened chicken with linguine wasn't that great.

I didn't sleep well Monday night, and got up at 5 a.m. after I got a small chunk of sleep. I started east before 7 and stopped in West Wendover, then at the Salt Flats. It was interesting to see how empty it is up there. I'm used to the desert, and even dry lake beds, but salt flats are just empty and white. Interestingly, people try to write things with darker rocks along the freeway. Names, mostly, from what I could tell. I wondered what those people were thinking. I'll probably never know.

Getting back to Salt Lake was bittersweet, because it is a whole lot more interesting than Elko, but I was ready to go home. The plane ride was uncomfortable, though I did discover that the emergency exit row is the roomiest row on a plane. No more comfortable, though.

Also, Elko is isolated, rural and probably pretty cool if you had time to explore a little bit. I didn't have much time, and it wasn't terribly pleasant to be there. I do have to say that I noticed several nice hunting trophies while there, and the game warden appeared to favor the restaurant at my hotel, at least for breakfast. I saw at least 8 racks of antlers in truck beds. You just don't see that very often in Las Vegas.

Army crawling

I know it's been a long time, and all I can convince myself to write about is Jay. He can crawl. He has teeth.

He can crawl army style to pretty much anywhere he wants to go. So far he's been most interested in going outside. He almost crawled out the back door today. When I saw how excited he was, I raised the blinds on the lowest foot of the french door, and he crawled up to it and looked outside. When Kelsea had to take out some trash, he tried to follow her, and when she got back to the door, he was there watching for her, and I had move him, because he wouldn't back up so she could open the door.

He also has 7 teeth, and more coming in. He has four teeth on the top, and three on the bottom. We let him eat pretty much anything he wants. Tonight we had waffles with cool whip and strawberries. Strawberries are one of those things you aren't supposed to give kids until they're one, so I didn't give him any actual strawberries, and he loved it. Unfortunately, we gave him a slice of apple on Sunday, and he choked on it. We'll have to wait until he gets some molars before we try that again.

And, since the last post was about patching the whole in the wall, here are the woefully inadequate pictures I took.

Still remodeling

We still have lots of remodeling to do in our house, and I've been trying to get all the walls painted. Before we moved in, I painted nearly every wall and ceiling in the place, but I used a white primer/sealer, and not a finish coat of paint. We decided to do it that way so that all the walls could be painted without cleaning the paint sprayer, and so that I could paint the ceilings as well, which were a little dingy.

Since then, we painted three bedrooms, and the two bathrooms. We also recently painted the kitchen ceiling, but only because I tore it up when I changed the light fixture. The biggest room in our house, and the one we spent the most time in, was still white, and the primer isn't as durable as a finish coat of paint, in case you didn't know.

So, a few weeks ago, we picked out a paint color, bought a few gallons, and I started painting. Most of the living/great room's walls are now painted the color of burnt almond, I think is the color's name (think of the inside of an almond, not the outside). But I was putting off doing the last wall. The last wall is covered by our bookshelves, which means we would have to move lots of books, and the lightswitch is weird.

In about 1984, the owner of the home added an overhead light, so a new switch was added, but it was a single switch, next to the original switch, for the plugs along that wall. And then the wall was patched poorly, and a crack was obvious. The two switches bothered me, so I wanted to fix it anyway, but the bad patch and the crack made tearing up the wall much easier to justify to Kelsea. So last night, I tore up the wall a little (maybe a one square foot whole). The newspaper inside the wall from 1984 let me know that's when the change was made. I'm looking forward to fixing the wires tonight, and hopefully closing up the wall, too. I'm not looking forward to moving the other bookshelves, but that's what I'll have to do to be able to finish painting, and that was the whole point, so I guess I have to. I'll try to remember to take some pictures, so you can see the difference, and I didn't take an immediately before picture, so you might have to trust me that it was a bad patch job.

Happy holiday weekend!

Isn't it great that we get an extra day to enjoy opening weekend of college football?

poll

Quick poll:

Who do you think looks younger: Dee; or Kelsea?

Thanks for participating.

Camping at Summit Mountain

For every year as long as I can remember (and probably the years I can't remember), my family has gone camping at least once a summer on Summit Mountain. It's land my great-grandparents owned, and I found out this year it used to belong to my great-grandma's father. We used to go over Labor day weekend, but since I've been able to go on my own, I've gone earlier in the year. There's a lake up there, it's very green, there's a raspberry patch, and lots of wildlife. Jay even got to go on a hike or two.

Holly and Mia had a great time on the hikes and wandering around following anyone they could keep up with.

This was our hike down the canyon to the raspberries. Holly and Mia really enjoyed picking and eating the wild raspberries.

See? Raspberries!

Just look at the size of that raspberry patch.

A nice meadow above the lake.

Sunset from the lake.

Sunset on the lake.

Jay had a good time, too, even though his walker didn't work out like we planned. (Mia is a ham).

Holly and Mia picked flowers on the way down to the raspberries, then left the flowers on this lovely tree.

And finally, Mia with her great-grandparents. Thanks for letting us visit your mountain.

Backpacking to Mummy Springs

On July 31, my brothers and I hiked to Mummy Springs, near Mount Charleston. We were planning to hike to the top of Mummy Mountain, but we were too slow and tired. We hiked three miles in three hours, the uphill part really slowing us down. We found a nice uneven hillside to camp on just past the spring, which actually had some running water. It was a terrible night sleep, but we had a good time hiking and talking together.

coming soon...

two posts about camping trips.

I went backpacking with my brothers the last Friday in July, and my whole family went to Summit Mountain the week of August 10. I love going to the mountains, even if backpacking made me realize I'm getting old and need to exercise more. I took lots of pictures on both trips, but I'm bad at doing anything with them. I back up all my pictures on my work computer, which is probably not the best system, but I want to see them at work too. I'll probably post some and put some others on facebook. There will actually be some recent pictures of the kids that way.

Look forward to it.

Time flies

I can't believe it's already the end of July. The best part of getting through July is that the heat is passing. At least in theory. August will still be hot, but July is usually the peak. Tuesday, our patio thermometer said it was 118 degrees. Our air conditioner works fairly well, but on a day that hot, it couldn't get it any cooler than 80 degrees, and it ran pretty constantly. There was a stretch when the humidity was a little too high to run the swamp cooler, but thankfully it's been working better lately. This morning it was 68 degrees in our living room, thanks to the swamp cooler. The swamp cooler works great, and it works the best when the outside temperature doesn't get over 105 or so.

But I'll be glad to get to September, when the highs will be under 100 again.

I looked at my pictures to see what I could blog about

It's true. Admit it. You like blogs better when they include pictures. So here's what we've been doing.

I think it was two weekends ago when we finally finished our kitchen ceiling. I had to sand, prime, and paint. It was dusty, dirty work.


The original picture will show you what the original light looked like, which was a monstrosity. It was so big that the cabinet doors would hit it and not open all the way.


Kelsea will no doubt appreciate the picture of her from last April.
She'll also be upset with me for using the picture below, since she thinks the lighting was wrong.

It was night, so there's no light from the window, but I think it looks good. And she hasn't taken a picture since then. Also, I added the handles to all the cabinet doors. The clean white ceiling and the brushed nickel handles make the kitchen look cleaner and newer. We bought all the handles almost a year ago, so Kelsea was pretty happy to finally have those on there. Oh, I also changed the horrible dirty outlet and switch to new clean white ones. So much better.
Maybe this will motivate Kelsea to take the picture she wants me to post.

Camping on July 4

On July 3rd, we went camping on Mount Charleston as part of a ward activity.
For dinner, we had hot dogs and hamburgers.





Holly and Mia enjoyed getting into bed at 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon.


Mia learned to climb trees... with some help.
Then on Saturday night we watched a few fireworks at my parents' house. It was small but fun.

Goodbye! Happy Independence Day!

salsa (now with pictures!)

Our garden is doing very well lately. I have more tomatoes than I can eat, and Kelsea doesn't eat them plain, so we decided to make salsa. We're also growing peppers that are doing well. After looking at various recipes, and reading the ingredients of our preferred salsa, I decided to combine what I knew I wanted, and make something up. I often cook this way when it doesn't involve bread, cake or cookies. So anyway, we had to buy some jalapenos, an onion, and some limes, which we combined with our bowl full of tomatoes, and one bell pepper. It turned out pretty good, though too spicy (I should have used only one jalapeno). It's nice to be able to do something productive with all those tomatoes.

Incidentally, I purposely got tomato plants that would not produce huge tomatoes. It has been my experience that larger tomatoes take too long to ripen in the desert heat, so they split, go bad, get eaten by insects, or all of the above, before we get to eat any. So this year, I planted 6 roma tomato plants, and one grape tomato plant. The tomatoes we're getting are mostly very small roma tomatoes, or very large grape tomatoes. But we're getting a lot, and they are very good.

Also, our basil is growing like crazy, we're overwhelmed by zucchini (which honestly doesn't take many zucchini), the cucumbers are overwhelmed by the zucchini plants, our carrots are leafy but the roots are still small, the peas have mostly died in the heat, we have one pumpkin that is already turning orange, and five or six watermelons that are gradually getting bigger. I think next year we might have to put in a lime tree to support our salsa habit. We also have some very young grape vines that won't do anything till next year.

So, in the picture to the left, do you see any watermelon? I know there are three that I could see when I took the picture, but in the picture, I can only find one for sure. The largest is about the size of a mini-basketball. We had a watermelons about that size (12 in. diameter?) before we even noticed that there were any watermelons actually on the vine. Then we saw the other four or five all of a sudden. They hide well.

Lake Pics

Lake Day

We went to Lake Mead on Saturday, and I was reminded why we don't go very often. I had fun, and I want to go again, but without a boat, it's crowded,and you have to put up with other people. I don't mind putting up with people, but it's nice to have some privacy, someone was smoking (which was weird all by itself), and you have to see people who don't understand that a bikini doesn't automatically make you look good. Also, I got sunburned, as usual, though not too bad, and only on my shoulders. I wore a life preserver a lot of the time, so that I could swim around with Holly and Mia more safely. We decided they both needed life jackets, and they're likely to be more daring swimmers than me if I don't wear one too.

I really enjoy floating along in the water with a life vest on. I've never been a great swimmer, but bobbing along in a big lake is really relaxing. I also enjoyed water skiing the last time we went, which was also the first time I went. If the girls didn't freak out about water so easily, Lake Mead might become a regular destination for us.

So we'll go to the lake again, especially if someone with a boat invites us. (Which might be a hint, but I don't know if anyone with a boat reads this). Unfortunately, I didn't take a camera, so I have no pictures. Consider that a gift though, as you are spared my blinding whiteness.

Family pictures

On Saturday, we went to my parents' house to have pictures taken. My sister and her family are visiting from Colorado, and it had been a while since our last family picture. After fretting about a photographer, Marissa, (who Tacy and I went to high school with) came and took some good pictures. Here is our official family portrait:
Marissa commented that my dad looks like he is comfortably hovering. I noticed who barely got off the ground. Tacy claims she has "bad jump timing." Yeah Tacy, I believe that. I'm also surprised that I look to have jumped as high as anyone, since all of my younger siblings have played volleyball in high school, and some played tennis. Granted, it's a jump for a picture, and Matt and Chris were wearing matching sandals, but still. For reference, we're lined up oldest to youngest.

Ok, fine, it's not really our official family portrait, and I haven't even seen the pictures Marissa took, with this exception. Here's the link to the Facebook album [link disabled, email me to see them] I made of the pictures I took.

Also, one note on graduation. My little sister's high school graduation is today. She thinks she'll be a CHS alumni. Of course, she'll be an alumna. As a Latin-based word, all forms are present in English, so alumna is correct, even in English, and alumni is only correct for more than one male graduate, or a group of male and female graduates. You know those license plate holders that say, for example, UNLV alumni? I could never get one of those, because I'm only one graduate, but I would buy a UNLV alumnus license plate holder in a heartbeat. I've often considered ordering a BYU alumni license plate holder, because that would actually be accurate, as Kelsea and I both graduated from BYU.

Yard

First of all, this is our garden:
There's no way to get a good picture of it in good light, but we have tomato plants, pepper plants, basil, carrots, peas, watermelon, pumpkin, zucchini, and cucumbers. We've already eaten some tomatoes, peas, and a tiny carrot. Zucchini aren't far away, and the rest are all looking promising. I like the size of our garden: it's very manageable, but big enough to give us some good veggies. Holly and Mia have been loving the peas.

Now here are some pictures of the little front yard section that is done.
It's your basic desert landscaping, low water usage, high shade plan. It'll take a few years to get the shade tree to do its job, but the girls enjoy the retaining wall as a little bench. Mia liked the fire hydrant, too. I think they were excited to realize we have a fire hydrant in our yard.

And of course, Jay. These glasses aren't really his color, but he still looks cool. He even seemed to enjoy them. He wasn't crying, at least.
Also, we're going to get rid of that shed, and park there. Anyone think we could move that thing (and give it to someone else), or would I have to disassemble it? Anyone want it?

preview

I haven't blogged in a while, so I feel like it's time for an update. I took some pictures of the yard the other day so that a blog update would be easy. And of course the girls followed me outside and wanted to be where the action was, so there are new pictures of them too. They'll be in the next post. Right now, just know that we are doing well, and our yard is seeing progress.

Also, I ate some tomatoes from our garden, and they were delicious.

Google Earth is getting better (or, Italian graffiti is long-lived)

That's me, in 2000, probably April or May of 2000, indicating that the Book of Mormon is for you.

I recently discovered that Google Earth has been expanding its global reach. To see something very interesting, copy the following address: 4 Via Magenta, Novara, Piedmont, Italy.
Enter that address into the search bar of google maps, then click street view and face west.

Or, try this link, zoom in close, then drag the little yellow man to see the street view at 4 Via Magenta, and look west. I was amazed.

If you're lazy, or can't quite get to the right spot, I'll just tell you that the graffiti is still there. I always wondered about that, but this is the only picture I could find that let me verify the status of any particular tag. I'll keep looking though.

Also, looking south down Via Magenta, you'll see the setting of this somewhat more dignified picture of me as a missionary.