House Christmas lighting!

The weather for the last few days has been just plain cold.  However, yesterday it started to warm up causing bunches of snow and ice (snice) to melt.  Streets that had been kinda covered with snice started to clear up, and as Monday afternoon the streets are pretty much cleared up with some snow still next to the curb.  But by the time the next system is due to hit us on Thursday (that's what the weather folks are saying right now at least!), the roads should be pretty free of any snice, and since there'll be bunches of sunshine between now and then, we may even have DRY streets!  Life is good, huh?  Well, at least until Thursday when the precipitation is supposed to get here again.  

So... as I said, Saturday's weather wasn't quite as warm as it is today.  BUT that was the day that was allocated to hang Christmas lights on the outside of the house.  Gotta commend James and Jeff as they did most of the work by getting up on the roof, and literally lying in the snow on the roof to put the lights on the house.  Yes, it was dryer on the ground where I was.  But my hands got cold because I don't have insulated gloves, that makes a difference, doesn't it?  Probably nowhere near as cold as James and Jeff got as Jeff got wet clear through all his clothes, and I don't think James was far from it also.  But the lights got up, and look like this:

(The handsome young man in front of the house is Avery looking down the street.)  That's 2 lines of red C7 lights held on to the gutter or vinyl siding on the side of the roof with a clip that has a little hooky thing that is used to hold four lines of icicle lights.  A neighbor promptly came over and congratulated James for having such an interesting bunch of lights.  Now the important thing to remember about most folks here is that they put their Christmas lights up shortly after Halloween as it's still warm then.  They aren't turned on until after Thanksgiving though, and they don't have to face hanging the lights in the snow and cold.  Like some people do...  Ok, that's what happened Saturday.

Since Jeff been here, he has gone to a "Life Group" which is a small group at church, and he met someone there for me to play racquetball with, although I'm not quite sure when as he's a pilot at Hill AFB, and works quite a bit.  So hopefully we'll be able to match our schedules somewhere in the coming weeks and/or months to be able to get some serious exercise done.  ...Not that I need it, or anything like that, right!  Having said that, it's gonna be good to get my racquet and other gear out of the moho.  Now the trick to that is that I've got them in one of the basement storage compartments on the street side, which at this time is like 6" away from a fence.  ...Just not sure if I can get that compartment door open enough to get my stuff out.  Have to take a crack at it later in the heat of the day tomorrow when more of the snice is melted, maybe even leaving the driveway clear.  Here's what it looks like now.

Ya think I'm gonna be able to squeeze in there?  I dunno...  What's more, I don't know that Jeff will be able to squeeze in there either, even though there's less of him than there is of me.  I may need to move the moho out to the street just to get the racquetball stuff out.  I don't wanna do that as it's kinda set up now, and while the process may not be all that much, it's kinda more than what I really wanted to do.  Remember, I'm retired, ok?

Update on the health of the folks in the Ford residence:  Everyone is pretty much done with the hacking and growing gunk in various parts of our bodies, which is good.  However, Katie started doing the coughing and hacking thing late Saturday night and couldn't stop.  Finally I told her to try putting Vicks Vaporub on her feet and then putting socks on.  Odd as it may sound, it worked.  I counted the seconds (as best I could) and she coughed again for a little bit after 1 1/2 minutes, and then went to sleep.  Now then, this procedure isn't always thought to be very smart, as seen here, BUT it worked.  Or at least seemed to work, enough so that Katie got a good nights rest.  So I'm gonna say that it may very well be weird, ...but I'm thinking it's an ok way to get a good nights rest.  Anyone out there tried it?  If so, what do you think of it?  

So much for the current conditions.

The Travelogue - July 2012

Amanda and her family came to camp with us for a few days near the end of July.  This wasn't an odd thing for camp hosts as a lot of the families of the hosts came to visit them quite a bit of the time.  By the time that they got to see us, we'd tried out the lake a couple of times with our blow up Hobie Mirage i14T kayak, and got to have quite a bit of fun with it going across the lake and back again.  Amanda and her family had a boat previously and love being on the water.  Their boat had a motor though, and they didn't have to worry about getting tired when crossing the lake from paddling or peddling the mirage system.  Of course they had to buy the gas for the engine, but that's beside the point, right?  

So, we went down the 100' or so to the lake and put the kayak in the water.  Here's what it looked like.

Here they are out in the depths of the lake (golly, maybe four feet deep or so, not very far from the beach) with James using paddles rather than the mirage system (you can see the foot pedals for it right behind Amanda) while he calls out a cadence for Amanda to sync with him (They do look like they know what they're doing, don't they?).  As you can see Riley and Avery are busy looking out for the dreaded Bear Lake monster (Oh no!)  

As you can see, James is pretty excited about being back on the water.  Dja think that this might be his impression of "the life"?  Well, maybe...  But the kayak doesn't have much of a galley, let alone a place to sleep.  Probably a good thing he was only there for a short time, huh?

Here's Katie and I giving Avery boat ride.  Maybe you can see that we aren't quite in sync paddling like Amanda and James were.  And the look on my face is that of "how did this happen"?  After 26 years of marriage, I'm not really sure how it happened, I just know that it does every now and then on a regular and unspecified basis.  Regardless of the unsyncness, Avery had a great time.  So did Katie and I.

Grandpa helping Avery to use the mirage drive pedals.  I think it's gonna be a few years before he's able to reach the pedals without having some pillow behind him.  In this case, it's the world reknowned Grandpa pillow, which is sometimes adjustable depending on the amount of padding the Grandpa has.  If you look past Avery and Grandpa, you'll see Riley, and Amanda & James, with James clowning around a little.  Luckily for them, the Bear Lake monster doesn't go into water that shallow during the day.  

Here's Amanda driving the kayak having a pretty good time.  The hills in the background are on the east side of the lake, less than 10 miles from the Utah - Wyoming border.

The next day would see James leaving for home, and the rest of us going to the National Oregon/California Trail Center in Montpelier, Id. 

Have a blessed day!

Lions & Tigers, and Bear Lake Monsters! Oh My!

Ok, before I get into the guts and glory of the title of this blog, in particular the Bear Lake Monsters (...who cares about lions and tigers anyway?), I gotta cover a couple of things.  

First of all, I'd appreciate it if readers would put their email addresses in the box to the right labeled "FOLLOW BY EMAIL".  This would allow me to stop putting email addresses in a box in my settings which has me sending this to only 10 folks.  Thanks.

Secondly, if you're gonna wanna do gift shopping at Amazon.com which has some pretty good deals, I'd appreciate it if you'd click on one of the Amazon links on the right side, and on the bottom of the blog.  As it lets Amazon know that you got to them through my blog, they send a small bit my way; not a lot, but a little.

Thirdly, if you've sent me a comment to a post, I'm sorry but I haven't figured out how to answer the comments yet, so I haven't been able to respond to them.  I'm still in the process of learning how to do all this stuff, please be patient.  Thanks.


The Travelogue June of 2012

Now to the Bear Lake Monster.  Raise your hand if you did any research on the Bear Lake Monster, ok?  If you raised your hand, you get a gold star.  Not sure how I'm gonna get it to ya, or where you're gonna put the gold star if you were to get it, I'm really thinking that point is mute (sorry to get your hopes up if ya were thinking you were gonna get one).  So, the Bear Lake Monster has various tales about it, obviously every single one of them true, depending on who ya ask.  Maybe...  One of the tales links the Loch Ness Monster to the monster at Bear Lake, which sounds pretty preposterous, if ya ask me.  Rather than try to give you a synopsis of each story, here's a link to Google's search results for the legends of the Bear Lake Monster.  Remember, each story is factual... kinda.  Because there's really a lake, ok?


We saw what was a facsimile of the monster, but I didn't take a picture of it.  Not sure why I didn't do that!  Luckily, Google has a few images of it, here are a couple of them.

Ugly looking facsimile, huh?  This facsimile was parked in the overflow parking area of the state park, and had been there for more than a couple of years, and was looking for a new owner, as I recall.  Just to let ya know that it was a real facsimile, it had a couple of outboard motors attached to it's butt, I mean stern.  Looking at the inside of the facsimile were benches for a few people.  Obviously, if this was the real thing, folks wouldn't choose to ride in a monster where his stomach would be!

Ok.  On to more ...real stuff.  The weekend after our arrival at BLSP, we were asked as part of our duties to help out in the office with the campers and picnickers.  Turns out there was a big event that weekend, the Mountain Tropic Triathlon took place there at the lake.  If you click on the previous link, you'll find out more about it, and see some more pictures of BLSP as well.  While Katie was indoctrinated in helping in the office with the various campers and picnickers that were coming in, I got to go down to the parking lot to direct traffic so the runners and bikers could be as unfettered as possible going to and from their courses.  Apparently, I did a great jog at directing vehicular traffic and making it easier for the competitors as the director of the event came up to telling me what a great job I was doing.  That was a good thing to do, but she didn't do anything for the mosquitoes that were feasting on me while I was keeping my hands in the air waving at folks wanting to get in or out.  And it may have been that there just wasn't anyone wanting to get out in front of traffic like that, so I can't really say that I was doing that great of a job.  It wasn't that big of a deal to me as I'd done it a few times while I was working for the City of Las Vegas, and sometimes had to be in traffic letting folks know where they could go and where they couldn't go.  Anyway, Katie learned all about the office procedures, and I got a little sunburn and bug bitten. 

Another thing that was kinda exciting for us was what we'd done to the moho before we got up to BLSP.  When we'd hit the road, we'd removed the dining table as we just didn't like the way it took up room or worked.  We didn't have a good replacement for the table and had endured sitting at plastic tables that we set up and took down every time we stopped at a campsite and left the campsite.  We'd already replaced the sofa, and set up the TV in an entertainment center across from the sofa for a better TV watching angle, so we were familiar with doing change in the rig and weren't afraid of doing more.  The solution for the dining table finally hit us when we were at Amanda's prior to going to BLSP in the form of two 24" base kitchen cabinets from Ikea, along with two 6' lengths of countertop.  By putting the cabinets on the floor aproximately 24" apart, and putting table legs on one end of one of the lengths trimmed to fit with the other end supported by the cabinet sides, we were able to have a dining area and increase the storage space by quite a bit.  The galley drawers that Winnebago put in our Chieftain 35U weren't wide enough for a silverware tray, but we now had a drawer big enough for LOTS of silverware space, in addition to another drawer for ...more of Katie's kitchen stuff.  The storage space in the cabinets, as well as the space between them, were used for ...more of Katie's kitchen stuff.  (No, she didn't suffer a whole lot when she had to downsize her kitchen toy collection.)  Here's a couple of pictures showing the finished product.

 

The dining area slides in under the countertop when the slide comes in.  We think we did a fairly good job of making the dining area much better than it was and increasing the galley storage space quite a bit.

Have a blessed day!