Fathers Day '09

It's cool to be the special guy once in a while. Keri cooked her magnificent fried chicken (with the amazing and always drool-inducing mashed potatoes and gravy). Brownies and ice cream for dessert. I think I gained 5 pounds with just that one meal.

Actually, Keri and the crew around here do a great job of making me feel like the special guy pretty much every day. I'm very lucky to have such a sweet and smart family.

The crew gave me a way-cool leather bag to haul papers and other misc. work stuff around. It makes me look very "Indiana Jones."

Fathers and Sons '09

What would happen if we threw a party and everyone came... and so did the rain? We have the party anyway.

The last time I went to Camp Murtaugh with the scouts in fall '07 it rained buckets. In fact, the news reported that the rainfall that day was a record for the date. During the night I kept pulling more and more of our stuff on to the air mattress to keep it "dry." We were an island in the middle of a swamp by morning. It took about a week for everything to dry out once we got home.

The stake held its Fathers and Sons activity this past weekend at Camp Murtaugh and, you guessed it, we had record rainfall for the date. AND one of our tent poles broke in the wind. As a result our tent was more like a funnel, directing the water directly on to our heads while we "slept."

Then we got up and ate breakfast in the rain. We actually had a reprieve from the rain for about an hour which was just enough time to set up the tables etc. for cooking breakfast. By the time folks were eating, however, it was pouring again.

This is what we call "fun."

Things will be dry in about a week.

Florida bachelor party

Friday, June 12th, was Day 2 of the AP reading. My roommate, Kelly Moylan (who I know from graduate school), and I went to the Daytona Cubs game after a day of reading a bazillion essays. We ate hot dogs and peanuts, made friends with some folks from the area (the dad kept hinting broadly that his single daughter and Kelly would make a good couple), watched the Cubs beat the Fort Meyers Miracle into the mud...

...and we saw these guys.

Their shirts read "There is absolutely no excuse for the way I'm about to act."

Turns out they were at the game for a bachelor party. Here's the groom, participating in a burrito eating contest.

Which one of them is the groom, you ask? The guy on the right, of course. The one whose shirt reads "Groom." He won the contest, of course.

Only in Florida... land of a million retirees.

Daytona BEACH

Okay. Here's picture #1. This was the view from our hotel room. Not to shabby, eh? Too bad we were stuck in a convention center 8 hours a day instead of snorkeling, etc.

Homeward bound

I'm headed home from the AP exam reading. It's been an interesting week in Daytona Beach-- something like a marathon really. ~900 of us read 344,000 AP exams in a week. When you consider that each exam has 3 essays which each need to be scored individually, that comes to well overa 1 million essays to be read. One stinkin' million!! Considering how readers there were, that comes to over 1,000 each, right? Yes!

I'm sitting in the Orlando airport. I got up at 1:15AM Idaho time. It is now 4:15 Idaho time. An hour + until my flight boards. I need a nap.

I don't have lots of cool stories to tell. I don't even have many pictures. I will post something soon, however.

Until then.

A late garden is better than no garden?

Last year we were very hopeful that our house would sell during the summer months. Even though we pretty much caused the housing crash in the United States (we put our house on the market the same week that NPR started talking about a possible mortgage crisis), we thought that the summer would be kind to us and we'd be on to a larger house. (Which hasn't happened yet, btw.) Because we were not planning to be in this house for harvest time last year, it didn't make much sense to plant a garden, right? So... we didn't plant one. That rectangular little plot behind the house lay fallow last season. No tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, peas, sunflowers... nothing but a few weeks. Actually, make that a LOT of weeds.

This year we're still hoping (against hope) to sell, but we've taken the opposite tack. This year we've (finally) planted a garden. This week I've put in tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, pumpkins, watermelon (do they actually grow here?), and onions. I may yet add peas and/or carrots. 

Like I said the other day, we've had some nice rain here this week and temps have stayed pretty cool. Things are quite green. It's been a unique spring, to be sure. Very nice!

Josh, my little apprentice gardener, and I planted impatiens and begonias in the back flower beds that are mostly in shade. Do impatiens and begonias do well in shade? I hope so.

Sock orphans and library books

Our house has a black hole. Yours does too, I suspect. Most houses do. It's that mysterious place where single socks, car keys, the case for that DVD that's been sitting on the TV for 3 weeks, and library books go. Our black hole has sucked up  two Twin Falls public library books that need to be returned tomorrow. I'd sure like to know the secret of the darn thing. 

I'm the kind of person that has a hard time letting such things go. I want to resolve this library book thing before I go on to the next task, whatever it may be. Until our "account" with the library is clear, I'm going to be obsessing about it. Where are those &^%$ books?

Of course the crazy, maddening thing is that they were right here on the computer desk just a few days ago. We have multiple witnesses to that effect. So where did they go?

We've had a couple of nice rainshowers this week. Things are sure green around here. More about the garden etc. soon.