This year's edition of holiday treats made at my house:

1)  Spritz cookies - I love these almondy, buttery little bites of heaven.

2)  Fudge - I tried Alton Brown's recipe again, but it turned to sugar again.  I'll try a different recipe next time.

3)  Caramels - My mom's recipe is excellent, and, surprisingly, contains absolutely no brown sugar.  I cooked it to a little higher temperature and it's a bit firmer than my mom used to make, but I like it a little chewier.

4)  Almond Brittle - Think upscale peanut brittle.

I think that's all I'm making this year.  No hand-dipped pretzels or peppermint almond bark this year.

What are you making this Christmas?

With my new calling as Scoutmaster/Second Counselor in the Young Mens Presidency/Deacon's Quorum Advisor, Sundays have become more and more busy for me.  On the second Sunday of the month, I attend Bishop's Youth Council.  On the third Sunday of the month, I have an Aaronic Priesthood Committee Meeting.  On the last Sunday of the month, I have a meeting with my Deacon's Quorum Presidency.

But no day is as busy as Fast Sunday for me.

On Fast Sundays, I'm in charge of making sure that a pair of young men visit each house in the ward to deliver a ward newsletter and to collect fast offerings.

I ususally drag myself out of bed at around 8am, shower, shave, and get dressed for the day.  The night before, I call a member of the Deacon's Quorum Presidency and have them call all of the deacons and remind them to meet at my house at 9:30 in the morning.  By a little before 9:30, the deacons have started arriving.  I send them off, two by two, and by about 9:45, I know whether or not I have to go into panic mode and start calling Teachers and Priests to help out.  Fortunately, we have a lot of really great young men in our Ward, so it's not too hard to find people to help.

It also helps that I bribe them with something like homemade cheesecake or dutch oven desserts.  Maybe that's not the BEST thing to talk about on a fast sunday, but research shows that bribery works well with young men this age, at least, that's what a friend tells me.  (He's a principal at a grade school, and he'd probably be able to point me to sources that say so.)

By about 10:15 or 10:30, all of the fast offering "routes" are accounted for and all the young men are out fulfilling that particular Priesthood duty.  If I can't find enough young men, I'll go along with one of them (preferrably my own son!) and I'll help out, but that's only a last resort.

At around 10:45, the young men start returning with the fast offering envelopes and leftover newsletters.  I'll give them rides home if they want.

During this "down time," I'm usually preparing a lesson for our Quorum meeting later in the day or I'll work on other calling-related things like making plans for an upcoming troop meeting or campout.  When all of the young men are back and the collection of fast offerings is complete, it's just about time to get ready for church.  Church doesn't get out until 4:00 in the afternoon, so by then, the day is pretty much gone.

I'm not complaining though...  Bishopric members have such schedules EVERY Sunday.

It's been a month ago, or maybe even six weeks ago, that I taught my scouts all about GPS and how it works.  They were excited to soon go geocaching.

Unfortunately, things kept happening that prevented us from actually going.

Finally, on Thursday night, we got to go.  The scouts had a blast.  Geocaching in the dark with a whole bunch of scouts is a little strange.  I had reminded them beforehand to be respectful of people and property and they did a very good job of that.

We ended up visiting 3 geocaches.  At the third geocache, we had just found the cache (after quite a search.  It was hidden WELL) and we looked over and saw what appeared to be a reflective vest--the kind that crossing guards wear.  Someone was standing on the sidewalk, looking at us.  I walked over to the person to make sure that it wasn't a neighborhood watch person or someone like that who was wondering what a dozen people were doing around a tree in a park well after dark.

It turned out to be a mentally-challenged person.  He finally asked me "What's going on?" and I told him that we were a boy scout troop out having some night fun.  He grinned a huge grin and said, "Oooohhh!  Boy Scouts!"  and went merrily on his way.

I think that a couple of my scouts are going to pester their parents to get them a GPS for Christmas this year.

Every year, for the past many years, we have gone to Festival of the Trees.  It's an annual fundraiser for Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City.  People elaborately decorate and then donate Christmas trees that are then auctioned off and all of the proceeds go to Primary Children's.

It's become a fun annual tradition for us.  We love walking up and down the aisles and aisles of trees, oohing and aahing over most things, and wondering what other people were thinking.  I know it's mostly a matter of taste, but some things, I guess I'll never get.

It's mostly a fun day to take the boys out of school and get into the spirit of the Christmas season.  It's a Christmas tradition for my family that I hope will last for many more years.

I love pie.

I love warm, fruity, double-crust pies.  I love cool, smooth cream pies.  I love the juxtaposition of tanginess and fluffiness of a meringue pie.  I enjoy some of the non-traditional pies like pecan pie, shoo-fly pie, and strawberry chiffon pie.

I love pie.

My favorite pie in the world is one that my wife makes.  Most people have a custard-based pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.  It's the traditional pumpkin, egg, evaporated milk, and spices mixture that is poured into an unbaked pie crust and the whole thing is baked in the oven for an hour or so.  My wife's pumpkin pie, on the other hand, is a pudding-based pie.  First, the crust is blind baked (without filling), and a delicious, spicy pumpkin pudding is cooked on the stovetop.  The pudding is poured into the baked crust and then the pie is chilled before being served.  I love this pie!  It's dark and rich and spicy and flavorful.  I can't imagine Thanksgiving Dinner without my wife's pumpkin pie.

The day before Thanksgiving, I had lunch with the team I used to work with in American Fork.  They work in the building next door now.  I decided to try making a pie in a dutch oven.  Here's a link to the recipe I used.  I was a bit nervous.  I had never tried a double-crust pie in a dutch oven before.  I didn't want the crust to go soggy, so I made the filling and put it in a ziplock bag, and I made the crust and refrigerated it.  Just before it was time to cook, I assembled the pie. . . in my cubicle at work.  It was rather funny.  I was getting some pretty strange looks from people as I rolled out pie dough in my cubicle.

It wasn't a pretty pie.  The top crust was cracked in places and there was no nice fluted edge.  It took longer to cook than I expected, probably because it was cold and a bit windy outside.  The result, however, was delicious!  The crust was brown and flaky and the apples were hot and bubbly.  They were a little too overdone for my taste, and I had used only granny smith apples, so the filling was a little more tart than I would have liked.  However, I was very pleased with the result.

I shared leftovers with my current team, and they wanted me to make another one for our Christmas holiday pot luck lunch on the 19th, so I guess others were pleased with the results too.

I LOVE pie!

I posted five times in November.  I probably wouldn't have even posted that many times had I not had a kidney stone to "woe is me" about.

I'm sure you're glad that I didn't post the other 25 days in November.  I COULD have, but I decided against submitting you to tales of what I was wearing that day, or what I had decided to eat for breakfast, or what inane thoughts were bouncing around in my brain that you most likely wouldn't give a hoot about.

So, you're welcome, twenty-five times for my lack of posting.

As I'm getting ready for a Winter campout with my Boy Scouts, I've had interesting and strange memories of winter campouts when I was a Boy Scout.

The most recent memory is centered around hot tang.

My Scoutmaster knew how to camp in the winter.  He would bring along his white canvas army surplus tent.  In the roof of the tent was a metal collar for the stovepipe of his cast iron pot bellied stove.  He would stoke the fire and usually, he would have to open tent flaps to keep it from being too hot!

One morning, he prepared hot Tang to help those of us sleeping in regular dome tents without stoves to get warm.  Then he proceeded to pour the hot Tang into Dixie cold cups.

The taste of hot Tang, to me, will forever be coupled with the taste and feel of wax.  The hot tang instantly melted the thin layer of wax that used to (still does?) coat the inside and outside of the cold cups.

When the cups were finally cool enough to handle, I grabbed one and wrapped my fingers around it to warm them up and felt a strange sensation of wax hardening to my fingertips and to the palms of my hands.  There was a shiny slick of wax on top of the steaming orange drink.  After a few sips, the waxy taste seemed to go away, but it took longer for the waxiness to leave the roof of my mouth.

The taste of cold Tang brings me back to my grandma Smith's kitchen in the mid 1970's.  I LOVED to go to Grandma Smith's house because she usually had sugar cereal in the cupboard and she usually had a container of Tang that we would mix up (probably too strong) and drink with breakfast.  Trix and Tang... I don't know if I could handle that particular combination today, but as a child, I thought I had died and gone to sugar heaven.

No, my house isn't old, but for regular PBS watchers, it makes for a good title.

I keep telling people that the movie "The Money Pit" should be required reading before becoming a homeowner.  It seems like there's always one more thing to fix, one more thing to upgrade, one more thing to be saving for because eventually, the carpet will have to be replaced, the roof will leak, the furnace will go out.

Several months ago, we noticed that all three bulbs in one of our outdoor lighting fixtures had burned out.  All three?  It seemed strange that all three bulbs would go out at the same time.  I replaced the bulbs, but it didn't help.  Upon further investigation I found that somewhere between the wall and the light bulbs, the wires supplying electricity had fried.  They had shorted out and the resulting arc of electricity had actually been hot enough to melt some of the metal in the light fixture.

Thus began the process of trying to find a matching light fixture.  After research in several lighting stores (fortunately, all of them are close to where I work) and on the Internet, I couldn't find what I was looking for.  Apparently, this fixture had been discontinued.  Great.

We didn't really want to replace three fixtures (This one is to the east of my garage door, there's another identical one to the west of the garage door, and there's another matching light fixture on my front porch), so I simply re-attached the light fixture to the wall, but I didn't re-attach the power supply.  It appeared that the light bulbs in that fixture were going to look like they were constantly burned out.

Moving forward to a couple of weeks ago.  I was getting ready to go to sleep and I noticed that it was very dark outside.  There didn't appear to be ANY lights on in front of my house.  Strange.  I didn't think much about it until the next morning when my sons discovered that they couldn't turn on the light in their bathroom.  I went downstairs and discovered that a fuse had tripped.  I re-set the fuse and things were fine until that evening when the automatic switch that turns on the outside lights switched and the fuse blew again.

I went outside and removed the light to the west of the garage door and tried turning on the outside lights (after re-setting the fuse again, of course) and everything worked fine.  Something had gone wrong with the other light.  Suddenly, it seemed like a good thing that we couldn't find an exact replacement.  Something was obviously flawed in the design of that particular light fixture.

At this point, I realized how glad I am for modern wiring and fuse boxes and things like that.  Not too many years ago and a flawed design in a light fixture might have caused a short that would have heated wires to the point of causing a fire and my house might have been at risk.  Instead, circuit breakers sense such problems and switch off the electric current to the problem circuit.

I'm even more grateful for the modern wiring than I am bugged that I had to go spend a few hundred dollars to replace three light fixtures.  I still HAVE the house to put the light fixtures on.  I'm not dealing with fire insurance and finding alternate living arrangements while a construction crew re-builds after the mess.

I ordered the new fixtures more than a week ago, and they told me it would take up to two weeks for them to be delivered.  Hopefully, I'll have them installed and working in time for Thanksgiving.

An infinite number of mathematicians go into a bar.  The first mathematician orders a beer.  The second mathematician orders half a beer.  The third mathematician orders a fourth of a beer.  The fourth mathematician orders an eighth of a beer.  The bartender says, "You guys are all idiots!" and pours them two beers.

This one has been worse than the others.

First of all, I've been suffering from nausea.  Even water doesn't want to stay down, which is bad when you have to take in a lot of fluids to move the kidney stone along.  It's also not good for me to not be able to keep down pain medication.  Finally, this morning, I went back to the emergency room and they gave me a prescription for something to combat the nausea.  It's nice to be relatively pain-free again and to not feel like anything I eat or drink will bounce.

Second, this one has now taken longer than any of the others to pass.  It started yesterday in the wee hours of the morning and it's still working its way out.  At least I HOPE that's what's happening.  There's really no way of telling without getting another x-ray.

Third, this one has been more painful than any of the others, probably mostly due to not being able to keep the pain meds down.  A new development - it hurts to walk.  I can feel my kidney jostle when I take a step and it's quite painful, to say the least.

Here's hoping that it will be over soon.  It's amazing how much pain can be caused by something that's only 2 mm across.