Trip #2 of 3 is complete.  I spent Tuesday through Saturday of last week at Lake Powell.

The daily high temperatures were around 105 degrees.  It was WAY too hot.  Good thing there's a great big lake to play in.  That's the only way to keep cool.

I went with the Venturers and Explorers in my Ward (one of whom is my older son) and we really had a good time.  Fifteen young men spent quite a lot of time together, and I was amazed at how well-behaved they all were.  There was minimal bickering or teasing the whole time.  It was a great group of young men.

We fished, wake boarded/waterskiied/tubed, swam, hiked (swiked?) ate lots of good food, and generally had a great time.

We were woken by a pack of coyotes pretty much every night.  I think they smelled our food.  It sounded like quite a few, but that was partially due to their barks and cries echoing off of the sandstone cliffs around our camp site.

Lessons learned during the week:

• When you crash, let go of the rope.
• When swimming through narrow canyons full of water covered with an inch of muck, watch out for what you can't see below.  Unseen rocks still cause scrapes and bruises.
• A five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat lid is better than no facilities at all... barely.
• Bodies skip across the water at high speeds much like stones.
• Fifteen adolescents with no shower become rather stinky.
• Old sunscreen quickly becomes water soluble.
• Coyotes are NOISY buggers.
• Your body adjusts to heat, but only partly.  105 degrees is HOT when there's no "indoors" to go into.
• 17-year-old young men emptying the aforementioned five-gallon bucket at the marina can be cause for hilarity.

It's good to be back in the civilized world of porcelain, and central air conditioning.

I've been away from computers for a little while.  Sure, I got online a couple of times to check tides or download camera software, but other than that... I was blissfully AWAY.

We spend a week in Lincoln City, Oregon.  From the time we arrived until the time we left, I don't think it got above about 72 degrees.  The sand was nice, the water was cold, the air was cool and windy, and the view from the condo we rented was breathtaking.  We played, read, slept in, followed no discernable schedule, and generally had a wonderful time.

I'll post more later, but I thought it would be good to explain my prolonged blog absence.

It's going to be over 100 degrees here tomorrow.  I believe that the beach is calling me again...

No thank you, Hollywood for the complete and utter rubbish you seem to be turning out these days.

And thank you, Redbox for making me only pay a dollar for a rental, so that when I decide halfway through a movie that I don't even want to watch the rest of the movie, I don't feel like I've wasted a lot of money.

There's an hour of my life and a date night that I'll never get back.

Stoopid, stoopid, stoopid.

Apologies to those that liked the movie, but for the rest of you, if you happen by a Redbox and see the movie P.S. I Love You available, do yourself a favor and rent something else.

Ugh.  Does anybody have anything to scrub the bad taste out of my brain?  Brain brillo?  Or maybe some mental floss?

I thought I'd put a couple of pictures here:

Before:

After:

He's not hurting that much so far, though he says he's already getting sores on the inside of his lips from the irritating brackets and wires.

Poor guy.

In the morning, I'm taking younger son to the orthodontist.  We've been in for the initial consultations.  We've had x-rays taken.  We've had pictures taken.  We had a device put in that was meant to push his bottom teeth forward.  But the latest x-rays show that his eyeteeth are impacted and aren't going to come in well.  Tomorrow, they're going to put in braces on his front teeth to pull them all together.  They'll put  springs in that will push everything forward.

I'm not very excited.  I'm sure that younger son isn't excited either.  I just HATE seeing my sons in pain, and as many of you know (I don't), braces are painful.

This is, of course, a preliminary step.  It's meant to make room for teeth that haven't come in yet.  When the whole crowd of teeth have come in, the next step will be a full set of braces.

Ugh.

It seems that as I blog, I either have tons of things to blog about, or nothing to blog about.   Because of this, I'll have three or four blog entries in a short span of time, then long spans of time without any blog entries.

Currently, I'm between creative spurts.  Hopefully, the next burst of creativity will be soon.  Until then, go to my dutch oven web site and drool over the recipes.

Each Memorial Day brings back memories of a day I spent in Apeldoorn in The Netherlands. It was the spring of 1990.

The Dutch have celebrated Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day) every five years since they were liberated from German occupation on May 5th, 1945. There was a huge parade in front of the palace Het Loo, the summer residence of the House of Orange-Nassau for over 300 years.

There was a fly-over of most of the remaining flyable B-17 "Flying Fortress" bombers left in the world. There were bands, military units, more bands, more military units...

But the most amazing thing to me that day was the carloads of the soldiers who had been there 45 years earlier and who had fought to free the Dutch people. Each of these cars had two or three old men, mostly Canadian and British, who rode among the cheers of people who were grateful for their service. Many of them had tear-streaked faces.

That was 18 years ago. Most of those men have since passed away.

Later that day, I visited the Netherlands American Cemetery and saw the rows upon rows of white crosses where 8,301 American servicemen are buried. Most of them lost their lives nearby. A memorial lists the names of an additional 1,722 missing American servicemen.

I had heard the poem, In Flanders Fields before, but on that day, it had new meaning to me.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
--John McCrae

In the years since, I've often thought of those who died fighting to preserve peace, and to them, I am grateful. I'm grateful to those that have taken up to torch of freedom today, some of whom have also given up their own lives fighting for what they believe.

Enjoy your Memorial Day on Monday, but don't forget the purpose of this day: to honor those who perished in military service to their country. Take a moment to reflect on the freedoms you enjoy and to pay tribute to the many that have died in defense of those freedoms.

This afternoon, a truck came along and dumped a load of mulch/bark in the street in front of our house.  Ten cubic yards of bark.

That's a LOT of bark.  It's enough to cover our entire dining room waist deep in bark.  That's enough bark to cover 1080 square feet of ground three inches deep in bark.

It's just over half of the bark that we need.  Wow.

We spread bark over all of the garden spots in front of the house tonight.  It looks really good.  We probably spread about 6 cubic yards.  We still have a pretty good pile sitting out there.  Hopefully, we'll finish up with what we have tomorrow and then we'll have a better idea of how much more we need.  On Saturday, we'll order the rest and have it delivered next week.

It looks REALLY good.  We wanted to get it last year, but we didn't know where to get it until we had already blown our landscaping budget for the year.

I'm sure that one of my next posts will be a complaint about lower back pain.

The first time I felt kidney stone pain, I had no idea what was going on.  All I knew is that I hurt, and no matter how I shifted position, the pain wouldn't go away.  We were living in a basement apartment close to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center at the time.  We had also recently purchased a new vehicle  - with a manual transmission.  My poor wife wasn't used to driving it yet and she had to drive me to the emergency room.  The emergency room staff had me diagnosed before I got into the emergency room.  They said I was doing what they call the "kidney stone shuffle."  The pain was horrendous.  I was vomiting from the pain before they finally gave me painkillers.

The second time, I already knew what the pain was.  I was at work near the mouth of Provo canyon.  I drove myself to the Orem Community Hospital emergency room.  I remember lots of yelling and pounding on the steering wheel while waiting at red lights.

The third kidney stone happened in the middle of the night.  My wife drove me to the American Fork hospital emergency room.

The fourth one came on the same day I was notified about an IRS audit.  I drove myself to the emergency room early that morning because my wife was already at work.

Today's kidney stone makes number five, but fortunately, it was the quickest.  I woke up at about 6:15 this morning with that familiar flank pain.  Fortunately, I still had Lortab left over from number four, so I took one of those, called in sick, and spent today in relative agony.  Fortunately, it came out before the Lortab ran out, so this will also be (BY FAR) the least expensive kidney stone.

I'm tired of getting them, of course, but I don't really know what else I can do.  I keep myself constantly hydrated, which is the best thing I can do.  I guess I could try a low oxalate diet (the second stone was sent to the lab and was determined to be a calcium oxalate stone), but between stones 2 and 3, I was on a low oxalate diet, and it didn't seem to help.

I guess that this is something I'm going to have to deal with every so often for the rest of my life.

*heavy sigh*

I'm quite proud of myself at the moment. I wanted to learn how to play Steve Martin's "Grandmother's Song" on the guitar. So I listened to it several times and figured out the chord changes.

And now I can play Grandmother's Song.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about:

Listen to it on YouTube

I don't play it in the same key... He starts out in the key of C and my F chord isn't so great right now. So I play it in D. It's better for my voice range anyway.

But wow! It's fun to be able to figure it out all on my own. I think I'm still doing pretty well for someone that has only been playing for less than 4 months!