Backyardigan Fun

Last week was Spring break for the kids but it rained through Wednesday so they were forced to spend most of it inside. Thursday and Friday were beautiful and so I spontaneously scheduled those days off to tackle a major yard project that has been looming. Cathleen bought 2 "to be assembled" yard toys last Fall soon after we moved in. A trampoline and the Super Fortress Dual Slide Play Set from Costco. The play set reviews were mostly all very positive, except for the repeated cursing of what an absolute nightmare it is to put together. Oh joy!

Let me digress first to a nice sunny August day last year when Cathleen decided we would set up the trampoline. She and the kids did help, but it was still a total pain as those of you who have been through this exercise know. The kids used it quite a bit until the weather got cold. And now this year (Spring) we have only had a handful of nice non-rainy days so the kids have only just started using it again. Somehow and without anyone realizing it, one of the leg posts managed to become disconnected. It only took our new 8 year old a few jumps on that part of the tramp to cause the frame to buckle in that section, thus rendering it out of commission. It looked like it could be salvaged, I would just need to request a single replacement arc segment from the manufacturer. Of course this would mean I'd have to mostly disassemble it first and those tensioned straps are a huge pain in the butt (pain in the hands actually)! That would have to be a project for another day, the main focus now was the play set from H-word. (Oh and be sure to take notice of the water retention ditch on the right side of this photo below).

So back to my Spring break project, assembling the sodding Fortress. As I was saying, it was a beautiful two days, in the 70’s, the kids were playing outside with me most of the time, offering to help so as to speed things along while also constantly asking me, “is it done yet?” The new house being built next door was also buzzing with activity with beautiful weather prompting wide opened windows and doors. They are mostly in the finishing stages now, doing some work on the deck, some interior painting and probably other fixture work, etc. and others were doing some landscaping in the yard. There were at least half a dozen Hispanic workers chattering about loudly to each other as they worked. I noticed that Nate suddenly became aware of them and looked over to observe for the first time the great activity next door, and then he exclaimed matter of factly, “oh great, our new neighbors are Japanese!” I can assure you that he has no aversion toward Asian people but rather was merely making his point that he couldn't understand a word they were saying. The girls laughed and corrected him saying, “that isn’t Japanese Nate”, to which he replied, “well French then”. The girls further explained that these people were not our new neighbors at all. He argued in protest, not able or willing to believe them, after all, how could they possibly know such things about these new strangers? Ah to be 6 again (and completely oblivious)... By the way, the play set product reviews are indeed accurate, warped lumber and the gazillion non labeled similar looking pieces are making this the project that would never end. After almost 2 full days, it is only about 1/3 complete.

Now back to more trampoline fun. Yesterday in the late afternoon it got quite sunny and warm. After several consecutive days of April showers and shin-high length grass, I decided to break out the lawn tractor and get the much needed mowing behind me. There were supposed to be thunderstorms in the afternoon forecast again, though no inclement weather in sight all (what do "they" know???). But the school of hard knocks (living in VA) taught me that I should plan for the worst and so I decided to put a little hustle in my stride. Just as I was finishing up, the clouds moved in quickly and it started to pour. In fact, the wind suddenly started gusting quite severely and it rapidly became dark, cold and ominous looking as I scrambled to get my stuff put away into the garage and get the door closed. It only lasted maybe 20-30 minutes and then it was over. The temps dropped 15-20 degrees and there was a constant 5 mph breeze but otherwise it was as if the storm never happened. Cathleen then discovered and informed me that the trampoline had taken a neighborhood stroll and was now upside-down in the water retention ditch down behind the new house next door (wish I had gotten a picture of it). Christopher and I went out and attempted to retrieve it but since it was quite twisted and mangled, and the rough sloping wet terrain offered no good leverage or vantage point, the two of us alone could barely budge it. Cathleen and the bigger kids were not excited about the prospect of getting down in that mud hole to help me retrieve it. My anxiety about getting it at least back on to our property was related to the fear of the infamous HOA police and possible fines, which motivated me to not delay this beckoning new project.

I put it off until after work the next day. Every now and then my advanced age and detest for heavy lifting lead me to shear brilliance where brain over brawn is concerned. I decided to pull out my handy dandy lawn tractor, rig up some towing straps and lo and behold I was able to easily pull the twisted pile of doo doo from the ditch, without any assistance from anyone else. My next fun project to look forward to is to take said doo doo apart and haul it to the dump, nothing is salvageable, not even the netted enclosure.

I can only hope that the infernal fortress will be swept away before I can get around to finishing it :)

Home Teaching Stories

I home teach a sister in our ward, Trudi Walsh who is a high school counselor in the next county over. She had Spring break last week along with our county's schools (my kids) and decided to go out to Nevada to spend a week with her cousin (below), who consequently has a very unusual horse.



The horse's name is Cholla, named after the infamous desert cactus, he was born from a Mustang stallion and a Quarter Horse mare. Attempts to "break" this horse were not successful, and if anything, it made him more cantankerous, hence his prickly name.

However, he does have a soft artsy side. Rather than athletic interests, Cholla considers himself more of the artistic type, and he has been invited across the globe as his talents are becoming more widely acclaimed.

Would you believe his works have sold for as much as to $2500? Here are some samples:

Visit the website to watch a video and learn a little more about this gifted animal: http://www.artistisahorse.com/

This cash cow (horse) makes the fictitious Mr. Ed seem not all that implausible...

A Month Later, This Is All I've Got

As Baloo would say, "Groov'n Baby"

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Happy Friday The 13th!

I don’t get home from work until midnight on Saturday nights and my wife usually goes to bed before I get home. I try to be quiet when I come in but as one might expect of a mother of 9 children, she’s a very light sleeper. Often when she awakes, she’s not really coherent. She’ll almost always ask me “who is that?” Since we go through this routine mostly every week, I’m of the mindset that she should know who would be coming into her room on Saturday night at midnight. I don’t know why she wants to wake herself up to have a conversation with me so I'd try to give a concise answer, “me” so that she can go back to sleep. But that's never enough, she then wants to probe further, as if asking incoherent questions will lead me to believe that she’s perfectly aware of what is going on around her.

So, one such night a few years ago when asked, “who is that?” I came up with a random answer that I was sure would boggle her mind. “It’s me, Uncle Steve”. Now, she doesn’t have an Uncle Steve and she doesn’t really know my Uncle Steve very well, so it was fun to listen to her struggle with the computation of this response. Of course she got annoyed, the very response I was looking for and so “Uncle Steve” is now my automatic "without a thought" answer to her when she’s talking in her sleep.

This past Saturday was funny though, my son is home from college for Spring break and he is one of these night owl people that stays up all night and sleeps in the day. So upon my arrival home, he and I exchanged some words downstairs in the entry way and she could obviously hear our voices in her dreams. Realizing that she may be upset our voices awakened her, I decided not to mess with her for our routine exchange and replied to the "Who is that?" question simply, “Me”. Then she asked, “who’s with you?”, I couldn’t resist, “Uncle Steve”. Her next few responses were fun and worth blogging about:

Cat:“What are you wearing, are you dressed like a wolf?”
Me: “Yes Bella, I’m a werewolf!”
Cat: Mumbling unintelligible voice as I retreat to the bathroom...

And then upon my return to the room, hoping she'd be back asleep...
Cat: “Come on, I’m serious”
Me: “What are you talking about?”
Cat: “Do you have a tail?”
Me: “Yes, all wolves have tails, good night!”
Cat: in frustration, “Whatever”

She did remember the conversation somewhat the next morning as we ate Sunday breakfast, I had the kids in tears (and her too) as I recounted the dialog. I said, “this is good stuff, I’m putting this on my blog!” Since I don’t like to post without a picture, I googled “wolfboy” and this is what I came up with. An interesting story of a very unique special little boy. Why does God do this??? Maybe for the very purpose of getting us to ponder that very question!

I realized that it was Friday the 13th only after I had put all of this together, and it dawned on me, the perfect title for this post!

Cursed Viruses, They're Of The Devil!

So yes, I’m a little more vulnerable than most because I have 11 computers connected to the Internet from my home, 7 of which are being used by non-technical children/wife. I’m pretty tenacious and usually try for hours to hack into the registry and rid the virus manually myself. This is dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing (and it’s dangerous even if you do). It’s somewhat easy to mess things up with your system if you’re not careful in the registry, which will require a reformat and complete reinstall. OK, I admit it, the dark side wins, they successfully have driven me to madness!

Usually, the most effective thing to do is to just reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. This takes a great deal of time but at least once you’ve been through the exercise a few times you get pretty efficient at it. I have two hard drives on all of my PCs, the 2^nd drive should be used for data that you don’t want to lose. That should never really get infected. The primary drive is for the operating system and all of the applications. That way I can reformat (losing everything) at will.

Then you start thinking about the value of utilities like “Drive Image”, “ True Image” or “Ghost”. The beauty of these tools is that you can create an image of your computer after all of your software is installed. Just try to limit using the Internet to updating your Windows, Antivirus maintenance, and things that you know are legit until you get a good copy of the image. I get all of the most current and proven drivers loaded, my windows maintenance, MQ Office, Paintshop Pro and other tools that I use as a standard took kit (winzip or winRAR, codecs, VLC, Mozilla, Macromedia Flash and shockwave players, etc.) Just get the thing loaded up as much as you can but avoiding stuff that you’re unsure of. Then take your image and next time you get a virus, you can just reformat your drive and then restore the image and you’ll be way ahead of the game.

It’s risky to keep taking image snapshots because you most likely will not know when exactly you picked up the virus. So I just try to get a standard image and keep it around for when I need to rebuild the machine. Gwen’s PC was the latest victim, infected with a nasty Trojan Horse called av360 (Antivirus 360). What it does is act like a free legitimate antivirus program and detects like 30-50 fake viruses on your PC and then tries to get you to buy a utility that will go and clean up the hoax viruses. The fact is, av360 is the virus, and it goes undetected right on by Norton and McAfee (way to go Norton and McAfee).

I found out that if you don’t have Norton Antivirus on your PC and then try to install it after the PC is infected with av360, it will cause Norton to not be able to download updates. At this point you’re toast, the only way to get rid of it is to reformat. I also just found out, because this time I did have Norton installed already, that even with the latest updates, Norton doesn’t detect this thing.

There are dozens of write-ups and alleged free utilities for removing this virus if you google av360. I avoided the free utilities because I can’t be sure that they are legit. I did go in and hack the registry and searched the files out and removed them. I’m certain that the offending program that brought the Trojan in in the first place is still out there dormant on her PC, so I may still have a problem in the future. But at least for now the phony virus pop-up that was coming up every time Gwen did anything on the Internet, is now gone. As it was in this case, not having to reformat means I am victorious (this go around)!

I have some PC issue to deal with at home usually every 1-2 weeks, it’s always something fun…

Snopes - The Truth Will Set You Free!

I got a few emails recently, this was one of them:

Check out what some of our boys overseas did to their helicopter.
This very special Mi-24 helicopter is presently flying in Afghanistan ,
where it is no doubt causing quite a stir. God Bless the U.S.A.

Snopes says "Real Photos, Inaccurate Description"

Origins: Common as it may be to assume that any neat-o piece of military hardware must be American (especially when it's painted to look like the same type of bird that serves as the U.S. national symbol), the helicopter shown here is not American, nor has it been used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The type of helicopter shown in these images is the Mi-24 Hind; the unusually-decorated version pictured here originated with the Hungarian Air Force and was evidently painted with the eagle design by one of its crew members. The craft was not intended to be used in military operations and carried no armaments; it is strictly a display vehicle exhibited at air shows and the like.



Before propagating this type of urban legend and propaganda further, I recommend at least trying a quick Snopes search first.

Best Quote Of 2008

Snopes says, "TRUE"


POLK COUNTY FLORIDA SHERIFF GRADY JUDD

Some 'dirtbag' in Polk County Florida who got pulled over in a routine
traffic stop ended up 'executing' the deputy who stopped him. The deputy
was shot eight times, including once behind his right ear at close range.
Another deputy was wounded and a police dog killed. A state wide manhunt
ensued.

The low-life was found hiding in a wooded area with his gun. SWAT team
officers open fired and hit the guy 68 times.

Naturally, the media went nuts and asked why they shot him 68 times...
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, told the Orlando Sentinel: "Because that's
all the ammunition we had or we would have shot him more!!!"

For the full story go to the snopes link.

Livin' On The Edge

Snopes says "TRUE"



Look at the first picture above. This guy went left to center. You can see where he broke through the guard rail on the right side of the picture where the people are standing on the road. His truck left the road, traveling from right to left, he flipped this truck end-over-end, went across the culvert outlet and landed on the side of the road where you see it now.



Origins: The above-displayed photographs depict a December 2006 accident in which the driver of a 1991 GMS pickup slid off the road onto the right shoulder, overcorrected when he turned back to the left, and crossed over the opposite lane of the highway before crashing through a cement barrier, skirting a railing above the drainage culvert, and coming to rest facing opposite his direction of travel - barely missing a plunge over a 200-foot precipice by about twelve inches.


The roadway in these pictures is verified to be Highway 59 (i.e. State Route 59) near Hurricane City, Utah.

The Hurricane City Police department also confirmed that these images "are consistent with a single vehicle traffic accident that occurred on State Route 59 in Hurricane City" on 30 December 006, and that "Hurricane City Fire Rescue responded to the scene". The driver told police he was traveling at 55 mph when he left the road, but the police report of the incident notes that the truck left a 92-foot-long skid mark, indicating a much higher speed (perhaps 75 to 80 mph).



My guess, the high speed probably caused the momentum for him to get across that culvert successfully. Horse Power Saves! And that's why I'm a huge fan of the BMW M3...

If this guy didn't believe in God before, I'd bet money that he does now!

Ricks College 1980-1982

I've been wanting to do a post of Ricks College, and now that ,y daughter Tory has been accepted into BYU-I, well it has been making me more nostalgic than ever. My days at Ricks were very special to me because it was a pivotal time in my life where I started to make important decisions that would impact my life forever more.

1) Returning for my 2nd year Fall 1981, here visiting Yellowstone national park (Dad, me, Mom, Sandra Joyce) 2) Me and proof that I did once have nice hair (and no gut)

I started in the Fall of 1980, I was assigned to a 6 man (3 bedroom) apartment at Targhee Chalet with only 4 other room mates: Cal Collins and Jess Kohlert (returned missionaries from Lake Oswego, OR) and Larry Soderquist (a local from Rexburg, ID who was not attending Ricks), and his cousin Joel (last name slips my memory). Joel was a cowboy from Nevada, he was in the Agriculture major, a rodeo boy of sorts. He often kept his gear (saddle, boots, etc.) in the front room though he was rarely ever home in the apartment. My good friend and neighbor from Southern CA would join me a week later to be my room mate, Craig Bingham.


Rocky "Rock" Babcock standing in front of the Rock Lobster mural that I drew and a few of us colored, readying for some "dancing this mess around" at the Star Palace.

Craig and I were a little culture shocked in our "own Private Idaho" and we set out to bring a bit of CA to Idaho with us. At that time, punk rock was big in Southern CA so we decided to introduce the small town of Rexburg to the "new wave" culture. We tried to stick to the more reserved punk/new-wave bands like B-52's, DEVO, Adam and The Ants and spare them the likes of the hard core: Dickies, Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys. We met some other Californians that joined in on the "party gone out of bounds" fun, namely Rocky Babcock and Barron Smith.

Pictured below: 1) Larry Soderquist, Craig Bingham (and his girl friend) and me 2) Craig ready to hit the Star Palace disco for some "bikini whaling", posed against our wacky wallpaper


3) Craig and me at a Stake activity back home in CA, summer 1981 4) Craig Bingham would later marry my little sister Debbie while I was serving my mission, this is them in VA Summer 2008 here in VA.

I recently hooked up with Jess Kohlert's younger brother Doug on Facebook (seems he may have been a Tau Sigger at BYU, as was I). I never knew him at BYU (and I don't really know him now), but I knew he was Jess's brother just from his picture, his last name, and Oregon residence. Through him I was able to reconnect after way too many years (25+) with Jess. Jess is now a Professor at Kings college in PA, he's married and has 5 kids. I was also able to reconnect with Tom Knudsen as well, through Jess. I guess now I just need to find Cal.

1) Cal and Jess 2) Lisa and Jess at the end of the school year


3) Jess and his family a few years ago 4) Jess and Tom a few years back

I can't remember why, but Cal Collins left us at the end of the Semester and Tom Knudsen, another Lake Oswego pal became Jess' immediate room mate. Jess and Tom would eventually turn out to be major factors in my transition to a better me. Larry and I reconnected several years back but didn't exchange any photos. I need to reconnect with him too.

1) Tom and Larry (no they weren't gay, we wrestled around a lot in those days) 2) Me and Tom last day of school before I would go back to CA.


3) Tom's beautiful family 4) Tom's oldest is now married, and also pictured his lovely wife LaNae (whom he met in Rexburg, she was a local)

With Craig Bingham in the family now (by the way he and my sister had 5 boys, awesome kids) it was only fair that we get another Ricks College buddy in the family. My wife and I would eventually hook Barron Smith up with my wife's younger sister Irene on a blind date, and they got married shortly thereafter in 2001.

1) Rocky, Barron and me 2) Barron


3) Rocky, Barron and me reuniting in CA 1984 4) Barron and Irene

It has been great hooking up with my long lost Ricks College Oregon pals. It has also been great to have some of my Ricks pals become brothers. Life is good!