morrowlife

Here’s our stake president and his wife enjoying their front-row seats to the Polynesian dancing show at his fiftieth birthday party last Saturday.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam and taken in their lovely back yard.

Yet another night of extreme short shrift for the blog.  It was Massive Meeting Tuesday.  That’s the bad news.  The good news: it’s my birthday!  Had a nice day, although we didn’t exactly celebrate.  We’re doing that on Friday, which is my day off this week.  I’ve declared the celebration to go from 9:00 AM until 9:00 PM, after which I’ll be tired and will go to bed.

Anyway.  Thanks to my many Loyal Readers (and others) for their phone calls, text messages, and Facebook notes.  I feel loved.

LRN4 is working on coming up with a good campground for us during the July 4 week (we’ll actually go out on the 5th).  It’s not an easy task.  The attractive campgrounds are far, far away and have no hookups.  The ones with hookups that aren’t far, far away are wretched, from the sound of things.  She’ll probably come up with something good, though.  All I can say is it’s not easy here in California.  Which it ought to be, actually.  Bad gummint.

And I’ll leave you with this truly disgusting toilet news: toilet restaurants!

See you tomorrow.

Here are some flowers on a bush outside of my building at work. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

No posts the last couple of days. I was at Edwards Air Force Base. That’s right, we finally took our trip. Had a very good meeting and got to go aboard the aircraft for the first time. I’m glad I went. It was a long day, though, and I’m also glad to be home.

LRN2 and LRN4 leave very early tomorrow morning on their trip to San Diego, Mesa, and Las Vegas. It’s going to be kind of quiet around here without them. Real quiet. Too quiet. To ease my pain right at first, I’m going on a camping trip with the stake young men tomorrow night. I’m taking the trailer (of course), so it ought to at least be comfortable. Still trying to decide whether to fill the water tank and use the bathroom facilities, etc. I have roughly 20 hours to make up my mind. Is the convenience worth the extra effort to drain the holding tanks afterward? How badly do I want a shower on Saturday morning? Decisions, decisions.

Otherwise, I expect it to be pretty peaceful here in Lardville. I’m hoping to do a lot of reading, maybe work on an electronics project or two (candidates: a programmable guitar pedal, an Arduino-based sound file player, finishing the robot car with or without resorting to a GPS receiver and a compass, and/or something else), do a little programming (candidates: some iPhone app, a Linux-based assembler and/or compiler – possibly Fortran for the Arduino, and/or something else), watch a bunch of TV shows and video podcasts I have saved up on Larry’s hard disk, do a little jacuzzifying, and neaten up my office and workbench. Also a bunch of other things, probably. My fondest desire is not to spend the entire time websurfing. Which would be way too easy.

I’ll also need to remember to change the snake’s water daily, feed the fish daily, and clean the pool and pond filters at least weekly. I’ll also undoubtedly have a bit of laundry to take care of, and maybe even a bit of cleaning up after myself. Oh, the humanity.

Anyway, it’s time for bed, so wish me luck in my solitude and enjoy this shocking toilet violence news: mayoral toilet theft!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN4 during intermission at Friday night’s Shakespeare performance. We went to see if the line was short enough to buy a cup of hot chocolate. It wasn’t. That’s the stage in the background. Further description below. Great Art courtesy of the famous iPhone-cam, which doesn’t really do all that well at night in terms of actual photo quality. I just claim to be going for that soft-focus look and everybody’s happy.

Missed a couple of days again. Got busy.

Had a pleasant weekend. It was Mother’s Day, of course, and we had LRN5 and LRN12 over on Sunday. LRN12 stayed, because her other grandma came yesterday and is staying through Thursday. We’re having a nice time together, and LRN12 is delighted to have two grandmas to play with. And be spoiled by.

Our Guest Grandma took us out for dinner tonight. I had Massive Meeting Tuesday to go to, so we went to our current favorite hamburger joint – Athens Burger. I usually have the pastrami burger there, but I changed things up and went for the avocado burger. It was good, but I think I’ll switch back to my old favorite next time.

We enjoyed the Shakespeare performance on Friday, as mentioned above. It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as predicted last week. It was absolutely free, and worth at least every cent of that. We had a good time, the weather was nice if a bit brisk for outdoor theater, and the play was entertaining. We were glad we didn’t pay a whole lot of money, but we were well entertained. At half-time intermission, they got out a bunch of plastic buckets and begged for money. We gave them a few bucks, but we’re considering bringing our own bucket to next year’s performance – might be able to turn a handy profit on it, as long as people can’t distinguish our bucket from all the others. Of course, there’s the nagging little honesty issue to deal with.

I’ll end today with this exciting job opportunity for my Loyal Readers: car-slowing angel. Who says there’s no work out there?

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 right after he received a Major Award at a school-related function Monday night. It’s the major reason there was no post yesterday. It was a moderately nice event, as school functions go, and I’m proud of his accomplishment. LRN2’s the tall male in the white shirt standing in the middle of all the girls. Not an entirely bad place to be. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

No post Friday either. I was busy. LRN4 and I went to my work dinner/dance. It was an elegant event and we had a very nice time. The band was good but they got a bit loud for us (call me old fashioned, but I want to be able to talk at events like that one) and we went home. Still thoroughly enjoyed it and we’re glad we went. I won our table’s centerpiece, which is a very nice floral arrangement. It’s downstairs on the kitchen table as I write this.

LRN4’s enjoying her week-long visit with her brother’s family and father so far. I’m expecting to hear from her shortly for our nightly call. I miss her.

Had a meeting scheduled for five of our people, including me, at our Air Force base for tomorrow, but events happened, so we’re rescheduled for Thursday of next week. That’ll be better for me anyway – I hate to leave LRN2 completely alone. The house gets lonesome. Either that, or he might have way too much fun. Call the party off, LRN2!

We got our weekly emails from LRN1 yesterday. He’s doing great and working hard. He’s feeling successful and happy. Couldn’t hope for more than that.

LRN5 and LRN12 were over for the weekend. LRN12 is such a cutie. A little too strong-headed for her own good (or anybody else’s, for that matter) these days, but cute. She’s exploring her limits right now and completely exasperating her mom, but this phase will end soon enough. Then she’ll be on to the next challenge. For now, I’m enjoying the heck out of her. Did I mention how cute she is?

And that’s about all the news tonight. I’ll leave you with this exciting toilet news: stick ’em up!

See you tomorrow.

Here’s LRN2 at the Eagle brunch the other Saturday. Congrats again, LRN2! It was a very nice – although quite expensive – breakfast. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.

The weekend’s over! Pretty decent one. LRN12 had her monthly sleepover with us this weekend – it was fun having her here. She’s still working on sleeping all night long, but she did pretty well. On a very positive note, she has started taking naps! Really! So there’s that.

The other big news is that LRN4, LRN12, and I went to Tracy to look at cars. True to my form, I ended up buying one. We got a 2010 Ford Taurus Limited with almost all the available options. It has automatic headlights, automatic high beams, automatic windshield wipers, adaptive cruise control, heated and air conditioned front seats, heated back seats, rear window sunshade, blind spot car detection, rear and side backup radar, Sync with navigation system that includes full phone and iPod integration, a big hard drive that rips CDs for you and stores them, a DVD player (front only, so it only plays when you’re parked – not sure how useful that will be, but it’s there!), and voice control for all of them, keyless entry and engine start (you just keep the “key” in your pocket and push the start button), selectable-color interior mood lighting, HID headlights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Strangely, it has no sunroof. Also no backup camera or all-wheel drive (we didn’t want the latter). Also no SHO, but I probably shouldn’t have spent that kind of money on it anyway.

So we like it a whole lot. And it cost a whole lot, but that’s only money, isn’t it? We haven’t technically gotten the word that LRN4’s old car is totaled, so we don’t technically have the money from it yet, which is a bit of a worry item, but I’m pretty sure it will happen in the next few days. In any case, I don’t think we want to keep that car, even if it’s repaired. It’s just a question of when the money will come in. And how much there will be. And how badly LRN4 will wring my neck if it isn’t totaled. Gulp.

We all think the car looks really cool. Strangely, it’s quite tall and chunky (muscular-looking, to put it a bit better) and has very small windows. So LRN4’s a bit uncomfortable driving it right now. Hopefully, she’ll get comfortable with it very soon. The trunk lid is chest-high!

And the tires are huge.

Anyway, I’m happy with the car (link note: our car look exactly like the one they tested – same color inside and out and same options!) and looking forward to excellent service from it for years to come. At the price, it had better give excellent service for years to come.

Let’s see, what else has been going on? Well . . . it rained. Yesterday and today. It’s supposed to be dry for the next five days. Things have greened up quite nicely over the last couple of months of pretty heavy and regular rain. In fact, the mountains are already starting to go post-green (read: brown). Which is a shame – they look absolutely velvety in the spring. And then ruggedly brown the rest of the year.

Anyway. Had a lot of meetings on Sunday – I was home only for a few hours during the day. Started at 7:00 in the morning and finished at 9:00 in the evening. Great day of rest, no?

Greetings from the train, by the way. I finished my indexing pretty quickly this evening and still had some battery power available, so I thought I might as well blog. I’ve been listening to a couple of podcasts from the church called “Everything Creative.” I may have mentioned it before – I really like it. The original premise was that they would interview an interesting creative person one week and then that person would interview a different creative person the following week, and so on. It seems to have morphed into a single (professional-quality) interviewer, which isn’t a bad thing The original idea seemed to have run its course after a couple of months. Anyway, I heard from the guy who maintains the Tabernacle and Conference Center organs. Along with a bunch of other, smaller organs, a couple of harpsichords, and about 70 pianos. It was especially fascinating to hear about the history of the Tabernacle organ. Or organs, to put it more correctly – they’ve replaced it at least a few times in the past hundred years or so. Anyway, it was really interesting. Now they’re interviewing some Creative Dancers. Interesting in an odd way.

Time to quit. I’ll leave you with this surprising food-related good news: eat more chocolate!

See you tomorrow.