Zyx

I created this great little 8.5 x 11 sheet for my kids tonight. I’m going to teach them the alphabet backwards by singing it on my buses internal sound system while we drive down the road. They can sing along and it will be much fun! Sample. (Click the Ear :-)

I just faced an interesting dilemma. I love promoting my blog and I originally put a busdriverjim.com link on the sheet. I thought about it for a bit and realized my blog is a bit too edgy for kids to be crawling around it. I want to be able to be myself here, not filter it for kids, so I replaced it with a generic link to the source.

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Categorized as The Bus

Research

I’m fascinated by the old document I found last week. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • The language of the document is Danish.
  • Latter-day Saints in Denmark were the first to translate the Book of Mormon into their native tongue, in 1851 (…by Erastus Snow and Peter Olsen Hansen).
  • 64 years later the document is printed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in April, 1915 and ends up as insulation in the attic of a Mormon family’s cabin in Teton County, Idaho.
  • The property where the cabin sits is owned by an oil and gas producer named Helm Energy out of Englewood, CO.
  • Here’s a shot of the cabin taken with my Bing Map app:
  • Here’s the Helm Energy info gathered from the Teton County GIS system:

Steph used to work for Teton County Title and she’s going to call in some favors next week and get this property and it’s previous owners, nailed. I’ll keep you informed… :-)

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Categorized as The Valley

Cabin Paper

It seems that every time I take Bates Road to Victor, I discover something new. Today I stopped and took some shots of this cool little crooked cabin. Take note of the brown thing laying on the ground, lower right.

That brown thing turned out to be a foreign language newspaper, three years short of 100 years old. I’m guessing that it was up in the roof as insulation and the wind just blew it out onto the ground. It certainly hasn’t laid there for 97 years…

If anyone knows the family associated with this cabin, I’ll get this document to them.

Update: I’ve tracked this language down, it’s Danish!

SlideShow (Cabin Paper)
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Plagiarism

I attended high school in Paradise, CA. back in the mid sixties. I pretty much hated it but I was a track star so I dealt with it. My average grade was a D. Halfway through my senior year I had to deliver an oral book review to my English class. I wrote it, presented it, and got an F. The teacher accused me of plagiarizing it because I was an idiot and couldn’t have written it myself.

I dropped out of Paradise high right after that, finished up at a night school in Chico, hung out at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury for a while and hitch-hiked around the country. I guess that’s what idiots did back in the sixties…

Five years later I started college and got my computer science degree, graduating at the top of my class with a 3.98 GPA. I’m not sure what the purpose of this post is, other than to tell that English teacher she was wrong!

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Old Twenty

I handed this twenty to a local vendor yesterday and she said “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in a while”! I gave her another and held on to this one, which dates back to 1988, two years after Riley was born.

So, I put this bill on my scanner along with a newer twenty dollar bill for comparison. Every time the scan bar reached the bottom of the new twenty, the scan would fail. It finally dawned on me that the scanner software was detecting that bill, which means that the detection algorithm is built into the software! Mind = Blown.

I used to make a very good living back in the early 90’s developing scanner drivers in assembly language for PC Paintbrush. I know how complicated the process is. I now realize that the Fed’s are mandating that scanner driver developers refuse to scan U.S. currency, even if it’s just for a simple little blog post.

Gee, I wonder if my IP address was sent to the FBI? I’ll let you know if I get a visit…

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South Of Victor

I was slowly cruising around the old Jackson Highway yesterday, setting up for a 1400 pickup in Victor. It was a beautiful warm early spring day and I was wearing my first T-shirt of the season. This is Trail Creek, a major tributary of the Teton River.

SlideShow (South of Victor)
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Time Is Slipping Away

Rob Brezney’s Horoscopes appear in the Jackson Hole Weekly, which I read, weekly…

My horoscope for last week went down like this:

If you don’t run your own life, someone else will, said psychologist John Atkinson.

Make that your motto in the coming weeks, Leo. Write it on a big piece of cardboard and hold it up in front of your eyes as you wake up each morning. Use it as a prod that motivates you to shed any laziness you might have about living the life you really want.

Periodically ask yourself these three questions: Are you dependent on the approval, permission, or recognition of others? Have you set up a person, ideology, or image of success that’s more authoritative than your own intuition? Is there any area of your life where you have ceded control to an external source?


Some other great quotes while we’re on the topic:

  • Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right. — Henry Ford
  • What’s going on in the inside shows up on the outside. — Earl Nightingale
  • I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun. — Thomas Edison
  • I always turn every disaster into an opportunity. — John Rockefeller
  • You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. — Micheal Jordan
  • Anyone can do nothing. — Ruben Gonzalez

B.T.W. The photo above is Brezney’s symbol for Leo, not mine. But, there is some symbolism in that image that captures my current physical state of being. :-)

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Cardboard Derby 2012

Here’s the Top 42 shots from the cardboard derby yesterday up at Grand Targhee. This is the 12th annual derby for Targhee and just as good as always! Here’s the SlideShow.

SlideShow (Cardboard Derby 2012)
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Cardboard Video 2012

We spent today up at the Grand Targhee Ski Resort for the 12th Annual Cardboard Derby. I’ve got lots of photos that I’ll post tomorrow, but I’ve created a great little composite video of today’s event, that I would like to share with you here:

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Hodgepodge

Hay, it’s Friday! My brain has just been popping today with ideas and Pinterest pins so I decided to clump them all together into one post.

I put some great current links up on my Interesting Links board, I found an amazing video of a freeway shutting completely down in Israel honoring the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, and the Cardboard Derby at Grand Targhee is tomorrow.

I also shot a short little video cruising through Huntsman’s Springs and spotted a cool green truck at Driggs Tire.

Whew… So, lets go:

Here’s the Huntsman Springs drive-by:

Here’s the old green truck:

Here’s the freeway shutdown:

We’re heading to the Cardboard Derby tomorrow…

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Tree Farm

The Trail Creek Nursery Tree Farm is out on Bates Rd at the base of the Big Hole foothills. I spotted this great copper colored storage tube there on Tuesday and snapped a few pictures. These tubes are great here because the snow can’t build up on them.

I checked the nursery’s website and discovered that Clint and Lori Calderwood, who run the Joshua Smith group home where I go several times a week, are co-owners of the place. I never would have found that out without this Internet thingy…

SlideShow (Tree Farm)
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Hello Kitty

Steph created this bag today and said there is no other one like this on the planet. I believe her and here it is, with kitty included for authenticity!

SlideShow (Hello Kitty)
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Categorized as Steph

Big Generator

Teton County has an emergency generator parked next to our buses at the base. It could be rolled out for anything, even a search and rescue mission. The specs:

• Capacity: 250 kW
• Power: 373 Amps @ 277/480 V
• Leads: 12
• Engine: 2006 John Deere Diesel
• Weight: 15,000 Lbs
• Fuel Tank: 250 Gallons

I opened up the doors today and took a look at this bad boy.

SlideShow (Big Generator)
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Hay!

I really like hay. I like the way it smells, I like the color and I like the texture.

Spotted this little display of stacked bales on Bates Rd yesterday and thought it had great character and was more than worthy of making an appearance on the blog.

SlideShow (Hay!)
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Down The Road

After leaving the cemetery yesterday I realized I’d never been on the road running North of there, so we went exploring. My GPS indicated that it was a dead-end but that another road cut West and down to Hwy 33. I stopped where the roads intersected and snapped the shot below and recorded the birds chattering there.

We ended up at the top of a hill with the road disappearing down the side, in Lucy, our front wheel drive elderly Mazda with no power-steering. What the heck I thought and handed the camera to Steph. The video would have been longer if a bump hadn’t knocked it out of her hands…

SlideShow (Down The Road)
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