Ok, so here’s the deal. I’m a lucky man! I have survived an amazing life and I live in a beautiful place with a good woman and my immediate family. (except Riley :-)
I have a job that respects what I do and allows me time off. Since this is Spring Break I have decided to give the routes available here to my co-worker Karen and I’m heading to Lake Havasu City, AZ on Friday to recharge my batteries.
All journey’s have a starting point and the bus stop here is the beginning of this one…
We had an interesting animal walk across our yard last night. I suppose it could have been a deer or an elk, I’m not a hunter so I don’t know these things…
It’s fascinating that the tracks are in a single line, like with two feet!
You know a cat trusts you when you can get her on her back and brush her belly. Most times we have these sessions in my dark office in the morning. Today we chose the family room for this short little video, with Steph operating the camera.
Bear in mind that Piper’s an outdoor hunting cat, cooped up by the winter. She’s not some lame indoor cat. It takes a lot on her part to submit like this!
Our little Mazda Lucy had some issues last week, all of her dashboard warning lights kept coming on. We dropped it off with our private mechanic, valley boy Jeremy, on Friday and picked it up today, all fixed. This guy knows his electrical as he fixed my truck Jack after I cross jumped him and fried his wires.
Heading out to Jeremy’s off 5000 I spotted this cool teepee and grabbed a shot.
I’ve also wrapped up a new blog function called Category. It’s available under Functions on your right and it’s a quick way to reach Posts organized by Category.
I’m sitting here on a Saturday night working on a blog routine that will allow me to group posts into sets, when I see the damn weather forecast that says we’re going to get more snow tonight and tomorrow.
I traveled down to Rexburg today with my co-worker Karen to attend a mandatory PASS training. DOT mandated, been there and done it many times, oh well…
The ground south of us is dry, and the snow on the ground here is fading away. So why are we getting more? Possibly ten inches in the next couple of days!
Spring Break = Me. Stay tuned… Lake Havasu City, AZ has a nice ring to it!
The first time I heard the expression mud season around here was in the spring following our first winter. Coming from a place like the Seattle area the phrase had no relevance to me. It sure does now…
It’s just generally a difficult time of the year here in Teton Valley. The snow melts, exposes winter born potholes, and then fills them with mud. The good news is, spring is coming. The bad news is, well, the snow is melting…
This is where the Ice Sculptures lived just a couple of months ago:
At least the roads in downtown Driggs are looking good!
Riley and I developed some great father/son Easter traditions back in Kent, WA as he was growing up. I know he’s going to pass them down to his own son. Since we’ve been here, and I’ve been driving kids around for years, new traditions have developed.
The first Easter, Steph made big beautiful baskets for my kids, which numbered about six. That’s totally impractical now but the tradition lives on. The pictures below represent forty Easter treats. We’ve kept the candy to a minimum this year and added a special treat inside the egg! I’ll be passing them out next week.
Each egg contains a mint George Washington Presidential $1 Coin that Steph managed to squeeze into little baggies. I hope the kids value and keep them!
I was shutting down the house this morning before heading off to work, and I had a little incident. After turning off the light at the end of the hallway I got disoriented and walked right into the edge of a doorway. It almost knocked me out but I’m lucky it connected between my eyes and not over an eye socket.
It feels alright now, may leave a scar, but I have a company training session coming up on Saturday and I need a good story for my co-workers. When I see my snow-bunny buddy K-Dawg tomorrow I’m going to ask her what’s the best gnarly ski-stunt I could reference in, you know, hip ski-dude terms.
So, when people say “what happened to you?” I can tell them that I was doing a {insert ski-stunt term here} when I ran into a tree! Hey, the door frame used to be a tree…
The sad truth is I live ten miles from Grand Targhee and I can’t ski because the eight screws in my left ankle would pop loose and boot, ski and foot would get left behind.
Green circle marks the spot…
Steph just pushed the cut together and put a butterfly bandage on it. Have I mentioned I hate Daylight Savings Time!
Updated phrase: I was huckin my meat off the backside when I pulled a Bono! (Thanks to K-Dawg and Sonny) Wow, sexual innuendo run amok :-)
This time change crap absolutely needs to go away. Like millions of others (Ok, looking at the unemployment numbers, maybe 1,000 or so) I drive to work in the morning around 0700. Yesterday it was dark as I drove in, while last Friday the sun was coming up. The problem here is that deer don’t get the news about a time change.
Coming down Ski Hill Road there was a large herd of deer (40+) munching on snow melted exposed grass along the side of the road. To the deer this was 0600, not 0700, and they looked at me with a what the hell are you doing here? look. They stayed out of my way and I flashed my lights at every oncoming vehicle until I got to the base.
Oh, and since I didn’t include a photo, here’s a video to warm your heart:
My buddy Dispatch Sally got a kick out of Saturday’s Insecure post so I’ve decided to put that photo into context. That’s assuming there is such a thing as context here :-)
This is Cardboard Derby time at Grand Targhee and these attractive young people were Steph’s co-workers at our local newspaper, the Teton Valley News. What more can I say?
Tom and Halina Hickey built our log home from the ground up some years ago and raised a daughter and a son here. In fact, my office was the son’s bedroom. They also planted sixty seedling trees that are now over twenty feet tall.
I’m not sure when they added the family room on but it was a great addition as Halina ran a thriving daycare business here for years and it was a place for the kids to play.
Yesterday, Steph decided to dig around the enclosed areas of the family room’s sliding doors with a coat hanger, to see what was jamming them up. Here’s what she found!
Piper scared the crap out of her twice by sticking her paw through from the other side :-)
Our friend Amy had a mental breakdown up at Targhee. She grabbed a newspaper and tape and made some, well, pointy paper breasts.
Then she started screaming “Look at me!!!” Everyone was too embarrassed to look…
Not sure what the alignment of the paper tip to Steph’s mouth means, or if the guy on the left is admiring Steph, or avoiding Amy’s fake appendages. So many questions…
Steph picked up this piece of plastic off the kitchen window sill this evening and said “What’s This?” Then she proceeded to drop it into the sink. “I think it went in the garbage disposal!” she said, and I replied, “You dropped today’s blog post down the drain???” After she frantically dug her hand down in the disposal for a while, we found it laying in a corner of the sink. So here’s the story…
I was making an egg sandwich for lunch today with my last two organic brown eggs and some fine 100% whole wheat bread. I ground some fresh pepper onto the eggs when something snapped and a bunch of black peppercorns landed in the pan.
Did I mention they were my last two eggs? Anyway, I picked a bunch out and proceeded to make my sandwich. I chewed each bite slowly and was carefully extracting the peppercorns from my mouth, when I encountered this plastic piece of intestinal death!
This was the reason that the peppercorns escaped from the bottom of the grinder. If I’d swallowed this thing I hate to think of the havoc it would have wrecked as it worked it’s way through my very delicate internal system!
Our beloved Spud Drive In is up for sale again. It changed hands a few years back from the original owners who started it in 1953. Unfortunately, technology is wreaking havoc on these old theaters since the new movies won’t play on old film projectors and a digital projector costs $65,000, and the Spud only charge a few bucks per carload.
It appears they have a couple of fundraising movies coming up shortly, to augment their t-shirt sales. I wish them the best but I must admit that my use of the word beloved applies to the folks in the valley, not me. I haven’t been there in years…
I’m a firm believer in signs. My many years as a human here on Earth have taught me to be aware of their presence and to never dismiss them when they occur. I spotted this one today and as the sky changed it’s hue I grabbed this shot from my moving bus.
What could be more obvious and ominous then a Heads Up sign from above? It’s usually my guardian angel that pulls these stunts so I better be on my toes for a while.
