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Saturday, April 26, 2003

Easter 2003

Stardate 56042.6 (4/26/2003)
It's been a bit since the last entry. I guess when you don't have medical problems there is not much to say. What I will say is this is a good thing.

I went camping with the family and the kids of a friend down south at Goblin Valley on Easter day. Of all the years I have been going camping, this one was the worst. Which is to say it was not all that bad, but it was the worst. All the rest have been pretty good. I was tired, for one thing. When we got there, I realized I had forgotten the poles to the tents, so we only had one small tent. The boys, dog, and I slept in the car that night. For southern Utah, it was surprisingly cold. My wife April can't sleep in the cold. I wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, but the car was just uncomfortable. Goblin Valley itself was great fun. Think of a massive playground, with thousands of rock formations to climb. There weren't to many people there, so I took the dog off the leash. He ran for hours. We headed back to the campsite for lunch. After, the kids took a nap. Then the wind picked up the tent and most of our stuff. We recovered most of it. At that point, we gave up and headed home. This would be the first time we were chased away by weather.

On a similar note, April went to Provo to take a course on camping for her Brownie troop today. She also has to work, so she's been away for the last couple of days. From what she has been telling me on the phone, it was really educational. So I got the kids up this morning for Rachel's soccer game at 9 am. She got to play in the rain, and it turned to hail and snow before she was done. Patrick's game was not until 1 pm, so I was planning on killing the time between with a picnic in the park. The weather took that idea away. So we spent a couple of hours in Toys'R'us. The kids just received their allowance, so they could actually buy something. Patrick played in better conditions. I really like the way the team is playing. The week before Easter I had one coach ask me how I managed to teach them to play as a team instead of as a crowd of kids. That made me feel really good. When we came home, there was a e-mail from the regional coordinator, who said many of the teams did not show up today. He went on to say the conditions were not great, but that it was still good enough to play. I think he was a little ticked off at the coaches that did not show.

As I mentioned above, we were watching a friends kids for a week while she headed to Washington, D.C. to spread her fathers' ashes at Arlington. Having five kids for that long is draining. The kids, Vreni (pronounced Franny) and Hans where not bad, but since they don't live with us, they do things differently. Hans doesn't like to sleep, and can't understand why anyone wants to. Every morning at dawn he woke Patrick up. Patrick got a little sick of it.

I've been working on the Medical Department web pages. It's been fun, and I have learned a lot. One of the most interesting things is that the creeping feature creature showed up. If you've never heard of this, you're probably not a programmer. I always imagine it to be a small demon that sits on my shoulder as I work on a computer. It whispers in my ear with things like "Yeah, that's good, but it would be better if you…", and "If you did it this way, it would be way cool". The idea is to keep you working on a project forever, endlessly changing things. What I realized after a while is that, until now, I have not heard from the guy in a long time. He used to show up at work all the time. As I said, interesting.

End of log entry.

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