Presidential Race

I usually don't delve much into the political arena since most of that is mainly full of ungrounded and rehashed opinions. And we all know what opinions are like...Belly buttons. we all have 3 or 4 and they are somehow always full of lint and grocery receipts. But I recently had a few thoughts. Thoughts occur to me rarely enough that I take note when they do arrive. My thoughts were:

Do you think the task of president is arduous?

Would you say it is a laborious task?

Would you say it is a hard task to bear?

Would you say the president is heavily laden?

Would you say a president in office has been laden with many difficult tasks?

Would you say if elected, Obama been laden with many tasks?

At the end of a long day would he mutter in an exhausted sigh "Obama Bin Laden - with many things" (hopefully he shares something in common with Karl Malone and talks about himself in 3rd person.)

I think if I share my opinion that I am not exactly thrilled with either candidate, I am for the most part, in accord with the majority of the nation. But, if elected I think Obama would be so much more fun to make jokes about. I was toying with the ide of making up some bumper stickers that say "Obama Nation".

In preparation I am asking for audience support here. I have this picture, but it REALLY needs a caption. Please comment and tell me what you think the caption should be

I am going to miss the comedic rivalry between these two! "Waving! Waving! Elbow! Elbow! Wrist! Back stab!" I thought it was great that the Democratic Party adopted a comedic duo that rivaled the Smothers Brothers, Abbott and Costello or Penn and Teller. Here's hoping that you two keep churning out the funny, I need some more blog fodder

Not my story

As I mentioned previously I had other stories from the reunion I wanted to share.  Family reunions are fun for me because I like to see how well the family's talents and abilities mesh together.  

I seem to be able to adequately express myself with a pen, but verbally... as I have mentioned, comes out so boring it puts myself to sleep.  My brother Doug and Dave seem to have the ability to talk.  They can both talk their way or out of just about any situation.  I am on the opposite end of the spectrum.  I couldn't sell a glass of water to a dying victim in the middle of the Sahara. 

At the reunion Doug was telling a story and I just sat there marveling at his craft of story telling.  This is an easy blog for me.  I wanted to retell the story as close to how he told it as I can recall.  He carved this one out and put the details in... I am just going to attempt to wrap a bow on it and regift it to you... the reader.  Enjoy!

This story would probably be told different by Gwenette because she sees the whole thing from a different perspective.  We were on a float trip and drifting through a calm spot on the river.  There wasn't much going on in the river.  

I was in the back of the boat putting a fly on my line.  Gwenette was in the middle and Tucker (dog) was lounged out on the front of the boat.  He is retarded and doesn't like the water.  Whatever was going through his head, he decided to get in the water. Instead of jumping in, he lazily stretched out and slowly melted over the edge of the boat head first.  As he went in his back legs got tangled in the rope and he was stuck.  Gwenette was sitting closer but she was not doing anything yet.  I finally decided to get up, reach over her and get him unstuck. I lunged for the front of the boat.  But, by this time Gwenette decided to help Tucker out too.  When she was untangling him I turned to to the back of the boat, just in time to see my pole go in the river.  I could see it doing a slow sink to the bottom.   I lunged out and grabbed for it but it was about an inch out of my reach.  It was slowly sinking and we are floating further down river.  The pole alone is $500.  I did not want to just lose it.  Without hesitation I went in after it.

Pole now in hand I turned around and start running towards the boat.  Gwenette did not know what the Hell was going on.  All she knew is that she was helping Tucker get untangled and then I am in the river too.  The water was up to my chest and the boat was still floating and getting further and further away.  

And then I saw my tackle box topple off the edge of the boat.  The tackle box has about $900 worth of flies in it. I was not prepared to let that go too.  Now IT was doing the slow sink to the bottom too and I was running as fast as I could to catch it.  Running in water that deep is very difficult and I was not getting to it very fast even though I was running as fast as I could.  

Finally I caught up to my tackle box.  Now I had my pole in one hand, and my tackle box tucked under the other arm. I had to keep running underwater as fast as I could to catch the boat.  Gwenette was looking at me like I was stupid.  She could not figure out what I was doing...  And then my hat fell in the river.  It was slowly sinking too.  Through even more strenuous running, I managed to get my hat back and caught up to the boat at the same time  After all of the underwater aerobics, I was too tired to get back up into the boat.  

I drug it over to the shore and toppled back in. 

Pffffft! Gone!

Last year our TV went on the fritz. The picture would disappear and a terrifically annoying squeal would blast out of it. I hated it. It was extremely annoying. It was just like trying to go to sleep and having a troll sneak into your bedroom and set your bedding on fire. Because EVERYONE knows what THAT is like!

About this same time we had a garage sale. Mandy stuck the TV out with all of the other junk we were selling. I didn't think we should even give it away. After the garage sale, I learned Mandy had hornswaggled some poor consumer $50 for it! I felt guilty and exuberant all at the same time. Similar to how it would feel if you caught the bedding torching troll and set his hair on fire.

With 50 filthy dollars we went to Best Buy in search of our new electronic babysitter, friend and mentor. I had not looked over an electronics show room for about 7 years. I knew nothing about the features that the new TVs had. I briskly paced in front of the TVs looking only at prices. I was shocked to see that a regular CRT TV was about $400-$600. Flat screen LCDs were starting at about $699, were larger and were a whole lot cooler. It did not take much before I had forgotten the Idea of buying a CRT and was now studying the tags on flat screens.

I wandered around and looked at the picture quality of every TV from the most expensive to the cheapest. Then I started looking at features, resolution and picture size. Assaulted by acronyms and terminology I couldn't even imagine the meaning of.

Finally a salesman came over and assisted us. He showed us a TV that was almost half the price of the others because it was last years model and it was only a 720 X 960 resolution. I looked at the picture and the price, smiled and said "We'll take it!" It has worked wonderfully ever since.

However...

Sunday I walked into the house, something smelled like burnt plastic. I wandered around to each room sniffing. The scent faded and I lost it. Later that night Mandy was reading a book in the living room and she heard a "POP" sound come from the TV. She did not think much about it and kept on reading. The next day I was working in the office. The whole family came in solemn and wide eyed like they had just witnessed a homicide. They all began speaking at once "The TV isn't working! I turned it on and nothing happened!" They all stammered at once. I went out and inspected it. checked the power cord, tried new sockets. Tested everything else plugged into the power strip. They were right! It had just mysteriously stopped working! Just like that our friend's life had been snuffed out in the middle of the night without any warning. I am surprisingly unaffected. The part I am lathered up about is that we haven't even started to pay off the card we put it on. It's karma for selling a broken TV for $50.

Mandy and the family's new blog

Mandy did create a new blog and it is here.

Mandy wipes her hands of what I do on Blogger

Last night Mandy says to me "Change the look of our blog so it isn't so... boring!" I said "Um...OK" so I did some searching around and made several suggestions to her for new designs. She said "Can't you put like cute stuff on the side to make it look pretty?" I looked at her like she had just suggested I pee on an electric fence. "I am not going to put CUTE stuff on our blog. If you want cute stuff make your own and be as cute as you want!" So she said "Fine! I will! Change it so that it is just your blog and I will make one for the family."

So... this is all my blog now! I can't really blame her. With all of the stupid stuff I say, I would want to distance myself from me too. Things are kind of in flux right now as I try out new styles and move things around. It also does not help that blogger does not seem to be playing well with Firefox. I get finicky results with everything I do. Right now as I speak I don't have the insert picture and font edit tools at the top of my page. So welcome to MY blog! When Mandy creates a family blog I will let you know (I kind of doubt she will... you saw how much she blogged on here).

Circle Journals

OK I might not get around to all of my blogs tonight... that last one took me 2.5 hours to write.

At the beginning of the reunion Kimball gave all of us notebooks and explained that they were "Circle Journals". You could write a question to anyone you wanted and ask whatever you wanted. You then handed your journal to that person and after they had responded they would give it back to you. Some of the replies and questions were funny, some were sad, some were provocative and some were beyond categorization... such as most of my replies. So, I am opening up a question to anyone who reads this.

What is something that nobody knows about you?

3 for the price of 3!!!

A week and a half ago we went to our Family reunion. I had collected some ideas to blog about, but until now I have not had the chance to write them. So HOT DOODOO, SON OF A SEAHORSE! IT'S AN ALL OUT BLOGFEST! YEEHAW!!! Everyone pull up a chair and get your favorite blanky. Old man Sterling is going to tell you how it was in the good ol days!

First off we drove to Idaho Falls to go through the open house of the new Idaho Falls temple. That was really cool. The mural in the creation room was incredible! After we went through the tour we went and had cookies and lemon water at the adjoining stake center. As we were leaving some people walked up to the car on each side with arm fulls of pamphlets and DVDs. The lady on the driver's side approached me and said "Would you like a pamphlet and video about the temple?" I said "Sure!" As she passed it through the window to me she smiled at the kids in the back of the car and said "These are FREEEEE!!!!" The smile slowly melted off my face. I looked over and the gentleman on the passenger side was passing Mandy a different pamphlet and DVD. Something seemed awfully fishy all of a sudden. I pulled out of the parking lot slowly as I looked at the pamphlet and DVD. When the church gives pamphlets to people I never hear them say "It's FREEEEE!!!!!" The pamphlet and DVDs had similar graphics and layout that you might expect to see on church materials. But on the back, centered on the bottom there was not a church logo but one for some organization. They had obviously gone through a lot of trouble to look legitimate. I never did watch the DVDs or read the pamphlet to see what sort of jabs they were taking. I had a hard time believing an organization would put any money into distributing "FREEEE!!!", informative and unbiased information about temples. We wondered if they could even legally stand on church property and hand out these things. There was so much security running around there, I doubt they where allowed to stay very much longer than just after we saw them.

We continued on past Hailey and Sun Valley and into Stanley Idaho. We were meeting everyone at the Triangle C cabins and from there were going to go eat in Stanley. I pulled into the Triangle C cabins which consisted of a long horseshoe shaped gravel road. Small one bedroom log cabins were on the Left and outside perimeter of the loop and a grass common area with a lone picnic table on the inside. I scanned the cabins for a familiar car of one of the family. All of the cabins were vacant and there were no cars anywhere. Off on the other side of the loop there sat a small house that was obviously the manager's house. I saw someone standing on the porch and he was flailing his arm up and down like it might have been on fire and he was trying to extinguish the flame. Amused and bewildered I drove closer. As I got closer I could see he was looking right at me. What kind of strange greeting was this? The closer I got the more frantic his movements became. As I got even closer I could see his face in the shadows of the porch. He looked kind of angry, more than he was happy. Now he had his hand in front of him, flat moving it up and down like he was pushing a floating table under water. I still had no clue what he was so angrified over. I didn't want to proceed fearing that whatever I was doing, by proceeding I was upsetting him more. But fearing that this might be some strange way of telling me he needed to talk to me and if I didn't oblige he would call the sheriff on me. Knowing this was a small town I was afraid, he might have been the sheriff too... and the judge... and the jailer. so I proceeded slowly. As I got even closer I could see he was yelling at me too. I still didn't know what to make of the situation and I proceeded yet closer and rolled down my window so that I might further interpret his wild gestures and his red faced bleating. When my window was down he yelled at us "SLOW DOWN!!!! We have children running around here!!!" I looked back at the empty and ghost town-like cabins I had just driven by. A lone tumble weed merrily bounced end over end through the grass. Beyond that nothing seemed living. I thought "Well... I wouldn't have driven so fast if I didn't think you were waving me over to you!" I didn't say it... but I thought it. For some reason anytime I say anything that begins with me jabbing an index finger into their chest and saying "Listen here dumba$$...!" Is always interpreted by the recipient as "I would like you to punch me... as hard as you can!" So, I just said "OK!" and rolled my eyes as I slowly drove away. Now Angry myself I drove away. Now Mandy was mad because she was hungry and tired and I wasn't listening to her, which makes her angrier. She wanted to go back and ask the jerk face we had just encountered if he knew where my family was. Personally I would have rather set fire to myself and gone for a jog around an oil refinery than go back and talk to him. The kids were now mad because they wanted out of their seats and suddenly we turned into a nest of contentious jackals on four wheels. We were all mad. Eventually we met up with everyone, went and had dinner, drove up to the campground and set up our tent. Sigh! everything seemed better now! Everyone was there except Dave. His campground site that we had reserved sat unoccupied. Several people drove through the campground slowly eyeing the empty site until they looked forward and saw all of us glaring at them and pounding our fists into our hands. some of us were shaking our heads "no." and others were making slashing motions across our throats. None of us were waving our arms up and down like they were on fire though. The camp site "shopper's" eyes would get big and they would gulp and drive on. Dave did finally arrive and set up his trailer and the campground host came around and explained that he felt that Dave should not have gotten the campsite because he arrived later.... um, I'm not the first one to tell you that I am no genius. But, isn't that what a reservation is for??? I am pretty sure that is why we made the reservation over a year in advance. I don't know. Maybe these hosts get a commission off of the campground. Maybe he was upset because he had run out of toilet paper. Maybe he heard there were people terrorizing the townsfolk of the nearby town of Stanley by driving 15 MPH in a 5 MPH zone... who knows. The next day my brother-in-law Terrell pulled his truck in to his parking spot, pulled through and ended up parking on off of the parking pad a bit. "Uh-oh" I thought "Campground host Adolf isn't gonna like this one." Sure enough, a while later the host puttered by in his truck. When he saw the infraction he got out of the truck walked up to the nearest person which happened to be Shawn and said "You are going to move this truck NOW!" Then he turned around, got back in his truck and left. Later that same day we went to a nearby ghost town. As we were leaving the campground they had the road closed down to a single lane so that they could do some logging and tree removal of some trees that had been blown down in a huge storm they had the week before. There were flaggers on the road and were only letting small groups go through each way. Kimball was driving behind a family on bikes. Mom was in the front seat and Dave, Cheryl and Larisa were in the back seat. When the flaggers waved them on Kimball who is a very careful and courteous driver got in the opposite lane (as there was no oncoming traffic thanks to the flagger on the other end holding up traffic) and proceeded to slowly go around the group of bikers. Now I have explained my position about sharing the road as a biker in previous posts. As a biker you carefully tiptoe along roads with no shoulder like you were sneaking out of a den of hibernating bears. I struggle with bikers who ride two, three or even four abreast on these roads. The father of this group took this mentality to a completely higher plane of stupidity. He began to wander over in front of Kimball, Wave and yell at him to get back. (Once again with the waving and yelling... maybe it was the same guy. I will give it to him that there were kids around this time) Kimball proceeded to carefully and cautiously pass in the other lane far away from where his family was riding. Dave is one of those people that says what he is thinking, so as they passed, Dave rolled down his window and yelled "Get out of the road KNUCKLEHEAD!!!" The biker did not take this character assessment well and yelled back "YOU WANT TO GET OUT OF THE CAR AND FIGHT ABOUT IT???" I really liked the things this biker was teaching his children. Dave either did not feel like giving this guy's family another lesson... this time on what NOT to do or it could have been that Kimball was driving and wasn't going to stop for Dave to get out. Nevertheless there was no more yelling and arm flailing to be had.

After the ghost town we stopped at a hot springs that fed into the Salmon River. Where the spring trickled into the river there were several pools blocked off by rocks. The highway ran right next to the river and there was a pull off from the road next to some old bath houses that were still standing there. At one point a truck pulled over and a family piled out. The kids wandered around and gazed at the river. Their mother trailed behind making sure they didn't get themselves into trouble. Lagging behind their father lumbered down the path. Not looking at where he was going. Ignoring the sites around him. Instead he fixed his attention on a small GPS that he cradled in his hands. He was looking at it, adjusting it, entering things into it and studying the information relayed back to him. Frustrated with his father's inattentiveness one of the kids said "Dad... why did you bring that?" His dad glared down at him and said "So we don't get lost!" To which his son pointed back to the top of the trail and said "But why? The truck is parked right there!" How do you explain to a child that you have to use your GPS because other than work and home you never go anywhere to warrant the use of your $800 GPS that you just bought?

Just before sunset we all wandered down to the lake for family pictures. As we stood on the beach setting up for the picture, the lake in the background, stretching out to the giant sawtooth mountains lumbering above. We were facing the road where we came from. I could see our campground host had just pulled off the side of the road where we were at. We were a good distance from the road and I could see him sitting in his truck, glaring at us. Wondering if the satisfaction of limping down to the beach to knock our heads around a bit, out weighed the trouble it would take to actually hobble down there. He sat there in his truck for about 10 minutes, glaring at us imagining the ways he could yell at us and flail his arms. After a while he grew bored of waiting for us to return and he pulled slowly back onto the road and left.

I think this was close to our 25th annual reunion. Every year we have been afflicted with some sort of scourge. Every year I say "That was strange! I think I've seen it all now! We must have exhausted mother nature of ideas by now, for sure!" But every year it is something new. We have had mice, bats, skunks, bees, lightning, broken cars, sunburns, and unforgiving heat... to name a few. This year I think our scourge was yelling and flailing arms. Obviously I am pointing out the worst of the reunion. Making light of it and exaggerating it. The rest of the reunion, the parts I glazed over because they didn't lend to my topic of reunion misadventures. Those parts, the ones I skimmed over were fun and entertaining and went by way too fast. If I get a chance I will write more about those times. Thank you for a good reunion Lori! We all had fun!

After the

Good news everybody!

I realize many of you have been moping around a bit the past few months with the recent illness and liquidation of Chudleigh. I myself haven't been feeling very keen either. Well... all that has changed! It seems that people are dejunking their garages this time of year and snow blowers are falling into the category of items that have not been used in 6 months and so they are being sold. I found a Hahn Eclipse 4 stroke, 2 stage, 5 hp yellow beauty. For anyone that might not know what those things mean... the four strokes engines are quieter, turn slower and are more powerful than their two stroke compadres. 2 stage means there is a big set of churning blades on the front that feed a second set of blades that turn very fast and actually toss the snow out and loft it skyward back to where it came from. 5 hp means the motor is a 5 horsepower motor. All designed to let old man winter know that his snow is welcome anywhere but on my driveway. They stopped making them in 1973, so it is somewhere between 35 and 45 years old. I am not sure why they built this thing as tough as they did. It is built like a tank. A solid chunk of mechanised, brute force, harmony.

For the time being it is at my friend Shane's house in Farmington until it can find a ride up here. It had a broken pull cord, so I don't actually know if it works. I figure I have a good 4 or 5 months to tear it down, refurb it and make sure it is everything that keeps a snowflake up at night worrying.

Anthony's wife, Cheryl suggested that I call it Reggie because it regurgitates the snow. I like that name. But given the stout and robust attributes of the snow blower I pictured something like a marine drill sargeant and Reginald seemed more appropriate. Since I have not heard Reginald run yet, I don't feel very acquainted. Perhaps when we get comfortable with each other I can call him Reggie. So, Reginald is what I am calling him now, perhaps after some winter storm assaults us and we have to clear out 3 feet of snow and I am wheeling him into the garage on a pristine and clear driveway I will pat him on the head and say "Good work Reginald" and he will grumble in a gravely voice "Eh, you can call me Reggie". Until that day, I am strangely looking forward with uncharacteristic anticipation for winter to arrive. What is wrong with me? (Don't answer that)