Kirk didn't have kids

Last night, Chelsea and I watched the original Star Trek episode "Miri," where he beams down to a planet populated by children who will contract a deadly disease when they reach puberty and become "grups." We made a realization: Kirk handled the situation all wrong.

He obviously didn't have children of his own. We each had separate ideas about how he should have handled that situation, so I will separate them out so Chelsea doesn't get any of the blame for my idea.

Chelsea thought he should have had the Enterprise beam down candy that they could bribe the children with because what kid doesn't love candy? She also suggested sending some of them to a time-out until they could act better.

I embraced the crowd control advice my Grandpa Tex gave us and suggested that Kirk should have taken out the ringleader. Just dropped him to the floor and that would have gotten their attention. Now that I think about it some more, though, that's what the kids were waiting for him to do so they could clobber him. Clearly, Chelsea's the better parent here, but Kirk totally failed.

Good rules

I'm with the kids tonight and while I was making dinner, Max asked if he could play outside. "Sure," I said. "What are the rules?" I had to check since he's been known to go on a walkabout before and that makes his parents less than thrilled.

"No going in the street and no going in the backyard."

Me: "You can go in the backyard. That's a fine place to play."

"And no stealing everyone's cars."

I agreed that was also a good rule, but I'm a little nervous as to how he came up with that one.

Fall Break trip to Lake Powell

I don't remember if we got a vacation in the fall when I was a kid, but Fall Break is kind of a big deal in Utah. Apparently, when I was very little and going to kindergarten in Utah, Fall Break coincided with the first day of deer hunting season and the school holiday was called Deer Hunt. That has since changed.

This year, Chelsea's dad entered a triathlon at Lake Powell and we all got together there to cheer him on. Our trip started like this:

Road trips are unequivocally awesome. Unless you're Chelsea, in which case they get horrible after a few hours. But this was the very beginning of the trip and we were all excited for the adventure ahead. The trip to Lake Powell included driving through just about every kind of weather in just a few hours. We drove through wind, snow, fog, sun, rain, clouds and hail. One of the cars in our caravan even ran out of gas. Fortunately, that happened at the summit of a mountain pass, so it was all downhill into the next town, where we got gas and kept going.

The resort at Lake Powell was nice. The rooms were typical hotel rooms, but the views were singular.

This was on the little porch just outside our room. You can see the dramatic clouds that gave us so much interesting weather on the way down. With this kind of beauty, it makes you want to wander around. The kids took off pretty quickly to explore and we all somehow ended up looking at the same thing.

When life gives you firefighters practicing putting out a couple of cars on fire, you don't make lemonade. You watch the firefighters. I didn't want to get much closer than this because they were serious.

After this, we drove into Page for dinner, and I wasn't feeling well, so I slept at the table. I was terrible, unconscious company but from what I heard, the place we went for dinner was great and the next time we end up in Page, that's where everyone else wants to eat again. The next morning, we got up to cheer at the race.

We waited here to see all the competitors ride and run past us and cheered for other people from time to time. Some of the smaller ones of us were tired after not having slept particularly well the night before. Like the one above. Or this one.

We entertained ourselves and kept an eye out for this and cheered like crazy. "Go, Grandpa Sir!"

And you know what was awesome about that? He won the gold medal in his age bracket.

Right after the awards, Craig showed just what kind of iron man he is and we played on the boat for awhile, which included pulling munchkins into the boat with the tow rope. There were also waterski and wakeboard runs that we didn't take pictures of because we were busy making sure everyone was safe and having fun.

After spending the rest of the day on the lake, we had dinner and went to bed. The trip wound down from there as we headed home the next day. But because we're a crazy group of crazies, we stopped for lunch at a Dairy Queen attached to a gas station that had a petting zoo. Raise your hand if you think a petting zoo and a fast food place should be connected. Okay, don't do that because I can't see it and that makes it just plain silly.

Somehow, Sophie came home with an emu feather and no one seems to have contracted monkey pox.

We had a great time and as much fun as it was to go on a little trip, it was nice to come home and sleep in our own beds.

I'm a smug creative jerk

The last few years, I've taken part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and written a novel that I thought was good enough to sell. One of the others has been printed and bound into a book that no one else will ever be able to buy because it was completely terrible and I just didn't want to expend the huge amount of effort that would have been required to fix it. I just didn't like the story that much. But I love creating something that I can share with other people.

Right now, I'm debating whether I want to take part in it this year because I'm still in my MBA program and have classwork to do as well as work my full time job.

Here's where the post title comes in. When we went to the orientation dinner for the program, there were some old guys by the door, shaking everyone's hand and welcoming us into the program. I'm still not sure who they were, since I haven't seen any of them after that night. But one of them said something along the lines of "it's going to be a really tough challenge" as he shook my hand and I smiled and said, "Probably not." Chelsea informed me that wasn't the appropriate response. She's really good for me to have around.

Nobody likes an arrogant loudmouth, but my program hasn't been much of a challenge so far. Sure, it takes some extra time from my regular life and I don't have the time to play video games or do other things that I enjoy, but the schoolwork itself hasn't been hard. I have a fantastic group who helps me get our work done and I try to contribute as much as I can.

But that's where I'm torn. The work hasn't been that hard for me, so I've still got some free time that I could use to write a novel (which gives me an enjoyable creative outlet), but then again, I'm not sure if it's going to get any harder and November is a large chunk of time near the end of my semester (when most large projects are due).

Any thoughts on it?

The floor's done

Chelsea's all done with the floor. It looks great, by the way. But don't take my word for it, here are more pictures of it.
 

Even Lenin's doing his part to hold down the glued strips of flooring

Chelsea put the edges down on the door.

She's been waiting very patiently to use her new mop. Note the baseboards around the floor.

Now we're going to start moving furniture back into the room so we can start spending part of our lives in there now too.

Flooring post 2

Here's the progress of the floor, oldest pictures on top down to pictures only a few minutes old at the bottom of the post. Chelsea's been working really hard on it.

These are our neighbors, helping lay it all down. And Kurt's legs there on the right.

Sophie and Kurt

I didn't have a saw to cut out this notch, so I perforated the board and punched it out. I felt like Wile E. Coyote.

Chelsea built this new trap door and laid laminate down on it.

Our tough, flexible door handle.

All that's left is to lay the transition strip around the door.

See? It looks fantastic. Chelsea would love to hear how good it looks from you because she thinks I'm biased.

Gem of wisdom

This came out of our boys' night discussion today over dinner: "I have to sleep so that I can get 10 energy. That's at the top of my head." Apparently, energy starts at your feet and fills your body up towards your head.

Phil Doan

My Gram likes to write. Most of what she writes now, she calls "ditties," which are little vignettes on her life that get emailed out to everyone she's ever collected an email address from. It's like the grandma equivalent of sending out pictures of kittens with cute little captions. But this is also where I get most of my emails where the subject starts with "FWD:" and have information about the latest, scariest computer virus that'll not just delete your computer, but will actually melt the computer into a puddle of ABS and solder slag under your desk. The forwarded emails about how the government is actually run by superintelligent alien goats, the pictures of the fancy beach house with the caption "location of our next family barbeque." The kind of thing where everyone should check Snopes and I tend to hold at arm's length.

For the three of you who didn't get the email, let me summarize the last "ditty" in my own words. My summary of the email is in regular text, my running commentary is in italics.

It was about how Grandpa was at the Calgary Stampede (the world's largest rodeo) and said "Hey, I just ran into a guy I went to high school with and he's a cowboy at the rodeo here." And flashed a signed postcard from some guy named Phil Doan. Now, my grandpa is the kind of guy who will sign Mickey Mantle's name on your baseball for you and has been known to tell people he was in the Olympics as a javelin catcher. With a straight face. He pulls it off because he does it with such understated seriousness.

There was really a cowboy who rode that night named Phil Doan. OMG! Indisputable proof that he's really Grandpa's friend! Throughout the years, pictures of celebrities would show up at Grandpa's office, with inscriptions that said things like "Any buddy of Phil Doan is a buddy of mine." From people like Cary Grant and Jane Russell. Doesn't she see that he's probably just signing these pictures himself? Also, why would these top-list celebrities be hanging out with some random bull-riding cowboy? Jane Russell, anyone would want to hang out with.

Then ol' Phil sent Grandpa a birthday card for his 80th birthday and he's apparently become a preacher in Canada. Sure, what a convenient way to send some Bible verses out to everyone, since that's one of the required parts of the emails grandmas forward on.

Cute little story, right? After I finished reading it, I decided to bring my research skills to bear on the question. I learned that Phil Doan was actually a cowboy, inducted into the Canadian Professional Rodeo Hall of Fame, and actually became a minister in Canada. Phil grew up in Canada though, and his brothers were also award-winning rodeo cowboys.

 

The rest of the story is as real as you want it to be.