Camping joy, part 2: Pictures

	I think these are rhododendron trees, I love all the character in the branches, and how bare the ground is underneath.
	I'm standing right by the water taking this one, the roots make for a surreal landscape by the water.
	The water here is clear and beautiful. It's also moving pretty fast, I love how the flow stays laminar (is that the right word?) for the first part of the drop here.
	This is what that stream does another couple hundred yards down.

Camping joy

That title is admittedly part sarcasm.

For those who expected me to do other things Friday and Saturday, here's a quick rundown of what was supposed to be a simple overnight campout. The rest of you can skip to the end -- the middle is mostly complaining. =)

• Review girls' packing job; Kennedy has packed 6 pairs of socks, and no pants.


• Vacuum out the van, looks like a vending machine exploded in there.


• Get the van loaded.


• Discover the battery is dead (girls left the van dome light on)


• Van won't shift out of park without battery power, so I have to pull the battery completely out of the truck to take it in and jumpstart the van.


• Van radio requires you to enter a code after a power outage or it won't work; the code is filed away the basement.


• Usual stops at Walmart, gas station, McDonalds...


• GPS unit says my 2.5 hour trip will take 4 hours (?!); how does it know I have kids? Finally get on the road 3 hours late.


• 15 minutes later, all 3 kids need to go to the bathroom "NOW!" (45 minutes later, they need to go again, unsurprisingly.)


• Why does TomTom send me the wrong way in EVERY state park? Seriously, it's 0 for 3 so far.


• Campground is nice, play for awhile, roast hot dogs and marshmallows, had a nice evening.


• Getting cold, time for bed! Uh, oh, really cold...


• Uh, oh again. Did we pack a binkie for Kennedy? Of course not.


• Spend about 2 hours trying to keep Kennedy from waking the whole campground with her crying about being too cold (despite kicking off the covers) -- I'm pretty sure she mostly just wants her binkie.


• It's getting colder, I can't move because I'll wake up Kennedy, and I can feel the cold pushing up through my hips. Not good.


• About 1:30 am I give up -- cover the girls with the 2 adult sleeping bags to keep them warm, and get up.


• What do I do? Go turn on the van and sit in there with the heater on for 6 hours? So I go and rouse the fire with little sticks (and a firestarter =).


• 20 minutes later Eric comes out of his tent in the same boat, so we get the fire going. Eric: "Old indian saying, 'Indian stay warm tending little fire, white man stay warm finding wood for big fire.'"


• An hour later, we hear rustling behind us -- "Something's over there," I whisper, but we don't have flashlights. I finally go get one, and shine it off toward the table. What do I see? A giant raccoon finishing off my lunch! "Hey, get outta here..." Ah, I forgot to put all the food away trying to keep Kennedy quieted down. He comes back a few times, but since we put the food away he didn't find much.


• About 4 am Regan comes out and wants to sit by the fire too.


• About an hour later, Kennedy's up and crying. Woken up, Scott and Jill offer to let her sleep in their tent by their space heater (!!), but after setting up a bag, her crying has woken up Scott and Jill's kids, yet she refuses to sleep there -- grr. She wants to come sit by the fire. Glad she woke everyone up.


• Fortunately both Regan and Kennedy get to see Swiper the Raccoon poking around behind us a couple times.


• About 7 am I finally fall asleep slouched back in the camp chair, sleep for maybe 45 minutes. McKinley appears around this time, she seems to have slept fine.


• After a slow start, we finally head to Fall Creek Falls (pretty), then on to Piney Creek Falls, which were much more impressive.

Actually, the area under the suspension bridge at Piney Falls is one of the prettiest places I've seen out here. Fast and beautifully clear water near a pretty little rhododendron forest. (I'll post a picture here soon.)

The drive back? TomTom messes up getting us out of the park ("so we're supposed to ram the gate into the youth camp?"), and if Regan hadn't specifically prayed for me to not crash, I'm pretty sure I would've. At one point I'm sure I would've failed a sobriety test, so I pulled over and took a nap. Why don't they make the seats in cars more sleep-friendly?

So, apologies for being MIA over the weekend. Hope your weekend yielded more sleep than mine. =)

Part of the test.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1926-2004):

Why should it surprise us, by the way, that life's most demanding tests as well as the most significant opportunities for growth in life usually occur within marriage and the family? How can revolving door relationships, by contrast, be as real a test of our capacity to love? Is being courteous, one time, to the stranger on the bus as difficult as being courteous to a family member who is competing for the bathroom morning after morning? Does fleeting disappointment with a fellow office worker compare to the betrayal of a spouse? Does a raise in pay even approach the lift we receive from rich family life?

Fixed-schedule productivity

I practiced this in college, I just didn't have a name for it.

Every college student should read it.

(Thanks, Eddie.)

Chainsaws

Think chainsaws are scary when they're running? How about when they're *not* running?

[ UPDATE: Just heard back from him and got a different story than the one he told that day -- not quite as surprising if it was running. ]

At a community service project, our HOA president (an older fellow) was cutting down brush with a chainsaw. At one point he shut the saw off let go of the trigger which stopped the blade, then in swinging it down happened to bounce the bar/chain across the front of his thigh and the blade jerked forward:

For those who are wondering how it turned out for my leg, after the job I cleaned up and went to the ER where they had to put in 7 stitches to close up the wound. I’m Ok but little sore now, that will learn me to leave off my chain saw leggings.

He was bleeding pretty bad, looked about as bad as most sword-slash wounds in the movies. And he was wearing jeans!

Watch out for chainsaws.

Weather radio fatigue

I really don't like my weather radio.

I got it for the tornado warnings, but it seems to be going off all the time. Thunderstorms, tornado watches, etc. Even if we snooze it, if something changes in the warning they reissue it and the thing is blaring again. The worst part is that if any part of the county is affected, all of the county is warned, both with the radios and the sirens.

Thanks to our visit to the WAAY TV station with the scouts the other night, I learned that their station has a $7/yr service called "weathercall" that will call your phone or send you a text message* whenever your address is actually threatened by one of those storms.

I love it, no more guilty feelings at 2am when the sirens go off and I go back to sleep, instead of getting up and going downstairs to turn on the TV.

And no, I'm not connected to them at all, I just think it's cool. Hopefully someday they'll have the same thing but keyed off the location of my cellphone...

---

* Actually it will call/email up to 3 numbers and 3 email addresses.

UPDATE: It's not just an AL thing, it works for any address across the country.

UPDATE 2: I just got an email from the weatherguy saying that the iPhone app is on its way -- I wonder how it'll know where I am if background apps aren't allowed?

MiniDV loses its voice

I have some bad news for those of you with miniDV camcorders -- our camcorder was stolen back when we lived in Tucson, so this week I'm finally getting around to borrowing one from a friend so i can get the video off the tapes and onto the computer.

Now the bad news-- much of the audio is trashed on some of the tapes, and even the video in a few places. So much for miniDV being a durable format.

It could be dirty heads, though I tried a cleaning tape and it didn't seem to help, and newer tapes worked fine. It could be that this camera is a Panasonic where mine was a Canon, but that's not much consolation if you're looking for a format that will survive companies going out of business or halting production of a particular piece of hardware. It could be that the tapes weren't well cared for, but they've been stored in the camera case, inside the house since the camera was stolen -- not overly humid or hot.

So what format lasts forever? Stone carvings? Engraving on metal plates? I think the lesson we learn is that all of our precious data needs to be maintained -- moved from old media and formats to new ones as the old ones go obsolete.

I wish it weren't so.