And now for the Utah part of the story...

I've spent way more hours than I'd like to admit trying to change the layout and tweak this silly blog. There are still alignment issues on the left hand side that came along with the template. I need to move on to other things for now. Several gals from this very state (Utah) have paid for a large soap order and I've yet to pull and prepare a single bar! Does "obsessive" cover it pretty well? Anyway... let's get to the rest of the photos from the Utah leg of our trip. I still have some garden pictures in a folder and things I thought about writing beyond that, but we'll see how long the time holds out.

The picture above was taken on the Salt Lake City shuttle that runs between Rexburg and the SLC International Airport. Sharen dropped me off in the morning of the 20th and it took the next 5 plus hours to arrive in Provo. We lost a bit of time at the vehicle change in Salt Lake City. Another service takes people from there to places south.

A nice young gal got on at Blackfoot and since I was testing out the on-board bathroom facility =:o at the time, she sat next to my empty seat, thinking it was the one place where no one was sitting. As it turned out, she was a nice traveling companion and we had quite a few common interests. After chatting with her on and off for a couple of hours I finally realized who she reminded me of and asked if anyone had told her she looked like Hilary Swank? She said she gets that all of the time. :-) She (Emily was her name) and her fiance were about to get married and he had a menagerie of farm animals and Arabian horses on the place. There seemed to be an animal theme going on overall since the shuttle driver raised goats and had a running conversation going with a gal sitting behind him. It sounded like he used them for pack animals and probably for breeding and showing.

Emily's mother had tried her hand at soapmaking some years ago and she was quite interested in that. I got her address before we parted ways and told her I wanted to send her a few bars to try out when I got home. She also wanted to order some as wedding thank you gifts for a few family members. Well... yesterday I got the email from her informing me that some unforeseen circumstance had led to the wedding being canceled. That's unfortunate. :-/ She seemed excited about it. I still want to mail her some soap so I hope she'll reply with her current address... I only had the one at Rigby where they were to live after the wedding. One has to assume that whatever comes down, it will ultimately be for her greater good. She was a really nice girl (a little older than Karen).

Since I was arriving in the late afternoon, Alex was supposed to meet me at the Marriott Center but Kristine pulled one of her fast ones and showed up instead. :-) Her boss told her to take off a little early when he heard she had family coming. The following are some photos taken at the house where they are living/house sitting. It sits on the last street on the edge of town.. halfway up a mountainside and bordering the Uinta National Forest (Mile High Drive). When you looked across the street from the driveway, all you saw was that mountainside... it had a real feeling of history to it. It almost feels wrong to have houses up that far... like it should be retained in its natural rugged beauty.

We made a sidetrip to Costco before coming to the house, so while I was goofing off snapping photos, Kristine was packing in the groceries. She led me in to see the cat they "inherited" with the house and the next photo is him greeting her. He belongs to a grown daughter of the folks who own the house but at this point he thinks he belongs to Kristine and Alex.

She made some dinner for us that first night and I cooked a couple of days later when Terry Ray came by for a visit after work. The photo just above is of the mantel in the living room. Wherever Kristine moves, she has that picture of Tabitha in a place of honor somewhere. She lived next door to us when the kids were little and was tragically killed a few years ago. That photo was taken on our couch when she and her then fiance came by to announce they were engaged. They had an infant son when she died. Michael has since remarried a really nice gal and they have had more children.

This next one is a closeup of part of the sunset from their deck. They have a breathtaking view of the Provo valley and Utah Lake. I loved this little cloud.

The next photo is the mountainside as seen from their driveway. If I were looking at this as a kid, I'd be trying to climb up to that rocky outcropping just beyond the first group of colorful bushes. That cave-like look under the rock shelf is very inviting. Kristine said there was a geo-cache somewhere in the vicinity but it was a chore to climb up.

The photo above was taken from their deck. The homes in this neighborhood are huge. I'm not sure why anyone needs quite that much space, but it seemed to be the order of the day. I suppose you'd stick out like a sore thumb if you built a normal size house here. ;-)

After she gets home from work, Kristine loves to cozy up on the couch (below) with her laptop. She started a blog (in the list to the left) recently and has been trying to keep that updated and entertaining at the same time. Hers is a lot more fun to read than mine! The next photo was later when she and Alex were discussing finances after a family home evening lesson on the subject. She'd gotten Quicken on her computer and was loading all of the info in that she could reconstruct. I love that program and it's really a nice thing when the discussions start. Better to have cold hard facts than just anxieties based upon partial knowledge and observation.

The third picture in this sequence was taken when Terry came by to visit and have dinner. It's always great to catch up with her (she lives in Heber). There is a glorious sunset happening outside and you can see that through the window.

Ron and I took a little walk in the neighborhood on Friday afternoon and I snapped a few more pictures of the native plants, etc. It appears Euphorbia myrsinites grows there (Donkeytail spurge). I love that little plant but never bought one for myself. We used to get them in the perennials section at the nursery. Even in the hottest weather, their blue green succulent foliage makes you feel cooler. I had a picture of one but I'm not putting it in here. It's enough that I torture some people with just talking about plants! The fall color had not finished yet and I wish I'd have had the camera when we took a quick trip to town to see where Kristine worked. There are tons of deciduous trees in the yards and along the streets and they were so pretty. There's nothing like autumn in an area that gets crisp weather at night.

This huge house has been for sale for a long time. Any takers? The photo after is of Ron looking at a couple of kids hiking up on the mountainside. He's standing right near their driveway (to the left) and that copper colored car is Diane's. We drove it down and left it for her. She'll fly in to SLC airport in January and drive up to Rexburg from Kristine's. I sure hope the weather will be good for her that week... and that a big rock doesn't come rolling down on top of her car. ;-) [ I think they moved it after this was taken.]

One of the fun parts of the visit was meeting some of their friends. She often talks of certain people and now I have faces and personalities to attach to those names. This fellow below (Denys) is from the Ukraine (speaks excellent English). His wife (Valerie) had gone there for a two month stint... either school or work and met him during that time. Amazingly... long distance relationships sometimes work out really well. :-) He seems like a real Renaissance type and very charismatic. They were a lot of fun. Another couple they see are named "Jack and Jill." They were over for Family night on Monday.

A few hours after Ron's arrival on Friday, Alex's dad flew in for a weekend visit. He'd already zig-zagged across the continent before finally getting to leave the airport! He was working last week and I believe came from Texas, but had to fly all the way up to Bellingham (layover?) before going back down to Salt Lake City. I don't remember why that happened, but it was tiring and time consuming. Alex and his dad spent the next day with his uncle and family on the lake while Kristine hung out with us at the house and took us to the airport. Ron got quite a few little things fixed while he was there. I teased him that he should move away and come home to visit once in awhile. He's a regular maintenance machine when he goes to his sister's or one of the kids' houses. :-) I think it's more fun to do those things at someone else's place... you don't have to own it. My contribution was tidying up around the place in the usual way (dishes, etc.), baking rolls for Thanksgiving and doing some laundry. We also got a bug one night and moved her big TV and entertainment stuff into the living room. I went to the trouble of taking the auxiliary hard drive with some video projects on it but never had enough concentrated time to dive into those.

All in all, it was a great week, despite some unusual experiences and a bit of sleep deprivation. I had the distinct feeling I was sharing my room for the first few days with someone unseen. I won't go into detail here since most people reading this would just think I had a loose screw, but I know some of you have had those experiences or go a step further and see who it is. I'm grateful I don't get the visuals! Nothing dangerous... just unsettling for this light sleeper. I think they kind of tagged along with the heirloom bedroom furniture. ;-) What was weird was that when I went into the room on Thursday evening and felt like it was clear, the overhead light was noticeably brighter than it had been the first half of the week.

Now we have a sense of place for the kids when they talk about what is going on in their lives and have met some of their friends, etc. I think that is the most enjoyable thing about visiting people... just going with the flow of their normal lives. It's quite different being in that sub-culture. I'm glad I don't live where most everyone around me is LDS. There are a lot of nice people there, but also a tendency for many to be extremely cloistered and somewhat on guard (some of the locals... not necessarily ones who are there for college etc.). With the neighborhood pretty much being all of the people you see at church, you don't really get much space or privacy. I don't know what it is... but it's noticeable to those who have moved in from areas where they were in the minority. Up here you are tickled to spend time with people who share your religious beliefs because it's kind of a rare experience. Down there you are probably hungry for some privacy and space. Candor can be hard to find. I'm sure when you get out of town and into the farming areas, this drops away.

Alex and his dad were having a conversation about "clean floors" on Saturday morning. His dad said the whole "clean floor" thing was fallacy and they talked about the intermingling of molecules that occurs when you walk across a floor in your socks or feet. I think there was some physics coming into play there. ;-) I told them a germ-o-phobe would freak out if they were listening to that dialogue, but it also made me think of how our culture is getting ridiculous in its anxiety over bacteria. Of course, there are some killer strains of bacteria out there we need to fear and avoid, but if we sanitize our environment of all garden variety bacterii (is that how you spell that?)... we are going to dismantle our immune systems. Our bodies were designed to react to the environment and build up immunities based on exposure. It's the same theory we use for vaccinating against serious diseases. The key is to get a little and not enough to overwhelm our systems. I think the same holds true when it comes to our mental-social-emotional strength. Being exposed to people with different opinions, belief systems and cultures causes us to challenge our way of thinking. If we learn to love people who are different from us, we broaden ourselves on so many levels. Cutting ourselves off because of fear is not a solution. Alex's father commented that when people try to cocoon themselves from outside influences, they can often get a rigid mindset or attitude that you can't teach them anything. They already have all the answers. They don't want to interface with those of a different mindset for fear they'll "rub off" on them. I'm speaking of "them" but I'm sure I have those moments myself. It's all a matter of degree.

Well... enough of my soap box! It's just been bugging me for awhile.

Oh... one other random but delightful event happened at the Salt Lake Airport, shortly before we boarded our flight home. I took that last trip to the ladie's room and while debating whether it was worth waiting (the line trailed all the way out into the terminal)... out emerged a woman obviously on her way to catch a plane. My menopausal brain has a data retrieval delay of several minutes, so all I could do at that moment was touch her arm and blurt out, "I know you!" It was Kate (Pearson) used to be Neilson from our ward in Silverdale. She's not lived in Washington for awhile and is now in California. It was the oddest thing bumping into her because I'd just mentioned her to someone a few days before (probably the only time in the last decade I might have had occasion to talk of her family... she's been gone for years). In talking to Judy's boyfriend about the perils of trying to combine families. His last marriage fell victim to that. Kate and her then husband were really nice people but the whole blended family trials just tore them apart. I always felt bad about that. It seemed they would have been a great couple under different circumstances. So, in the two minutes we probably had chatting at the entrance of the restroom, that's one of the first things to come out of my mouth. It was just weird. I sure liked her. It was a gift to bump into her like that.

Better close this for now. :-)