On the trail...

Yesterday I decided that I should try to take Daisy on more hike up to Dog Lake before the the end of the season. The Big Water Trail is at the very end of of the Millcreek Canyon road, and the upper half of the canyon closes for winter at the end of the month. Sure enough winter has already started up there, with the exception of a couple of west facing dry spots, and some chocolate pudding like wet spots, most of the trail was snow packed from the parking lot up to the lake. It was a tiny bit slippery for me in my hiking boots, but heavenly for Daisy who just loves frolicking in the snow. She must be showing her age (she's 9), for the first time ever she didn't play in the water at lake. It was pretty cold, maybe she's a smart dog after all. We hiked the three miles up ad the three miles down, but it wasn't until I was about 30 feet from the parking lot that I slipped on the ice and landed on my rear...
I'm not sure but I think Daisy laughed at me....

Ebay....

Ta da, after a long hiatus, I started listing some beads on ebay again... hopefully someone will find them and like them. Sometime early in the summer my friends wanted to go on bike ride on the night I normally did ebay listings... so I skipped one night. And then it happened again, and again... and the next thing you know I've taken the summer off from ebay. But now it's time to let some beads go... they are kind of weighing down the south side of my house again....

The Utah Roller Coaster

From my deck...

Wednesday night, from Olympus hills

My backyard, Thursday morning

The other Utah Roller Coaster.... the weather. We get beautiful fall weather and beautiful sunsets. I wish I had brought my camera when I went out to the Park City farmers market (Park Silly) last weekend, the fall colors the blue skies, it was so beautiful. My friend, who drove that day, owns a convertible, and it was positively perfect top down weather. But being Utah things change quickly. Tuesday it was 80 degrees, Wednesday my daughter called me at work, all excited because it was snowing. Thursday we awoke to snow in the yard, and had to scrape the car windshields. The weather coaster is always interesting here.

Friday was my annual pants-a-phobia day.... after only wearing shorts and skirts all summer, the advent of the cold weather meant it was time to put on long pants - for the first time since May. After so long without wearing pants I'm almost phobic about puttingthem on again, thus the first time I wear then is my pants-a-phobia day... the day I have to get over my pants phobia.

A day at the fair...

I recently had a great day bonding with my daughter. We went to the state fair, something we always did as a family, so I was glad she still wanted to go when it was just she and I. I like all the diverse things the fair has to offer, farm animals, flowers, vegetables, fine arts, photography, arts and crafts, vendors selling crazy thing you know nobody really needs. We saw it all... except the giant pumpkins... they moved then this year, and we never found them. Darn.

I'm always fascinated by how they treat the "arts". Quilts and needle work are with the baked goods in the "home arts" building. Paintings and bronzes are the "fine arts". Photography has it's own exhibit, and then there's the "creative arts" which encompasses everything else. This is my favorite exhibit, because it is so absurdly diverse, and such a prime example of the art vs craft argument. Things like stained glass, pottery, woodworking, and jewelry making which can be pretty darn fine art, are displayed right alongside kids diaramas, silk flower arrangements and plastic canvas needlework. Art and kitsch all lumped together,it's kind of sad in a way. This years plastic canvas showpiece was a huge castle sized for Barbie dolls, complete with opulent room fulls of plastic canvas doll furniture. All under glass like fine art.

We checked out all the animals. I love the bunnies, and this year Sarah was in to the cows. Maybe she's her grandfathers girl. He studied animal hubandry, ans worked in the beef industry (If you shopped at Kroger in the '70s and '80s he bought your beef). While other kids dads may have had bowling or golf trophies, my dad had dresser full of cow trophies. Maybe Sarah gets her cow love from him. The cows seemed to love her too, they could probably tell she's a vegetarian! (So maybe she's not that much like PopPop)

And last but not least there were the rides! I have to admit that at first I didn't want to spend the $20+ each to get ride passes, then Sarah pointed out that next year she would be at college so this may be our last fair together. So ride passes it was and ride we did. We rode most everything, to the point we were both a little sick. We rode the most wild one: two arms with cages on the ends that flip you upside down both backward and forwards as the arms spin around. As we aproached the on ramp I had to remind Sarah - "You realize that some high school drop out, with missing teeth, who got drunk last night, put this ride together", but it didn't stop her from wanting to ride. We tossed forward and backwards and spun upside down and just laughed and laughed. The highlight of course was the tilt-a-whirl... We've always been tilt-a-whirl gals. I think we rode 7 times, 5 of them back to back rides! I don't know if the smiling carnie was more amused by how we'd run down the exit ramp then get right back on, or amused that 48 year old woman was racing on and off the ride. A good time was had by all!

I'm back... I hope

The other day I came home from work and this is how I found my two favorite critters, Daisy and Oreo. Kind of begs the question "What were they doing all day that seem so very worn out?" I certainly don't have any idea!

I can kind of relate to how they appear to be feeling... I have not been feeling at all ambitious since returning from my vacation. I've also been plagued by computer problems... My poor laptop had been acting squirrely for a while, squirrely enough that I wrote all my files and pictures to Cd's at the end of July. Not sure what the problem is... a recalcitrant virus that I can't find and conquer?, a badly bogged down windows OS?, some fried hardware, possibly due to a frayed power cord not replaced soon enough? It finally became a terminal issue, a computer booting to the "blue screen of death", regardless of safe mode or any other trick I could think of. I decided to bite the bullet and and restore my computer back to factory condition. I figured if I had a virus problem or OS problem this should fix it. So after using the Thinkpad recovery program to backdoor my way to hard drive to back up any remaining files I hit the magic nuke and rebuild button.

All good so far, until I realized I couldn't connect to my wireless nework, which had been set up by a now exhusband who apparently never wrote down the passwords. After hours of fretting and being sure I'd never get back on the internet again, I finally got brave and hit the reset button on the router. It's amazing what a big problem your mind can make of something that you don't know how to fix. By some miracle I managed to get everything back up and working and connected in just a few minutes... I guess I didn't need to torture myself with worry after all.

But sadly, after all that and reinstalling some programs, the squirrely problems are back. Some times the computer will work fine for an hour other times it bluescreens every five minutes. The probability of a crash is correlated with how much you have done since your last save: the more you've typed the more apt the computer is to crash before you hit the save button or send the email.

And if that's not bad enough I also had 3 computers terminally crash at work this month...a mother board, a hard disk controller, a power supply. Just try finding parts for a 15 year old computer that runs old but important equipment! UGH! I'm getting kind of sick of computer hell!!! And now I guess I should be thinking about replacing my laptop... double ugh! Can someone please send some good computer karma my way!

Hawaii Again...

I was lucky enough to take my trip to Hawaii because of one of my friends. She had a couple of free condos in Maui because of her travel club membership, and she decided to invite us and some other friends to join them on vacation. Our little travel club consited of me my two girlfriends, one girlfriend's new husband and our 7 kids - three 19 year olds, three 17 year olds and a 13 year old. We have all been friends since our kids all were all toddlers at day care together. With 3 woman, 1 man and 7 kids, all from Utah, the polygamy state, we decided to call our trip the "Sisterwives Tour".

One of fun little excursions was taking the whole family to a luau. The old Lahiana Luau is right along the water were we were treated to yet another lovely sunset. I was a little worried that the kids would all think a luau was lame, but they all enjoyed it as much as we adults did... even if they were a little apalled about the dead pig in the pit!




Our "family" at the luau. Being a big Utah family and all We couldn't all fitat one table, so the 17 year old girls got one of their own.

Aren't they just cute as can be?

Nerd Humor

One of the guys in my lab has spent most of the summer in a lab in Australia learning new research techniques. He finally sent us postcard this week. I love his quirky sense of humor, sending us a little of his research in the mail. I guess laboratories don't sell post cards to send to your friends back home.... maybe there is an entrepreneurial opportunity there. LOL. Oh, the horizontal white "lines" in the picture in the middle... that's DNA!!!