Just another Pawn in the Game

I was supposed to be in Utah today fishing on Strawberry with Mike, but I caught a bad cold on Tuesday and couldn't bring myself to expose everyone to it in Utah just a week before our planned cruise. So I found myself today with Jonathan at the city acquarium and bio-park since he has his camera and wanted to take lots of pictures.

Actually, my associates in the picture are part of a exhibit of some of the thousand or so buried Chinese statues found about a decade ago, but the human figures would be good models for a chess set.

I haven't been at the bio-park for quite some time, and like so many green areas visited in my past, things have grown up a lot here. The dragon next to the Children's park is quite overrun with ivy now (as are some of my walls at home). One of the nice things I found out was that I could get into the park for half-price, being as old as dirt myself.

Once I got back home, I had the computer on and my sister Marian rang up, and we had about an hour-long discussion about what is happening here and in Africa. It's their rainy season now and I could hear over the computer phone, the thunder brewing over Accra, but as soon as I got off, I began to hear the same thing here. The summer monsoon has been threatening all week, but mainly with dry lightning, but the forecasters are promising incoming moisture and a good chance of rain from this evening on. I'm a bit late on some dry-season caulking of some of the windows and I hope I can get it in before the rains come, but the clouds are getting pretty threatening outside right now.

Fishing on another Ocean
I finally added the Atlantic to my ocean fishing experiences. The dock for a half-day boat was next to the hotel, so I went down and met the skipper one evening. "I've never been fishing on the Atlantic, though I've been up and down the west coast", I said. "Have you been on the Red Rooster?", he asked. "I sure have", I said. The skipper said "I have a three-hundred pound jacket from the Red Rooster." That means that he went on one of the really long trips beyond the tip of Baja and caught a 300+ pound tuna, and they gave him a jacket for that accomplishment. "Come down in the morning and I'll take care of you" said the skipper, so I did go out on the morning trip on Wednesday in my Red Rooster t-shirt. The trip was drift fishing over a reef about 2 miles offshore in beautiful blue water, and the skipper placed me next to the corner of the driftfishing side and the stern; the best place there is for this sort of thing. Thirty-five other fishermen showed up, so I was glad for what he did for me.

Unfortunately there were hardly any fish; less than a dozen for everybody in the whole trip; hardly a bite for me. Red Snapper, baracuda-like Kingfish, remora (swim with sharks) with suckers on the top of their heads about the size of a sandal (the skipper brought all the kids over and said "Look, he's my pet" Stay!" and then planted the remora on the ceiling just above my head where it stuck), and a nice fat Bonito, the only fish I could identify from my experiences in the Pacific.

No fish but it was a lot of fun, just being out on the water and back on a fishing boat. When I got back to the dock I bought a t-shirt there which I'll wear on an upcoming trip out of Ketchikan.

A Third of the Way to Ghana
The Government Finance Officers Association, to which I belong had its annual conference at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, just north of Miami this week. So I and two others from the County climbed on a plane and went to the workshops. The distance was just a little more than 2,000 miles, but it was a different world in that tropical air. The plane featured video screens which displayed maps, altitude, and outside temperature just like when I flew to Europe a few years ago. The freezing level over south Florida was at 28,000 ft. and on the ground the temp varied between 80 and 90. Mornings dawned relatively cloudless, but the clouds built up over the land and drifted east to give us afternoon showers every day. The first morning I stepped out on the balcony to get pictures for the panorama above and the camera lens immediately fogged up, so it was wipe and snap, wipe and snap to get the pictures.

We spent much of our time attending workshops and sessions at the conference. There were keynote speakers on two days; Mary Madiline, the conservative wife of Democratic Party mogul James Carvill on Monday ("We get along - we have two separate TV rooms to watch the news", she said.) and Shalala (the Clinton Health Secretary) on Tuesday. Very interesting comments about the upcoming elections and the candidates from both of them.

There's lots of good seafood places to eat there and we were treated to one big dinner by the County's bond underwriter. Overall a nice time.

The least expensive attraction is the yellow water taxi ($13/day) which route spans over 2 hours and with lots of commentary about who lives in which mansion that fronts the bay. With a day pass you can get off and on the water taxi and do your own looking around.

Jonathan's first Digital Camera Outing

Jonathan has taken an interest in photography, and since we're only weeks away from our big summer Alaska cruise, Jon and I went down and purchased a camera for him and today we drove home "the back way" along highway 14 and the back side of the Sandia mountains. He took this photo of a little church in Golden, a tiny town along the way, and also a few pictures on the pass, looking back toward Santa Fe, which we put together into a panorama. The June skies have been a relentless blue, without a single cloud over any part of New Mexico for a week now, but the temps are tolerable; near 90 in the day, dropping into the 50s at night because of the near-zero humidity.

Desert Blossoms
The Cholla are blooming in the heat of June now. We have two huge ones now along the front walk. The birds have built a nest in one of them. Once they are done flowering and the birds have hatched and flown away, I'll have to considerably prune down the chollas. They have a tendency sometimes to grow up and then fall over, and their spines are no joke to get entangled in

There's a desert sage that sprouts these litlle fluffy seed pods about this time of year. The pale pink color of them is nice if you can pick it up in a photo.

First June Tomato
We're in the hot, dry period of June, before the monsoon gets here in July to give us some moisture, and the tomatoes I bought in April and planted last month all have fruit on them and I was able to pick this small one tonight and make it a part of a big chef salad. We've almost never had ripe tomatoes in years past before mid-August. Among the plants is a patio tomato which some fruit was turning color when we left for Utah at the beginning of the month. When I got back, the orange tomatoes were all gone, victims of snails, so the slug bait is out now.

The scouts went to camp Rand last week and the older boys made their own camp in the Zuni mountains. Another one of those cold late spring storms came through Wednesday night and it snowed at both camps. Jason Payne in the bishopric went with the older boys. He awoke in the middle of the night -- "All I saw outside the tent was this big expanse of white; I didn't even want to wake up the leader to tell him about it." But the dry climate has a sure grip on us now.

I home-teach a 70-year old lady, Mary, whose grown up kids dumped all ther dogs off on her (3 at present), among which is a boxer named Maia; aimiable but still like a puppy and strong as a horse. She was walking Maia in her back yard when a neighbor's dog jumped the fence into her yard and Maia took off after it with a lead wrapped around Mary's wrist. She got dragged across the yard and into a pile of rocks, blackening her eyes, bloodying her nose and breaking a thumb; spraining the other. So Jon and I were up there Sunday giving her a blessing. Her back yard fronts the mountain wildland, so she can't let any of the small dogs out at night. Several coyotes come down at night and in the morning and taunt the dogs to come out, so they can get one. Mary says that the coyotes walk along the top of her back wall in the morning.

Sunday was Evelyn's day as she received her infant blessing in Church. Afterward, all the relatives gathered again and Evelyn found herself on the laps of quite a few folks. Here at the center is Evelyn with the Johns to the left and the Griffins to the right.


Great Grandmother Carma Mineer is shown here holding Evelyn

Jonathan even got his chance to hold the baby in his lap - a nice picture of Jon as well as of Evelyn.

On Monday, I had a short opportunity to shop in Salt Lake before flying home with Jon. Marolynn is with her mother until the end of the month. It's plenty warm in the 90s and dry in New Mexico, but it rained again in Salt Lake today, and snowed an inch at Alta where there is still 34 inches of snow at the base of the ski area. We're hoping for a bit of that moisture down here.

Saturday was the big celebration for Nora; two years old on the 31st of May. This birthday occasion was for the adults as much as for Nora. All of Jenny's sisters were present; one with a family of four boys. Great-grandmothers on our side and on the John's side also were there.

This year it was different with the birthday cake. Nora coached by Mike blew the candles out and was right in the thick of eating the cake. She had a great time with her cousins. Jenny staged the party on a Winne the Pooh theme and plenty of such presents were opened.

Just back from Utah where we celebrated Nora's 2nd birthday and Evelyn's baby blessing. Marolynn and I drove up with Jonathan for the events and Jon and I flew back to Albuquerque this afternoon.

With the summer season has come some good movies, including the second of the Narnia series, "Prince Caspian" which we all saw a week ago. When the first Narnia film came out, I bought a lecture series on C.S. Lewis to hear during my commute to and fron Santa Fe. Jon and I started listening to the lectures this last week, and we listened to the first four on the way up to Utah. These have been about Lewis' defense of Christianity. C.S. Lewis was an athiest in his youth but was brought to a belief in Christianity by J.R.R. Tolkien who was a fast friend, and Lewis utilized his schooling and a brilliant mind to write several books and essays on his conversion and beliefs. Lewis' line of reasoning is astounding in regard to LDS principles; for instance he discusses the relation of man to God in regard to free agency, and man's destiny with God in regard to righteousness here on earth. Very amazing stuff to me -- as if the missionaries were whispering in his ear. We usually listen to only one or two hours of lectures on a long trip, but we had to keep listening to this. The last half of the 12 lectures will deal with Narnia and his other fictional works.

Before Nora's birthday party began on Saturday, I got a chance to run up American Fork Canyon. The loop is still closed and snowed in at the top, but I went up a left fork in the road to a small lake. I had never been up that way before, and actually found the area on Google-Earth. It was well worth the trip with a pretty view of Timp across the lake, and the back-country of Lone Peak in the opposite direction. It should make for some great pictures of the golden aspen in the fall.