Full Pool
The water level at Lake Powell is referred to in comparison to its highest level or "full pool". I know because I wrote a letter to the editor in regard to a Sunday article on the lake and the landing at Hite, Utah that had been abandoned because "climate change" was causing the lake to drop below usable levels for the boat ramp at Hite. In reality, Lake Powel is 50 feet higher than this time last year and within 57 feet of "full pool". Well, that's another story.

July has been a dry and hot month with us wishing for the monsoon, subdued all month by a high-pressure region squarely over New Mexico. Wishes were fulfilled at 5pm yesterday when a big cloudburst deluged the area where we live, dropping over 2" of rain in about an hour, and filling our pond out front from completely dry to full-pool in about an hour (what you see here is after Marolynn bailed some water out). The rain and runoff from the roof flooded the back yard right up to the house, necessitating a towell brigade to sop up water leaking into our remodeled bathroom area. The drainage is bad from back to front and we had a couple of "french drains" (big pits filled with boulders) dug to handle flooding, but this is the fist time since we lived here that everything was overwhelmed. We have one rain barrel with a hose that runs out onto the lawn and we're thinking about another to catch the roof runoff at the side of the house, with an outlet hose to the front yard. These are very local storms, though, and the downpour covered only about a square mile centered directly above us. We measured 2.39" for the storm this morning whereas the Albuquerque airport only measured a trace of rain.

The Grind

One would think that retirement would bring easy days, sleeping in, and just having lots of fun. Well, LOL, that isn't the way it is at the Griffins as we sift through

20 years of stuff in the house and lay in packed boxes for transport to Utah. All the boxes behind Paul contain genealogy, family histories, and valuables that we'll leave at Mike's house. Am I ever glad now that we bought a truck. I figure that we will have worked through the small stuff when 3 times this has been packed and transported up north.

We even had a grarage sale today for a couple of hours until the rising temperatures got to us. In Albuauerque, thrift shop and swap meet vendors in their big trucks and trailors patrol the streets from very early on, looking for deals at garage sales, ignoring the "Garage Sale Closed" sign which we posted while setting up. Othewise, the garage sale was spotty, reflecting the economy, but we made some money by the time we concluded the sale. On Monday, Marolynn will call the ARC people who left a flyer offering to come by and gather up anything we didn't sell.

Deer Creek Reservoir
My son Mike and I, and Mike Rowbury went on another fishing trip last Saturday, this time to Deer Creek Reservoir, just at the top of Provo Canyon with Heber on the other side. A month ago, we were totally skunked at Strawberry which was high and had lots of debris in the water from the Spring runoff. Mike R. said that Deer Creek was a bit unpredictable, but we decided to give it a try and caught fish from the get-go until all had their limits by 10 a.m. Deer Creek is much closer than Strawberry, and with Timpanogos in the background, quite a bit more scenic, and with the fish included, we were very happy with the trip. A cool, rainy June resulted in more snow that we usually see on Timp this time of the year, but the hot weather of the past week is probably melting it fast.

A Truck and its Boy
We have been in Salt Lake the last ten days, working off a list of items to take care of in regard to the Mineer house and Jonathan. The truck wasn't on the list but we saw some car ads and decided to take a look around as the range of choices was greater in Salt Lake than in Albuquerque. After dickering with the GM dealer and the Toyota dealer on a new truck, the latter showed us a low-mileage used truck that had an extended cab, so we went ahead and bought it. Now we get to triple the loads of household stuff being transported up to Utah. I haven't owned a truck since my sons were born 26 years ago, so it looks like we get to re-live the truckin' days again.

First Fruits of the Garden
Everything is coming along fine in the Salt Lake garden. We spent every morning weeding and improving the back yard and garden area, and twice this week picked raspberries - 30 of those containers you see in the boxes on Monday, and 40 on Thursday. So we have a whole lot of raspberries which Marolynn spread on a cookie tin and froze before bagging them. Otherwise, with a couple of exceptions, the seeds we planted are now plants. We even saw the first zuchinni taking shape today. Marolynn's neices will do further pickings after we return to Albuquerque on Monday.

Paul Griffin Day at Santa Fe County
On my last day at the County, yesterday was the Board of County Commissioner's (BCC) meeting. The day started out with an Finance staff meeting where I handed out mathems (as in Bilbo Baggin's birthday party) to each member of the staff. The house is full of all sorts of silly things to give away, so that was a ball. Then I went over to the BCC meeting which started at 10am where I found out that they had really gotten even with me. I was hauled up in front of the Board where a long proclamation was read, outlining my whole life and career, proclaming June 30, 2009 as "Paul Griffin Day in Santa Fe County." I guess I had built up quite a reputation (or rather, notoriety) in the County utilizing humor and giving elected officials look-alike names - a practice which Duane Lee and I developed at Hanford. Also, I quietly over the years, conservatively budgeted tax revenues and built up a large reserve of money in the General Fund that now, the Commissioners love because we're not in financial trouble like everyone around us.

Of course the Finance shop had to be part of it - I wondered why Teresa, my boss asked all about my life; then it popped up in the proclamation, and they also presented me with the t-shirt you see in the picture.

The afternoon was full of cleaning out the office and I finally took my last trip home, well into the evening. I guess you get some bragging rights (hope this isn't too much) at times in your life, like retirement and funerals and such.