Backyardigans

When we bought our house six months ago, I could hardly contain my excitement with finally having a big yard. I grew up in North Ogden on about an acre of property. Now that I'm 30, I have a better perspective of acreage. When I was seven, that acre of property might as well have been a jungle. I can't even explain how much I love watching my kids exploring on the half acre we live on now. At least once a day, Tyton will ask, "Dad... can we go on an adventure?" I've learned when Tyton says "adventure" he just means "walk around and look for something cool to do".

Right before we moved in, the seller decided to tell us about some things she didn't like about the house. Most of them involved the various animals she's had to deal with in the back yard. Her least favorite were the garter snakes. The idea of having garter snakes, raccoons, squirrels, weird breeds of water rats, and other miscellaneous creatures just made me more excited. My wife was excited, too, until a raccoon (we think) climbed into her car window in the wee hours of the morning and ripped open 3 ranch packets that were left in a Burger King bag on her front seat. Ranch and raccoon hair on black upholstery do not a happy wife make.

So, we were all outside about a week ago and I was moving around some hoses that littered our hill and were also semi-concealed under some tall grass. I caught something out of the corner of my eye and immediately thought it was a mouse. I called my boys over and told them to look closely as I continued to move things around hoping they'd catch a glimpse of the same mouse or rat. I picked up a large tree branch and, again, glimpsed about 5 inches of what appeared to be a rats tail. At this point I started to get a little nervous because this could end up being a very very large rat. I told my boys they should probably take a few steps back just in case the rat decided it wanted to get even and go after them. Well, surprisingly, they remained... undeterred... until they heard my wife say, "Oh I see it. It's down here. It's a snake." You would not believe how fast my kids can move when they think there's a snake within 50 yards of them. And they didn't just scream once, like my wife does when I hide behind the bathroom door. They continued screaming the entire time the snake was in their field of vision. My wife was eventually able to calm them down and, though it hurts to admit it, she was the one who eventually caught the snake by the tale while simultaneously holding Season with her other arm.


I put the snake in a small container to allow closer inspection by my children. After they saw me pull the snake out of the container, they became much more comfortable and began handling the snake themselves. Since then, Tyton and Boston are almost always on a "snake search" whenever they go into our backyard... and they've found them on more than one occasion. It makes me love my house and yard even more.

PS There's a good explanation for what sounds like Betsy nagging me on that short video clip. Betsy didn't know I was taping when my neighbor requested 8 additional feet of hose for a sprinkler system repair. I was purposely ignoring him since I was preparing to capture the "snake chasing" on video. I have since promised Betsy I would tell her when I'm taking video so she doesn't look and/or sound stupid. Sorry, honey.

Costco

There are certain things I can buy in bulk at our local Costco that I wish I couldn't. I mean, toilet paper is great cause you know you'll use it all eventually. Same goes for detergent and even blank cd's. But whenever I buy the huge bags of fresh broccoli it always turns brown and limp and a little slimy before we can eat it all. My wife and I both love broccoli so I think we eat it at a fairly quick pace. We've even accepted the fact that it makes our whole upstairs smell like farts, because we know how scrumptious the cooked broccoli will be with butter and salt and pepper all over it. I swear, though, that we don't get through half the bag before it starts getting brown and slimy.

Some of you might ask, "Why don't you divide the large bag into several smaller bags via Ziplock and store them in your freezer for later consumption?" Well... I could, but if I wanted to eat frozen broccoli, then I'd BUY frozen broccoli. Then you might ask, "Maybe, but don't you find it frustrating that frozen broccoli is 90% stems and 10% florets?" Yes, I do find it frustrating, but it's only one of the many reasons I prefer fresh broccoli.

Another thing I shouldn't buy at Costco, but I probably will for the foreseeable future, is pistachio's. Man I love those nuts. I have a few problems with them, though. First and most importantly, it drives me crazy when I get a nut that doesn't have even a teeny tiny crack. I close my eyes and try to think about Disneyland or something whenever I have to put a sealed pistachio on top of my pile of shells. What a waste.

Secondly, though... I can't stop eating them. They're so extremely good I have a hard time deciding when to stop. I just keep eating and cracking... cracking and eating. I'll eat them until my stomach feels like I put way too much Horsey Sauce on an Arby's Melt. The problem is, when THAT pain starts to fade, my stomach is gurgling and I know I'm gonna spend most of the night and following morning in our downstairs bathroom away from my family... per Betsy's request. The sad part is I think it's totally worth it. I'm like a social drinker who always gets hung over and tells everyone around them while echoing off the inside porcelain of the toilet, "I'm never ever ever going to drink again." Then they drink again that night. It's like I forget how miserable I am when I see that gargantuan bag of pistachio's in my cupboard. It also doesn't help that we haven't painted our disassembled cupboard doors yet so I can see everything in our cupboards every time I go into the kitchen.

And finally, I feel like I'm wasting something when I dump all those pistachio shells in the garbage. Betsy says she's never once thought about it, but I think about it every time I hear the sound of hundreds of pistachio shells bouncing and sliding off different pieces of garbage until they make their way to the bottom of the garbage can. I actually went so far as to google ideas people have had to recycle pistachio shells... and I'm not even the "recycle type". I mostly just found a bunch of people making fun of people like me who want to find ways to recycle pistachio shells. Screw them. I have hundreds and hundreds of ant boats to keep me busy.

Resemblance

Different people have told us different things about who Season looks like in the family. Some people say she looks like me. Others say she looks like Betsy. Betsy and I both think she looks a lot like Boston, but makes some of the same faces that Tyton made when he was an infant.

So we decided to post a candid photo of Season and then post equally candid (completely unstaged and never posed) photo's of the rest of us.

Luckily we happened to have similar photo's of the rest of the family already stored in iPhoto. It was actually a freaky coincidence. So what do you guys think?











































































Also... before you judge the massiveness of my muscles, remember that the bathwater has a magnifying effect. My muscles in the photo are deceivingly huge. I'm much less toned in real life.

"Over" population?

Quite some time ago I lived in a house with nine other renters. We were always trying to do something that no other renter had done. One night I was up pretty late after a date or group outing or something, and I stumbled across a late night/early morning program about starving children in one of the many Third World Countries. The program was successful at tugging at my heart strings and by the end of the program, I had called the toll free number and given the operator my credit card information so they could automatically withdraw funds from my account on a monthly basis so I could help “Feed the Children”.

They were very diligent in taking the money from my account. They were even more diligent in sending me personal gifts (i.e. Address labels, stamps, pens) as their personal thank you for my continued donations. This disturbed me. Where exactly was my money going? My monthly donation was being given straight back to me in a ruse to get more money. I don’t need address labels. I don’t need stamps or pens. I wanted to “Feed the Children”.

The more I reflected on the process of donations (as I stared at the magnet on my fridge of the adorable black girl that was supposed to be getting food) the more it perturbed me. I even went so far as to quasi-rebel. I started telling people that the reason we had so many starving children in the world is because we continue to feed them just enough to keep them alive and suffering. My simple solution was to stop giving them rice for a month or so. After that, we wouldn’t have any more starving people in the world and we would no longer be burdened with senseless late night programming and useless personalized knick-knacks.

There was a time when I was concerned about overpopulation of the Earth. It didn’t keep me awake at night, by any means... but when it was brought up in conversation, I thought about it. Then I took a sociology class at Weber State University. I read an article in a side column about the myths of overpopulation. There was a fact listed (now pay attention to this) that stated the entire world population could be split into families of four and each family could live on a 1/8 acre plot in Texas and not spill into any other state. Given, that doesn’t account for roads, forest, rivers, employment, or recreation, but it was a perspective I hadn't heard before.

Religion casts an interesting shadow on the supposed facts and information regarding population growth. Utah is predominantly Mormon and a Mormons are taught that one of the first and most important commandments is to “multiply and replenish” the earth. It is directly linked to the doctrine of spirit children in heaven that are waiting for a mortal body to inhabit. Mormons are taught to have as many children as your means will allow, assuming you are capable of providing and caring for them in righteousness.

This is a pretty big wrench that has been thrown into the inner workings of population control. Here is ones’ religion stating that they need to bring spirit children down into their families, directly opposing birth control, while scientists and researchers all over the world are crying wolf about population control and “zero growth”. What are the religious followers to do? Science is considered a blessing from God and information obtained in righteousness should be heeded. But what if that information is contrary to the teachings of ones’ church? Some would say, “Err on the side of conservation” while others would say, “Err on the side of obedience”.

And one last thing: Nobody seems to take into account nature’s ability to control the population as well as the likelihood of a World War assisting us in controlling the population. The recent tsunami and terrorist activities are prime examples of this type of elimination. It appears as though the production of nuclear weapons and bio-terrorism is also an extreme likelihood. It’s fairly safe to say that we live in an evil world and this evil is becoming more and more capable of destroying thousands upon thousands of people very quickly.

It may be a scary thought to consider, but from a religious standpoint, there is an Armageddon approaching quickly and that should help out the Earth’s population problem.

But that's just my two cents... or three.

By Request

Here are a few recent photo's of Season:

Nicholls Road

I have a lot of Mormon friends so maybe someone can enlighten me on what the actual Mormon beliefs are when it comes to the supernatural. I'm not down with horoscopes or palm reading, although I do totally dig on hand massages, and even though I know I'm a Cancer... that's pretty much where my astrological knowledge ends.

However, I HAVE seen a ghost. I'm not embarrassed to say it either. I know it wasn't a dream so all you nay-sayers can stop thinking what you're thinking. Here's the story:

I was a Senior in High School and I was cruising around Kaysville/Fruit Heights in the passenger seat of my friends manual transmission, dark blue, family van. My friend, Rory Powers, is driving and my little brother, Nicholas, is in the back seat. I don't know what we were doing or where we were going, but it was dark outside... probably around eleven or twelve. It was summer and we turned off Highway 89 onto Nicholls Road.

Nicholls Road connects Highway 89 to Main Street in Kaysville, but it's a pretty skinny road and it winds around all curvy like once you pass a baseball diamond on the north and a golf course on the south. Immediately after you pass these landmarks, the trees get really thick on both sides of the street and the road starts to get all twisty and turny. There are no streetlights either... at least there weren't any 13 years ago (Oooo... 13...).

So we start driving down this street and there is no other car on the road, which is normal for Nicholls. For some reason the meaningless, mid-pubescent banter stops and the car is completely silent. None of us are scared since we've nothing to be scared OF... yet. As we pass the golf course and diamond, Rory decided to throw on his "brights" since we're entering the particularly creepy portion of Nicholls Road. Well, you know when you turn your brights on, there is a split second when the headlights are marginally brighter than your actual high beams? Well in that split second, I saw a white figure standing off to the side of the road... not quite in the trees. It was there and gone so quickly, it didn't fully register that I had even seen anything.

A few seconds passed and I think that I actually had dismissed it as some sort of imaginary... something or other. But then my little brother leaned up from the back seat so his head was between Rory's and my own. He was very hesitant and he paused while he asked this question, but he asked it anyway. He said, "Did you guys... uh.... see that white... thing... back there?" It was obvious he didn't want to say the word "ghost". I looked at him as it actually sank in that I'd seen something. Rory did the same thing and we all laughed nervously as we admitted to having seen this figure in the road.

I've never bothered to research the history of Nicholls Road to see if anyone had died there, though it wouldn't matter much if someone hadn't. I mean... I saw what I saw. I'm also not down with the Wee-Jee board either or else I might have tried to give that a shot with Rory and Nick... deep in the trees on Nicholls Road. We could have asked the board a few questions, like "When am I going to die?" and "What are the initials of my future spouse?", then Rory would have pulled a mirror out of his pocket at exactly midnight, looked into the mirror and said "Bloody Mary" THREE TIMES. Then we'd drive around the local graveyard until we saw some dark figures following us then we'd have gone back to my house and tried to fall asleep on the trampoline until Nick started REALLY freaking us out by looking up at the stars and talking about where space ends while we all try to get our heads around the concept of "forever".

Seriously, though. I saw the ghost and so did my friend and so did my brother. I figure pretty much everyone has experienced something similar or maybe even cooler than this. I haven't seen a ghost since... although something even creepier happened when I was in about third grade. I don't have any witnesses and the older I get the more I think maybe I dreamed it. But that's a story for another day.

Honey Oat

It's only been the last few years that I've really found myself involved in politics. I don't know if it's just something that happens when a person hits 25 or if there is something else that triggers it at different ages for different people. It's not very often that I find myself involved in political discussions and I think that's for the best. I judge people pretty harshly and I usually don't need much of a reason. I judge my friend John every time he orders a sandwich on white bread. Seriously, John... you have six choices of bread here and you're choosing WHITE? You're an idiot. I really do think those words... "You're an idiot". Sometimes I even say them. He doesn't care, though. Now I actually think he prefers Honey Oat and probably orders it when I'm not around, but chooses White when I'm standing behind him in line.

I also found myself in a discussion the other day with someone who I've known for years. For some reason the topic of the Death Penalty came up and I casually mentioned that Utah doesn't execute enough dirtbag savages. The next thing I know, this dude is rambling on about how "killing is never a solution for killing" and "yeah, well, could YOU pull the trigger?" and "studies show that execution isn't a deterrent for violence". You know. All the usual criminal-lover rhetoric. The funny thing is... I don't like that guy very much anymore.

The abortion, socialism, and Feed the Children topics are pretty one-sided... at least in Utah. But then I started talking to a co-worker about Global Warming and he actually thinks that An Inconvenient Truth is fact. Criminy.

It makes me wonder if people like me less when they find out how I feel about random political issues. Then I think, "Yeah, but do I really only want to be friends with people who agree with every single thing I do?" Of course not. I love arguing. What on earth would we talk about. "Man I love Honey Oat." "Me too." "And I hate Pugs." "That's crazy. So do I." That would be so lame.

Then... about 30 seconds ago... I thought, how many anti-death penalty, pro-pug, anti-Honey Oat, and Pro-Global Warming people are going to read this post and decide I'm not as cool as they thought I was? If they're like me, they'll never frequent my blog again. But maybe I'm changing. I still hang out with John.