Sunday, July 29, 2007

On a whim, we headed up the road to make a loop that neither Ryan nor I had ever made in one trip before, one which had some promise of small water, desert and mountains.
Ours was the pleasure of watching the rain fall in great torrents, splash playfully on the water, and evaporate before finding ground. We saw places that might hold fish, and others that held more than I've seen all summer. There were old bridges, long since abandoned to gravity's relentless tug and butterflies much to fast for me to photograph very well.
We were served food better than we've found in cafes all over the state, saw women, who just might have been vacationing for a spell from the beaches of Ipanema, strolling the sidewalks of a rural town in central Utah, and were lost and found from time to time on roads we'd never been on before.
Most of all, the road rose and fell, the sky darkened and lightened, and in the end, we were very glad to see Spring City after it was all too quickly over.





Friday, July 27, 2007



Drie made a really good lunch this afternoon, blending Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other delicacy food to create what we like to call, well, Nirvana.

Thursday, July 26, 2007



The monsoon of '07 has been with us for a couple of days now, but today we got our first good taste of rain durning the day. Everyone approved.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

























The Twenty-fourth parade in Bountiful was on the weekend before the official holiday this year, and though the day was hotter than last year's parade, the slow, grinding pace of the parade made it seem a bit cooler.
Actually, I'm just saying that. It was terrible hot. But joy was felt, nevertheless!


















Mr. Death was a bit grumpy, though.

Monday, July 16, 2007



A quick trip up to the Haystack confirmed that everything that was there before was there once again last night,
has probably been that way since before I was born,
and will hopefully be that way for a long time after I'm no longer neither here or there.
In short, it was beautiful.

Friday, July 13, 2007

I love to write and to speak at length about things I believe in, little parts of life that I love passionately.
There's one small passage in Shakespeare's Hamlet typifies how I feel right now, though.

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Hamlet, 2. 2

So, in place of rants that I might go on right now, please enjoy the views I was a part of today. There're also a couple of photos of the tunnel that brings water from the other side of the mountain to us in SpringTowne and one of the wee birdie who flew onto my shoulder for a few seconds, just this morning.





Thursday, July 12, 2007

It rained hard on my way home from Manti, washing the guck clean from the Sanpete sky for a few hours. Tapering off as I got home, the torrent never quite returned as I had hoped, but it drizzled here and there throughout the late afternoon and evening.
The kids enjoyed gardening in the rain, and while I was puttering under the hood of on of our trucks, our neighbor, Vida, yelled at me from across the street.
"Adam!"
"Oh, Adam!!"
She had that tone of voice she gets when she needs her television adjusted or her sprinkler line fixed, but when I finished pouring the oil into the crankcase and yelled back to see what she needed, she said something I couldn't register right off.
"I caught a lizard, you think the kids want to see it?"
After a few seconds it clicked.
Ha. My kids want to see a lizard? The only thing better would be a gallon or two of ice cream.
So they all ran up to talk with Vida and see her lizard. Her story included lots of startled jumping and broom whacking. She's quite a lady.
One of our ducks finally hatched her eggs, by the way. She's trundling her young ones about the back three quarters, hissing at anyone who gets too close. We're all delighted with this brood, but we're going to have to figure out a new use for some of these fine ducks, someday soon...




Saturday, July 7, 2007

This week has been hot and dry around SpringTowne.
Moving about and keeping the garden alive has been a bit of a challenge, though I am grateful that water restrictions haven't been any more restrictive with the unseasonable heat and dry weather we've been going through since, well, since early March.
There is a big wildfire over the mountain, mentioned below. It was started in the same way as the one back up on the Horseshoe back in '97, with a helicopter and uniformed government types playing with napalm guns. The '97 fire was started late in the season, so it didn't spread much. It was supposed to improve Elk habitat and get rid of climax species such as spruce and other conifers. The only significant result was severe erosion the following summer, along with degradation of our irrigation system that persists to this day, ten years ago. Good old NPS.
Anyhow, the fire raging right now was supposed to be a 'controlled burn' to last throughout the summer, begun on the 28th of June. I don't really know what school of forestry that the managers who decided on this one went to, but no one I've talked to thinks it is a very good idea. It's been upgraded to a 'uncontrolled wildfire status, with fire crews on task to try to get it back under "control" , so that doesn't bode well, though it isn't at all surprising.














Another case in point is the Milford fire that started just yesterday and has burned over 150,000 acres already. Today, we've been under a pall of smoke and ash all the way up here, over seventy miles north.



Who knows. I'd better get the Husky tuned up if I need to countermand my mother-in-law's wishes and cut all of the brush away from her cabin up the road from here. It's just too danged hot and dry this summer.