The power's on!
Been so for a half hour or so...
That was a quick one.

Here you are, the dope on our outage:

It's apparently a 'loss of transmission'...
From the Rocky Mountain Power Outage page-

Moroni, Mt Pleasant, Chester, Pleasant Grove, Fountain Green, Indianola, and Birdseye

• Area of outage: Zip codes 84646, 84647, 84623, 84632, 84629 and 84062.
• Estimated time of restoration: 9:00 p.m. MDT.
• Cause: Loss of transmission.
• Customers affected: Approximately 2,263 customers are without power.
• Crew: On site and repairs are underway.
Updated 4:35 p.m. MDT on August 20

Sigh. Nine. That means around 12:30am.

Power's out again in our third-world retirement enclave...

A series of thunderstorms is swirling about the valley, and though none of them have actually blessed us with rain, we are now recipients of yet another power outage. Been off for about an hour and a half now, with not a blink of info.

We're all out in the blessed shade from surrounding clouds doing things that ought to have been done long ago, so things are not without a silver lining. I'll get back when things change or have prognoses...

Presenting Michelle Bachmann: the Winner of the Iowa Straw Poll

Along with other like, extremist thinking, right-wing candidate wants to abolish the EPA.




What a sweetheart. We'll be hearing more, I'm sure, soon.

Mobile Entry

The evening is sunny and cool; fall seems to be making her first forays into this maturing summer...

Tor the Treasure Finder

Tor has been trolling the newly dry stream bed that goes through town down from our house for cottonwood seedlings. He always finds other cool stuff, like old ice-skates, amazing rocks and curious-looking bottles. He found one this afternoon that was particularly odd; sort of like a large baby food bottle with a built-in well. I thought is looked noteworthy, so we washed it up and found on the bottom a patent number with no name or brand.
Enter the power of the web.
We googled the patent number and came up with this webpage. Our little bottle was about halfway down the page:

From the author's site:

The Ink Market Was Once Competitive
Mr. Owen E. Raab's Patented Ink Bottle (No. 1,759,866)
It Makes it Easy to Fill Your Pen
Click here if you want to learn how to get Patent Drawings

Society is indebted to Mr. Owen E. Raab of Seattle, Washington for the invention of a "significant improvement in combined wells and bottles". His Patent No. 1,759,866 was granted on May 27, 1930 and signalled the demise of the penwiper industry.

Anyhow, a fun little find; the boy has the treasure-finding gift. Perhaps he got it from his genetic link to Hyrum and his brother Joseph...

A Trip in a Sort of Southerly Direction

467.3 miles.
That’s a tally that includes round-trip to and from our little house in SpringTown to the Escalante Plateau and a few little trips to and fro. Quite a few miles to drive, but that’s alright.
There is water and sky and stars and earth and fish and bobcats and trees there. And much else, too. It’s an area I’ve spent lots of time in, at least the environs thereabout. I love the place and have learned much of myself and my surroundings while there.
Ryan suggested we head out that way as the summer winds down and our teaching assignments begin tugging at heart and mind; he’s been there quite a bit with his own family this year. They were pro companions; our family had a splendid time and wanted to stay much longer.
Nights started cool, and in that the air was dry, they got downright cold by the time dawn made its way ‘round to our place on the earth. The sky was clear, too, and the stars typically spellbinding in brilliance and number. I found myself staring into the sky more than a few times as I woke up in the thick of night for one reason or another; my reward was bliss and at least six long-lived meteorites of different colors across the dome of dappled black and light.
The days were fair hot. Our time spent at Calf Creek was spent mostly in the water, immersed or wading, by the majority in the two families. The stones and cool, clear liquid danced with the imaginations of the children, and as they played, they engaged in exploration; pretend restaurant, painting each other with naturally pigmented clay, extemporaneous hide-and-seek, and other games too short-lived or unnoticed by adult eyes.
Again, it was time well given and though not long near enough to wholly heal hearts and minds pricked by day-to-day life and rationalized decisions of survival and expedience, it did much good for us ‘round this little house in SpringTown.