James scored a goal!

Ladies and gentlemen, he did it! He scored a goal! James played soccer the best that I’ve seen him play tonight. He was more aggressive, and really went for the ball tonight, and in the course of doing that, he scored his first goal.

I may need to add a little background to this story. There’s a boy on James’s team named Jake, and he is the “star” player on James’s team. He’s the best 7-year-old player I’ve probably ever seen, and allegedly he’s the national wrestling champion for kids his age. Anyway, this whole season, I’m not sure that any other person on their team has scored, other than Jake. So tonight, while the coach had Jake pulled out for a rest, James took control of the ball and took it down field, and kicked in a goal. It was awesome! He was pretty dang pumped.

That was the bright spot on what has been a somewhat difficult week. The kids are trying to adjust to their new schedule, so they are cranky; I’m adjusting to my new schedule, so I’m just tired; Julie is adjusting to her new calling (sorry, it’s not officially done yet, so you’ll just have to wait); and my step-mom’s sister died tragically in a turn of events that apparently took everyone by surprise. So, seeing James succeed tonight, and seeing how excited he was really made my day.

Cell phones gone

For those of you who aren’t aware, our old cell phone numbers are no longer in service. You can now (usually) reach me at 801-797-1315 and Julie’s phone number is in the sidebar. We have prepaid cards for emergencies and such, but we’d prefer you call us on the other numbers.

When we discovered that we only used 150 of our allotted 1000 minutes last month, and since work doesn’t reimburse me for my half of the bill, we decided it just wasn’t worth keeping the account. Thanks for understanding.

Labor Day Invitation

SPECIAL: For all faithful readers of the ClarksInWyoming blog, you are cordially invited to join us for thin pancakes on Monday, September 3, 2007 (Labor Day). We'll gather at approximately 9:30. Please RSVP your acceptance of the invitation by email to either Aaron or Julie. The RSVP deadline is Friday August 31, 2007. Plan to bring a healthy appetite and an appropriate side dish.

After breakfast, we will make our escape from the run-amok lifestyle of Marbleton/Big Piney to the nearby mountains for a quiet mountain constitutional.

For those needing accommodations, we have inside staterooms, hostel style lodging, a garden view lodge, and mountain view rustic lodging* available to meet your needs, with check-in available as early as Thursday, August 30.

*Mountain view rustic lodging not available on premises. Please bring your own garden view lodge and sleeping accouterments.

After all the hype: Photos

I'm not sure I need to say anything else.

Useful tools for blogging

For those of you who might be interested in how I run and post to this blog, the following items are really quite useful:

1. Picasa. Picasa makes it easy to post a photo to your blog. I also like the sorting/tracking functionality it offers when you have a lot of photos on your computer. My Dad probably would overload it, because he’s a professional photographer, but for us amateurs, it’s great.
2. Blogger Markdown Support. Can I say wow? This is awesome. You type in basically plain text, and it converts it to properly formed HTML. For us HTML nerds who (used to) post to our blogs in handwritten HTML, this is very helpful. It requires the following two tools.
3. Firefox. The best browser I’ve ever used. Period.
4. Greasemonkey. If you have Firefox, you should try Greasemonkey. It allows you to modify your browser with javascript. This is ubernerd territory, but you can download scripts that other people have written. I’ve customized the Blogger Markdown Script to use Showdown and to convert straight quotes to curly quotes.
5. Blogger. I’ve been on Blogger since before it was owned by the Big G, and I still like it a lot. It is really easy to use, and I can customize most of their stuff to my heart’s content.

That would about do it. My extensive knowledge of HTML and CSS are helpful, too. (That’s joke, by the way. It’s hard to express sarcasm on the web.) Hope that satisfies any curiosity that may have existed.

So, how about that fish

Things have been pretty hectic around our house and at work for the past few days, so we apologize to our reader for any lack of output from the ClarksInWyoming clan. This week should be a little lighter.

Julie will probably have to tell us all about the guest experience from last week. (Nine guests, plus our four, makes 13 persons living in our house. We were surprisingly comfortable!) Or, perhaps, I’ll find some time to tell about it. But Julie was there the whole time, whilst I was there only in the evenings.

I’ll tell you about our post-guest excursion to Middle Piney Lake. After the guests left, Julie wanted some time to herself to unwind and straighten up our castle. James, Anna, and I, eager to oblige, decided to take our equipment and head up the road for a little bit of fishing.

We drove up to Middle Piney Lake, which we had heard was a good fishing spot. It only takes about 30 minutes to get there from our home, and the drive itself is worth the trip. We saw all kinds of animals, trees, rivers, and hills. The mountains are gorgeous. I look forward to camping there sometime.

When we got to the lake (also gorgeous), the wind had picked up a bit, and casting was difficult. James was having a pretty rough time, and Anna didn’t even want to fish. I put a big sinker and some bait on Anna’s rod (yes, Anna has a rod), cast it out, and handed the rod to James. Then I worked on fixing his line, which had become tangled in the wind. After fixing it, I cast it out, and began to reel in.

I felt a familiar tug, and told the kids, “I have a fish!” Then I realized that my line had crossed James’s line in the wind, and that I was just reeling in his line. When I told James to reel in, he got really excited, and started to reel. When the drag on his line started to sing, I got really excited for him. James kept working on bringing in the fish, and then we brought it in.

The fish he pulled in was bigger than any fish I’ve ever caught. When we took it home to measure it, it measured 16.5" in length, which is a good size for a rainbow trout. Boy, were the kids excited to see the fish. Anna kept asking if she could pet it, and when she did, she jumped back when the fish wriggled for her.

Anyway, it was a fun experience. Here are the pictures we took of the triumphant fisherman and his fish: So, the pictures I thought I had copied onto my computer didn’t actually get copied. Sorry. As soon as I find them, they’ll be here.

About the fish

For those of you who read this blog’s comments, I had planned on posting something yesterday, but we encountered one of our infamous wind storms, and lost power for most of the afternoon. I hope to get something posted later today or tomorrow.

Additionally, we’ll be hanging out in Salt Lake later this week, so if you want to get together, drop us a line.

Our talks today

Since I intended to write about Maggie on Saturday, but didn’t have the chance, you have to get a couple of posts on the same day. I’m hoping that this won’t cause ClarksInWyoming overload for anybody, but if it does, I apologize in advance. This post is somewhat churchy in nature, so if that bothers you, you can quit reading now.

We’ve had a great day today. Our talks went off without a hitch. The kids both did a great job: Anna recited her line from last year’s primary program, and James recited a scripture that he memorized for primary last month. I started to get pretty nervous during Julie’s talk, so I (sheepishly) admit, that I don’t know what she talked about.

My talk covered some of the impressions that I got as I read “The Living Christ”. I talked about the need to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Lord; we should prepare ourselves physically (food storage, financial reserves), mentally (education and understanding), and spiritually (obedience to the commandments and learning to love God). Then I talked about the hope that Christ gives us, especially the hope of a resurrection. I talked about Miguel, one of the converts that Elder Allison and I taught in Chile, who drowned on a scout activity just a month after his baptism. His family, though beset by grief at the loss of their son, was strong because of their knowledge of the resurrection. They were sealed together a year later (Miguel by proxy), and as far as I know, they continue to be a beacon in their branch. I talked about how I hoped for the day of resurrection to see my grandfathers, whom I love a lot, and long to see again. Because of Christ, I am sure that I will see them again, and it gladdens my heart. I also talked about the Atonement and its importance to all of us. I shared some of my favorite scriptures on the Atonement, and finished by bearing my testimony. I closed, we sang the closing hymn, and walked out of the chapel at precisely 10:10. I couldn’t have planned it better if I had tried.

Every time I speak in Church, I’m amazed by the way the Spirit works. There were a couple of times when I had planned on saying one thing, but I said something else, and there were a couple of scriptures that came to mind while I was speaking that I hadn’t even thought of during my preparation, but that I felt needed to be shared. I’m certain that the Lord had something in mind for someone when He prompted me to say and do what I did.

The new preferred method of locomotion

I’d like everybody to meet Maggie, my new bicycle. Do you remember “A Christmas Story” and Ralphie’s desire to get “an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and ‘this thing’ which tells time”? Well, for a while now, Aaron has been desiring a soft-tail, aluminum-frame, disc-brake equipped mountain bike with Shimano components and Rock Shox for riding around town. And he got it.

I should explain: when we moved here, we finally had both time to take leisurely bike rides, and a place to store bikes so we could take said rides. The problem was, we didn’t have a bike for everyone to ride. So, while I was at work, Julie, James and Anna would ride their bikes to the library, and to the fair grounds, and through the neighborhoods. In the evenings, I would occasionally borrow Julie’s bike to take a ride of my own, but it was really hard for the whole family to ride bikes. So, Julie gave me permission to buy a bike.

I did some research, and discovered this Orem based outfit called Fezzari. They sell bikes directly to consumers, so they cut out the middle-men and sell cool bikes for a lot less than the competition. I was looking at a Trek 6100 (I believe that’s the model), which is more in the starter end of Trek bikes. For about the same price, I was able to get a bunch of sweet upgrades (including the soft-tail), and have the bike delivered straight to my door in Marbleton, Wyoming. How cool is that? Not only do I laud the Fezzari folks for building a good product at a good price, I must mention that I ordered the bike on Monday, and it was delivered on Thursday. I thought it would take at least a week, so huzzah for Fezzari.

The bike, which I am naming Maggie in honor of the horse that Anna rode, arrived on Thursday night, and we took it for two rides: a quick ride on Friday morning before work, and a longer ride in the Red Hills yesterday. She performed superbly. Even now, I become a little verklempt, just thinking about it.

And that’s the news from Marbleton, where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Assignments from the Church

Our dastardly Bishop showed up at our house last night under the guise of “wanting to visit.” So, we let him in. How could I, of all persons, not recognize the ploy used by bishops and stake presidents the world over?

The visit started innocently enough with some chit-chat about how we enjoyed life here in Marbleton, and if we were growing accustomed to the climate, and so on and so forth. Then, without any warning, he dropped a bomb: “Have you ever spoken in Church?” To which we replied that yes, we had spoken many times in church. “In our ward?” he asked. “Not yet,” we answered. “Would you like to?” How do you say “I’d rather eat prickly pear cactus without skinning and de-prickling it first” without offending? So we agreed to speak in church. And that, we thought, was the end of the visit.

But it didn’t stop there. He started asking about our background in the church, and did I have any teaching experience. I told about my different callings, and my stint as a trainer at the hotel chain. He nodded his head, said something in Japanese to his wife, and then turned and dropped the big bomb: “We’d like you to be a seminary teacher. Would you be willing to do that for us?”

Stunned silence.

I didn’t know quite what to say, other than, “Sure. Yes.” OK. What did I just do?! Seminary teacher? Me? Yikes!

Well, I’ve had a day to let the idea sink in, and it still doesn’t seem real. I met the CES Coordinator for the area today, and signed my volunteer form, so after it gets processed later this week, I will officially be one of two seminary teachers for the Big Piney Ward. Wow!

Ahh, to be back home

Let me start by saying that I had a splendid weekend. I enjoyed hanging out with everyone, and being a part of James and Michelle’s wedding. Going to the old ward and seeing our friends was cool, too, and almost made me nostalgic for the old life in Salt Lake.

But then I spent today in Salt Lake, and felt myself strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) longing for home. I missed the slow-going rural lifestyle. For all of my life, I considered myself a city-slicker, and I probably always will be one, but there’s just something undeniably addictive about life in the country. It could be the lack of traffic, or the clean mountain air, or the slower pace of life, or the folks who talk to you in the line at the grocery store who don’t know you from Adam, but whatever it is, I missed it this weekend. I suspect that it may be all of those things, but even more than that, I’m fairly certain that there is something in our subconscience selves that likes to be “home:” sleeping in your own bed, using your own toothbrush (Julie has a story about that, I hope), being able to find what you are looking for in the kitchen: it is all part of “home,” and I’m glad to be back.

A Great Day!

Jimmy and Michelle were married Saturday in the Bountiful temple. They were married at noon and had a lunchen at 3 p.m. with just close friends and family members. It was just right, everyone stayed and danced, and then bride and groom left about 6 p.m.

This picture was taken at the Bountiful temple. Anna and James were trying to hide from a camera. Little did they know there were being ambushed from the side.