Some People Learn the Hard Way

I thought I already posted this, but apparently I didn't. This is from last week.

Today Jason is very relieved. He just survived his first Scout Camp. It has been a quite the learning experience for him. He had to learn a lot of things about Scout Camp and it seemed that people didn't have the answers. He had to do his homework on the subject, but he now knows where the scout camp is, what forms the boys need, how to sign the boys up for merit badges, what camping equipment our ward has, how to plan a week of meals, how much food five 12- and 13-year-olds can eat, and how to coordinate with the scout leaders and fathers.

He only actually went up to the camp Friday night. He left in the early afternoon for Camp Tomahawk at East Fork of the Bear. Because the roads are pretty bad from the snow, he had to go a longer way through Evanston, WY. After the first hour and a half, he ran over something that he never saw, but everything seemed to be okay so he kept going. An hour later (25 mi. past Evanston) his car started shaking and smelling really bad.

He was able to safely pull over to the side of the road. He was pretty shaken up and worried that something had blown up, half expecting smoke to be billowing out of his hood. He tried to call his dad, but he didn't get any phone service. He figured out how to lift the hood of the car and looked around but didn't see anything glaringly wrong. He opened a couple fluid caps but decided he couldn't see anything wrong in there. He started walking around the car and looked under it to see if there were any fluids leaking. When he got around to the other side of the car he noticed one of his tires had blown out. (I smile to think that he didn't know that the bad smell was burning rubber. :)

So now that he knew what was wrong with the car, all he had to do was change the tire, right? Wrong. He didn't know how to change a tire--in fact, he didn't even know where the spare tire was located! I guess he missed the auto mechanics day in scouts when he was a boy. Well, he finally got out his tire and a wrench and then he tried to call his dad again. He must have looked pretty worried because a logger driving past him turned around and came to find out if he was okay. The logger just got right to work and quickly got the tired switched out. Jason just sat back and asked lots of questions. :) He then drove 25 mi. back to Evanston to get another tire and then turned around and drove all the way to the camp. Actually finding the camp on the poor excuse for a road is a story for another day. Hopefully he learned enough to do change a tire again if he has to. If not, we'll be sure to have similar adventures later on.

Father's Day and Business Trips

I am so grateful for good fathers, and in particular my father. He is such a good, kind, honest, hard working, and loving father. Not everyone is blessed with a father like mine, but I'm so grateful to have had that example growing up so that I would know how important it was to marry a good man like him. I know Jason will be a great father too some day.

I flew to a project kickoff in Milwaukee on Thursday. We had a day-long meeting Friday most of which I was responsible for. I needed to get a lot of information from them to create a design document for their project. I had lots of questions for us to discuss, but I learned very quickly that what I thought to be simple questions with simple answers were not very simple and they had a hard time giving me direct answers. We ended up talking around the points I needed to get, so I hope I'll have enough info. to create a solid design. They are paying a lot of money for this project and I have the heavy responsibility in most respects of making sure they get what they paid for. Our flights were delayed coming home so I didn't get home until 2:00 in the morning.

Here are a few pros and cons of business trips:
Pros:

• Eating out a lot and having the company pay for the food
• Visiting new places
• Sleeping in nice hotels with very comfortable beds
• Having other people make your bed and clean up the room
• Time to read good books on the plane
  

Cons:

• Not getting to come home at night and consequently having to work longer hours per day
• Delayed flights and long hours of travel
  
• Not having as much time to do what I want to in the evenings
• Not being with Jason
• More stress at being in charge of meetings with VIPs in the company and needing to make a good impression
  

An Eventful Saturday!

Wednesday Jason and I got new cell phones. My phone has slowly progressed from a little broken to a lot broken. When my screen wouldn't work today so that I could find someone's number in my address book, I decided it was time for a new phone. My old one was over 2 1/2 years old, so I could get a new one for free if I signed up for another 2 years. Jason wanted to be on the same contract schedule, so he ended up getting a new phone for free too. Now we can have his old one as a back up in case anything happens to one of our phones. It's kind of fun to have a new gadget to figure out. My phone has a touch screen with a keyboard that I can slide out for easier texting. Jason's isn't a touch screen, but it does have a slide out keyboard as well.



Saturday morning we had a Stake Family Fun Day. Our stake put on a pretty cool carnival complete with pancake breakfast, game booths, cotton candy, snow cones, and popcorn. They had a 5K run in the morning. Jason decided to run in it when he found out that not enough people showed up to play basketball. He took first place in his division and 3rd place over all--a couple minutes behind some high school guys that run cross country at Jordan High School. He even jogged over to the Stake Center before the race and jogged home afterward. I wish I had his energy!

That afternoon we went boating on Utah Lake with Jeff and Sally and their four kids and Jason's parents. Jeff and Sally just bought a boat several months ago and invited us all out on the lake to celebrate Jason's mom's birthday and Father's Day. It was a great day to go boating. Jason and I went tubing and Jason tried some surfing, but I wasn't brave enough to try any type of skiing yet--hopefully next time.

Afterward we all went to Jeff and Sally's home for a delicious BBQ. At the BBQ Jason started getting an ear ache. It kept getting worse. We tried several ways to try to get the water out of his ear without much success. We called Dr. Mark and he told us Jason had a case of swimmer's ear, a condition where water left in the ear causes it to swell and hurt. Fortunately he had some ear drops for it. We drove to their house at 10:00pm and picked it up. It worked amazingly well and he felt fine again in the morning. Thanks Kristilyn and Mark!!