Steel Days and River Rambles

So this will probably be a shorter one.  I haven't posted for awhile and will probably continue to be spotty because my laptop appears to be at least partially dead now.  I figure I better wait until back-to-school sales come up before getting a new one.  This would have been much more of a hardship for me in the past, but will decent internet access available to me on my phone still, I'm mostly surviving at this point.  Still, it has annoyingly made it much more difficult for me to blog.  Right now, I'm taking advantage of a church Family History Library computer while I wait to see if anyone shows up to learn about indexing (though it's looking kind of unlikely anyone will show on that score!).

Temple Reflections

I had an interesting thought when I went to the temple last week.  To explain, I'd better backtrack to the Oregon family reunion a bit.  As I mentioned before, one of the biggest highlights of the trip was going on the 10 waterfalls hike.  While there were many gorgeous waterfa cflls to see there, the most impressive and unique were a few that you could actually hike behind.

Rounding Up the Rodeo

Last Friday, I went to my very first rodeo.  This wasn't entirely by choice, and I almost didn't go at all, but I'm really glad that I did.  I had a very good time.  It all materialized because someone in the stake, probably a cowboy, decided to make the Lehi Round-up Rodeo the stake activity for June.  This meant that the stake provided tickets for free.  My personal policy is to participate in all ward and stake activities that I can, and though I'm not always perfect at following that guideline, I didn't see a good reason to make an exception for the rodeo, so I signed up to go.  When they later passed out the tickets after Relief Society, I was talking to a few people and almost forgot to collect mine, but one of the presidency members called me back to get it.  The day of the rodeo itself, I ended up working a little later and was already feeling fairly stressed and tired.  I wasn't eager to go at all at that point, but I put on my western booties and got in the car.  Even on the drive there, I almost turned back, but going home seemed foolish and the fact that I had a ticket that had already been paid for sealed the deal.

Oregon Family Reunion Funny Ha-ha Good Times!

Last weekend was the much anticipated Oregon family reunion.  I always look forward to the yearly reunions and consider them one of the definite highlights of each year.  I've only missed four in my life, two while I was on my mission, one a couple years ago when we went to visit Gerrit and Elisabeth instead of the reunion, and one more when I had just started a State Farm.  Missing them is always a big downer, so I was very pleased that I was able to go this year even though I haven't been at my current job very long.  Still, two days was all I could manage to get off, so a quick flight was needed after work on Wed. to get me to Oregon in time for the reunion.  I would have liked to have a bit more time, but it didn't work out that way.