byufan.net

The nicknames are gone. They just sounded dumb and they were too hard to maintain. It was also impossible to prevent commenters from using our real names. I am making one concession to anonymity though: I have removed all instances of our last name from the blog.

The part of raising a family I don’t really enjoy dealing with is that of injuries. This past weekend we had another trip to the instacare to fix another injury. It was Luppin’s turn to get some stitches.

While I was mowing the back lawn Luppin and Samuel were in the front yard playing around. I was about a third of the way done with the lawn when Texas comes up to me and tells me that Luppin is really hurt. Usually when someone is hurt I am not to worried, but when they are really hurt I come running. It turns out Luppin fell down on the front steps on her chin. There was a pretty big and deep gash and I knew that a bandage was not going to be enough. I even saw the fatty tissue under the skin. So I took Emily with me to put pressure on the wound and we went to see the doctor. Luppin was really good and stayed really still while they shot her with numbing medicine and then stitched her up. She got six stitches in all, one underneath the skin to close up the underlying tissue and five on the top to close up the skin. Now we will go back on Saturday to get the stitches taken out.

It’s been a few years since we’ve been to the 4th of July parade in Provo. If you’ve been to one of these parades you’ve been to them all so there isn’t really any need to keep going each year. Of course, we’ve been enough times in the past that we’re considered the “experts” on the logistics of this parade in the family. This year, Aunt Melissa was in town and her boys had never been to a parade so we were happy to go with them.

Waiting for more candy

The key to enjoying the parade is to get a shady and grassy spot on Center street. Unfortunately, those spots are in high demand so some expert strategy is required in order to secure a spot. Provo City ordinances, specifically title 9.14.220 of the municipal code, prevent anyone from putting their blankets and stuff down before 5:00 a.m. on Center street and the Provo Police typically enforce the ordinance. Thus, there always is a mad rush at 5:00 a.m. as people throw down their blankets and chairs, rope off spots, and generally act like buffoons as they try to reserve space in the prime locations. If you don’t live in Provo and don’t want to get up really early to catch a prime spot, there are still a few tricks you can use to get yourself a nice shady location. The first trick is to realize that people always grab way more space than they need. They’ll set out a huge tarp for only 5 or 6 people. They also put a foot of space between their blanket/tarp and the next guy’s blanket/tarp. The gaps and spaces between tarps are prime real estate for late comers. You also need to remember that all the kids go running up to the curb as soon as the parade starts passing by so that they can get candy. The kids never actually end up sitting still on the tarps/blankets/chairs which contributes even more to wasted space. Finally, remember that possession is nine tenths of the law and if someone doesn’t physically hold their space down it is prone to usurpation from squatters. Usurpation is also perfectly legal because, as the parade website says “Please note that in order to reserve a spot on the parade route at least one person must be present. Any items left unattended may be moved.”

If you’re a squatter like me, you need to get there early enough so that it’s not jammed packed but late enough so that the original land rush has settled down and the hard-cores have tired of holding down their spot and have set off to collect their families or get something to eat. Between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. is about right. You walk along the sidewalk looking for gaps between the existing arrangement of blankets/chairs/tarps then you swoop in and do a little rearranging. A little tugging here, a little adjustment there, and viola! – you’ve converted that unused space into a perfect little area for your own blankets and chairs. Avoid doing weak junk like folding their blankets in half or removing their blanket altogether (even though it’s perfectly legal). You’re not decreasing the amount of overall space they’ve claimed – you’re simply making the most efficient use of the total available space by rearranging such that small gaps become big gaps.

Enjoying the parade

Of course, squatters are prone to protestations from the few hardy souls that have stuck around since 5:30 to hold down their blankets. The staker-outers mostly just sit there and glare at you but the bold ones may cry, “Hey, those are someone’s blankets!”. You need to be tough and say, “Well, I’m only scooting them over so I can use this extra space over here” or, simply, “Well, they’re not here”. You also need to periodically loudly say “People ALWAYS reserve way more space than they need!”. That generally shuts up the most vocal sentries. The most important key, of course, is DON’T BUDGE from your space. You have to put your chairs down and sit in them and don’t leave. Otherwise, you will get squatted upon yourselves or you will get moved aside by the original homesteaders when they return to reclaim their land.

The return of the original homesteaders is where your resolve will be tested the most. They will say “Hey, that was our spot!” or “We reserved that location!” Good responses are “what spot?” “where?”. They will say, “There, where our blanket is”. You can then respond “Your blanket is still there”. Remember – don’t move. Don’t stand up. Just STAY SEATED. They will think you are a mean jerk but that’s OK because you think they are greedy land-grabbers reserving way more than they need. Eventually, the homesteader’s full party will arrive and they will realize, “Oh, we didn’t really need 30 chairs for only 20 people” and they will start to fold up some of their blankets and such. At the same time, the super-late crowd will begin to arrive and ask things like “Is it OK if we just squeeze our blankets in here?” This is your chance to really sink the knife into the homesteader’s greedy heart. Your response should be, “Sure! No problem! There’s always room for more. After all, people ALWAYS reserve WAY MORE space than they need”. This response accomplishes several things: You gain allies among the super-late crowd, you look like a nice generous congenial person, and you make the original homesteader look like a dork for reserving WAY MORE space than he needed. Now, you can enjoy the parade from your nice shady spot!

Thanks to Melissa and Kyle for helping me successfully squat on some shady ground at this year’s parade. Thanks to Grandma Connie for the treats. I’m glad we went but I certainly have no desire to go again next year.

Nancy and I have been thinking about the best ways to teach our children how to work. This past week we instituted a new chore program. Each day the kids have daily chores that they need to complete. If they complete their chores they get points. Once they’ve earned up enough points they get a treat. Even Nancy and I get points for doing some of our daily chores. The kids also get points for attitude. Attitude points are completely subjective and can be taken away if they whine, are naughty, etc. Kind of like House Points in Harry Potter’s world. Once the entire collective family earns a certain amount of points then we get to do a family activity like go bowling or miniature golfing or something fun like that. We need 2,000 total family points in order to do an activity. I figured it would take about 5 or 6 weeks to earn up 2,000 points.

On Saturdays each kid has major cleaning chores to do. I tried to devise the chore lists such that it will take each kid about two hours to do their chores. There are no points for doing Saturday chores. Saturday chores are just part of the price you pay for being in the family.

This past Monday we had a special Family Home Evening where I explained the new chore program, and the rewards, to the kids. They did pretty good throughout the week although Samuel lost his attitude points every single day except Friday. He was also grounded for the entire weekend from playing with friends so that should tell you the kind of week he had. Overall it worked pretty well. The kids needed the usual pushing and prodding but they did their chores and towards the end of the week they started to do them without as much prodding.

This Saturday was our first day of doing Saturday chores. I thought we would get a lot of whines and moans and groans from the kids but we had a family meeting this morning and gave out the assignments and the kids set about doing their work without any complaning. Nancy and I helped the youngest two kids with their chores and helped the other kids with things like getting the cleaning supplies out of the cupboards and such. I was so pleased and surprised that they worked hard for two hours without complaint that at lunchtime I awarded an extra 100 bonus points, 5% of the total needed for an activity, to our family total. It’s probably too early to call the program a long-term success but I would say the first week was an outstanding success.

You may have noticed that most posts have been updated to replace our names with nicknames. This was a small measure to provide a bit of anonymity. No, I’m not terribly worried about people knowing who we are – if you know us then you know us. I just thought the nicknames would act as a bit of a roadblock for any true online whackos out there. I’m not willing to password protect the blog so the nicknames seemed like a reasonable security addition.

UPDATE 07/30/2009 04:11 p.m. – I got rid of the Nicknames because it was too hard to be consistent and they sounded dumb anyway.

For some reason I love to take pictures of my flowers each spring because I think they are very pretty. Here are some of them that I took recently. Which one of these pictures do you like the best?

Flower #1

Flower #2

Flower #3

Flower #4

Flower #5

While doing my secretary work this past Sunday, Luppin’s teacher comes up to me and tells me a funny thing she did in class the week before. They were having a lesson about the word of wisdom and the teacher was talking about how tobacco is not good for you and that you shouldn’t chew it or smoke it. Luppin raised her hand and began to tell the class how her daddy ate tobacco with everything. Daddy has Tobacco on his eggs, his tomato sandwiches and he uses it almost every night with his dinner. After the teacher stopped laughing because of her comment, she explained to sweet Luppin that it was Tabasco not Tobacco that her daddy used.

On Wednesday we had an appointment with our Congressman (Rep. Jason Chaffetz) to tour the U.S. Capitol. We had tried to get a tour of the White House through Rep. Chaffetz but the staff member told us that since Chaffetz was a freshman rep and also a Republican, the Obama Administration wasn’t making any White House tickets available.

We rode the Metro in to Washington D.C. in the morning and made our way to the House office building. The kids probably enjoyed the train as much as they enjoyed anything else in D.C. When we got there Rep. Chaffetz wasn’t in the office but his staff was very nice and they escorted us on a wonderful tour of the capitol building including spending time in the House Gallery watching the debate on the Hate Crimes bill.

Riding the Metro

Each state had two statues in various parts of the building. Utah was represented by Brigham Young and by Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television. Brigham Young is about as Utah as you get but Philo is controversial because Idaho often claims him as one of their own.

Hanging with Brigham Young

The rotunda was impressive and made you dizzy craning your head to look up at the building. We heard the various little tidbits that the congressional aides have been trained to tell about each painting and nook and cranny of the building.

The impressive Rotunda

After our tour of the Capitol building we found a McDonalds nearby that was jam packed with the DC government employee lunch crowd. We shared tables with a couple of business people who looked upon us and our collection of Happy Meals with bemusement. After lunch we made our way over to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I thought the kids would really enjoy this one but they were rather ho hum about it. The place was jam packed with busloads of school kids but our kids didn’t think moon rocks and space shuttle parts and looking up the inside of a Saturn V rocket was as cool as I thought it was back in 1982.

The one thing that Emily and Anne really wanted to see was the Holocaust Museum. We made our way over to the museum and Nancy and I took Caroline, Sam, and Diana through on the quick tour while we let Emily and Anne go slow and spend as much time as they wanted. Anne seemed to be fascinated the most – she spent time reading every display and carefully looking at every exhibit. We let Anne take as much time as she wanted up until the point that Caroline, Sam, and Diana were frustrated and cranky and ready to go home. We had planned on visiting other Smithsonian museums and possibly the National Art Gallery but by the time we were done with the Holocaust Museum everyone was “museumed out” and we decided to catch the Metro home before the rush hour crowd overwhelmed us.

More Metro

After the frustration and headache of trying to get to Virginia and getting our luggage, we didn’t do much on Monday. We decided to stick at the hotel and swim at the pool and basically just get into a vacation mindset. By Monday afternoon we were bored so we decided to go to Jamestown. I think the kids enjoyed Jamestown pretty well. We got to see the archaeologists digging in the dirt and then got to watch them filter the dirt through a screen to get the little bits of artifacts out of the mud. We spent a little time in the museum and also went to a glass-making demonstration which is one of the first industries the Jamestown colonists tried to start up. For some reason we don’t have any pictures of Jamestown but it was good enough for an hour or two on Monday afternoon.

A word of wisdom to those who travel in historic Virginia. There are two separate visitors centers at Jamestown – one run by the state of Virginia and one run by the U.S. government. The historic Jamestown settlement site is the one run by the U.S. government and the state has a Jamestown site that has a boat in the harbor. If you buy an entrance to one site it is NOT transferable to the other site so make sure you get the right historic Jamestown. We knew from our various trips in U.S. national parks and national monuments that our pass to the Fed’s site would be good for a week and would get us into any other Fed sites in the area, plus we wanted to see the settlement so we bought an entrance to the fed site (something like $20 for the whole family – not too bad). I’m not saying don’t go to the Virginia state Jamestown site – it may be fantastic for all I know – I’m just warning that there is a distinction between the two even though they are right next to each other.

On Tuesday we decided to stay in Virginia and go to Colonial Williamsburg. I remember Williamsburg from when I was a kid. I remember it being interesting for about the first 10 minutes and then boring after that. Well, not much has changed in 28 years. The prices at Williamsburg are relatively outrageous for what you get. It cost something like $125 for our whole family for the opportunity to walk around Williamsburg. There are lots of little “add-on packages” that you can buy – extra money to tour the capitol building, extra money to see the movie, extra money for a historic lunch, etc. It was interesting for the first hour for me (probably 10 minutes for the kids) but after that I was ready to go.

The Armory

The biggest issue with Williamsburg is that you can hear someone talk about making paper, furniture, bricks, blacksmith stuff, etc. but you don’t ever actually see them making the stuff. At least not on a sweltering Tuesday in late April 2009.

The obligatory stockade photo

One of the new things at Colonial Williamsburg are “reenactments” of historic moments in colonial history such as the Virginia House of Delegates deciding declaring independence. Throughout the afternoon there were actors in period costumes that acted bits of the drama out through various parts of the town. In addition to the House of Delegates drama there was a fake romance between the daughter of a Tory and the daughter of a revolutionist – kind of a 1776 version of Romeo and Juliet. These historical reenactments were interesting for about the first 30 seconds but quickly became tedious because you couldn’t hear anything and, frankly, dialog about whether or not the House of Delegates should vote for independence just wasn’t very gripping. Aside from the specific character actors in these play bits, none of the Williamsburg staff was “in character” which was a bit of a disappointment.

Lunch

The best part of Williamsburg was lunch in the shade. We found a picnic area near the parking lot and enjoyed a leisurely lunch.

Lunch

Lunch

My recommendation on Colonial Williamsburg: If you’ve never been before, it’s worth going once in your life but don’t bother to spend more than a day there. There are plenty of other interesting historical things in the Virginia and Washington D.C. area that are also much less expensive.

2009 is a “big” vacation year and this time we chose to do our vacation in the spring while the elementary kids are off track because it meant only Emily would have to miss class. We thought it would be fun to go back east and visit Williamsburg VA, Washington D.C., and Maryland where Nancy’s aunt lives. I had more United Airlines miles that I was able to use in booking the tickets. Unfortunately, when I tried to book it was impossible to get any flights out of Salt Lake City on United miles. Our only option was to fly out of Boise, ID – a five hour drive from Salt Lake City.

The Boise airport

We left Salt Lake on Friday and drove up to Boise where we spent the night in a hotel before catching our flight on Saturday morning. The other problem with flying United Airlines is that they often fly through O’Hare airport. I hate flying through O’Hare. Every time I go through there my flight gets delayed and this time was no exception. We flew in from Boise on time but when we got to O’Hare, our connecting flight to Richmond VA was delayed due to bad weather in Chicago. For some reason we were able to fly in but no flights were going out. No worries, we thought, we’ll just wait out the two hour delay and get to our hotel a bit late. Unfortunately, about about an hour’s wait I got an automated email from United stating that our flight had been canceled. I turned to look at the flight board and it was like the classic scene from a movie when all the flight statuses started changing to canceled. There was a mad rush to the ticket and customer service counters as thousands of stranded travelers tried to figure out how to get out of Chicago.

Waiting around in O’Hare airport

After spending an hour in line I finally got to the ticket counter and reviewed my options with the agent. The agent said she could put us up in a hotel that night and the fly two of us to Richmond VA the next day. The rest of us would have to until Monday or Tuesday (remember it was Saturday) because all the flights to Richmond were already booked due to a NASCAR race. Spending two or three nights in Chicago certainly didn’t appeal to me. Splitting up didn’t appeal to me. I started grasping for straws on ways to get out of Chicago that night (the storms had finally blown over and flights were going out again).

“How about flying into Reagan National?” Nope – full.
“How about Dulles?” Full.
“Newport News VA?” All full.

Finally the ticket lady said, “I can fly all of you into Baltimore. The flight leaves in 45 minutes. Do you want it or not?”. I did the math and it meant that we would get into Baltimore at about 1:00 a.m. with a 3 hour drive to Richmond so we would wind up at the hotel at 4:00 a.m. I weighed that with the prospect of spending 2 or 3 nights in Chicago on a United Airlines hotel voucher and took about 2 seconds to decide: “Book it”. Nancy collected the kids while I got on the phone and started making rental car reservations for a minivan in Baltimore. How difficult is it to rent a minivan in Baltimore MD from your cell phone in Chicago that you want to pick up at 1:00 a.m. and drive out of state one-way to Richmond VA? I’m here to tell you that it’s pretty darn difficult. We eventually found a minivan but the one-way charges were so exorbitant that we had to agree to drop it off in Baltimore before the week was over. No problem, we would just drop it off when we went to visit Nancy’s aunt in Maryland later in the week.

After making the arrangements we caught the flight and winged it to Baltimore. We picked up the car and I managed to stay awake and drive the 3 hours to Richmond where we wearily checked into our hotel to start our vacation. Oh yeah, our luggage didn’t go with us to Baltimore. We were told we would be able to pick it up the next day in Richmond. “No problem”, I thought, “we’ll have time to go to the Richmond airport Sunday morning, pick up our luggage, and still make it to 1:00 church”. Unfortunately, we were once again about to learn the nature of Murphy’s Law.

We went to the Richmond airport on Sunday morning to pick up our luggage at the United baggage office. The first problem: nobody was at the office. The second problem: there were a bunch of bags stacked up outside the office and I could only see one of our bags – two were missing. Nancy tracked down the luggage lady and she investigated where our other two bags were. “Oh”, she said happily, “they’re still in Chicago!” How on earth the airline managed to send one of our bags on to Richmond but leave two in Chicago is beyond me. I was so frustrated and annoyed at the airline that I had to leave the luggage office and let Nancy deal with it because I was afraid would completely lose my temper.

Luckily for Nancy and I, the one bag that made it to Richmond had our clothes and underwear in it. Nancy made arrangements for the airline to drop the missing bags off at the hotel once they finally made it to Richmond and then headed out to Walmart to buy some temporary clothes for the kids. Needless to say we scrapped Church plans and just ended up relaxing at the hotel trying to overcome such an awful start to the vacation.