Tag: nature

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life

Miracles On An Icy Road

We witnessed a miracle this evening. Actually, we witnessed several. At one point we had 5 vehicles and a FedEx truck stuck on the hill between our house and two houses down from us. Over a two hour period we had at least 10 vehicles slide into various snow banks in that 150 foot stretch of road. Even the snowplow got stuck in front of our house when it tried to turn down our hill in order to salt the road.

On top of that the most obvious miracle was watching as one out of control car slid down the hill through four other stuck cars without hitting any vehicles or people who could not get out of the way because of how slick the road was.

Eventually we got all the cars freed and the only damage sustained was one tire flattened on a UTA service vehicle that slid into one of the curbs quite hard.

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life

Adventures at Grandma’s

Enoch wanted to go for a ride tonight so we decided to go down to Grandma Colette’s house to visit and harvest some things from our garden. While we were there Enoch picked up something white from the ground and started to put it in his mouth. Grandma noticed him pick it up and decided that perhaps he should not put the object in his mouth so she went to get it from him. As she grabbed it she found egg yolk running down her fingers. Apparently the object he had picked up was some kind of bird’s egg – big surprise for all of us.

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life

It’s Spring

Spring arrived a few days ago. I know this independent of whether the snow has melted and without regard to whether we have passed the technical March 21st that officially marks the change of seasons. I know it like an arthritis sufferer might know a storm is coming. I know it because every morning I wake up and begin sneezing as if my life depended on it.

Luckily my biological aversion to pollen has not awakened anyone else so far but there is no doubt that the season has changed.

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life pictures

Four Wheel Drive

It’s a good thing I bought a vehicle with 4WD – I got stuck driving into my driveway this afternoon coming home from work. I should have got a picture of the Explorer sideways in the driveway or at least a picture of the sideways sliding tire tracks in the driveway. Better yet I should have had Laura take a video of me driving in after clearing away the snow around the tires (I was still sliding).

I had cleared the driveway before I left for the breakfast with Senator Bennett but by the time I got home there was another 8 inches of snow on the driveway. I did think to get  this picture (taken by Savannah) after I had cleared the driveway.

snowpack

It doesn’t show in the picture but that pile of snow is over my head in height. The line in the snow near the height of my knees is the level of the snow from today.

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life

Mists of Fog

Last night was very foggy in the valley. I got to drive around in the very thick fog to run some errands and it got me thinking about the “mists of darkness” that Lehi saw in his dream. (see 1 Nephi 8) I noticed that the fog did not seem dark itself, it just muted all the lights so that my field of vision was extremely short (sometimes less than 100 feet to even see a light). The thought struck me that the “mists of darkness” might be just like this fog. They need not be dark themselves so long as they impeded the lights from outside them from penetrating to those within the mist.

In fact, within the fog (especially while walking) it did not seem dark at all. Again I suspect that this is like the mists that caused so many in Lehi’s dream to lose their way. It may not be that they felt that they were in the dark at all. Without an eternal perspective (which the fog would impede) everything within the fog seems just fine, even if there is reduced visibility.

As I was driving home I started lookinng to see how close I would have to get to the temple before I would have any glimpse of its very bright lights. The answer was surprising. I caught no glimpse of the temple until I crossed Davis Blvd. (about a mile west of the temple). When I crossed that street I not only got a hint of light from the temple, but I saw it across that mile with great clarity because the fog ended abruptly at that street. 10 feet back I could see nothing, but once I passed that boundary of the fog I could see everything. I guess those who stick to their goal even through the mists while they cannot see are safe if they do not forget their goal because of the lack of long-distance sight. Once they pass the msits they see clearly again.

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life

First Snowfall

Earlier this week, knowing that I would be too busy this weekend, I though to myself that I might only have to mow my lawn once more this season. With the light dusting of snow that we got yesterday I knew there was a chance I would need to clear the driveway this morning of an inch or two before we left for church. When I looked out this morning there were six inches of snow on the driveway (and a little more than that on the grass). It took more than a couple of minutes to clear the driveway and I realized that it’s possible that I won’t have to mow the lawn again.

The kids have been loving all the snow – they went out last night and again this afternoon to play in the snow. I don’t think we’ll ever wonder in the future if we will be having a white Christmas. We also have been given an early reminder of all the things that we need to be snow ready (e.g. a better coat and snow-pants for Isaac).

Before we moved in our neighbors invited us to a neighborhood party so they could get to know us. At that time, back in August, we were warned that we would need a snowblower up here – a shovel just would not cut it. If this is the first snowfall of the season, piling almost as much snow early in October as the middle of winter managed to accumulate in our Lehi neighborhood, I’m thinking we are going to need a bigger snowblower – by Thanksgiving.

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life

A Duck Downtown

There is a duck walking around the sidewalks of downtown Salt Lake this morning. Aside from the fleeting feeling that I might be in the middle of an AFLAC commercial, I wish I had had a video camera to record the duck and the way people acted when they were near it. Everybody (myself included) would start to walk slower as they approached the duck so it was easy for a procession to form behind the duck as it walked down any given sidewalk. The duck, for its part, did not seem to want to fly or to walk anywhere near the road – the result being that it would slow down foot traffic on the sidewalk wherever it was and it would start looking for alternate paths anytime there were people coming from both directions on the sidewalk.

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life pictures

Crazy Storms

Most of the people in Utah know about the crazy storms that we have had the past 2 days (mostly yesterday). I thought I would share just two pictures showing the results in our yard.

Sunflowers after a windstorm

These are our sunflowers. They were already bending under the weight of their ripening heads, but they were over 9 feet tall. I’m surprised to see that two of them are still standing.

 Fence hit by pool

This is our fence, which we just put up this year. The wind caught a plastic pool in our backyard and blew it around the house and into the fence. The toprail is bent and will have to be replaced, and we have to  pour more cement around the gatepost so that it can be secure again.

It could have been worse – we could have lost our trees like the four trees that were downed in our church parking lot.

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life meta

Lunar Day

I enjoyed watching the full moon set this morning as I was out running. I watched as the last wisp of the moon fell behind the mountains in the west. This evening I was driving to the store with my kids and we all watched the moon rise in the east from the first tiny slice of the moon until it was fully risen. How’s that for bookends on the day.

As I came here to post on that and share with my hordes of readers that we got a new tree and many of our flowers in for this year I discovered that the spam bots had discovered my site today.

Thanks to Akismet, nobody had to suffer through anything – not the porn, the dubious pharmaceutical products, nor the offers to lose real money in virtual casinos. What surprised me was that before today only about 10 spam comments had been caught by Akismet (and none missed) and none of them were of the variety mentioned above. Tonight there were over 60 comments that had been caught by Akismet and all of them, unless my skimming missed an anomaly, were of the types listed above. This is much easier to maintain than the blacklists etc. that I was relying on two years ago.

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life

Shadows of Life

While I was out running this morning my brain began to wax philosophical. I thought I’d share some of the main elements that were rolling through my brain – spurred by seeing my long shadow as the sun rose.

As I saw my long shadow (about 50 feet) I got to thinking about the shadows that people cast in their lives and through history. Interesting things about shadows include the fact that they show the shape of something but remove most of the details and the third dimension. Also interesting is the fact that they are altered by the background upon which they fall and the light from which they are generated. This last thought percolated into this post.

Our perspective on a person will change throughout their life just as a shadow changes throughout the day. In the morning it is long and heading West. In the middle of the day it is very short, or even non-existent. In the evening it is long but facing East. Likewise, we view children through the shadow of possibility that they cast. At first they cast a big shadow of virtually endless possibilities. As they grow the shadow gets shorter as they begin to hone in one specific possibilities. Later the shadow changes from a shadow of possibility to a shadow of accomplishment which grows longer over time.

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