OK after ignoring my blog for the last few months I am ready to post again. The massive vortex called life has continued to swirl like the black hole of death. That is an exaggeration but it has been a couple crazy months. We moved out of the monster house and it is for sale $435K any takers?
We have finally heard the clarion call of the get out of debt council and we are moving forward as fast as we possibly can. I sold the H3 and that reduced the monthly out flow by about $700 a month. Gas prices have dropped like crazy and that was a big chunk of what we were spending. We now own our cars and only have our houses and one credit card that still are not paid off. I feel some comfort in knowing that there are only those things left, but they are the big things and I am afraid that unless we can sell the monster house it is going to be a long road to financial freedom.
I received a new calling in the ward I am now a counselor in the young men's presidency. Looks like lots of camping and lessons to teach are in the future. Yeh!
Farmer Joe would be proud of my latest acquisition. 1993 Toyota Land cruiser FJ80 paid cash $1850
And its in sweet condition. Miles are 251,000. I am happy as a tornado in a trailer park.
I took the kids out to the desert on Saturday and we dug for Opal. We found one pretty good spot and came back with some pretty big chunks. Opal is a mineraloid gel that is deposited at moderately low temperature. It is transported by water to the surface by hot springs through cracks and fissures in the rock substrate. In our area it is common to find opal deposited in basalt. (Lava flows). The gem contains from %5 to 20% water and after dug out of the ground if not stabilized can crack at room temperature. The gem quality opal has lots of flashes of "fire" blues reds yellows greens and oranges in a mostly transparent rock. But the stone can range from completely white and opaque to black. Fire opal is the most rare and desired. The stones we found were mostly white with some blue and a few had some fire. We didn't find anything of gem quality but in the area we dug people have pulled out some very nice opal.
We left early and drove out to the desert south of Boise and started digging about 10:30am. I took Aisling and Brenna and It was a frosty morning with clear skies and no wind. As soon as the sun hit our dig it warmed right up and was quite pleasant. Although the girls stayed in their coats I was in my shirt sleeves pretty quick, nice for a December morning.
We drove over some pretty rough terrain and the Fj80 did great. I am tickled pink with that truck.
By 1pm the kids were yelling from the truck "Dad I am hungry and you said we would go 10 hours ago!"
So it was happy meals on the way home and back to show Challis our finds.
I had a ton of fun and expect to head out there again soon to search for that elusive treasure.
This might be the beginning of an exciting rock hounding career.
Last night I made English muffins, They turned out ok and I got a pretty good raise in my dough, but I am not completely satisfied witht he recipe. If anyone has a good recipe they have personally made and had a good result I would be very interested.

Rock Stars

Here are some picture of the Rock Stars

The hurricane comes home to the range

OK the person who first said "when it rains it pours" must not have been through a hurricane. I think they missed out on the gale force winds and the lightening and thunder. Its probably not good to start blogging by wining, but I don't care. So here is the first little cloud burst of the day, I got to work and realizing there was a mountain of things in front of me I dug in and started shoveling the s*@% ( that's short for "stuff")...(honestly). Then I got one of those great phone calls saying Mr. Grisham you have insufficient funds in your bank account and your overdrawn and need to come down to the bank and put money in your account or we will charge you a hundred million dollars in late fees, thank you for banking with us :) Here came the real torrent! So I left my mountain of "stuff" and went down to fix the issue with my account and low and behold there was something else wrong on my account, the equity line we are using to fund the remodel of the monster house has been changed without notice. Now instead of having $145,000 credit limit they cut our loan $45,000 !!! wow would you look at that that is $100,000 less than we were approved for. I didn't know that they could just offer you a loan with a certain approval and then change their minds after the loan was in affect. So here I am sitting in the bank with Miss smiley banker choking on the fact that her establishment just royally screwed me. I have thousands of dollars on credit cards from house renovation costs waiting to be paid off by the now gone equity line. She was a really good actor and seemed more upset and than I was, and I didn't even have to show her how pissed I really was. There was no yelling, throwing of chairs or even dirty looks. But I tell you what I will never bank with Washington Mutual or City Bank for the rest of my life. Those people can rot in hell. What a load of "stuff" :)

To my good buddy Farmer Joe

The other day Farmer Joe called me. It was great to hear from him it has been a long time and alot of miles. He asked me why I hadnt been keepin up the blog, so joe this one is for you.
I was able to take Friday off and spend it with the family, It was a great day and we had lots of fun. Aisling and Brenna are taking swim lessons at the community pool and I was able to take them to their lessons. Aisling is able to swim half way across the pool with her face in the water and not freak out. I was pretty impressed. (looks like ol' dad might have to learn to really learn how to swim now). Brenna now can put her face under water and splash around about 5 feet to her teacher, and she is really getting good at floating on her back by herself. They really had a good time, they have lessons for the next few days and then the season is over. Its hard to believe that summer is wrapping up and we are headed into fall.
Speaking of fall Elk season starts on the 31st of this month so I went out and shot my bow today, good thing I have a couple weeks to practice it wasnt pretty. Looks like i will shoot again tomorrow.

Is it still 2008?

This is the West Face of Donaldson Peak, 12023 ft. We turned back about 3/4
of the way up the snow in the picture. As a side note for scale the trees in
the foreground are about 2 miles nearer the camera than the snow is.

Boy these last few months have been sooooo busy. I feel like there are not enough hours in the day, I can go and go from 6am to 8pm and still not get everything done. I recently moved the Laboratory to a new location it took about a week and things are still finding their places. Work has been steady and I am growing the business through more accounts and higher volume. That all takes a lot of time, and I am sure it will pay off in the long run, but I am still looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. ( I hope it is not a train)
We had an exciting week, some good things and some not so good. Lachlan had a high fever for 3 days and then his soft spot on the top of his head began to swell. We ran him to the emergency room late Wednesday night and had him checked out, they drew his blood and looked him over and gave him some fever reducer. He turned out to be fine, but I was pretty worked up over the whole thing. What really had me worried was that some of his symptoms were the same as the symptoms of Bacterial Meningitis which is very serious and very dangerous. We gave him a blessing and I believe there was more than one person praying for him that night, and we were all blessed, everything turned out fine.

Dan and I went mountain climbing over the weekend back to the good old Lost River Range in northeastern Idaho. I have climbed over there many times and we were going to climb two mountains I have already climbed a few years ago. Dan needed to climb these to finish up the 12,000 footers in Idaho, so I thought I would tag along and show him the route. We left on Thursday and hiked in about 3 miles. The mountains are really rough and we had a hard time finding a spot big enough for us to camp on. We finally found small ledge big enough for both of our bivy sacks and a small fire. We pilled rocks on the down hill side so we wouldn't role off and on the up hill side was the fire pit and a thorn bush. Dan got the fire pit and I got the thorn bush and Dan's feet in my face all night. I took my summer sleeping bag that is rated down to 30 F, it was 98 F when we left Boise so it thought that would be warm enough, surprise I was wrong. I was up most of the night shivering and checking my watch every half our to see how long till the sun would come up. It finally came up about 6am , but the temperature didn't warm up until about 10am.This is Donaldson's East Face Taken from neighboring
Mt. Breitenbach. We climbed the west face after
traversing just left of the east face in this picture.

We left camp and started to make our way up the mountain, It was a very long hike and covered in loose rock. In some places you slide backward with ever step you take. We were making jokes about walking up a downward escalator. That seemed funny for about 2 seconds. I really began questioning why I climb mountains. I think that I am more fond of the mountain after I have been to the top and then am sitting back at home in a warm tub watching 7 brides for seven brothers and eating a Big Mac. Ahh the simple things in life.
We turned around about 200' shy of the summit. We had been hiking hard all day long and had reached the crux of the climb. It is at the top of the mountain and is a thousand feet of small ledges and broken towers of rock. The slope is very steep and a fall over one of the cliffs would most likely send you to the daisy fields. We had ascended most of the wall with out incident. Dan had one little bout with some loose rocks, but we were both very aware of the potential danger of the slope, and we were moving cautiously. I climbed up this little section of stable rock and looked down at Dan to see how he was fairing. He was sitting down and he just said " I am done". I had climbed this route before and so I knew that we were less than a half an hour from the top. I was half tempted to try to persuade Dan up the rest of the face, but he said "I got a feeling I need to go down" I feel like you should always listen to those feelings. So I said "OK" and down climbed to him and we started back down. Nothing of importance happened on the way back down and we arrived safe at the car 4 hours later. What did happen that I think was important was that Dan had the courage to speak up when he got that feeling, and that we fallowed it. I don't know if something bad would have happened if we kept climbing and quite frankly I am glad I didn't have to find out.