There was a great special on ABC tonight--a report by John Stossel about the failure of the "war on drugs." If you missed it, you missed out--hopefully they'll rerun it sometime soon.

I'm pouring another concrete pathway in my back yard, so next spring I can start landscaping back there. I only completed pouring a few molds yesterday evening, but I plan on finishing the entire width of the yard behind the house today. After that, I have to work on the length of my yard, which is more than twice the width, and there will be many more curves involved because I have to go around a lilac and a snowball bush. I still haven't decided how I'm going to finish the pathway off, though. I can either buy some edging and edge both sides, or I can go with the natural look and let the grass grow up between the stones. The latter is not only much easier, but I'd need more than 300 feet of edging, so it'd save me a lot of cash too. I'll post some pictures in a few days (umm, or maybe weeks) when I get it finished.

That's right, this is layout #27. At least, it's #27 since I started keeping archives of all my past layouts. I'm sure I've had at least five or six that I don't have saved to my hard drive. It's been tested only in IE6 in Win98, so if anybody else sees any problems with it, please let me know. Fuck Netscape. I know for a fact it won't look good in Netscape 4, because Netscape tries to re-repeat the background image for any nested tables, rather than making them transparent, since there's no background image specified for any of the nested tables.

By the way, I used this picture for the background image for this layout. I took that picture last week from 4-Mile Hill, along with some others in which I actually caught some lightning.

This morning, I had originally planned on driving past the peak where I got rained out last weekend, but the exact second I topped out at the peak, it started raining. This time I had Traci and Michael with me, and we decided to just drive down the muddy hill again and try our luck elsewhere. I wasn't all that familiar with the area, so we drove up Indian Canyon and took the turnoff that leads to Reservation Ridge. I knew that road was supposed to lead to Soldier Summit, but I'd never been on it before, so I didn't know what was in store. We didn't leave town prepared to go on a long drive, but we were gone for four hours total--luckily, we had enough milk and Pringles to keep Michael happy for the entire duration of the trip.

We saw a few deer, and a lot of beautiful country. It had hailed not long before we went up Indian Canyon, and some of the peaks were white with it. There were a few places from which we could see US-6, which served as a reference point so we could tell exactly where we were. Most of the time, it felt like we were far away from any type of civilization, which we actually were. We only passed one other vehicle on the entire stretch of dirt road. When we were back on the highway, we kept looking off to the east to see if we could see the road we were on, and sure enough, there it was. I've driven on that highway hundreds of times, and I'd never noticed the dirt road winding around the ridgeline several miles distant until today.

Round trip from the paved road at Indian Canyon to the paved road at Soldier Summit was about 27 miles, and the Subaru handled it all quite nicely. There were several roads that dropped off the ridge down into other canyons, and I'd like to eventually return and explore many of them. When we got near Soldier Summit, we started scoping out camping spots, because we're going camping somewhere in that area the weekend of August 17th.

I think next weekend we'll drive from Sheep Creek to Little Baldy Mountain, which is where we saw a black bear cub two years ago. There was a really nice spot to camp there, but I don't know how I feel camping at a spot where I've personally seen a bear just ¼ mile away. I'd also like to drive to Strawberry Reservoir while I'm that close to it, but I've never actually been before and I'm not sure I can find my way. We'll see if I can, because Traci really wants to go there too.

Did you know that one second is equal to 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesuim atom's resonant frequency? Me neither. Go here and syncronize your watch or clock with the official U.S. time.

I finally finalized my vacation schedule for the year, and most of the days I'm taking off are next month. I've been with my company for five years, so they give me a ridiculous number of vacation days to use, and I always end up arbitrarily choosing which days to take off. I'm going to have a lot of four- and five-day weekends next month.

I think I'm going to spend my time off driving through the mountains around here, taking pictures and just relaxing. I did that quite a bit two summers ago, and it was loads of fun. I don't know that it'll be as great this year, hauling a 1 year old kid around, but I'm still looking forward to it.

Oh, and due to the drought conditions this year, there are supposed to be more bears and mountain lions in areas where they're more likely to come into contact with humans. So I think I'll be packing my shotgun around with me while I'm out and about. I would hate to kill such a beautiful animal if one tried to attack me, but I'd hate much worse to be attacked by one. Damn, I need to get a handgun.

I put some new pictures up yesterday and today. The first bunch are from our camping trip last week, along with some other miscellaneous pictures taken this week, and the second bunch is from a drive I took today near Matt's Summit.

I had planned on riding my bike up to Kyune Reservoir this morning, but when I got up there in the Subaru, I didn't feel like trying to haul my bike over the gate, then riding five or six miles uphill on a road I've never been on. So I drove on to Matt's Summit, then took the dirt road south to see where it went. It wound up the mountain and through the area where that wildfire was a couple weeks ago, and the stench of burned wood was still heavy in the air. I reached the point where the road topped out at a summit and started heading down into a valley, but there was what appeared to be a small rain storm approaching, so I figured I'd wait it out at the summit, then drive down after the rain had passed--I didn't want to drive down only to find myself stuck at the bottom of a steep, muddy climb back out. It started raining, and after about five minutes, I saw a large lightning bolt strike a peak across the valley about two miles away, and I decided it would be best if I wasn't inside the only piece of metal at the highest point around. I drove about 400 yards down the road I had just came from and parked near the treeline to wait out the storm, and just a few minutes later it started raining extremely hard. That little storm was pretty deceiving, and it appeared to have grown much larger in just a few short minutes. Water started running down the ruts in the road, and I decided I'd better get back down the way I came before it got any worse. The drive back was fun, though I almost slid off into the sagebrush a few times. It was the first real four-wheeling I'd done in the Subaru--the first time I'd ever needed to use four-wheel drive--and it performed quite well. If I'd been in my truck, I would have been screwed because I still don't have a front driveshaft in it. Hell, if I had decided to trek on down into the valley before the rain came, I would definitely have been stuck down there.

After I hit the paved road again and had driven just a few miles, the rain was gone. Right before I reached Highway 6, I saw two deer right off the road, and ended up following one of them through the brush for quite a while before it decided to drop down off a steep hillside. As I was following it, it would keep a distance of about 75 yards, stopping to look back at me every so often. I saw two deer in the same area a few days ago, and another one dead on the side of the road today, so there must be quite a few of them that hang out by the river around there.

The family loaded up in the Subaru yesterday evening, and we headed out to the Kyune area and did some four-wheeling. I had originally planned on going to Kyune Reservoir, which I didn't even know existed until yesterday when I found it on a topo map. I knew exactly where the dirt road that leads to the reservoir starts, because it's where Ty and I parked to watch the meteor shower last year. I never noticed whether or not the gate was locked, though, so I figured we'd drive up and give it a try. The gate was locked, so we decided to just drive around on some other dirt roads along the Price River. It had rained up there the day before, so the roads were a little muddy, with some giant puddles left behind as well. We drove that car where a lot of passenger cars couldn't go--I even had one of the tires in the air going through a deep rut running across the road. Hell, even Traci drove around a bit and splashed through some mud puddles.

A few times I got out of the car just to walk around and take in the scenery, and to take a few pictures. I accidentally found at least one rock containing some fossils, and another that either has some fossils in it, or some possibly some oncolites. It's hard to tell, because oncolites can look so different from one another, but these ones are way bigger than some that I found about two years ago near Helper. The last time I needed some fossils identified, I just posted a link to some pictures to sci.bio.paleontology and sci.geo.geology, and I got quite a few responses, so I think I'll try that again.

I forgot to mention that on our way to and from camping, we had problems with BOTH vehicles overheating. On the way out, the truck was overheating really bad, and the Subaru wasn't much better. But since the Subaru has an electric fan, it could cool off much faster than my truck when the engine is off. And the truck had about a ton in the bed, and another half-a-ton being towed behind, so it wasn't a big surprise. It took us about four times longer than it should have to reach the campground.

While we were camping, I removed the thermostat from the truck so the coolant would just flow through the engine all the time, and on the way home, it worked very nicely. It didn't even get up to its normal operating temperature until we had travelled ten miles or so, when normally it would have done so in about two miles. But when we reached the big uphill part of the drive home, it started overheating a little bit (not nearly as bad as before), and the Subaru was also getting pretty hot, so when we reached the top of the hill, we stopped to let both vehicles cool off a bit. I got out of the truck to open the hood so it would cool off faster, and there was coolant leaking out of the damned radiator. I think I may have overfilled the radiator after I'd removed the thermostat, because once the coolant stopped leaking out, I tried to open the radiator cap and coolant gushed out into the overflow, so I know there was still pressure at the top. So I just let it cool off some more, then headed home and didn't have any more problems.

I'd like to get rid of both of these damn vehicles, but I still don't have enough money to get something that's not shitty.

Camping over the past five days wasn't all that great. I mean, it was ok, but it's usually much more fun. I think the problem was that Michael's at that age where he's too old to just sit around next to you while you do your thing, but he's too young to let him wander around with the older kids. And Traci spent most of the time helping her mom with some damned thing or another, so I usually ended up keeping an eye on Michael, which is a full-time job. At least on one of the days we were up there, I just loaded my bike and the bike trailer into the car, grabbed Michael, and we headed up to the top of Huntington Canyon for a bike ride, which was a welcome relief from the sweltering heat in the campground, and from chasing Michael all over the place.

The campground was at the very bottom of the canyon, at nearly the same elevation as Price, so it was probably around 100° F every day, just like it was in Price. At the top of the canyon, it must have been 20° cooler, and it felt good. There were wildflowers blooming everywhere, and there was even snow clinging to life on some of the slopes.

I honestly wish I hadn't taken so many days off work for my wife's family reunion this year, because it just plain sucked. I had originally planned on just taking Friday off, but I decided to take Wednesday and Thursday off too. Pretty soon, though, I think we're going to camp in this area, where Traci and I went for a drive a couple years ago. It was gorgeous country, and it's gotta be around 9,000 feet or higher in elevation, so it should be much cooler up there. Hopefully it will make up for the crappy time I had over the past several days.

Amen, brother. A good point made by a fellow Price resident.

I'm going to have to buy two new propane tanks because of this stupid law. According to that article, there are about 600 accidents each year due to overfilled propane tanks, so starting in April of this year, you're required to replace any tank with the old-style of valve. This will make about 40 million propane cylinders obsolete. Now, let's apply some fucking logic to this thing: 600 accidents, divided by 40,000,000 tanks, equals a 0.0015% chance of it happening to you. Damn shitty retarded lawmakers. It's gonna cost me about $60 to replace the tanks in my camper, but luckily my barbecue came with one of the new ones.

My site currently ranks first in a Google search for "worst site ever". Here's a screenshot for when it no longer ranks.

I've been busy-busy-busy getting ready for my wife's family reunion, and I'll be much more busy in the next couple of days. I decided to take Wednesday off from work as well, so it'll be a five day weekend. I bought a new battery for the camper, but since we'll have power hookups at the campsite, I don't really need it except for the water pump. We're really going to be roughing it--I'm bringing my blender to mix frozen drinks with, and we're also bringing a TV and DVD player.

I helped my wife's sister move from Ferron to Price this weekend, which was a pain in the ass, but I got a free couch out of the deal. Actually, it's not a couch...it's a loooooveseat. Ahhhhhh yeeeaaaahhhhh. So now I've got to rearrange my office in order to make room for it. My DSL router should be here tomorrow, but I don't think I'll have time to hook it up until after next weekend when we get back from camping. But since I'll be moving my desk anyway, it's just as well that I won't be hooking up the DSL router this week, 'cause I don't have time to do any of this stuff. We put everything off until the last minute, so it's gonna be a scramble to get ready to go by Tuesday evening.

Damnit damnit son of a bitch.

I revamped the pictures section today, and added a few new pictures as well.

Phew, I feel so much safer now. I was worried that terrorists were going to target Carbon County on Independence Day, but now I can rest easy.

Here's a story from the local paper about the fire in Price Canyon last weekend.

I broke down yesterday and decided to buy a pair of 64 oz. mugs (one's for my wife), so now I'll be travelling to Gas-N-Blow half as often to get something to drink. I got tired of going there two or three times a day to refill on Mountain Dew. These mugs are so damn big, I have to strap one into a seatbelt in order to make it home without spilling, and it takes me hours and hours to finish it all. And we all wonder why 99.8% of the country is overweight (or whatever the statistic is :)--it's because of 64 oz. refill mugs.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, but I stayed up 'til after 4:00 am last night. Traci and I made a shitload of beef jerky, then she spent some time moving stuff into her new craft room, while I set up her computer in there. I decided to swap hard drives in her machine, so it'd boot from the larger 6.4 GB drive, and I cloned the smaller drive using xxcopy. I had some problems formatting the drive in the first place--there were some bad sectors, so I ran a Scandisk surface scan to make sure I caught everything before I started copying files. After that, I copied all the files over from the old drive, then swapped positions in the hard drive bays and changed the jumpers, and now the computer won't recognize that any drives are present at all. I'm sure I just messed up the jumper settings or something, but I was too tired to stay up any longer playing with it. I get off work early today, so I'll mess around with it then.

Update: Yeah, I'm dumb. Or rather, I was too tired to even be working on a computer. I had the jumper on the main drive set to slave. It doesn't help that the diagram on the top of the drive is the reverse of how the jumpers actually are on the back, but I should have known that because just a few days ago I had changed them when I originally installed the drive.

Give a brother a hand. Hey, it's for research.

I'm debating whether or not I should take a nap when I get off work. I'm afraid that if I do, I'll sleep until the wee hours of the night, at which point I'll wake up bored and with nothing to do (because I will have already slept plenty). You see, I stayed up so late last night, that I actually stayed up until right now. I know that I could sleep now if my head got anywhere near a pillow, but I could also stay awake until tonight if I wanted to. Decisions, decisions...