I got an official-looking letter in the mail the other day from W5YI informing me that my amateur radio license is about to expire (it actually said, "YOU NEED TO RENEW YOUR LICENSE NOW!), and that all I had to do in order to renew it was fill out the enclosed form and send them $6.00. Wow, and just think, I almost renewed it online for free. Good thing these guys are looking out for me.

I missed an entire day of work today because I hurt my back last night. I was sitting on the floor at Ty's, and I tried picking Bradley up when this stabbing pain hit me really hard. I still don't know why it hurt me, since Bradley only weighs a little over 20 pounds, and I pick him up all the time without any problems. Anyway, it hurt like hell when it first happened (it was difficult to keep the grimace off my face), and it bothered me all night to the point where I didn't get much sleep. I decided at around 5:00 am that I was going to call my doctor as soon as the office opened, but when I called, the earliest I could get in was at 3:00 pm. So I ended up laying flat on my back in bed all day until my appointment, but after nearly two hours of waiting at the doctor's office and the pharmacy, I've now got a pretty good stock of drugs (Skelaxin, Zanaflex, Relafen, and Percocet) to keep me going until the back problems go away.

Speaking of such, does somebody really get paid to sit around and dream up names for prescription drugs? I would have thought coming up with new names for cars would be tough enough (Outlander,

Freelander, Highlander, Uplander [ok, so maybe not that hard]), but there are probably hundreds of thousands of prescription drugs out there, all needing somebody to come up with a unique name. I'd like that job.

Bradley is finally walking regularly, without being persuaded and often without any particular destination in mind. Lately, he'll walk out into the middle of the room, then he'll just stand there and start laughing, as if he's insanely proud of his accomplishment. Michael started walking when he was exactly 11 months old, and Bradley started one day before he turned 11 months, though technically Michael started walking the earliest if you count the number of days rather than months.

I took a break from working on the dining room today and went for a drive with the whole family. I vaguely remember seeing some petroglyphs once while out riding a 4-wheeler with a friend somewhere east of Wellington just off of US-6 about 8 years ago. We tried finding that road, but nothing looked familiar, so when we got to Woodside, we headed east on a road that parellels the Price River as it cuts through the Bookcliffs.

This page says that after six miles, the road should end and there should be some petroglyphs there. I actually found a single panel of petroglyphs a little further than six miles down the road, but the road certainly didn't end there (although it got really rough then). This map, made in 1985, shows that the road exists and that it's a well-maintained road, yet this map made in 1969 shows the road as being a "jeep trail" and ending after about six miles. So, the information listed on the America's Byways website must be really out of date.

Anyhow, this page tells of some petroglyphs where the Price River flows into the Green River, and I'm pretty sure that this road eventually goes there, but whether or not the petroglyphs are on the west side of the Green River is another matter. We had to turn around at one point where the road turned into a 4-wheeler trail and we couldn't go any further, but someday I'd like to bike from there to the confluence. After driving over six miles we weren't even halfway to the confluence, so it'd probably be a long ride, and it's not likely that I'll end up returning until October.

Looks like there's a Donnie Darko fan working for the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification (see Figure 5 on page 5).

My dining room is almost finished, but the thing that finally got me to work on it is that we're having new carpet installed on Thursday, and I'm determined to get everything done before then. I definitely don't want to have to paint stuff after the carpet is installed. We'd planned on just buying an area rug and covering most of the floor, but it turned out being just a little more expensive to have the whole room carpeted. The only major thing that'll be left to do in that room after this week will be to furnish it--we desperately need a new dining set, since the tiny 6-year old table that we got at K-Mart will look horrible in such a nice room.

I'm also having a new fence and gates installed, probably next week, in the driveway. The fence will basically extend from the garage to halfway down the driveway, then there will be two gates across the driveway, one 3' and the other one about 11.5'. That will allow us to leave the back door unlocked and let the kids roam freely in and out of the house without worrying about them playing in the heavy traffic out on the street. This was another project I was going to do myself, but it turned out being just a tiny bit more expensive to have a professional do it.

These two things, plus all the other home improvements I've done over the past couple of months, will almost wipe out my tax refund. I still have enough left to build the kids a really nice playset in the back yard, but by then I'll be grateful that the money's gone, and all this work will be behind me.

Yesterday was our 6th wedding anniversary--it actually feels like much longer than that. Traci and I ditched the kids and spent the day in Provo/Orem. We played some mini-golf, did some shopping, then ate dinner and headed home. I had a $6 margarita with my dinner, and although it was mighty tasty, I think I could have drank a gallon of that stuff before even feeling a buzz. The entire day was extremely relaxing, and probably one of the best anniversaries we've celebrated so far.

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I got all my hiking gear ready and headed out to the Gordon Creek bridge to do some hiking. I found three very vague references to petroglyphs in the area, the last being the most descriptive. I parked near the bottom of the bridge, but not quite near the river bottom, and started hiking downstream. I crossed the stream early on, but realized after a short while that the petroglyphs were on a ridge above the river bottom and on the opposite side of the creek. So I back-tracked and finally found the petroglyphs, and they extended for at least 0.6 miles, which is as far as I got in about two hours before deciding to turn back and head home. There weren't many of them, and they were spread out pretty far between, but it was pretty interesting being able to see such things just a few miles away from my house.

I've actually done a lot of hiking in the past two weeks, and I hope to continue doing so throughout the summer. I haven't had much desire to go camping yet this year, but once I exhaust all the hiking opportunities near town, I'm sure we'll end up going camping quite a bit. I put up some pictures that I took over the past several months that I just never really had an excuse to post on my site (or I was just too lazy). I'm hoping to get a new digital camera in the near future, so hopefully when that happens, I'll start posting many more pictures.

When I said "killer hike" in my last post, I didn't mean it literally. We ended up hiking up the San Rafael Reef and hitting this cache, but we were too tired to press onto this one which was only a quarter-mile away. Not only that, but we were running dangerously low on water, and all three of us actually ran completely out before we got back to the car. Luckily, I brought an extra two gallons of ice cold water and left it in the car.

The hike itself was fun. We had to stop quite a few times in the shade, which was hard to come by sometimes. We had to squeeze up against rocks most of the time in order to attain some measure of coolness, and other times we were able to stretch out on our backs underneath an overhang and almost fall asleep in the shade.

I'm not sure what was worse, the hike uphill with the burning leg muscles and shortness of breath, or the downhill portion with the other different burning leg muscles and hurting feet. I thought I'd really be paying for this hike today, but I'm surprisingly not really sore. When I run up the stairs or chase Michael around, my muscles start to burn again, but otherwise everything's normal. I really need to start getting out and hiking much more often, then this exhaustion will be a thing of the past, at least until winter sets in.

So much for hiking East Mountain or South Tent Mountain this weekend. I didn't really want to chance driving all the way up there and getting skunked because of snow, so I searched all over the web trying to find out if Skyline Drive or Miller Flat Road were accessible. I found a statewide fishing report on the DWR's website, which says that Cleveland and Huntington Reservoirs are still mostly frozen, and that Potter's Ponds are inaccessible. Miller Flat Road runs right between Huntington and Cleveland and goes straight to Potter's Ponds and then to East Mountain, and Skyline Drive runs parallel to it on the west and at a higher elevation to South Tent Mountain. I'll just have to wait until Mike and Matt show up this evening to figure out what we're going to do. I still want to go on a long hike, but unless they feel like driving down to I-70 and going on a killer hike, I can't think of anywhere decent to go.

Mike and his family are coming to stay at our pad this weekend, and it looks like Matt is coming along as well, so we're planning on going for a hike Saturday. We haven't decided exactly where we're going, but it looks like probably South Tent Mountain in Sanpete County first, then East Mountain in Emery County after that, at least if the first hike doesn't kick our asses. The combined round-trip distance of both hikes is only five miles, but East Mountain has the steepest grade of all Utah's county high points--more than 1,600 feet in elevation over one horizontal mile. There's also no trail at all, and the forest is pretty dense. The only thing I'm really worried about is snow--we'll be over 11,000 feet, and there's sure to be a lot of snow still on the ground. There's no guarantee that we'll even be able to drive on Skyline Drive, let alone do any hiking.

Price Shitty is repairing the street in front of my house for the third time, and hopefully the last (however unlikely that may be). They actually dug up all the existing asphalt and are starting over from scratch, instead of just throwing down a thin layer to patch their already shitty job. And get this--they're actually using hot asphalt to fill in the hole. They've finished paving most of it already, but there's still a big hole on the shoulder of the road that needs to be filled in--I think they ran out of asphalt and they're waiting for more. I called to complain about the big bump in the road last week, and I'm completely surprised that they're actually doing something about it. You know what they say about the squeaky wheel. But then again, it's entirely possible that they received a lot more complaints other than just mine, since at least hundreds of people drive on this street every day.

I got my ass kicked today. Late last night, just before going to bed, I decided that today I was going to ride my bike to Kenilworth and back on the dirt roads that run between here and there. I never really knew how far the round trip was before today, but I brought my GPS along and gathered some stats. I was gone for a total of 3 hours and 24 minutes, of which I spent 47 minutes stopped for one reason or another. During the 2 hours and 37 minutes that I was moving, I averaged 5.8 mph, with a maximum speed of 22.4 mph. I took the east road from my house in Price to my grandpa's house in Kenilworth, which turned out to be 8.7 miles, and the west road home turned out being 6.7 miles long, for 15.4 miles total. The total elevation gain was 1,250 feet (technically, it was zero, but you know what I mean).

I must have seen no fewer than 200 Busch Light cans along the road (damn rednecks), mostly on the road up (which is easily passable by any vehicle). The road down is really rough and rocky, so it gets almost no travel except by bikes--there weren't even many ATV tracks on that road. About an hour into the ride, I came across a guy who was walking with his dog in the same direction as I was going. I got fairly close to him and I expected him to have heard me coming up behind him, but he apparently didn't, so I turned my bike a bit from the hard-packed dirt to the gravelly shoulder just so my tires would make more noise. When he heard that, he turned rather quickly and half-way raised his walking stick. I'm glad I wasn't closer to him--I startled him pretty good. I just said hi to him and we asked each other "How's it goin'?" before I passed him up. I'd forgotten I'd tucked my shirt behind my handgun so it was perfectly visible, so I wasn't looking for a reaction, but I wonder what he thought when I went by. I also saw a deer, almost close enough to spit on--I think we startled each other. It was the only wildlife I saw the entire trip, except for butterflies and lizards.

My ass hurts now, since this was my first real bike ride of the season--I'll get used to riding again pretty quickly. I also got sunburned pretty badly on my arms and face, and on top of that pain, my legs are sore and weak. I think I'm going to try to take a long bike ride like this, close to town, once a week, at least until I start hiking county high points again. Those will all require hours of driving before I can even begin hiking, so it'll have to wait until I can devote an entire day to a single hike during the weekends.