Mark and I did some geocaching on Monday, but it turned out to be a bit of a bummer. The first cache we tried for was somewhere along the Fish Creek National Recreation Trail near Scofield. I'd never been in the area, and I was surprised by how nice it was. There's a campground at the trailhead, but there was no "Fee Area" sign, so presumably it's free for day and overnight use. The trail climbs 1,100 vertical feet over the course of 10 miles to Skyline Drive, but the cache was just over a mile upstream from the campground. When we were within half a mile of the cache, we came to what was supposed to be a bridge over Fish Creek, but the bridge was out. We bushwhacked through some thick stuff up and downstream looking for a place to cross, but the spring runoff was just too high, and we ended up heading back to the car empty-handed. I thought the trail and campground were awesome, so I've got plans to return late in the summer for a weekend of camping, and possibly a mountain bike ride from Skyline down to camp.

I didn't originally have plans to find any more than just the one cache, but after not being able to cross the creek, we decided to try for a couple of others along Skyline Drive. It's normally a pretty nice road, something I thought my Taurus could handle, but I didn't count on there being so much snow up there. At about 9,100 feet in elevation, we hit a snow drift across the road that extended for about 75 yards, and it was so thick there was no way my car was getting over it. There was a short road going around it (apparently this snow drift is annually-occurring), and I tried getting my car onto that road, but it's just not cut out for that kind of driving. I actually had one rear wheel about ten inches off the ground trying to get through a slight dip and up the hill onto the bypass road, but the opposite front tire just kept spinning in the mud. It looks like all those caches along Skyline will have to wait until later in the summer as well.

The kids are both pretty sick right now. Bradley has an ear infection and intermittent fever, and Michael has bronchitis and strep throat. They've both been in to see the doctor though, and they're taking antibiotics to get rid of the nasty stuff. For most of yesterday and all of today, they've both just sat on the couch or in bed dozing most of the time, and neither of them has eaten much. It's not as though they eat much normally, but now I'm afraid that they're going to wither away. Each of them ate something substantial for dinner tonight (if you call cold cereal "dinner"), and I'm hoping they're back to normal by the weekend.

I've been up Spring Canyon three times this week. I first drove up with the whole family on Tuesday night to find a new geocache up there. It was getting dark when we left home, and it was almost full dark when we got there. The hike to the cache was a little tricky with two kids in the dark, but we made it up to the general area without any problems. Finding the cache proved to be the really tricky part. Traci eventually took the kids back to the truck while I stayed up on the hill looking for the cache with just my dim headlamp, but I never did find it. We went home empty-handed, but it was still a fun trip.

A couple of days later, I went up with just Michael, and we found the cache after a brief search. Daylight made all the difference. After that, we hiked further up the old tramway where they used to haul coal down the mountain and did some sight-seeing. I found an old underground tag that the miners used to use to indicate which people were underground at any given time. Strangely, it was laying out in the open, and I'm surprised nobody else had seen it and picked it up.

Today, I returned with the kids to find some petroglyphs. I noticed this image yesterday, and decided I would try to find the petroglyphs up there on my own. Looking from inside the car along the road wasn't much use, but walking along the old railroad grade was even worse because it was so windy that I couldn't keep my eyes open without getting dirt blown into them constantly. I ended up taking the kids back to the car early, and we drove a ways past Standardville, then turned around and headed for home. Shortly after passing a car going the opposite direction, I came across a fallen tree branch that covered both lanes of the road. It couldn't have fallen any more than a minute before I came across it, because the car I passed obviously made it through. Luckily, the tree was mostly dry-rotted, and the branch wasn't impossible for me to move.

I saw some interesting plant fossils two of the times I was up in Spring Canyon. Actually, it was just off Spring Canyon in Sowbelly Gulch. There were some tree leaf impressions much like those on the trees in my front yard, and there were also some palm fronds in some of the rocks. The sandstone was pink, and the leaves were mostly dark red, especially the palm fronds (like this). In fact, if you go to this page and scroll down to the Price Utah > Mesa Verde Group Dinosaur Tracks section, I believe those pictures were taken in the same canyon. I may one day try to find that exact location, just because I get a kick out of doing things like that.

Ok, I got Movable Type 3.2 working this morning. Looks like it was actually a problem with Firefox--it was using a cached version of the javascript files from my website. I had to clear my cache and restart Firefox to get it to use the new files I uploaded last night. Strange, I've never had a problem with Firefox using the wrong (cached) version of a file before. Reminds me of back in the days before IE, when Netscape was notorious for ALWAYS using cached files and it was sometimes a pain in the ass to get it to refresh from the web.

I upgraded my website to use Movable Type 3.2 this evening. Hopefully it will help me deal with spam being posted to the comments. I don't know what's wrong with these people, but since I have comment moderation turned on, I can't imagine why they keep trying. After one post, they should be able to figure out that their spam is not actually getting posted to my website, but they just keep trying. Fucking morons. I don't think I'll bother playing with the new features tonight, but maybe tomorrow I'll give them a look.

Traci and I ditched the kids this evening and went out gathering some rocks for our yard. I wanted some flat rocks to use for building a walkway on the parkway in our front yard. I'm finally getting around to fixing up my front yard after it got dug up more than two years ago, but I don't want to maintain a lawn on the parkway. I plan to xeriscape that part, with mostly rocks, and probably a few low ground cover plants.

The rocks we gathered are just awesome. Most of them contain fossils of some sort, but a few of those have some decent sized (about 3-inch) cephalopod impressions in them. Now I just need to go back to southwestern Emery County to pick up enough volcanic rocks to ring around the trees in the parkway.

Edit: I just realized that Movable Type 3.2 is crap. The Save button on the New Entry page does not work in Mozilla Firefox. When I click Save, it does absolutely nothing. I had to switch over to Internet Explorer just to save this post. I'll have to do some research tomorrow to figure out what the hell is wrong, but for now I am very unimpressed.

I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to fix the inside passenger-door handle in my truck. You'd think that Ford would be able to design something a little better than that after so many years in the business, but it's almost to the point where the entire door needs to be replaced just to fix the handle. I still haven't been able to fix it, but a trip to the store tomorrow to buy some new nuts and bolts should take care of it.

The past weekend was a blast. Friday, I did a lot of geocaching, and went on a great hike with some old and new friends to the top of Lake Mountain in Utah County. After the hike, we just went to West Valley and crashed for the night. Saturday morning we were up early for our drive to Farmington and the UTAG spring meeting. After that we did some more geocaching, then some shopping, and yet more geocaching (the last part was just Mike and me caching late at night). Sunday brought a little more caching, then the long, boring drive home.

This week, we've gone on a couple of walks around the neighborhood. I'd like to get the kids in shape enough that they could walk a mile or two without any help. We walked 1.5 miles last night, and I only carried Bradley on my shoulders for a short distance of that. Myself, I'd like to take much longer walks, but my family can't handle that yet. Maybe in a month or two they'll be able to keep up with me. Until then, I'll be carrying the youngest on my shoulders and pushing the rest to keep up. :)

Exactly eight years ago, Traci and I were trying to sneak out of our own wedding reception. God, that just seems like forever ago. I was such a punk kid--not that I've changed much in that respect--and we were so eager to be "adults." Now that eight years have gone by since we got married, our outlook on life is quite different. We've got two kids, a mortgage, two car payments, and all the responsibility we could ever want.

Some things haven't changed, though. Here's to another eight years.

I was bummin' around yesterday like I often do--you know, hubs locked in, transfer case in 4-low--and I saw some pretty interesting stuff. I had driven down this dirt road that I'd been hesitant to do for quite some time because it looked like private property. You turn off of US-6 just the other side of Wellington, cross a cattle guard, and drive toward a house that has a lot of junked cars in the yard. After passing a few of the junked cars, the road forks. The right fork goes directly to the front of the house, and the left fork takes you up onto a plateau that is surrounded by cliffs, all except on this one side where the road goes up. Shortly after taking the left fork, I lost sight of the house as the road started winding and climbing up the plateau. Along the way, I saw a lot of rocks with fossils in them right along the side of the road. I even got out of my truck at one point to look at some of the rocks (and to load some into my truck bed) and I spooked a rabbit out from under some of them. I think it scared me as much as I scared it, 'cause my heart didn't stop beating fast for a couple of minutes.

I followed the road past a couple more forks, and eventually ended up at a dead-end overlooking US-6 and Cat Canyon. I ended up placing a geocache nearby, then decided to drive around a little more and do some exploring. I saw a single pronghorn antelope, and I tried stopping the truck and stalking him on foot to get a good close-up picture, but he was too wily for that. I had stopped the truck behind a rise, but when I topped the rise on foot he was already long gone.

After returning to the truck and pressing further on down the road, I came to an overlook on the east side of the plateau. I parked and got out to take some pictures, and I saw a baby snake on the ground. It was stretched out and unmoving, and it was only about 10 or 11 inches long. I touched its tail to see if it would move, but it didn't budge. Then I grabbed its tail and pulled it backwards, at which point it coiled up and tried striking at me while it shook its tail. I'm not sure, but I think it was probably a baby rattlesnake. I took a few pictures and some video, then left it alone.

On my way back toward civilization, I saw a lone doe deer fairly close to the house and the alfalfa fields on the outskirts of Wellington. After leaving, I decided that this place was pretty damn awesome. I don't think there's much traffic out that way, since the road coming in appears to be private, though according to Carbon County GIS it's a public road. There is no other vehicular access that I've been able to find, but there's a lot of land and wildlife that appears to be relatively undisturbed. I have definite plans to go back and spend the better part of a day exploring it, but I'll have to remember to wear high-top boots and long pants.

I uploaded some pictures--if you've actually read this entry this far, you deserve to see them.

Traci and I started teaching Michael how to ride his bike without the training wheels yesterday evening. He didn't do so well along the fairly narrow sidewalk on our street, so this evening we took him to the old tennis court at the park and he caught on pretty quickly. Now he can ride for long distances without crashing, but he has a hard time getting started from a complete stop. I remember when I first learned how to ride a bike, and that was the hardest part for me too. I think he's ready for a bigger bike now, so we've got plans to get one tomorrow. Then we can get started on teaching Bradley how to ride Michael's old bike.

It looks like I'll be staying home this weekend, rather than going camping. I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing, but it probably won't be any fun. I've just been moving so much lately, I needed a chance to sit still for a weekend. I'll probably still go do something either Saturday or Sunday, but the rest of the time I'll probably spend at home. I'd love to go back to the Mussentuchit area, but that's a long drive for just me and the kids. Traci will be out playing all weekend, so it's just us boys.

So, I bought the new Tool album on Tuesday, and something funny happened. I brought it home and ripped it directly to MP3s, 'cause I do most of my listening on my computer, but when I got to track 10, the MP3 was messed up. I tried ripping it again, but Windows Media Player froze up at 21% on that track. I tried playing the CD directly, and it skipped at the same place as the MP3 did. I just figured I got a defective disc, so I took it back to Kmart (apparently Mad Platter has closed down, like so many other independent businesses in town). I exchanged it for a new CD, but when I got it home it did the same thing in the exact same place as on the other CD. Apparently, the CD just doesn't like my CD drive (the Samsumg CDRW/DVD in my Dell). It plays just fine in my car and in my other computer. I ended up ripping the MP3s on my other computer and copying them over to this one. I don't feel bad about taking a good CD back to Kmart, 'cause I still consider it to be defective.

I'm now wondering about how wise it was to buy a truck with a diesel engine. Diesel fuel is $3.25/gallon right now, though I get about 19 MPG in my truck. Regular unleaded is $2.80/gallon, but most big gas engines would only get 10 or so MPG, so I'm probably better off. Fuel prices have curtailed my driving plans for the forseeable future, so I'm stuck trying to figure out where to go camping close to Price for this weekend. Something near the dinosaur quarry would work, but that's still more money than I'd rather spend for a weekend outing.

Man, Sanpete County sure has spruced up their website. They sure have a lot of nice pictures on there. Almost makes me want to visit the area.

You probably wouldn't expect the senior citizen across the street to be the one blasting music at the entire neighborhood, but Old Man Arno is doing just that. It's funny, this old guy who lives across the street from me has a big speaker out on his front porch, and for the past couple of months he's been playing Johnny Cash and Hank Williams over it. I don't even know if he realizes that everyone else within half a block can hear his music, but it amuses me either way.