For the past several weeks my truck has been making a rattling noise, coming from the front-end somewhere, whenever I hit a bump. It hadn't bothered me enough to even look at the suspension until today. I made plans with Mark to go hiking this weekend, and I wanted to make sure the truck wouldn't leave us stranded out there. I found the problem pretty quickly--the lower mounting bracket for one of the shock absorbers is broken, so the shock is just dangling from the top bracket and bouncing around. I already ordered the part from the Ford dealer--$55 for a simple steel plate with a couple of holes in it--and it'll be here on Tuesday. I've been driving the truck like this for a while now, and there's no uneven tire wear or any other problems, so I'm not in a big hurry to fix it. I think I'll do the work myself since it looks like it will be pretty straightforward, but I'm not looking forward to crawling around on a cold concrete driveway.

The place where I want to hike this weekend is out near the Wedge, and if all goes well we'll end up overlooking Buckhorn Wash from the top of a 1,200' drop-off. The hike will probably be less than two miles, as long as the road is in good shape (and not too muddy). I also want to hike to a place near Castle Dale for the U-Dash game. That hike could be as much as three miles round trip, but there's a small chance that I could drive much closer in the truck. There's a faintly-visible road in the aerial photos of that area that could put us within 0.3 miles, though I wouldn't mind a longer hike because it's right in the middle of some fossil-bearing rocks.

Things are finally winding down around here. I spent a couple of days last week finishing part of the bathroom remodeling project that I started months and months ago. I finished the drywall work, painted one wall, and installed some new cabinets and a light fixture. Last night we had my family over to open presents, and today we ate dinner at my mom's house. Hopefully now I can relax for the rest of my vacation. I've got a week left, and I don't really have any plans--I just don't want to do anything remotely resembling work.

The snow came a day late this weekend. Saturday's hike on Cedar Mountain wasn't all that great because it was cold and windy instead of snowy and still. There are three roads that get close to the area where I wanted to hike, and two of them were fenced and gated, while the other one turned into little more than a cow trail a couple miles short of our destination. Mark and I hiked down the cow trail anyway and walked along the bottom of a wash called Johnson Hollow for more than a mile, then climbed out to the rim and hiked along the edge of the wash back to the truck. Based on what little I know about geology, I'd have to say that the geologic map of the area is wrong where it shows several huge sections of Morrison Formation exposed on top of Cedar Mountain. We only ran across one tiny area exposed, and there wasn't much to see.

We did come across a really cool place up there. Cedar Mountain is pretty much completely covered in juniper, pinion pine, sage brush, and a little bit of ponderosa pine, but there was this one little nook at Gooseberry Spring that had aspen and spruce trees which seemed completely out of place there. It was like going from the desert straight to the mountains instantly. If it wasn't for the cold wind and the little bit of old snow on the ground, I would have climbed down the ledges into the aspen stands and hiked around a bit. I'll have to put this place on my list of places to visit this spring when it warms up.

I can't wait until I can drop this whole pretense with the kids about Santa. Hiding the Christmas presents from them is easy right now because they still think Santa is going to bring them in just over a week. But deceiving your kids into believing that there's no such thing as Santa Claus just seems wrong.

I've only got three more days left at work this year, then it's goodbye until 2007. I think that next year I'm going to take much more time off during the summer, because the days I've taken off this winter have been very unproductive. I didn't work this Monday, and I don't work tomorrow, and I've got nothing to show for it. At least during the summer, I'd have been able to do something better with my time. Michael being in school complicates things a bit because the entire family can't take off for a week this time of year without him getting behind.

I hope to get out and do some hiking this weekend. There's an area of Cedar Mountain that, judging by the aerial photos, looks like it might be fun to explore. I think I'm going to bring my rock hammer and do some fossil hunting. I'll be in the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation, which is known to hold some dinosaur fossils. I doubt that I'll have any luck finding anything, but the solitude should be nice for a change. It looks as though the weather might not be nice, but hiking while it's heavily overcast and snowing is one of my favorite things to do.

I've been working overtime at work each day since last Monday, so not much else has been going on. I stayed home nearly all of this past weekend and finished a book that I started the week before. The cold weather has kept me cooped up in the house for too long. I haven't even started up my truck for two weeks--it's sitting in the driveway with the two spare tires still on the rear, but the two new tires should be arriving from SLC tomorrow.

Friday is going to be a busy day. I'm working in the office all day, then I plan on doing some shopping and geocaching around Provo, then Traci and I are going to my company's "holiday" party in the evening. I think that on Saturday I'll be replacing the kitchen faucet, since the ancient faucet in there is leaking pretty badly. I always have bad luck when it comes to plumbing, so I expect that project to take me all day, if not part of Sunday as well.