This has puzzled me for quite some time:

Why is Price City's dog license tag shaped like a cat? It's either pure genius, or pure stupidity. Knowing the city, I'm leaning toward the latter.

I'd planned on spending the past weekend doing some odd jobs around the house and yard, but on Friday evening I got a call from a friend who lives near SLC who needed some help. He'd done a construction job in Price a while back, and some stuff got left behind on the job site that needed to be cleaned up. He offered to pay me and Mark to clean it up, so that's what we did on Saturday and Sunday. We hauled off roughly 30,000 pounds of bagged sand and bentonite, about a dozen wooden pallets, and a couple hundred feet of plastic tubing. I don't think I've ever done so much manual labor in my life, and my entire body was sore up until yesterday. We spent about seven hours working, and made five trips to the landfill with both our trucks. I made more than I normally make in a day at my regular job, so it was worth it, and the money will probably go toward a couple more camping trips this year.

I wanted to go camping this weekend since it's Labor Day weekend and there's no school or work on Monday, but the weather will be a little on the hot side, and we'd have to go alone because my sister and her family can't come, so we'll do it another weekend. I'm going for a short hike on Saturday. I'm really in the mood for a hike, and I'm sure Torrey would like to go for another trip as well. I'm planning on starting near Buckhorn Reservoir and hiking through a wash up the western slope of Cedar Mountain, then I'll cut across the rough sandstone/conglomerate for a short distance to another wash and hike back down to the car. There's a small spot about halfway through the hike that, judging from Google Earth, looks to be relatively lush and green for being in the middle of the desert. I've hiked just a very short distance up one of the washes before when I found this cache near some rock art and a dinosaur skeleton. The wash bottoms were either gravelly and sandy, or solid rock, so either way the recent rain shouldn't make it too difficult to hike through.

Recovering from a long weekend is always tough for me. I was camping Thursday through Sunday, and I had Monday off work too, and I still haven't unloaded the camping gear from the truck. The trip to Potter's Ponds was about the same as usual, but fewer people showed up this year. Sam and Mark couldn't make it, and a few other people who I expected to show up didn't.

The forest ranger told us on Friday morning that there had been a bear in our campsite four weeks earlier, so after that we wouldn't let Michael and Bradley play outside without very close supervision. Before anybody else showed up for the get-together, we took a drive to find some caches and to gawk at the place where they're drilling into the Crandall Canyon mine to look for signs of the trapped miners. We couldn't get within a mile of the drilling site, but we got close enough to check it out with binoculars and to take a few pictures. We turned in relatively early that night, and right before bed I walked out behind the trailer to take a whiz and saw the light from my headlamp reflecting back at me from two eyes in the trees. I ran back inside the trailer, with my belt still unbuckled, to grab my 4D Maglite and cautiously went back outside to find out it was only a deer.

We went for a drive with John and Julia up to Skyline Drive on Saturday, found a few caches, then returned to camp to do the poker run and potluck dinner. Traci and I stayed up 'til 1:30 in the morning with the rest of the "rowdier" crowd around the campfire.

We hid a new geocache with some friends on Sunday morning, then packed up and headed home. We unloaded only what was absolutely necessary, and I have simply been relaxing ever since. Traci started the fall session of preschool yesterday, and Michael started first grade today. I worked today, but luckily I finished the most difficult project of the year last week, so today was relatively calm. I'm going into the office for lunch with my team on Thursday, but other than that I've got no solid plans for the rest of the year (for once). I may go camping on Labor Day weekend, but that will depend on the weather. I'm hoping for cooler weather so we can hit the Swell in a couple of weeks, but it's looking doubtful.

I spent the last week without the use of my Visa check card, and it was such a pain. I went to my credit union last week to order a new check card because the magnetic strip on my old one was worn out and wouldn't read at the DMV office earlier that day. They ordered me a new card, but the lady also changed the expiration date in the computer because my old card expired shortly anyway. What she didn't realize is that changing the expiration date rendered my old card useless. I never use cash unless absolutely necessary (which turns out being about once or twice a year for me), and I only write checks to pay certain bills that I can't pay online. Using cash and checks all this week turned out to be a huge hassle, but I got a new Visa card today and I'm happy again.

I realized today that I haven't permanently deleted anything from my e-mail since May 2004. I'm still using Outlook Express to check my mail, though someday I'll finally make the switch to Thunderbird. Anyhow, I checked my Deleted Items box today just out of curiosity, and I had 12,985 deleted e-mails in there (105 megabytes worth), all of them spam. To think, I've received nearly 13,000 spam e-mails, and I have yet to use all those weight loss and erectile enhancement drugs that I bought!

Yesterday I finished building some new shelves in the shed that's attached to my garage. They run floor to ceiling, and take up nearly the entire length of one wall. I spent the last three evenings after work building them, and the materials cost about $100, half of which was for just two sheets of 3/4" plywood. Damn, that's expensive stuff. The entire floor of the shed used to be covered in junk that's been stored there for years, making it impossible to even walk in there, but now I've moved about two-thirds of it up off the floor and onto the shelves. I'm usually not very good at carpentry projects, but this one turned out so well that I will probably do the same thing for the garage once the weather is too cold for camping.

Next week is my first camping trip since May, and only the fourth this year. I'd like to go camping every weekend through October after this coming trip, but I'm sure I'll have to spend at least a couple of weekends not camping. I'm really looking forward to going back out near the dinosaur quarry to do some hiking and exploring around the Humbug Canyon area. My sister took this picture of me the last time we were there, but we didn't spend much time there. There are zero geocaches out there past the quarry, and I think spending a weekend looking for somewhere to place a few would do me some good.

Compared to last weekend, I've been lazy all this weekend. I made several trips yesterday to all the hardware stores in town and managed to round up all the parts I need to fix the sprinkler system in the front yard. Most of the system survived this, but I've got to replace 20' of pipe and a lot of tees and elbows and such. I had actually planned on doing the work yesterday, but I thought better of it. Late August will be a better time to plant grass, or maybe sod if I can talk myself into spending that much money, so I might as well not bother with the sprinklers quite yet. Yeah, that's a good reason. It's not because I'm lazy or anything. ;)

I'd planned on hiking to Spanish Fork Peak this weekend with some geocachers, but after last weekend I was just too beat, and I wanted to save my gas money for the Potter's Ponds camping trip coming up in a couple of weeks. I haven't been camping since May, and I'm looking forward to getting back into it this fall.