waterskiing

April and I got to test our waterskiing skills last night at Utah Lake. It'd been a couple years for me and a few more for her, but we're still the rockin' waterskiers we grew up as. (We started skiing doubles at 11 and slalom at 14?15?). After I got a couple of good runs in I gave the wakeboard a shot. I got up on my fourth try, but biffed it on my way out of the wake. I have no idea how people do flips on those. The HB did some skiing too, but most impressive was that his dad, who's in his 60's got up on skis too! I hope I can still waterski when I'm over 60!

last chance for dutch oven rant

The HB wants to buy a dutch oven so this is my last chance to rant about them. I know I’ll have one soon, and I’ll enjoy it too (well not cleaning it and lugging it), but I just have to express how dumbfounded I am over their popularity. I grew up camping in Montana. Sometimes we’d catch fish and eat them for dinner. Most of my camp dinners these days trade off between some type of burrito and some type of foil dinner including meat and vegetables. I guess it could get boring considering that I’ve been going camping about once every three weeks the last couple of months, but it doesn’t. It seems to me we always have good food camping, we buy snacks that we normally wouldn’t like chips and keeblers. We bring fresh fruit and make our foil dinners with fresh vegetables. Sometimes we’ll bring homemade cookies and one time we heated a pie in our camp oven. So tell me, what is all the rage over dutch ovens?

I don’t have anything against dutch ovens, I’m sure they do make great cobbler, great lasagna, etc. My point is not that they’re bad, but that they’re not the end all. Many Utahns seem to believe that it’s a fact you can’t have a good camp meal without a dutch oven. They rave about their recipes like most men would about sexual conquests. I believe that these people are not true campers. Campers like good food, but dutch ovens are made for day-trips, for big dinners with big families that require huge amounts of preparation time. Overnight campers and multiple night campers may like the idea of the dutch oven, but not the reality of it. Frequent campers would dismiss it as a burden to their ability to impulsively depart for a trip.

Campers embrace the idea of cooking over the coals. Why not make a cobbler in a disposable tin foil pan and cook that on the coals? Is the dutch oven so superior? I just don’t understand what all the rage is in Utah over dutch ovens. I’m not saying they’re bad; I just don’t know what they’ve got on campfires.

kissing teens

My office at work is on the ground level. There's a large and open window well sort of in front of my windows that faces the street. Out of the corner of my eye is a bus stop, a little roofed structure, for the Park City bus. Recently there were 2 teenagers sitting behind the bus stop, on the grass, smoking cigarettes, dressed in all black, kissing, laying on the grass together, rolling on top of each other. Four of us watched from the office window, some just entertained, one guy, commenting on how upset their parents would be if they knew. But me, I thought the whole thing was sweet.

There are so many different ways of looking at love. The HB and I went to see the movie Paris Je T’aime on Monday. While we were sitting in the parking lot, windows down, eating our dinner, a patron of the nearby outdoor pub walked over to a car parked a couple over from us and proceeded to urinate on it. He returned to the pub and two more people, a male and a female walked over to the same car and urinated on it. It was strange because I wasn’t disgusted, I just thought it was strange and wondered why they were doing it. The movie was refreshing, I especially loved the segment by Alfonso Cuaron. Afterwards it seemed natural that those people would urinate on that car like they did—not because it’s acceptable—but because the world is full of surprises, it’s full of people doing things they wouldn’t normally do, it’s full of people falling in love with the wrong person, or making an unlikely match. And that makes me happy.

Beats per minute

Mine is 44. I went to the insta care on Saturday morning and my heart rate and blood pressure were taken. I like to think that I'm pretty healthy because I like to be active, despite my penchant for cookies and ice cream. I knew my heart rate was low but this time it actually set off an alarm. The nurse looked at me kind of odd and remarked how low that was. I responded "I work out a lot" to which he said "I've only seen a rate this low once before and that was a 100-year-old man--my heart rate is 58." So then I felt kind of weird. Then the doctor came in and made a similar comment, listened with his stethoscope and said "yeah, it kind of just beats every once in a while." No wonder I'm always so cold. No wonder sometimes at night I feel like my legs might fall off--blood must circulate so slowly to them.

April gave me a massage on Thursday night. I have been needing one so bad, it felt soooo good. Thank you April! She works up at the Sundance resort spa and is the best massuese ever.