Drafting out a few words for grandpa’s funeral tomorrow… feel free to ignore. I never felt that I knew Dick very well. Of course, growing up, we didn’t call him that. We always called him Grandpa S. We saw him once every few years, but with a thousand miles between Baton Rouge and Des Moines, I suppose that wasn’t too surprising. While it came 20 years later than I would have liked, I have appreciated being here today and at the visitation yesterday, hearing everyone’s impressions of the man that my grandfather was. ...

I heard from my mom today that my grandfather died this afternoon. It wasn’t a complete shock. He never fully recovered from a stroke a few years ago, was recently suffering bouts of ventricular tachycardia, had just this week been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (which recently claimed Randy Pausch - go watch his “last lecture”), and had signed a DNR order. I never did know my grandfather that well. Of my five grandparents, he was the one whom we visited least while growing up. There’s also the difficulty of understanding someone 50+ years older than you. And his general Norwegian disposition, a silent doer, made it difficult to know what was in his head. I suspect you got to know my grandfather more by working with him than talking to him. ...

May 24: Memorial day weekend is in full swing and there are idiots everywhere. I swear that the older I get, the more I sympathize with my father’s dislike of crowds. We braved a bit of the crowd (keeping in mind that we’re already in the least crowded part of the park) and went up to Floating Island Lake to see if the sandhill cranes were nesting. When we got there, a coyote was crossing behind the lake and the cranes, who were on the shore at the time, were putting on quite a display: loud squawks (or whatever noise cranes make), spread wings, raised heads, etc. Basically, everything a crane can do to tell a coyote to go away… which he did. There weren’t any eggs in the nest yet, so we left and decided to get away from everybody by hiking the Lamar Trail. That was a very nice hike, we only saw one other group of people, but we did see many hawks and bluebirds. We got down to Cache Creek and stayed for a while. The rain didn’t start until we were a mile and a half down the trail home. That would be great, except that it left us another 2 miles back. We did have rain gear, but it isn’t very good and doesn’t breathe well, so we didn’t put it on. Between the lack of rain gear and my putting my hat on the camera, we arrived back to the car tired and soaked, but happy. A wet day of hiking is still better than crowds. ...

May 20: In the morning, we saw a small herd of bighorn sheep near the Yellowstone Picnic Area. Later on, we saw a grizzly bear hanging out in the Lamar Valley: sleeping, grazing and hanging out. Heading back into the cabin for dinner, we talk to our host. He’s going through a nasty divorce which may wind up causing them to lose their business (for reasons I shouldn’t get into). Helpful hint: if you’re going into business with someone, even a spouse, set up an LLC. You don’t want everything to be owned jointly. In the evening we see still more grizzly. It’s apparently a grizzly year - it looks like we’re going to have to cruise the Tower Junction area if we want to see any black bears. On the way home that evening, we saw three moose by the side of the road. I got out and took a few pictures which were (at best) okay given the lack of light. Neater than the pictures though, was hearing them tear off the plants and chewing them. That was very cool. ...

As mentioned previously, K and I have been out on vacation for the past two weeks - no phone (okay, there was voicemail), no email, and really very little in the way of computers. I did take some notes, because, unfortunately, my memory is exactly what it used to be: bad. May 16: An inauspicious start to a vacation. Neither K nor I were particularly in the mood for heading out of town. We were seriously contemplating not going next year and possibly even forgoing the plane fare this year and bailing. I had been putting in too many hours working on a project for work, and K was have some difficult times with her rehab. That said, we dropped of the dogs and headed out to RDU. Unfortunately, the Delta/Northwest merger meant that instead of taking RDU->MSP->BZN flights, we were taking RDU->ATL->MSP->BZN (yes, 3 flights) and upon checking in, it seemed that we were going to be delayed in getting to Atlanta :-( Well, that worked out okay. We got into ATL at 5:30 and our MSP flight left at 6:35. Oh wait, no - it, too, was late and left at 8:00pm. That meant that in spite of the assurances of several Delta and Northwest agents, we landed at MSP at 9:30 - the same time the BZN flight left. Well, it turns out that we weren’t the only ones in that situation (‘and if you ever find yourself in that situation, there’s only one thing you can do: sing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant”’). Delta left 17 of us stranded in MSP, while their computers showed that they were only stranding 3. Delta proposed routing many of us to Salt Lake City (SLC?) where we could catch a flight to BZN in the morning. Of course, unless we were flying first class, we would have to eat the costs of staying in SLC. One woman vociferously complained (though it later turned out that she had already been booked for a morning flight to SLC). When we arrived at SLC, they had hotel and meal vouchers waiting for us (score!). So a night at a very gracious Comfort Suites capped the day. FWIW, on the IT front, the Delta/NW merger has been pathetic - at every point where a user interacts with their computers, they have a front-end which redirects you to the appropriate computer system: Delta or Northwest. It’s no wonder they can’t figure out that they stranded 17 people, they can’t even make good sense of their different flight numbers! May 17: Relatively uneventful. We grabbed the shuttle to the airport. SLC is apparently one of the few airports now invading your privacy by looking at your privates through millimeter radar. They redirected our line through the system where they had you enter the scanner. They proceeded to use the Twister spinners to dictate how you place your hands above your head while performing a pelvic thrust for the sensors, then getting annoyed when you didn’t understand the first time that you should pretend to be flashing teenage school girls in order to get the posture correct. Once it was done, they had to fondle your pocket regions. No, that’s not a euphemism. The wavelength of the radar is apparently too short to penetrate the pockets on (men’s?) pants and they then have a pissy highschool educated TSA weenie with delusions of grandeur frisk your pockets. FWIW, I’m equally pissed at myself that I went through the damn thing. I should have insisted on a pat-down. If someone is going to violate my person, I want to get a good look at ’em while they are doing it. Having the person sit in an anonymous room getting their jollies just isn’t cool. So, once we got through the faux-security checkpoint, we ran into the woman who complained in MSP (and got us free lodging)! We made it to BZN - though our luggage didn’t, rented a RAV4 and went to our hotel. The luggage showed up around 5pm. Lucky for Delta, otherwise, they could have had it delivered to our final destination, Cooke City - 3 hours away. May 18: bought supplies and headed into Yellowstone. We didn’t see much on the drive in and we didn’t go out to the park in the evening: too tired. The beds were great (pillowtop mattresses) and the kitchen was very nice. I wasn’t too sure about having a TV in the room, but having a phone that we could use after hours was nice. May 19: First real day in the Park. We did get a late start in the morning, but the viewing was great. We saw a wolf on the northern ridge above the Lamar valley. People were saying that he was a part of the same group that killed several coyote pups in the valley the night before. We saw a grizzly bear, a coyote, a bald eagle and a golden eagle (on a old kill). That evening we went out again, we saw two grizzly and lots of bison with their young calves, also a very nice scenic view, complete with DRAMATIC LIGHTING. (* all of the images in this series are original jpegs without the color correction, etc. that will be applied later)

K and I just got back from vacation - your regular, intermitant blogging will resume shortly. I don’t think there has been anything new posted since late April. The first couple of weeks of May, I was tied up at work, getting ready for the last two weeks when we were to be in Yellowstone. So, having left Bozeman, MT this morning on a 6am flight, we’re back in NC. I’m sorry for the lack of warning up front, I just hate announcing to the world that I won’t be in town for two weeks. :-)

It’s definitive - we are having a 20th year high school reunion. I’m not entirely certain how I feel about the whole thing. Thinking back, I don’t have too many fond memories of high school. In fairness, I don’t do well with event-type recollection, so I don’t have too many memories in general from that period, but my overall sense is that the past 20 years have been much better than the 3 at CLA. I will admit to a certain morbid curiousity about the reunion and my high school classmates. General predictions: 1) the correlation of popularity to success is less than or equal to zero; 2) while we are all adults and more than twice our age at graduation, cliques will reform immediately at the reunion; 3) people who enjoyed high school will have a better time at the reunion than those who didn’t; and 4) I’m one of, if not the most, liberal members of our . :-) ...

It looks like the average IQ of democratic senators and the average IQ of republican senators have both declined today. Hopefully there will be a 2010 challenger in the PA democratic primaries.

If only we could get Carol Burnett to highlight the plight of the lonely possums on the muppet show. Of course, she would get all interupted by Gonzo’s dance marathon, but hey, rehabbers will take what they can get. K got in a solitary young opossum last night. Sad little girl (the possum, not K… at least to my knowledge). Dehydrated (definitely the possum) and underweight (both actually!). Hopefully she’ll make it (both again): ...

… and he and Tim Berners-Lee want you to stop breaking the Internet. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had several occasions to be invited into someone’s walled garden on the internet. You know the places. Lovely little sites that are entirely self-contained and which you can’t access unless you are a member? In the old days, Compuserve and AOL were the big walled gardens. These days, it’s Facebook and Linked-In. ...