Bodhisattva Path

We planned a trip to Zion. It was somewhat a spur of the moment decision. It was my birthday and my wife wanted to end my streak of crappy birthdays and also it is our tenth wedding anniversary next week. We don't have any money to go back to Hawaii like we wished we would but we figured we needed to go somewhere.

So we looked for cheap hotels online and got a good deal at the Holiday Inn in St. George, UT. We we arrived late to check in they were nice enough to give us the Honeymoon suite at no additional charge. Honeymoon suite means that there is a heart shaped, jetted tub (just like Dumb and Dumber!) and only three walls on the bathroom. Which meant I could look over the glass partition and watch football or the Golden Girls marathon while I was washing my hair.

As if that wasn't enough, we still traveled to Springdale where we ditched our car and headed up the canyon. We started hiking up to Angels Landing but it was very hot and my wife is terrified of heights. So we just headed to the Narrows where hot days are made more enjoyable by hiking through a chilly river.

When you're in Zion you feel like it is impossible to take a good picture because everything is so grand and panoramic that you know you can't capture the whole place in a picture but at the same time it is also difficult to take a bad picture. I did some fancy work with tape on one of these pictures to give you a better idea of what it was like to look all the up from inside the canyon.







It is also hard to go to Zion and not swing by Bryce canyon as well. Our shuttle driver said that Zion is the geographic layer on top of the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon is the geographic layer on top of Zion. I believe the call the whole works The Colorado Plateau.

Bryce is more enjoyable because it is higher in the mountains with cooler temperatures. Viewing points are easy to drive to and pretty astounding. We kept eating crappy food for the sake of saving time and my wife said she didn't feel like hiking down into the canyon but I couldn't help myself and told her I would just run down a trail a little ways. But that is a hard thing to do at Bryce. It just gets prettier and prettier the deeper you go and you can't stop. You always want to know what's around the next corner.







Needless to say, it was my best birthday in years and years. I missed my kids but they didn't seem like they were in any hurry to get back home. They like it at grandma's house. I also took a picture of EVERY lizard I saw for Ethan, no matter how tiny.

This Is The Real Me, Ladies. You Won't Find No Shelter Here.

Today we were working at a giant scrap-booking compound in Provo. When we finished, we had some big cardboard boxes that needed to be put in the trash. We couldn't find a dumpster around and the truck was stuffed full so we put the garbage on the roof of the camper shell and drove down the road in search of a trash receptacle.

We spotted one behind a dance studio and as we pulled into the parking lot we noticed two girls sitting near the street. They were staring at us and only stared harder as we approached. When we past within a few feet of them, they were still staring and their faces lit up with smiles. I waved at them.

My coworker said, "Why did you wave at them? And why were they smiling at us like that? Because we're two dudes driving around together in a tiny truck? We look gay?"

I said, "Yeah. That was my sexual-harassment wave. Sometimes the only way to convince girls that you're not gay is to sexually harrass them."



Earlier, when we were eating lunch I asked him, "Did you notice that nearly every girl that works in that scrapbook place is huge and pregnant? Like they have a sign inside that says YOU MUST BE AT LEAST THIS PREGNANT TO APPLY?"

My coworker leaned close and said under his breath, "I probably shouldn't say this in the middle of a crowded restaurant but... it's a different breed of people down in Utah County."

I said, "Yeah, you shouldn't have said that. Some guy is going to jump us in the parking lot, yelling A DIFFERENT BREED WITH SUPER HEARING. KA-POW!" at which point I threw a punch into the empty air before me.

Girls in White Dresses with Blue Satin Sashes

We were doing some work at a university. We sat down on a grassy hill in front of our parked cars to take a break at about 9 am. We were eating some snacks under some trees that grew these puffy pods on them. My coworker was breaking the pods open and found they had things that looked like peas inside of them. He started bouncing the peas off the windshields of our cars and soon started giggling as he attempted to do complicated bounces off of several cars.

He said, "I don't know why I get such a kick out of this but I do."

I said, "That's good. It's important to have small things in your life that make you really happy. Five years from now, when your wife hates you and you're going through an awful divorce, it will seem like the world is ending but you can just decide to go outside and bounce some peas off your windshield and then things won't seem quite as bad anymore."

Carry Stress In The Jaw

M: "Look at K, she has a butt-chin."

K: "No, I don't."

M: "You totally have a butt-chin."

K: "Well, you have the same butt-chin that I do except yours is hairy."

Me: "Your chin is a Mel-Gibson-butt-chin."

M: "There's nothing wrong with being told you look like Mel Gibson."

Me: "But there is something wrong with being told you look like you have Mel Gibson's butt on your face."

Problem Free Philosophy

"I know we need to replace at least one and probably two of these but we'll take four, just in case."

"Yes. It's good to be prepared. They sing a song about it in The Lion King."

"I only remember the one, I Just Can't Wait To Be King."

"That's the Good-Guy song. The Bad-Guy song is Be Prepared. I suppose that might send a crossed message though: Having the good guys sing a song how great it will be to become king so you can boss everyone around and then have the bad guys sing a song about the importance of being prepared. It's confusing. Who do you listen to?"