We went to Lake Powell last week, mostly to say that we went... It was beautiful, but very hot.
A cool gas station on the way there: We got a camping spot in Halls Crossing, where we went swimming and spent the night. The water wasn't so great there. It was a little dirty and very wavy, because of all the boats so close to the shore. The next day we went to Bull Frog, and the water was ten times better there. It was clean and the bottom wasn't muddy as in Halls Crossing. To get to Halls Crossing we needed to board the ferry, which comes every two hours. We were lucky enough that both times, when going there and when coming back, we got there just a few minutes before boarding time. But since Bull Frog was so much nicer, it's not really worth the trouble or the money to go to Halls. Now I know for the next time.
The laundry room, along with the weedpatch and the shed (former dog's house), was the ugliest part of the house. The walls had like three or different colors. The floor was a horrible, dirty, ripped green linoleum. It was so ugly that we tried to improve it by covering it with colorful rugs, but it didn't really work. We've been working on it for a year now. First, we painted the ceiling white and tried to white wash the walls, but after three coats, it still looked bad. We also changed the switch board. This summer we decided to change the floor. Meg found some tiles that she liked, and as soon as we had a free weekend we retiled. We didn't want to rent a wetsaw, so we marked the tiles that needed cuting and took them to a tiles place in downtown Ogden. It was cheaper and faster than doing it ourselves. Not to mention better done, since some of the cuts were quite tricky. The tiling itself was pretty easy and quick. Megan then painted the room a dark yellow and we put floor boards. The room looks so good that it feels like it's an indoors part of the house now!
One of the ugliest features of our house, when we moved in, was a patch of dirt between our two driveways. Now one the ugliest one is Manuel.
Anyway, this patch would only grow weeds, and nothing else. We tried watering and doing all we could (we didn't know how to do much back then), and all we got were more and more weeds.
We had to keep looking at that ugly thing for the rest of the summer. We tried to fix its appearance a little bit by planting a couple of cherry trees, but it didn't help much. Then the snow came and covered it all. It was wonderful.
But when the snow melted, we were faced with that horrible thing we could only call "The Weed Patch."
We finally decided to do something about it, and resolved to cover it with rocks and things like that. We weren't sure what we wanted to do, but the first step was to get rid of the top soil. We wanted to rent a sod cutter, but it was big, and we don't have a truck. So, one day when it was raining, I thought that the ground might be soft enough, and started shoveling. It was a lot of work and it took three days, but it wasn't as bad as I thought.
We ended up putting a bunch of rocks, pavers, and mulch to cover all that indecent weedness that knew nothing of boundaries. This time we did need to borrow a truck. Fortunately, one of our neighbors was interested in some of the soil I shoveled off, so we traded: dirt for a truck. Awesome deal if there's ever been one.
There's a hole in the wall between our hall and living room. When we first moved into the house, it had an awkward looking telephone holder that was too small to hold any phone book (that we've ever seen), as well as an ugly box phone jack.
Our first project was to rip off the ugly holder and painted the walls of the hole the same color as the living room walls. But we always said that we would do something else with it.
Megan found some cool looking mini tiles at Home Depot and decided to try something with them, and the result looks as good as: -- pizza with five meat toppings and anchovies (according to Manuel) -- Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line (according to Megan) -- when all the evil from earth dissapears and only cool, hip Mormons will remain (according to cool, hip Mormons) -- etc. (sorry, we couldn't agree on just one simile).
Manuel replaced the phone jack, which has a 0.5 level of difficulty (out of 100.5), but he's still very proud of it...
Uncle Tom's Cabin is one of my all-time favorites. It's beautifully written, and the characters are so well developed that you really feel for them when something bad happen--and a lot of bad things happen to them. It is true that the book is somewhat melodramatic (it was published serially in the time, and those kinds of publications could be compared to the soap operas of our time), and the author's agenda is quite clear. She portraits the slave in a (maybe purposely?) naive way, and the stereotypes portrayed could make cringe any modern reader. But overall is an amazing book, and a must read for every breathing being!
This book was considered the cause of the civil war because of its secessionist views, and although is was highly respected in the North, I was surprised to find out that in the South there was a whole movement of so called anti-Tom literature. Some of the most popular ones were The Planter's Northern Bride, by Caroline Lee Hentz, and The Sword and the Distaff, by William Gilmore Simms. The Planter's Northern Bride is easily available and quite cheap, but the only copy of The Sword and the Distaff is priced at almost $300.00 on Amazon.
I found a couple of links to the complete texts (here and here), though, and they are a very curious read. It's interesting to see the perspective of the Southerners of the time regarding slavery. These authors argue that the slaves were very happy in the plantations, and that if there was any abuse against slaves, it was caused by those masters who were also abusive towards their children. Slaves then equaled children, and in the authors' minds, that was perfectly fine. They say that slaves would rather die than leave their masters, and that if a slave ever left the plantations to go to the North, it was because "they have most of them been made disaffected by the influence of others-- tempted by promises which are seldom fulfilled."
As any decently written book does, the anti-Tom books give us a very clear perspective of a section of the population's opinion at the time, and how hard they tried to justify an action as horrible as owning slaves.
Last Thursday was our last day of school. We had to go to school on Friday, but it was mostly to box our things and to get our classrooms ready for summer school.
I was offered a different classroom. One with a door and at least one real wall. The teacher in that classroom was going to leave, because she's an elementary teacher, and with our school changing to junior high (currently it's a middle school) there will be no more sixth graders, and, therefore, the school has no use for elementary teachers anymore. Thing is, the principal decided not to give me that classroom, but one of the old science rooms instead (the science teachers are getting brand new classrooms with computers in each desk), and it's like ten times better than the classroom I wanted. It has two doors that lead outside, a door to enter my classroom from the hall (I didn't have one of those this year, which can be extremely distracting in a middle school), four real walls instead of crappy panels, and a walk in closet!
With my Language Arts class we made a movie. We were supposed to make three, but they were so stupid the last days of school that it was like trying to teach cats how to dance the Can Can.
I also made a video for the end of year assembly (the teacher in charge asked us to please share anything, because she didn't have enough material). It took me a long time to film and edit this, and at the last minute she decided to ask the nerds in the computer department to just show two million pictures with background music instead.
Warning: this might be considered an extremelly geeky entry.
Last Friday we went to see The Cure with Megan, Matias, and Emily. It was pretty good. I didn't like it as much as the Curiosa festival they did a couple years ago at Usana, but it was pretty good. The concert lasted three hours, and by the end Robert Smith said something like "Sorry, my voice is gone." It's hard to tell. I've never been able to understand him...
I haven't followed the band for a while, and the first thing I noticed when the concert started was that there was a different guitar player, that he was bald and that he was wearing shiny leather pants, high heels boots, and a fish net shirt. There was no keyboard, just bass, drums, guitar (the bald guy), and the second guitar by Robert Smith. The instrumentation made it so the songs sounded pretty similar to each other, and the songs from the techno era, such as "The Walk," sounded kind of weird. It was also somewhat disappointing that Robert was changing the older songs' melody, and in some of them he didn't even seem to be trying to get them right.
Overall the concert was really good. Not too many new songs, which was good. It was a pleasant surprise that they played songs from the first and second album (Boys Don't Cry, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing an Arab, Jumping Someone Else's Train, etc.).
After I got home, I did some research, and I figured out that the bald guy was the old guitar player, Porl Thompson. I always thought that the good Cure albums (Disintegration, Wish, etc.) were good thanks to him, but now he's back, and their new songs still suck. I'm confused now.
I tried to record the concert, but it was so loud that the recording was ruined, even when I was holding my thumb to the microphone. But I did a quick search on YouTube and found a bunch of videos of the concert. This is my favorite. It isn't the complete song, but you can see the bald guy with the high heels pretty clearly:
A couple of weeks ago I received a call from a guy trying to sell me some home owners protection. Apparently we had that for free when we bought the house, but, after a year, you need to renew it and start paying for it. I knew I wouldn’t get along with this guy when he opened with “well, we sent you a renewal letter a while ago, and we still haven’t received an answer. What’s up with that?” I asked him what was he talking about, and he briefly explained it, which still left me with a lot of questions. “So, is this like insurance?” I asked, to what he answered, very, very slowly, and with a very exaggerated intonation “Well, this is called hoooome-ooow-nerrrss-proo-teeeeeec-tion.” After a few more questions, and once I realized that the guy wasn’t going to give me any really useful information, I asked “so, how much is this?” At the time of my question, the guy was explaining me for the fifth time that the protection wasn’t an insurance, and that if you have a car you need to have insurance anyway (I still can’t connect that to his overall speech), and he didn’t like the interruption, so he told me “if you don’t let me finish, sir, I will hang up on you” (!!!!). No need to explain that right after that I had to hang up on him.
After that, I called my loan guy to ask him if that protection was really necessary and/or important, but he was out of town, so I left a message and a week later he called back and left a message on my phone that went something like this “Hello Manuel, this is *so and so* returning your call. I just came back to town. We were in Disneyland. We had a wonderful time, by the way. Please call me back to …”
After thinking it through, I don’t think I’m getting the home owners protection.
Last Saturday was pretty interesting. Megan ran her half marathon, and she did it within her goal time of two hours (her time was 1:59!). Later that day we went to the Living Traditions festival in Salt Lake. We didn’t see much, because we got there at 7:00 pm, but we got to see “Son de Madera,” a cool Mexican band that played some kind of traditional music (I don’t know what’s called, but it sounds just like the music from the movie Frida). They were really good.
At 8:00, once they were done, we wanted to go to see the mariachi band playing in the other stage, but nobody else wanted to go, and we didn’t want to separate, so we just stayed and saw the Irish band that was playing there. I wanted to post a video of them, just to make Geoffrey jealous (the band consisted of two guys, one playing the guitar, and one playing the concertina, and he was really good), but I didn't bring my camera, and couldn't find it on you tube. Dang it.
Well, people may know O-Town for the crime (our own Ogden Trece Gang made it to a National Geographic show. Yeeeh!), for our crazy people, because the police here are actually busy, etc. But all is not bad in Ogden. Things are clearing up. We have indoor sky diving and surfing now. How many other towns can claim that, huh??
But besides that, Ogden is a town with a lot of history, and the Union Station is an example of the cool architecture that can be found here. And if you go to downtown, east of Washington Boulevard, you'll see the coolest houses and buildings. I tell you, one day we'll end up there! What I like the most about these houses is that they have a lot of personality. They are not those cookie-cutter new houses that you see popping everywhere now. A few blocks from our house there is a whole neighborhood of new mansions, they are huge, but they all look pretty much the same. I probably wouldn't pass the opportunity to live in one of those, though :), but if I had to choose, that Russian looking house up there looks pretty awesome to me...
