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Marissa is running around the house wearing a pair of her mother’s earmuffs yelling “19, 19 come in! Over! Can you bead me?”

I bought a used Xbox last September to use as a media center and game console. Since then I’ve bought a few used games to go along with it, including a couple for my wife. She was hesitant to let me get the console because she worried it would monopolize my time. It has’t so far… I’m not a hardcore gamer and I doubt I ever will be, especially since I can only afford to buy used consoles and games three to five years after they were originally released. However, I have struggled to find a title that Erica really wanted to play. I picked up a copy of one of the Harry Potter games because she is pretty into the Potter thing. She played for a few minutes when I first brought it home, but I don’t think she’s done anything with it since. She’ll watch me play Burnout Revenge and ocassionally race against me, but she’s not really into that either. Frustrating.

Well, score one for the home team, because I have finally found her gaming niche. Last week I picked up a copy of DDR Ultramix and a dance mat for her. She had seen the game in arcades and thought it looked kinda fun, so I started looking for a cheapish way to let her play at home. She was a dancer up through high school, and taught dance for two years at a middle school, and even though playing DDR probably isn’t really “dancing” I thought she would enjoy it. She was excited to open the big box and when she saw what it was she wanted to plug it in and try it out. Since then she has spent a few minutes playing almost every day and is getting pretty darn good at it. I’ve finally found a game that she will actually put into the Xbox and play all by herself. Woohoo!! A gamer is born.

Sometimes people get accused of being a little too dedicated to their dogs, well I can tell you it is nothing compared to how horse people are with their horses.

I neglected to post about this when it happened because it was a little too real to me. I couldn’t think of a way to write about it. Last August my parents found one of their horses, Echo, with colic late one Sunday night. They called the vet and after trying to help the gelding for a couple hours it was decided that the best thing would be to put him down. My parents have had to deal with this before and as anyone who has lost a pet can tell you it is in many ways similar to losing a member of the family. It’s a little ironic, I think, that in the case of our animals we can legally make a choice for them to end their suffering when a human can’t legally do that himself. I don’t want to get into that discussion, though. As Echo was going down he sort of jerked and started to fall toward my father, who was standing at his side. Dad jumped back as best he could, saving himself from more serious injury, but Echo landed on one of his legs, crushing it beneath him. To make a long story short, Dad spent the next several weeks in bed and now has a titanium rod in his lower leg, along with several screws and pins. At one of his later checkups they found what they thought must have been another break that they missed the first time through. In total I think they found his tibia and fibula had been broken in a total of 6 places.

Dad is highly motivated; about the only time I ever see him sitting still is when he is reading to his grandkids, and as soon as he had the go ahead from the doctors he was back at his day job and working almost as hard as ever around their big house and outside with the livestock. He has a bit of a limp still and it’s kinda fun to watch him hobbling around the pasture and training areas working with the horses.

Well, as fate would have it, yesterday afternoon Mom and Dad were out working with their youngest mare, Moonlight, who is newly trained. They’d worked her around the training area for awhile, taking turns riding. When it was time to quit for the day, Dad said he’d ride her out of the training area and back to where they’d remove the saddle and brush her down. From what Mom has been able to piece together, they must have brushed past a tree branch that rubbed along the outside of Dad’s nylon coat. That sound likely spooked Moonlight, who reacted as immature horses do by preparing to bolt. Dad reacted to this by tightening up on the reins and gripping with his knees, which spooked Moonlight even more and she managed to shake him loose. He hit the ground on his lower back, but seemed to be ok. Mom caught Moonlight before she could do any more damage and led her away safely, then came back to Dad. By that time he was starting to get himself up off the ground, so they both thought he was all right. As they were putting the tack away, Dad seemed a little confused as to what had just happened. They went inside and got Dad an ice pack for his back. He still couldn’t keep straight in his mind exactly what had happened outside, including which horse he had been riding and whether or not he had fallen off. He went upstairs and lay on the bed for about 20 minutes, then told Mom he was feeling really dizzy. He blacked out for a few seconds and when he came around Mom asked if she should call an ambulance. He said yes and she turned to the phone and dialed 911. When she hung up she told Dad the ambulance was on its way and he asked, “Why did you call an ambulance?” Obviously not entirely there. When the paramedics arrived, they found his blood pressure was only 48 over 24 and he had a large hematoma on his back and buttocks. They ran him to the closest hospital and tried to get him stabilized, but couldn’t seem to keep his pressure up for very long and they couldn’t get the bleeding under the skin to stop. They did CAT scans and other tests and couldn’t find any organ or bone damage. My mom called me last night about 7 and told me they were moving him to the regional hospital in Provo for further checks and possible surgery.

She called this morning and let me know that he is looking much better. She spent the night there with him. He’s in the Critical Care department at the moment, so no visitors and no gifts, but he has been out of bed a bit and went to the bathroom on his own, so things are progressing nicely. They didn’t operate overnight, but he may require a blood transfusion at some point today.

It’s a bit of a shock to realize that your parents are getting older, but it has happened to me twice in the past six months. My Dad is in better shape than just about any of his kids.We celebrated his 60th birthday with a big party a few days before Christmas. It was the first time the whole family had been in the same place in more than a year. Dad handled it all with his trademark humility and total selflessness. He is a very quiet guy, but full of honor and courage. I love you, Dad. Get well soon!

It’s been unusually cold here the past week or so, on theorder of 20 to 30 degrees colder then normal. In the morning when I get up to go to work it has been at or below zero degrees fahrenheit. Of course in some parts of the country that is completely normal and they have learned to deal with it, but around here it’s something we don’t experience very often. I’ve learned a new way to tell how cold it is without looking at the thermometer: when I walk from the front door to the truck parked along the curb, if the hair in my nostrils freezes with the first breath of air and then crackles when I wiggle my nose, then the temperature is between -5 and +1 degrees. It’s kinda neat.

I neglected to followup my previous mention of J-Dawgs hot dog stand after the kids and I visited it last week. We shared a polish sausage with sour kraut and J-Dawgs special sauce. Wow. All the hype I had heard at work was spot on. It was a very special hot dog. They keep the dogs hot in water, just like every other place, but then when you order they make a series of diagonal cuts all down the length of the dog and throw it on the grill. The cuts open it up to the heat of the grill and it ends up slightly blackened in some areas and piping hot. Then the place it in a fresh, slightly toasted bun and top it to your liking. I asked what was good and the guy recommended the kraut and sauce. It really was an excellent hot dog. The sauce gets down in those cuts so you get a perfect belnd of sausage and sauce in every bite. Even my kids (3 and 6) liked the kraut with that yummy, sweet and slightly spicy sauce.

When Erica came home from work Saturday and asked what was for lunch I told her I wanted to hit J-Dawgs again and she seemed skeptical at first but agreed. She and Jonathan waited in the car while Marissa and I got the meal. I got two polish with kraut and sauce again, cause I knew the kids would like it and I wanted to see what Erica thought of it. She asked what the white stuff was (she had heard of sour kraut but never eaten it I guess) and when I told her she said the kids wouldn’t eat it. I told her they had liked it before and she was surprised. She had a couple bites of hers and turned to me and said “This is really good!” That’s her ultimate seal of approval.

So, if you’re ever in the vicinity of campus and feeling peckish, I highly recommend a visit to J-Dawgs. Good eats.

We saw The Illusionist Saturday night, courtesy of Netflix. I think we did ourselves a bit of a disservice by having seen The Prestige, which was the other period magician themed movie this year, in the theater a couple of months ago. I have a nagging feeling that The Illusionist was a better movie, but The Prestige packed more of a punch and so I think I liked it more. They’re both worthy of a second viewing in a couple of months, I think, maybe The Illusionist first and then The Prestige.

In other movie related news, I bought a used copy of  Annette Insdorf’s book Double Lives, Second Chances: The Films of Krysztof Kieslowski and I am about to embark on reading it and watching his work that is available on DVD as I read through the book. It will be my third viewing of The Decalogue, my second of The Double Life of Veronique and my fourth or fifth of The Three Colors Trilogy. I’ll also finally get to see a few of his earlier pieces that are finally available from Netflix. Kieslowski’s method really resonates with me even though some of his themes are pretty foreign to my experience. I’ll try to report back here on what I learn from the book and watching the films again.

Had to come to the office at about 5:30 this morning to kick a server in the chops. It has been snowing all night and the roads are powdery and white. I saw just one public snowplow on the way in, though the commercial guys were zipping around doing parking lots all over the place. Nice to know that once people manage to slide off the road every thirty feet on the way in at least they’ll have a clean place to park when they get to work.

Last fall a new pizza place opened in Orem near where I used to work. My brother came in to work one day raving about the 25 cent slice at Wooden House Pizza. I guess that was their grand opening special. We went to try it a couple weeks later. It was sort of a large hole in the wall.. decorated on a small budget and run by a BYU student who just liked good pizza. He had a real wood burning oven and made each pie by hand. Quite authentic. He had some great combinations of toppings on the menu too, but I think my favorite was the margherita: tomato sauce, basil and mozarella, just like in Napoli. Yum.

Well, like most good, independent dining spots in this area, Wooden House has gone the way of all the earth. I’m sure the owner thought he had picked a pretty good location, basically right between the two major colleges in the area, but I think what they really did was put the place outside the frequented area of both student bodies, and, frankly, the look of the place probably turned away many of the “grown-ups” who might have really liked his product.

Fortunately, though, there seems to be another real pizzeria opening soon in Salt Lake City. Settebello Pizzeria from Henderson, Nevada is rumored to be opening a store in downtown SLC next week. We’ll be there.

I promise this goes somewhere:

The other day I tried out a new restaurant called “Hot Dog King.” It opened a couple months ago in south Orem on State Street. I drive by there every day and I like a good dog so I figured I better try it. As it turns out they have something like 36 different dogs on the menu and cover more or less the whole world. I had a Chicago Dog. It was really good. So if you’re in that area and you like dogs, give em a shot. It’s on the west side of State at about 1700 south. Terrible location, so like every other good restaurant in Utah Valley, they’ll probably not last long.

Convolution number one: I was talking about “Hot Dog King” at work and one of the guys asked if it was as good as “J-Dawgs.” “J-Dawgs?”, I repeated. Apparently, it’s a hot dog stand just south of BYU campus. It was started as an entrepenurial project by a college of business student and ended up doing so well that he not only won the prize offered by the college but dropped out of school to run his business. I had never heard of it but everybody in the office says the dogs are simple but excellent. I immediately went to google.

Convolution number two: One of the google results was a blog that mentioned a visit to “J-Dawgs.” I read the article and then glanced at the author’s picture that was featured at the top of the page. She looked familiar but I couldn’t place her face. After clicking through a couple other entries on the blog I realized that the author is someone who lived in our neighborhood before we moved to our house last May. I had known her for several years.

Covolution number three: I didn’t recognize my old neighbor because when I knew her she didn’t usually look much like the picture on her site. She also didn’t talk at all like the way she wrote on her blog. It dawned on me again just what a powerful tool the web is for presenting to people what you want them to see. My neighbor has crafted an image of herself that is much more appealing and professional than the impression I had of her from being her neighbor for a few years. That’s not to say that she was appealing or professional in person, but the blog presented her the way a resume would. Many of her entries were about subjects in relation to her occupation, with a few personal blurbs thrown in for flavor, and most of these were written in a style similar to her professional entries. The same goes for a business with a website. Even the tiniest, low budget operation can look like a big player if they present themselves correctly on the web, and of course if you can back up your image with good service or products then you’re probably one your way to becoming a big player.

Convolution number four: My neighbor’s blog linked to that of someone my wife and I knew in high school… in fact he asked my wife out on her first date, and has become a bit of an in-joke because she had a terrible time. Small world, isn’t it?

It’s not a New Year’s Resolution, because I have been telling myself I should be writing more on this site for months, but I am going to post more frequently. I think it’s about time for a redesign as well… gotta clean this sucker up a bit. It’s busy. Too busy.

Back soon.