Muhlesteins

A new blog again

2006-05-03T09:49:00.000-06:00

Well, I explained why over on the new blog, but http://muhlesteins.com is going to have to change. Oh well.

The old Muhlesteins.com

2005-11-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

I got the old muhlesteins.com hosted on a virtual server yesterday. I'll keep this content here for a little while until I figure out how to transfer it over there. http://muhlesteins.com

Quote of the Day

2005-11-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

Dad: "Scott, you got your feet from me."
Dad: "Dallin, you got your feet from Mom."
Dallin: "No Daddy, we got our feet from Jesus."

The Harvest Festival

2005-11-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

We had a little Pre-Halloween party with the ward last week. They really did a pretty good job of providing entertainment for all involved. All the kids dressed up in there Halloween costumes. The youth had various activities that you could rotate through. For the adults, there was a Pie contest and a pumpkin carving contest.

Gayla spent all day trying to re-produce an apple pie from a recipe contributed to the Relief Society cookbook by Great Grandma Harvey. She ended up making three different pies before she was happy with one. She doesn't like nutmeg so the pie she settled on was a combination of Gayla's mom's apple filling and the cream part of Grandma's pie.

Meanwhile, I bought a pumpkin carving kit on the way home from work. I'm not artistic enough to draw anything competitive. We thought if it was worth taking a pumpkin we might as well make it look good. It took me about an hour to cut all the little patterns out with the kit's little tiny knife.

The boys really enjoyed all the different events. They had a donut eating contest. Tim just picked off his donuts with his hands. Scott and Dallin attempted for a little while but eventually, they just ate the donuts too. At another stop they got to do a cakewalk where everyone got a cupcake. There was a fishing pond and also a room with a movie playing.

The highlight of the kids evening was probably when we went through the spook ally though. Scott says he likes to be scared but when we went through I think he was having second thoughts. There was this one place where there was a hand in a candy bowl. Scott wouldn't take any of that candy. At another place where you had to go through a little box into the next room. They let Scott go around. Finally, there was a young man laying on some chairs not moving. He never did move but you thought he was going to. Then, on the other side where you weren't looking, there was somebody that sat up and said boo. Scott started to cry at that point. He survived though.

They had a group of guys all taste each of the pies. They came to a consensus that Gayla's pie was the best. (It really was pretty good.) For winning the pie contest we got free movie tickets with free babysitting by the young women. Then they had everyone vote on the pumpkin contest. There was some confusion about which numbers went to which pumpkins, and Gayla voted for our pumpkin number once for each of us. (I put in a vote too unknowing that Gayla had already done it.) Since the mixup of numbers though, we don't really know who's pumpkins all the votes counted for. Somehow, we still won the pumpkin contest by two votes. We already had free movie tickets though so we gave the new tickets to the 2nd place pumpkin.

Anyhow, we're glad the whole Halloween thing is done now. The kids ate all their candy by the day after so we don't have to deal with hyper kids any longer.

My Halloween Spam Index

2005-10-31T14:13:00.000-07:00

Well, Happy Halloween everyone. Gmail deletes my spam after 30 days be default. So rather than me ever peeking in there, I just let it all pile up. I like to watch the number to see if I'm getting more or less Spam than the previous 30 day window. It's been up to 705 at one point. Since then I changed some mail forwarding rules and am bouncing more mail (meaning it never gets to me) than I used to.

Anyhow, I thought today's index was appropriate being Halloween and all.

You all better buy Scott's Star Wars Art

2005-10-28T18:31:00.000-06:00

Scott wants to sell his wonderful Star Wars art on eBay so he can buy some Star Wars toys. You better go place a bid here.

Look what Gayla found

2005-10-19T17:31:00.000-06:00

Gayla was picking grapes and found this nice little guy (or actually it's a female) on the side of our house by the grape arbor

She came and started hitting me after that. I'm not sure what the deal is. Cat spiders are harmless, but you better watch out if Gayla sees one!

Prince of Persia in Flash

2005-10-17T12:02:00.000-06:00

This is one of the coolest things I've seen done over the web. I used to play this game all the time on my Grandmothers old 286. (Thanks Grandma)

House Update

2005-10-16T19:05:00.000-06:00

It's been over a week now, but I forgot to mention we finally got a road built in front of the lot for our new house. Our builders representative said that they got the permits back from the city to start building some of the other homes and we were among the first few to sign up. They expect our permit to come back any time he said. Hopefully we should have a schedule of when they will start and how long it will take within a week or two.

We're not expecting anything much though based on past experience. Perhaps we'll be surprised.

Baby Pop Quiz

2005-10-16T18:52:00.000-06:00

Today during church, I was holding Tim and he fell asleep. I looked down and it occurred to me that he looks a lot like Dallin did at that stage. So today I decided to post the Baby Quiz. Lets see if you can tell which kid is which.

Each picture is either Tim or Dallin. Post your answers in the comments and I'll post results one of these days and let you see how many you got right (or wrong).

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Everyone take a guess!

Edit:Gayla got one of them wrong :D

Why mothers stop breast feeding.

2005-10-16T18:37:00.000-06:00

What's left of Tim's last bottle:

Pretty colors in the mountains.

2005-10-13T13:07:00.000-06:00

Saturday Jed and I rode motorcycles up above Heber. We were at the very top of the mountain if you go up past Tibble Fork in American Fork Canyon. We rode a good 2 1/2 hour loop around some of the peaks up there. We wanted to make sure we got at least one last good trail ride before the beautiful fall colored mountains become winterized and unrideable.

Here are some of those pretty fall colors. We had a great ride. It's worthy to note that whenever I ride with Jed, I don't have to wait for anyone. There was one part where I was ahead of him and got to test out a slippery hill. He had to wait for me to get out of the way for a tiny bit there. There were patches of snow on a lot of the North facing slopes and for some reason, I couldn't seem to get quite enough speed at the bottom to make it up all the way. Jed was sure to get a picture of me pushing my bike up the last part but I'll leave that part to your imagination.

We saw lots of other people (considering the weather) up on top of the mountain. There were a few hunters on horses and a few other people riding bikes. Some of the guys on bikes (coming down the trail) didn't think we could make it up the ice trails but they, having never met us before, were unaware of our history of going places that other people say you can't.

All in all, we had a fun time. Just as we got back to the truck, a few drops of rain started to sprinkle. I suppose our next ride may be down at a little lower elevation.

Finally sold the laptop!

2005-10-05T15:15:00.000-06:00

Yea! Horray! It took a few tries but I finally sold the laptop.

Here is the secret of my success this time over the previous times.

Use the buyer protection tools. This is the most important one I think. eBay has a newly implemented feature that allows you to limit certain buyers out. You can check a few different options like: "Limit buyers in countries I don't ship too." and "Limit buyers with negative feedback.". The most important one, and the one I think saved my Laptop from being bought by a Nigeria Scammer was "Limit buyers who don't have a Paypal account.".

I still got all kinds of offers from scammers who wanted me to ship the laptop to their sister attending College in Nigeria but they couldn't actually click the buy-it-now option.
Use a reserve. A reserve costs 1% of the reserve price but the fee is refunded if the item sells. My reserve price was $13.50 but since the item sold eBay gave it back. This protects you from the next item.
Start the bidding low. The low bid attracts buyers at the start. Once they start competing, the item should go up to a fair value. It's cheaper to start the bid low too. My initial cost was about $5.50 to list the item not counting the reserve fee. If you start the bid higher, the listing cost is higher and it isn't refunded.

Summary:
Listing Fees: $18.90
Final Value Fee: $35.31
Refund Reserve Fee: -$13.50
Total: $40.71

That isn't the real total though. You can't accept more than $500/month with a Paypal account unless you upgrade. Upgraded accounts charge you 2.9% on received money though. We have a new Paypal account that we upgraded (goes to an old bank account) so that we can use it only on large items. That way my current on we can still use as is and not pay 2.9% every time we get money.

Paypal fee: $43.00

So all in all it cost around $83 to sell the laptop. That doesn't count the FooBar first attempt!

Edit: I payed for shipping too, that cost another $63.33 for UPS 3 day Air.

Flat Tires

2005-10-02T08:58:00.000-06:00

For some reason, we can't seem to keep the air in any of our bike tires this summer. When I say any, I really mean ANY too. I'm not sure how they got flat, but at the start of the summer I had to replace both of Gayla's (actually Holly's bike that Gayla is borrowing) tires and one of the kid carrier tires. I have a patch kit too. We bought too tubes and I thought that I'd just use one and patch the other one and then we'd have an extra tube. That worked for a while, but within a week or so, the tire was flat again so I just put the new tube in.

One of our neighbors gave us a bike for Scott to ride. He has a smaller one he learned to ride on but has outgrown it. We'll just save that one for Dallin. It wasn't long after he started riding it around that it had a flat back tire. I think the tire just had too many miles on it. It was quite bald and the tube was pretty thrashed. (He rode it a bit after it was flat.) I bought a new tire and a new tube and fixed that back up.

Then the other day, I had the kid carrier with Dallin and Tim. Scott was riding around with me following to supervise. We rode over by some dirt so Scott could play around on. I didn't notice until a couple days later, but there were little brambles or sticker things that had stuck in the tires. (There were just way too many holes to patch this time.) Gayla went to K-Mart to buy two more tubes for her bike and a new tube for Scott's bike. While replacing those 3 tubes, I noticed that the other tires were flat too. That's right, 6 tires were flat not 3. We didn't go ride bikes that night.

A couple nights later, Gayla bought 3 more tubes, I did the grunt work and we were able to finally ride bikes again.

Well, it's been a few days since we last rode bikes. I wandered by the bikes in the garage and noticed that Gayla's back tire and one of the kid carrier tires are flat again. There were so many stickers in those tires that I was bound to miss one or two. Hopefully I'll get them all this next time around!

Trying Something new with the Laptop

2005-09-23T11:38:00.000-06:00

I decided to try something besides eBay for selling the laptop. For whatever reason, Craigslist.org popped in my head. I was able to list the Laptop and set everything up surprisingly quickly. I didn't even have to create an account. All I had to do was verify my email address. That's pretty cool. We'll see if there are any takers.

Fathers and Sons

2005-09-22T13:29:00.000-06:00

This last weekend I went camping with the boys on our Ward's annual Fathers and Sons campout. Here is us getting ready to leave:

As you can see, we have 3 little boys and a motorcycle in the back. For some reason, Scott wasn't very happy at the moment I took this picture. I think it was taking too long to actually leave or something.

Scott and Dallin and Tim all had a great time camping. They played in the dirt, rode on the motorcycle, and even slept through the night fairly well. We didn't have tables, so it was sort of a problem feeding Tim. I did have his portable chair that is supposed to hang on the edge of a table. I just sat him in that in the back of the truck and it worked ok.

During the night, Tim wasn't very used to having to sleep in a sleeping bag. He kept trying to kick it off of him. Finally, I just gave up and pulled him over by me. He wasn't too bad but I didn't sleep that well. In the morning, Tim woke up first and just sat up and looked around. Probably 5 minutes or so later, he finally starting making these little grunting noises and laughing at himself. Then he went over and trampled over Scott and Dallin until they all got out of bed too.

We had a good time and plan to have many more camping adventures.

I'm beginning to hate eBay

2005-09-21T14:57:00.000-06:00

Well, I decided that I should relist that laptop. Here is the newly listed (and newly ended) item.

Guess what, the outcome was the exact same as last time. Some Nigerian Scammer used the buy-it-now option again. The funny thing is, they used a pretty much canned response exactly the same as the last scammer:

Hello,

Compliment of the season to you. I am Mark Tunnell from Mesquite,USA.But Presently i am leading a conventional church program in London. I saw your item advert on ebay and i'm interested in buying it for my daughter who is studying a Computer Science Course in the University of Lagos (Nigeria) and i will handle the shipment expenses.I will send you my personal fedex account number after the payment so that you can ship the item to her without paying any shipment fee. I will be sending you payment via PayPal,So kindly send me your (PAYPAL EMAIL ADDRESS) so as to immediately make out my payment to you. Make sure you get the package ready for immediate or next day shipment okay?.You can ship the item as soon as you receive the paypal confirmation mail. Expecting your reply so as to immediately make out my payment for this item purchase.Mail me back it's urgent.

Regards
Mark.

So now, I have to get my money back AGAIN. I find it funny that people trying to do this Scam can't come up with something on their own. Heck, if they were going to really try to pay with PayPal, why don't they just not mention their Daughter in Nigeria? I suspect if I were stupid enough to send this guy my paypal address, he'd just send a forged paypal email that appears as if I had received payment. Who knows? Who Cares?

I just want somebody legitimate to bid on the item so I can get rid of it.

The Big Purple Spot

2005-09-18T22:15:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, something happens that is so stupid that you can't help laughing. This time, Gayla couldn't help laughing. I'm sure you'll enjoy too.

At one point or another, every child has one of those stick on basketball hoops. They have great big suction cups on the bottom so that you can slam dunk the foam basketballs and they won't pop off whatever wall or bed they happen to be stuck to at the moment. Well, Scott and Dallin have one of those, but they had pulled it off the bed it was stuck too. Only one of the suction cups came off with the hoop though, the other stayed stuck on the bed.

I thought to myself, those things really do stick pretty good. So I pulled it off myself. The boys and I started to have fun with it. We tried sticking it on the walls, mirrors, whatever. Then I stuck it to my forehead. Wow, that thing could even stay stuck on my forehead pretty well.

Scott and Dallin thought it was really funny to give it a good tug pop it off of my forehead. Well, laugh away, here is the result of our play:

So Today, being Sunday, we had a few things scheduled. First of all, the Ward Secretary called and asked if we could say the opening and closing prayer in church. Next, I had to teach Sunday School. Finally, We were supposed to take family pictures with all Gayla's inlaws after Church. Not a bad day to have a big purple spot on your forehead.

Things turned out ok I guess. I made Gayla run to the store and buy some cover-up stuff. (She didn't have any). Also, not everyone could be there for pictures so we didn't have to worry about that. It'll be interesting to see how many days it takes to get my normal color back.

We rode with Nathan Woods and Ty Davis

2005-09-07T22:40:00.000-06:00

Monday I had the chance to go out on the "Industry Trail Ride". Dad, being heavily involved with all the trails on Blue Mountain, was selected to be the guide for all the riders after the weekends races at Bull Hollow (by Monticello if you don't already know where that is.) Since it was a holiday, we made sure that we could be down there too. Who could pass up an opportunity to go riding with Nathan Woods and Ty Davis. If you don't know those names you better click the links.

Well, things started off fast and slow. We all took off with Dad leading the way and not all the riders ready to go. It's a good thing someone in the rear knew which direction we were heading. Not too far up the first little road Jed hit a big rock and landed on his rear. I saw it. Ty Davis saw it too. Lots of people saw it. I'm sure Jed is excited I remembered to point this out.

A little later, we all waited at the top of the mountain (by the towers if you are familiar with the area.) Dad made me wait for all the people in the rear. I waited and waited and waited. Then I decided to coast back down the hill. I found a few riders 1/2 a mile or so down the hill also waiting. They said they knew where to go and were waiting for someone who had a breakdown. I'm glad they broke down there because we weren't in the middle of the boonies yet. I took off to catch the rest of the crowd.

At the head of the Spring Creek trail I got assigned to wait again. (Good grief I'm missing all the action.) After a bit, the slow crowd all showed up and we started to catch up again. When we found everyone, we started on a new trail. This time the people who were slow riders were separated from the people who were just slow because they were waiting for people. I still had to wait a bit for some of the guys in the rear. It took way too long to get up the hill and I saw some big ruts from all the people spinning around the switch backs. Of course, my trusty CR500 didn't need anyone's help but my throttle hand to get up the hill. I had to help a few people push though and ended up walking up and down the hill a few times.

Finally, over the mountain, past Shooters Rock, and into Robertson pasture, we caught up to Dad (Only because he was waiting though.) I convinced him I had ridden at the back long enough and needed to head on down the trail. So I had the 6 guys with me that didn't need waited for and he stayed and waited for the slow riders. We headed down the Red-Ledges trail and caught up with the slow pack from the first crowd. Avalanches this year created a few places in the trail that most riders aren't used to riding across. One guy got stuck on the wrong side of a tree and had to have a couple guys help lift his bike over to the trail again. Nothing me and the 500 couldn't handle here though.

Here is a picture of most everyone waiting at Indian Creek. The #1 rider is Nathan Woods and the #2 rider is Ty Davis. After catching up to the crowd at Indian Creek, I was finished riding with the slow crowd. They decided A-Riders go down the Indian Creek trail and all the rest go up to Aspen flat directly. I took off with the A-Riders. I must admit I wasn't rubbing my front tire on the back of Ty Davis' but I did keep up and left most of the pack a ways back. We came out the bottom of the trail, rode to the head of the Aspen flat trail and then waited for the rest of the crowd to show up.

The picture here is of Jed and Ty Davis waiting too. After a bit, Dad came riding up and said that he got to ditch the slow riders too. We all took off through Aspen Flat as quick as we could go. At this point, we had spent too much time waiting for slow people and needed to get back so we could have lunch. Some of those guys had to drive a long way too and were supposed to leave. (Dad's adventures usually take at least an hour or two longer than planned though.)

There was a little more slow going when we caught up to the other group that had gone the short way. Also, one rider ran out of gas and I had to give him my extra. Good thing I brought extra. I never did need it anyway. He ended up running out again and had to borrow from someone else.

After Aspen flat we headed up the road and were fed a great lunch at the Halliday's cabin. We took this picture. You can see how many riders came on this ride. I'm the one on the far right.

I also took a picture of my face so you can tell how much dust there was. It really wasn't too bad on the trails but the roads were quite dirty after than many bikes went past.

After lunch on the way back to the truck, one of the riders hit his face on a stick. We thought he broke his nose. He landed in the ditch and had to recover for a bit, but in the end he made it back too. All in all, I had a great time.

More of my handywork on the internet again

2005-09-07T14:27:00.000-06:00

My handywork has popped up on the internet again. If you follow the link back, you can check out a little video of me drawing an X-Wing in addition to the completed work:

No deer for me this weekend

2005-09-06T12:24:00.000-06:00

We spent the weekend in Monticello. I had only two things on my agenda: Hunt deer and ride motorcycles. I'll post more about the motorcycle stuff later.

So here is the hunting story. On Friday night I hiked a ways up the mountain where Dad said he had a tree stand. I guess I didn't pay close enough attention to where the stand was, because after hiking up the hill a while, I still hadn't found it. I did spook out one doe that watched me for a bit. No luck seeing any other deer though. I found a place where deer would come into a small meadow and waited on the trees there for a while until it got too dark.

Saturday morning Dad and I drove around and looked for anything. It was really weird because we didn't see anything at all. (Other than a couple more does on the way there.)

Saturday night I rode my motorcycle to a place that I could hike to a different tree stand Dad had put up. I hiked a little past where it was but eventually figured out where I needed to go to find it. I spooked out 3 more does up the hill. When I was about to the tree stand there was one more doe.

After I found the tree stand and waited a bit, it started to lightning and thunder a whole bunch. Then it started to rain a lot. Finally, when it stopped raining, I saw one more doe walk by. Hmn. Not too much luck finding deer with horns this weekend. Anyhow, since I was cold and it was dark, I hiked back down the hill. Jed and Ben picked me up so I didn't have to ride my motorcycle home in the dark.

New Struts on the Elantra

2005-09-01T14:49:00.000-06:00

Our Elantra needed it's tires rotated. Those tires had about 25K miles on them. We got them at Big-O tires and so the rotation is free. Of course, I could rotate tires myself any time, but why when I can just drop it off there and pick it up in a bit.

Not so simple though. We've been having this problem with a sort of grindy sound in the front wheels. I'd been thinking that maybe I needed some new wheel bearings in there. I did some digging around and found that it was practically impossible to find information about the front wheel bearings in the Hyundai Elantra. I guess it's black magic. I did find out that they usually last a rediculously long time though.

Well, whatever the noise was, I wanted Big-O to check it out when they rotated the tires. In this post, I mentioned how we weren't able to get back to Big-O in time to pick up the car. I called them Monday and they said they already threw away the work order and that we could just bring it back in and they'd check again. (Uugh).

Well, the sound was worse after the tires had been rotated so I thought I better go ahead and have them look at it. It turns out that the struts were really worn out. Because the struts were worn out, it was causing the tires to wear unusually fast and the alignment wasn't good. The only good thing about the whole deal is that I only needed three struts instead of four. One had already been replaced.

Cost of two front struts: $269
Cost of one rear strut: $130

Well, you can't just put new struts on without aligning it can you? Cost of Alignment: $59.

Now, you can't just align it and put new struts on without getting a couple new tires because the old ones are so worn. (I opted out of getting 4). Cost of two new tires for the front: $100.

Well, after the whole deal is put together, it cost about $620. The good news is that it wasn't quite as much as filling up on the way home.

Selling the Laptop Again

2005-08-31T23:11:00.000-06:00

Well, after procrastinating for too long, I decided I better go ahead and list my laptop for sale again. This time, in addition to spicing up the details a bit, I set a reserve.

Here is something I found out about reserve fees. The fee for reserving the value of the auction is much less than the fee for starting the bid higher (1%). In addition, when you start the bid lower, it encourages early bidders (who then are more likely to bid more toward the end). Another bonus is that when the item sells, the reserve fee is refunded.

Anyhow, I decided to start the bid at $9.99. Someone could use the Buy-It-Now option and get it for $1479 with free shipping. We'll see if I have more luck selling it this time than last!

Know anyone that needs a laptop?: Sony Vaio K37, Pentium-4 3.2 G w/ 1 Gig Ram.

Hope I have more success than last time.

We grew some corn

2005-08-29T18:02:00.000-06:00

We haven't had a terribly productive garden this year. I think the boys have walked on each plant at least once or twice. We have grown a few things that tasted not too bad though. Yesterday we had a stir fry that had a couple big green bell peppers right from the garden. Tonight we are eating some corn. I must say, it's pretty good.

We Braved Timpanogos Cave

2005-08-27T22:11:00.000-06:00

I was relatively convinced that this Saturday wasn't going to be a great success in terms of having lots of fun. Gayla had meetings this morning and I just didn't have a lot of plans for the rest of the day. I needed to got some work done on the wheels for our car and wasn't too excited at the length of time I was going to have to wait to get that done. After Gayla was finished with her meetings, I could tell that Scott and Dallin were going to need something constructive to do or we were going to have a VERY long day.

Then it dawned on me. We had been saying for a long time that it was a shame that we had lived here for this long and never hiked up through Timpanogos Cave. That was enough to convince me. We packed up the boys and headed off. On the way I dropped off the car at Big-O and told them we'd come back and get it later. (Sure beats sitting and waiting for them to get stuff done.)

Here is Gayla and the boys at the start of our adventure. (You can click on most of the pictures to see bigger ones.) Scott doesn't look like he is too excited about hiking 1.5 miles up the hill. Dallin has no idea what he is getting into. We found out that there was a 1 hour wait before we could start hiking up to the cave. That is because there was quite a few other people that had the same idea as we had today. We called Big-O and told them just to put the keys in the car under the seat when they were done and we'd pick it up later. We weren't going to make it back before they closed.

The Visitor Center at the start of the trail has a movie you can watch. It shows a bunch of stuff about the cave for those that don't want to walk up and see it. It can also help pass that 1 hour waiting time before you are supposed to start hiking. Tim and Dallin were quite bored with the video and about caused enough noise that we didn't think anyone could hear so we decided to just start walking early. We figured we might need the extra time anyway. Once we convinced Scott that he could actually walk this far (he had no clue how far it is, but usually starts complaining about walking after 100 yards or so), his 5 year old legs outperformed Dallin's 3 1/2 year old legs. Dallin was not to be left too far behind though and did a great job.

Here is me and the boys about 1/3 of the way up the trail. (1/2 mile). As you can see, Tim was also working very hard to make it up to the cave.

The pictures below proves we made it. We rested for a while and the boys quickly regained any energy they lost. Scott and Dallin were a bit anxious when we entered the cave. They weren't too sure about going 500 feet down into the mountain.

At one point we passed a couple of park rangers sitting along the tunnelwaiting to do whatever job they were supposed to do. You couldn't see them until we were right there and since they were sitting, they were about Scott's height. He about jumped out of his skin when he saw them. I guess he just wasn't expecting people to be right there in the middle of the mountain. There is one point in the cave where they turn the lights off and let you see how dark it naturally is. Our group was rather close to the group ahead of us when the first group decided it was time to do that demonstration. Unfortunately, we were in the middle of a tunnel walking and not in the standing place. However, Gayla, the boys, and I were toward the end of the pack and could still see a little bit of light from the portion of the tunnel that didn't get turned off. We wondered what we were going to do for a bit, stayed still for a bit, tried to keep Scott and Dallin calm, and eventually they turned the lights back on.

Us at the cave entrance. Elevation 6730 Feet (1130 feet above the Visitor Center)

We saw many really cool stuff in the cave. Unfortunately, our camera just isn't that great at taking pictures in really low light. This one above turned out OK though. They warn you not to touch anything in the cave because the formations (like those above) are extremely delicate. They break easy but take millions of years to grow.

Coming out the other side, you can see it is a very long way down to the bottom of the canyon. Actually, you can't see the bottom of the canyon here.

All in all, we had a great time. As you can see from this picture, Tim was rather tired out from the hike. We made it back and noticed that a trip to Wendy's was rather necessary. We had brought lunch but no dinner. We thought the hike could justify the calories.

My blog is filtered in China

2005-08-16T10:52:00.000-06:00

My uncle who is in Beijing right now, notified me that he gets a "page cannot be displayed" message when trying to view this website. I imagine that all the blogger created sites are banned over there. It's a good thing they protect their citizens from all the radical things that I post on here.

How NOT to sell something on eBay

2005-08-11T22:23:00.000-06:00

Well, it's come time to get rid of my laptop. Pretty much everyone wanting to get rid of anything technical either pawns it off on family/friends, or sells it on eBay. I don't know anyone personal who wants my laptop, so eBay it was. Last Wednesday night I took a picture, put up a description and started the wait.

Well, most of the same models of laptops as mine that had already completed the auction had sold for around $1350 to $1450. Some of these even had quite a few people bidding on them. My laptop was not only in very good condition (Only had it about 9 months), but it still has a warranty for another two years. I thought for sure, I would get top dollar for it. I set the starting bid and $999.99 with a Buy-it-now option for $1500.

To my surprise, I didn't get a lot of attention during the first few days. I thought, this is probably because there are quite a few of those laptops for sale and mine still has a while before it ends. I was more surprised when the last couple days rolled around and I still did not have any bids. Perhaps the item was ending at a time when it wasn't so good to sell things. It ended at 10:35 pm MST on Wednesday night. Hmn. That means 12:35 am on the East coast and 11:35 pm central. Perhaps a lot of people went to bed already.

Lesson 1: List the item when the most people are likely to see it end.

So finally, one person placed the $999.99 bid Wednesday afternoon. He was from California (West coast & earlier-Lesson 1). By this time I had 17 people watching the item. I figured during the last 10 minutes or so, it would take off because the savvy ebayer waits until the last to bid as to not drive up the price.

Lesson 2: A lot of the time, those placing a bid earlier don't expect to win the item, but they like to get rid of the buy-it-now option by placing a bid. That way they can keep watching it until the auction ends, and if the price stays right, they can bid again. They almost always believe their initial bid will be outbid.

Well, don't ask me why, but no-one else bid on the laptop. It ended and the original buyer received the item for $999.99. EEEK! This was not something I could afford to do.

Lesson 3: Start the bid at the minimum price you can take for the item or place a reserve on it. I never thought the laptop wouldn't sell so I didn't follow this rule. I was very perplexed as to why nobody else placed a bid.

Well, at this point I was bound by the eBay rules to sell the item so I dutifully emailed the buyer and asked his preferred method of shipping and how he'd like to pay for the item. After I turned off my computer and was about to head to bed, I remembered lesson 2. This guy perfectly fit the profile of the early bidder. I thought that perhaps he really didn't want the laptop anyway.

So I fired off another email and asked the buyer if he would prefer not to pay for the item. I was taking a long shot, but hey, there was no way I wanted to ship this off to someone who didn't really intend to buy it.

To my surprise, he emailed back and said I was right. And that I could go ahead and relist it!

Lesson 4: Take rule number 3 into consideration before listing your item!

Well, now I still have my unsold laptop. Before I list it again, I'm going to check into some of the things people have used to describe the other laptops selling. I'm also going to research a good time to sell.

All I have to say is I'm a Lucky Dude today!

Fun with Rain

2005-08-09T13:01:00.000-06:00

Last week we had the big Family Reunion out at the Muhlestein Cabin. Lots of fun there of course.

As usual, Saturday afternoon was time to take a spin on the bikes. It had rained earlier in the day settings us back a bit but we didn't haul motorcycles all the way back home to let them sit. I think we got started around 4:30 or 5:00 pm.

Jed said, "We're going to ride every trail on the mountain as fast as we can".

We started out going somewhere between slow and fast as we can. Seth (bother in law) came along riding my dad's new CRF450R. He was probably going as fast as he could. When we got on the first trail, it started to sprinkle just a little. During the trail it started to rain a little more steady but was still light enough that we thought we'd just keep riding. By this time we were on the back side (West) of the mountain. At the end of that trail we headed North up toward the top of the mountain and our next trail. There weren't a lot of places to go between the two trails so and we could see some pretty heavy rain coming up the draw.

We were already soaked pretty good, but when rain started coming down so heavy we couldn't see, I pulled over under a tree. Soon Jed and Seth were there too and we waited the bulk of the storm out for a while. We were so soaked that we could squeeze our gloves together and water would stream from them. We shivered a little too but not too bad.

When the rain let up a bit, off we went. We didn't have too much trouble with mud on the trails. What we really lacked was time though. We got to the North-West side of the Mountain and then started back on another trail. We realized about 1/2 through this trail that we really needed to ride a little faster.

My dad's bike had a bald back tire and Seth kept having trouble starting it so Jed and Seth traided bikes for a while. Seth said the YZ250 felt like a toy after the 450. After a little more, I traded my CR500 for the 450 and Seth rode my bike back to the road.

At this point, we really needed to hurry. Good thing Seth was there to help us keep pace or Jed and I may have run off the road. There were a few slick spots on the last trail but we made it up even with Dad's bald back tire. About the time we got to the last 4 wheeler road it was pretty dark. At this point, we started riding quite slowly. Jed just tried to stay between the trees, Seth just went where Jed went, and I just went where Seth went.

We made it all the way back to within a few minutes of the cabin and then my dad came driving up the road. He followed us back (we could see with the truck headlights now). We'd have made it anyway, but thought it was nice not to have to drive in the dark any more.

Cleaning out the Garage.. Sort of

2005-08-03T22:47:00.000-06:00

My father put his motorcycle in my garage a while back so as to sell it. I live where there are more potential buyers than he does I guess. Well, the ads expired from the papers and there still hadn't been anyone come and take it for a test drive. To get my garage space back, I had to take matters into my own hands. My neighbor a few houses down mentioned he'd like to buy the bike but probably couldn't get the cash together. I thought it would be great to take it out for a test spin so him and I headed up the mountain with the bikes. It worked like a charm. He worked out a deal with Dad to do some woodwork for the bike. Best of all, I've got a little extra room on that side of the garage again.

It's a good thing I have Linux

2005-08-03T00:02:00.000-06:00

This afternoon, my wife had to turn the computer off after a crash. It wouldn't boot back up. Even in safe mode, it would stop after some driver in Mup.sys.

It's a good think I have Linux on that machine too, I booted into linux and used the ntfsprogs package to look around the data in the Windows partition. I was able to copy all the data that mattered into another drive for backup. I really should be making cd backups on a regular basis. The ntfsclone utility reported that there were errors I needed to fix before I could use that though.

Anyway, I booted into the Windows Recovery Console to use the chkdsk utility. It reported there were unrecoverable errors that could not be fixed. Well, at this point I've decided that I get to re-install. I booted back into the Windows install CD and attempted to re-install Windows. It reported that there was an error with that drive. Good Grief.

So I booted back to Linux (again a good thing I have it on there), reformatted that drive (it works fine), and then booted back to Windows. At this point, the install is started and seems to be going well. For some reason though, Windows assigned the letter J to the drive.

Why doesn't Windows just work? (Like Linux).

Non-Progress on the New Home

2005-07-31T21:31:00.000-06:00

Back in April, we thought we might be moving into a new home around the end of August or beginning of September. HA! Fat chance of that. The road isn't even built yet. Gayla wasn't satisfied with the answers she got from our sales representative, so she started making calls to different people. Eventually, she got in touch with the contractor in charge of the road. He said they had plans to start this week and that the road should be completed by the end of August.

Well, if they complete the road in August, they might be able to start the home around the beginning of September. It takes 100 days to build the home. Add to that the time it takes to complete the closing and any other days and we've decided we probably won't be moving into a home this year. If we're lucky, it'll be done the start of next year some time.

Homes are selling pretty fast during this part of the summer, so we hated to miss out on the opportunity to sell ours too. We've had lots of people look at our home but no offers yet. We don't know what we'll do if someone actually wants to buy it though. I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. Most likely, we'll end up renting somewhere for a while.

Free Maze

2005-07-30T11:37:00.000-06:00

We're always searching for something fun and constructive for the kids to do. I drew this maze. I think it'll take'em a while. Feel free to try yourself.

If it's worth doing, it must be worth doing a few times.

2005-07-26T17:41:00.000-06:00

I'm beginning to wonder what it takes to get the tires on my vehicles to function property. After we bought our van, the rear brakes started to squeak. Thinking that brakes aren't that hard to get to function property, I simply had a mechanic put new brake pads on for us.

Total so far: $108

It wasn't a few more days before we started to hear a little squeak in the rear brakes again. Hmn. In the mean time, we had a check engine light that was bothering us. I decided I'd take the van in to the dealer and have them check the light and also tell us why the brakes still squeaked. The answer we got back was that there was a recall on a part in the van that was causing the engine light and that the brakes squeaked because the brake shoes installed were "After-Market" and not the "Honda Genuine Part". (Whatever.)

Total so far: $108

The good news is that we didn't have to pay for the recall part but the bad news is that we still had squeaky brakes. They were squeaking more and more.

Well, It came time to go to Monticello for the weekend and we decided that we really didn't want to have horrible squeaky brakes the whole way. I hadn't been able to get a hold of the mechanic that originally did the brakes, so I decided I'd just do it myself. I called the Honda dealer and they we're out of "Genuine Honda" brake pads. I had to call the next closest Honda dealer. Luckily they had the part coming in that morning but I'd have to drive 40 minutes to get it. The "Genuine Honda" brake pads cost $60.

Total so far: $168

So I came back home and set out to put new brake pads on the van myself. I'd done that job in the past so it wasn't terribly difficult to install the new pads. Unfortunately, they were adjusted too tight on one side and I didn't think to loosen the adjuster before putting the drum back on. (I was in a big hurry to get on the road.) In the process of this all, somehow I got big blisters on the palms of my hands. I think it was when I was wiggling the screwdriver to get the drums off.

We started down the trail and promptly noticed that the left rear tire was vibrating a bit. I thought we better go fix it before driving far. When we got back home I also noticed that it was HOT. We sprayed it down with the hose and I took the wheel off but I couldn't get the drum back off. It was just too hot and on too tight.

We got in the truck, repacked all the stuff and the boys and left the van in the driveway. Gayla and I were an hour and a half late for my class reunion but that turned out to be ok because everyone else was slow starting anyway.

When we got back home Sunday night, the truck got a flat front tire as we turned into our driveway. Hmn.

Monday morning I got up and worked real hard and got that drum off. It was a pain. After I loosened the brake adjuster thingy It went back on easy as pie. The brakes on the van don't squeak now but if they do I'm making the Honda people fix it.

We took the flat tire on the truck to Big-O-Tires Monday night because they fix flats for free. They were closed because of the Holiday.

Looks like we have to do that job twice too!