cc: file, Marti, Sara and Des, Diane Cluff, Tony Hafen, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Eric and Annette Krueger, Eric and Renee Miner, Claude and Katherine Warner, Forest and Amy Warner, and Ivan and Chell Warner.
One of the more visible casualities of the last year has been the swimming pool in our back yard. I remember in the spring of 1990 when we put had the hole dug in our back yard and we were told by friends and neighbors that the $28,200 installation price was only the tip of the expenses. We could afford it. Roice you were 15, Ben you were 14, and Paul you were 12. It seemed there was something needed to provide an energy release four three very active young men and a pool seemed like the solution. Of course, Melanie, Sara, Rob and all of their friends would use the pool for years.
I really don't like to swim. Never was very good at it. I think your Grandma Nelson was afraid of water and kept me away from swimming pools because of her fears. The first significant water experience I remember was when I was about 5 years old. We had moved into the house on the farm when I was about 3. A couple of years later Sara and I were playing in the new cement ditch that ran in front of the house. There was a broken bottle in the ditch and as I crawled in the ditch it cut most of the length of my lower leg to the bone. I remember running into the house screaming. I remember having a blanket wrapped around my leg and being driven uptown Cedar City to see Dr. Farnsworth. I remember sitting up and watching him put three rows of stitches in my leg. I remember having stitches and puss still ozze out of the edges of the scar several years later. Thirty-eight (+/-) years later the scar is still 4+ inches long and 3/4+ inch wide.
I remember going to an Aaronic Priesthood Commeration campout at Warm Springs, down at Glendale, Nevada. This was well before I-15 cut through the Virgin Gorge, when Highway-90 went out through Santa Clara and over by Beaver Dam. My Uncle Bud (Garth Bengt Nelson), your Grandpa Nelson's next younger brother, drove us down to Warm Springs in the back of his pickup. I remember the trip because he passed a semi-truck on a double yellow line and as we were next to the truck, near the top of a ridge, another semi-truck came in the opposite direction and we somehow were not hit by either of them. I didn't know how to swim and so I spent all of my time in the shallow water playing vollyball and tag. The bottom of the pool was very rough and all of the skin was gone on the bottom of both feet by the time we left for home. One of the main reasons I never progressed past a Star Scout was the fact I never really learned how to swim very good.
The summer of 1969 there was a man in Mom and Dad's ward whose last name I think was Matthews and who rented the older Sargent's home where the new High School has just been built. He worked at the college and his daughter came home from Stanford for the summer. She was a couple of years older than I was, and yet I was determined to make an impression. So I taught myself how to sort of swim and dive at the old Cedar City Municipal Pool in the city park. We had a Cedar City 3rd Ward Young Adult Party and I remember how hard I tried to impress her. Didn't work. She left the party early.
Even the white-bead swimming tests at El Ranco Cima and Camp Strake at Rob's scout camps the summers of 1995 and 1996 were hard for me to finish. However, I did it (although just barely in the river at El Ranco Cima). I guess my lack of interest in swimming is one of the reasons we never bought a boat, never did any regular water skiing or fishing, and never spent much time on the ocean. Guess this is part of my excuse for not doing my share of maintenance on the pool after we got it. The result this summer has been terrible. Green water everytime it rains, black alga, leaves floating in the pool and sinking to the bottom. It was so bad I think I am about the only person who swam in the pool all summer, and that was only a couple of times. I miss your Mom and her maintaining the swimming pool. However, reality what it is, I hired `Dave' to drain, scrub, bleach, and fix the pool. It just finished filling up today and it is starting to look really good again (like in Paul's painting which Ken Turner did of the Creation).
I figure if I swim for a half hour at least twice a week as long as I stay in this house, say until Rob graduates from High School in 2001, I will have had 200 hours of exercise and enjoyment. This might be optimistic based on how little I like to swim. At a cost of $120 per month, plus $647.24 to clean it up, plus $1,000+ to replaster it in the next couple of years, it works out to be paying a little over $37 per hour for exercise for just me. If I add half of the origional purchase price as a discounted purchase price, the cost exceeds $107 per hour of exercise, which is more than I have been making consulting this last year.
The message is simple. Come and visit and swim. Bring your friends and swim. And think through it several times before you purchase a swimming pool to put in back of your own personal log cabin."