"My bike ride on the new Barker Reservoir bike and hike trail last Saturday (0446.html) kind of set the tone for my thoughts this week. So as the first week where my Thoughtlet is actually written to be an on-line diary entry, rather than an e-mail to children and family, this is my chosen theme.
The next day, on Sunday at the Regional Conference (0446.html), Matt moved a folding chair across an aisle to sit by John Farmer. I sat next to the blank space where he moved the chair from. In front of the Farmer family was Bill and Leslie Hagen. We had got there early to get a good seat, and still ended up in the folding chairs, and Andrea was in Salt Lake with Audrey. So while we were waiting I pulled Bill Hagen aside, since I know he runs cattle on his ranch out past Columbus (../0004.html and ../0115.html), I asked him:
His response was:
I said:
His response was:
And after I did, he basically said it was a bad business
idea, and there are a lot cheaper ways to collect the kind
of data I am interested in collecting. Sounds like Andrea.
In fact, since Andrea was in Utah visiting Audrey and Josh
over the weekend, I ended up writing a song about Barker
Reservoir on Sunday:
So I start the week off on Monday morning, driving past the
Barker Reservoir on I-10, and thinking that my ideas are
nothing more than daydreams, castles in the sky that will
never be realized. And that again set the tone for my week.
There seems to be plenty to do at work these days, and so I
have been buckling down and working on whatever e-mail or
project is placed in front of me, putting aside my dreams
and schemes. At 2:00 we had a meeting on the West Cameron
Tile 2. I had completed my maps, and needed to do a few
more displays and to edit sections 2, 4, and 5. I finished
up my displays and work on Tile-02 by Tuesday evening.
Tuesday morning I I called Sara at 5:00. Turns out I had called her last week on Monday, and did not write about it in the Thoughtlet (but did write about it in the Benin letters (http://www.walden3d.com/benin/letters/041108.html). Sara was hit by a motorcycle and knocked down and out, and she seems to be recovering fine. Although the Doctors kept her in Benin for two weeks of observation and recovery. On Tuesday morning, I told Sara about the times I landed on my head. First there was the time when I was very young, probably younger than 8, and I was staying at the ranch with Uncle Glenn and Aunt Connie. We were taking the cattle to the north field, and something spooked the horse I was riding, it ran away, and Uncle Glenn found me next to the fence on the east side of the property, where the horse had stopped, I'd gone over it's head, and landed on a flat volcanic rock on my head. I was knocked out. They drove me the 40 miles to Cedar, where I woke up and drank a glass of orange juice in the hospital then went back to sleep. The next time I woke up I was at home on the farm.
Then there was the time the horse I was breaking ran away with me. I was on him bareback, and again I could not stop the horse, even though I was a lot older this time. He ran down the road from the Meat Packing Plant to the byproducts plant and grainery. When he got to the grainery he stopped, since it was a 6 foot tall cement wall, and I went over his head and landed on my head on the hard packed gravel road. Steve Lovell, the hired hand that lived in my room for a long time, saw it all, and came running over to help. I got up, and he said, `Well you certainly do have a hard head!' This was the same horse that ran away with me, someone had closed the gate into the feed yard, and he hit the gate at a full gallop. His head went back into my head, and broke my glasses, and I ended up with about 5 stitches in my eyebrow. Oh well!
The third example was when I was on my mission in Ipswitch. I was in Ipswitch for 9 months and 4 companions, which is quite a while in one area. The accident happened with Elder Barnhurst. He was a greenie. We were working in the far western part of town, and were riding our bikes down a big hill by the city park on our way to our area. It was rush hour and there were cars backed up all the way up the hill. Remember they drive on the left side of the road. I was riding down the hill between the cars and the curb, and going at a pretty good clip. A white Volkswagen turned to a small side street without signaling, just as I reached him. I hit the back side of his front bumper and went over the car and landed on my hands and chin. I ended up with a half a dozen stitches in my chin. I also ruined my suit. Oh well! At least I have a hard head. Although, as I said to Sara, head injuries are very dangerous, and maybe this is why I sometimes think so much different than anyone else around me. I also told Sara Ellyn that we do not have the money to bring her home right now, that I am not going to get in the middle of Roice's wedding plans, and that I hoped to be able to visit here, if GDC does send me to Libya as they have said they are going to do. Sara does sound like she is doing OK after being knocked down and out by the motorcycle. At least it wasn't a car.
I left home about 8:30, instead of the normal time between 6:00 and 7:00 AM. I went to Dr. Solis' Katy Office at 8:45 AM to have blood drawn as the final step on last week's physical. I also presented him with the information I had got from the Center for Disease Control on the Internet concerning travel to Libya and Benin. He told me who to go and see to get my shots. Hopefully I get this taken care of next week.
Wednesday I received a nice Plaque from SWLGS for my talk last week (0446.html). It read:
As I drove home Wednesday I called my friend in the Ward
Choir (0445.html). Last Sunday when I asked his thoughts
on the material we had gone over, he said he had been
traveling and hadn't had time to think about it, nor time
to show it to his friends. He also told me I should call
him, so I called to find his thoughts on the Barker
Reservoir. I would describe his reaction to my call as
glib. I reminded him that Lot 3, which is 600 acres, is
at a current lease $600/year and Lot 4, which is 745 acres,
is at a current lease $1,192/year. He basically told me
it was a bad idea, and he will get back to me on the Cedar
City property after he talks to his friends.
I then called Joe Roberts and he asked me to come by the house. So I drove over to his house on the way home. I did not pull out the computer and give him a presentation. We talked. He is still hurting a lot regarding Jennifer. When I described my tree house concept for Barker Reservoir he got very interested. In fact, he called back on Friday to talk some more about it, and to see if it would be applicable to another piece of property he is aware of. We will have a lunch with the owner to follow-up on this. However, regarding Barker Reservoir and the cattle/horse leases, his response was `Roice, that's a tough deal.' Anyway, the bottom line is he strongly discouraged me from pursuing bidding on a lease for any of the property in Barker Reservoir. Everyone but me seems convinced this is not something I should pursue.
Thursday morning I called Brad Schmutz in Cedar City to find out the status on my appraisal of the property up Cedar Canyon. He can not find a comparable piece of property in Iron County. He says lots in Cedar City are selling for $50K-75K for 1/4 acre, and the closest example is $80-100K for 3 acres in Cross Hollow, which is on the west side of the Leigh Hill. In the valley it costs $500-$2,500 per acre. There was an example up Parrowan Canyon. I 1991 a guy purchased 80 acres, and built a house back into one of the steep slopes. The land is now valued at $500,000. Brad said he is going to think about it for another couple of weeks and will get me something early in December. I look forward to this data. Thursday at lunch I was suppose to fill in for Mike Dunn at a meeting with a small independent downtown, I think it was Houston Exploration, if he did not make it back from Mexico. He made it back. Dave Johnson was with him and he had several things he wanted to review. Dave finished at about 12:15, and so I took my lunch and drove out to the Addicks-Barker Ranger Office on Highway 6 for the bid opening for bids on two tracks in Addicks Reservoir (parcels 1 & 2) and two tracks in Barker Reservoir (parcel 3 [600 acres leased the last five years for $600 per year] and parcel 4 [745 acres leased the last five years for $1,192 per year]), which were the ones I wanted to bid on. . Joy Smith from the Galveston Regional Office was responsible for the meeting, and Ranger Kenneth McDonald opened the envelopes for her. I recorded the following in my green notebook (palm pilot):
As I write this, I think there was some confusion as to
which block Brent Glover bid on. He said he wanted to
bid on the 745 acre plot in the meeting, and I wrote down
that he bid on the 600 acre plot. The bids by Mark Wilcox
and Mark Whitliff were thrown out because they were less
than the value of the property as determined by the Army
Corps of Engineers. According to my notes, if I would
have used $1600. of the $2,600. in the Walden 3-D account
I would now have a lease on 745 acres in Barker Reservoir.
However, based on my conversations with Joe Roberts and
Bill Hagen, it was a dumb business idea to bid on leasing
this property. The bottom line is I left the room feeling
like I had made the right decision regarding bidding to
lease property in Barker Reservoir. I got back to the
office about 2:00.
I worked late with Tony Traweek. He was going to load the wells for Tile-02. However, Scott Burns had requested a well and the 4 small 3-D seismic surveys from Unocal in Indonesia. Tony can load this data in a quarter of the time I can, so I had him do this. It took him 4 hours to load the 4 small subsets of the 3-D surveys, and the well and the logs.
I got home about 9:00. It was not the best evening Andrea and I have had. Oh well! Matt wanted to know what we were disagreeing about. So we talked about it. He seemed OK about it. However, I got a phone call at work about 4:30 on Friday from Matt. He has had a kid calling him names and giving him a bad time all year, and was particularly aggressive on Friday, actually hitting him in the back of the head. Matt turned around and decked him, and ended up with three days off campus detention. This means he will not be able to go to the Madrigal Dinner practices, and so he will not be able to be the Jester. He will still be able to be in the choir and participate. But it has been a pretty hard lesson for Matt. I spent all day working on the Unocal well project. I think the results are pretty good, and it will be interesting to see what Scott Burns thinks. When I got home we just spent the evening watching TV: Enterprise and JAG. Saturday Andrea and I talked through the things that had been bugging each of us and got back on track. I also decided to stop e-mailing these Thoughtlets, and sent out the following e-mail to current recipients of the Thoughtlets:
Saturday, after posting the three outstanding Thoughtlets,
and sending the above, I went on a bike ride. I took a
copy of `The Trial Furnace' (Morris and Kathryn Shirts' book
about the Iron Mission in Cedar City) to Alan Peterson, and
then rode over through Barker Reservoir. It had been raining
for several days, and the trail was flooded on the other side
of the boardwalk. On this bike ride I realized I can use
access to the bike trail portion of Barker Reservoir to do
the inventory and data collection and virtual modeling I
wanted to do on the cattle/horse lease. It will be
interesting to see how everything turns out and what ends
up happening.
Saturday night we went to see National Treasure. It was an OK action film, with a semi-plausable premise. And I left the theater feeling like it was missing the punch it could have had with the plot they had put together. Guess we just get too caught up in the magic of today's movies and expect them all to be as new to us as Star Wars was.
Today's sacrament meeting was very good. I wrote the following three possible stanzas for Prime Words:
So today is Mom's second birthday on the other side of the
veil. I hope she has found more peace than she found on
this side, particularly the last few years of her life.
Maybe she has finally found the peace I hope to help
create in a place like Barker Reservoir."