Fun and Games

A classic Flower & Bee taken by Dad, of course, during our geocaching adventures on Saturday, July 12th with Autumn & Leslie.

This cache was hanging on the evergreen tree to Leslie's left at A Nice Walk Cache on Main Street at about 550 North in Farmington.

Here we are finding the Newbury Award Cache at the Farmington City Library. We missed being the FTF (First to Find) by about 45 minutes, darn!

SWAG! On Friday evening July 18th, we decided at the last minute to visit a nearby cache or 2 and drop off a TB (Travel Bug) that we had had for a while. We started by grabbing another trackable, a geocoin named Uncle Jon out of our cache, the Rock Walk, to move it along also. We took its photo and left about 8:15pm. Within the next hour and 15 minutes, we dropped off the coin and the TB, visited 4 caches, picked up a new TB and 3 more geocoins, plus a cute guy in a car and a Lego figure (orange-haired prince?) Talmage we were thinking of you. We believe it's a new record for us! Poor Uncle Jon was only in our possession for about 30 minutes! In the photo above you can see the swag, plus 3 geocoins (Carion Crow, Cockatoo, and Mr. Explorer3's Prague Geocoin), and the Travel Bug named Sam which is a tiny (size 1) hiking boot. One of the caches we visited was called The Snake Farm, because it was close to a swampy pond and had snake grass growing nearby. It also had rubber snakes inside and small packages of rattlesnake eggs! Ha! It was a rather hard one to find because it was in a bunch of big old cottonwood trees and the signal kept jumping around. Also, the way it was hidden...buried in the ground with a 14" in diameter flat rock over the top of it. I just got lucky and turned the rock over for the heck of it and saw the lid to a big plastic jar. The clue was "Australia" which didn't really help until we connected with "the land down under" afterwards. Well, we're pretty proud of ourselves, but now we've got 4 more trackables to move along next weekend!

The Deflated Cheerio

Last night, finishing up the exciting task of weeding, I started noticing some black ”cracks” in front of my right eye and a few flashes of light. Later I noticed it was actually an irregular circular-shaped black-edged floater inside my eyeball, about ¼” in diameter, constantly changing position and shape and sometimes even flipping over. It was very annoying, but there was no pain. Today after church I called my optician, who lives in Farmington and has an office in Bountiful who said he was just leaving to see a patient in his office and would take a look at my eye if I wanted to come in. (what great timing!). After dilating and examining my eye he announced that it wasn’t a retinal detachment, but a vitreous detachment, which is quite common (particularly among nearsighted people) and not as serious. He saw the floater which he called a deflated cheerio! My vitreous is about 60% detached and so far the retina is still OK. I have to go back about every 2 weeks and have the dilation done again hoping to see that the vitreous is detached completely without damaging the retina. Oh, goody. The best part is there is nothing they can do about the floater. The doctor said I would get used to it and eventually it would probably sink to bottom of my inner eyeball. I hope so. Here is info from the internet…my single floater is considerably larger than mentioned here.

Facts About Vitreous Detachment
Most of the eye's interior is filled with vitreous, a gel-like substance that helps the eye maintain a round shape. There are millions of fine fibers intertwined within the vitreous that are attached to the surface of the retina, the eye's light-sensitive tissue. As we age, the vitreous slowly shrinks, and these fine fibers pull on the retinal surface. Usually the fibers break, allowing the vitreous to separate and shrink from the retina. This is a vitreous detachment. In most cases, a vitreous detachment is not sight-threatening and requires no treatment.
As the vitreous shrinks, it becomes somewhat stringy, and the strands can cast tiny shadows on the retina that you may notice as floaters, which appear as little "cobwebs" or specks that seem to float about in your field of vision. If you try to look at these shadows they appear to quickly dart out of the way. One symptom of a vitreous detachment is a small but sudden increase in the number of new floaters. This increase in floaters may be accompanied by flashes of light (lightning streaks) in your peripheral, or side, vision. In most cases, either you will not notice a vitreous detachment, or you will find it merely annoying because of the increase in floaters.
A vitreous detachment is a common condition that usually affects people over age 50, and is very common after age 80. People who are nearsighted are also at increased risk. Those who have a vitreous detachment in one eye are likely to have one in the other, although it may not happen until years later.
Although a vitreous detachment does not threaten sight, once in a while some of the vitreous fibers pull so hard on the retina that they create a macular hole or lead to a retinal detachment. Both of these conditions are sight-threatening and should be treated immediately. If left untreated, a macular hole or detached retina can lead to permanent vision loss in the affected eye. Those who experience a sudden increase in floaters or an increase in flashes of light in peripheral vision should have an eye care professional examine their eyes as soon as possible. The only way to diagnose the cause of the problem is by a comprehensive dilated eye examination. If the vitreous detachment has led to a macular hole or detached retina, early treatment can help prevent loss of vision.

Imagination

Here is the 1977 photo of Briton & Baron imagining Star Wars characters with sieves in response to Brie & Colby in tupperware bowls!

Sunny Summer Weekend

Autumn, Leslie & the Festival Days Pirate Slide at the park.

Mom and the Whale Slide

Leslie, Autumn, the remains of my hotdog & Cheetos and the indestructable parachute!

Picking raspberries.

Running through the Dora Sprinkler

Colby in the Froggy Pool

Soaked!

The battery-powered Bubble Gun Fight

Grandpa & Colby

(The bubbles didn't pop when they hit the grass?)

Brie and the Bubble Gun

Grandma gets blasted

Fatherly advice...this is the trigger.

Tricked ya'!

The old-fashioned way

"Grandma & Grandpa's House"

The house, gable and door mat are cut outs pasted onto another sheet. Thanks, Brie!

Raspberry Report

I'm happy to report that the raspberries are in full swing. Dad and I picked a whole plateful this evening after dinner. Just wish all of you were here to help us eat them! Always reminds me of Grandma with her quart jar tied around her waist with a string.

Our 4th, 5th & 6th of July

Just sharing the events of our 3-day weekend. It was a pretty toasty one with temps in the 90s:



Here's our 6 little plastic American flags along the curb. (double click to enlarge)

4th—3 hours of yard work followed by 4 hours of geocaching to 1 regular and 3 more State Parks:
--The Jordan Parkway Modelport (for model airplanes)…not a soul in sight
--The Utah State Park Headquarters Office…not really a Park but the home of the Division of Natural Resources where this game originated
--The Point of the Mountain Flight Park…there were only a handful of Hang Gliders, but we saw a million grasshoppers and one huge black widow spider.
Then we had burgers on the BBQ with trimmings and went to see the always good (at least to me) fireworks display at Lagoon, from the perimeter road this year.


Check out the tiny cockleburs on my pants - from geocaching, of course.

Dad at the point of the mountain State Flight Park. This is where the Hang Gliders take off. Looking southwest to Lehi.

Our own little 4th of July BBQ at 9:00pm...sun was down (no heat) there was an occasional breeze (see hair) so there were no bugs...perfect! The raspberry jello salad with blueberries and whipped cream was refreshing.

The Finale at Lagoon.

5th—Off to finish the game of State Park Geocaching:
--Willard Bay…we have driven by this area hundreds of times in our life but never ventured in. It’s a big area with shaded camping spots and beaches and plenty of water for swimming and boating. There were 7 stages to this cache with the final ammo box being just a few yards from the starting point! Funny!!
--Hyrum Reservoir…we were surprised to find this pleasant spot right on the edge of town.
--Bear Lake Marina…wow it was busy, glad we weren’t trying to launch or retrieve a boat. The cache was across the street, up on a hill with a nice view of the lake.
--Bear Lake Rendezvous Beach on the southern tip of the lake by Laketown…not one of the original State Park caches from last year (don’t know why) so we could only count it as a regular cache, not one of the 47 listed in the game. We ended up with 44 out of the 47…at least one cache in every State Park! (Kinda funny that our last one was at Bear Lake. We didn’t have time for caching when we were up there last fall cleaning the house.) It was quite a quest. Now what will we do for entertainment?

While in Bear Lake, we stopped at the house, it was looking better than last year, had an ice cream bar at Minnetonka Market, went up to see G&G’s graves at the St. Charles Cemetery (it was 3 years to the day that Grampa Almy passed away). Then we drove around the little, old town of Laketown and we think we found the house where Almy grew up and then we went out to Round Valley (just a few miles west) where Almy was born. I had never been there and it was a beautiful, green, valley with no development, just a few farms. Peaceful and pristine would describe it. We didn’t see any people. We took the short circular drive around the valley and discovered the Round Valley Cemetery through a fence and up on a hill. It was amazing…small and fenced in (wooden poles) with wild flowers and lilac bushes and lots of aromatic sage. We felt we had stepped back in time and we think Dad was related to about everyone in cemetery…Earleys, Murphys, Spragues and others. We wish we had had the names of his ancestors with us. We came back to Farmington through Randolph and Monte Cristo (Causy Reservoir/Camp Browning) which should bring back a few memories to some of you.

Dad retrieving a cache at Hyrum Reservoir

Bear Lake with part of the marina from the hill across the road.

Beautiful Round Valley, Utah

The Round Valley Cemetery. We think this headstone is for Dad's great-grandfather's twin brother (which we didn't know he had). I think you can see the Earley name if you double click on the photo. We couldn't remember his great-grandfather's name at the time, but now we know that he is buried here also.

The Round Valley from the cemetery.

This shot is of Laketown from the Laketown Cemetery. Grampa Almy grew up in a home in the clump of trees (2nd back) on the left.

Laketown cow ("Welcome to our Cowbin") and chicken head.




Random vehicle--an International

Harvester Minivan???

6th—Slept in, went to church, ate waffles, took a short nap, logged our caches, picked raspberries (yep they’re ripening every day), took the best ones to a neighbor going through chemo, then we spent a few hours reading about Ireland and the British Isles, checking out ferry boat schedules, towns and sites and trying to start up an itinerary. Oh, no, 3 weeks won’t be enough! Something fun: Dad was looking on the internet at the town of Marston, Bedfordshire, England where the Barkers came from and while he was looking at the town he saw a short street named “Barker’s Piece” that ended in a kinda cul-de-sac of homes and green “pasture” surrounded by trees. We’ll undoubtedly have to go there and check it out…most likely named for “us”! I found on the internet some photos of Ramelton, Ireland, on the Lough (“arm of the sea”) Swilly and Lennon River, including several bars/pubs and a building called the “Ancestry Center”. I think my great-grandmother Eliza Flynn was born in this town in the County Donegal. Guess we’ve got to get to the Family History Center here in SLC…does it sound like we’ve been bitten by a genealogy bug?