It was winter and then it was spring.  Like everywhere else, we had a pretty warm winter.  You won't hear me complain about that.  A couple more winters like this one and I might be convinced to stay in Wyoming longer.

Zia playing in the thaw with friends.

Not pictured: smell of winter's worth of cow poop defrosting

I've been pretty busy, but no real art projects.  I did paint this bird house for my two favorite things: theater and Sheridan.  Yeah, I bet they didn't get anywhere close to my 20 hours of that.  Mental note not to participate in charity events again.

This is how Boomer has been helping me lately.

Pretty much all Lincoln did this winter was build with Legos.  Here is one of his own creations.

Lincoln turned four.

Amber turned more-than-four.

Eating breakfast (Wild, I know).

Smushing on Boomer.  I really like this picture.  I think it captures Lincoln and Boomer's relationship extremely well.

Sometimes Zia makes her own lunch.  This is called the Super Sandwich.  She's been making these for years.  It is one part ham, one part butter, one part peanut butter, and one part jelly.

So, last year the town Easter egg hunt was this big disaster.  There were about 200 kids and about 200 eggs.  This year I designed the flyer and hooked up an Easter bunny costume.  For the flyer I went with a "There will be Blood" theme.  Needless to say, this was met with confusion.  But I will consider it a success for one reason: there are no other "There Will Be Blood" themed Easter Egg Hunt Flyers anywhere, ever.

So, the Easter hunt went better.  There were 2400 eggs so everyone got some.  Ian was the Easter bunny.  He did a good job.

I guess Amber already put up pictures of the kids, but this was my favorite one.

Zia had her First Communion at church.  This made it easy for me to pick the date of my one day of going to church for the year.

I forgot to upload pictures of our new garage.  Yeah, it's still being worked on, 8 months later.  The masonry has been done and everything else is pretty much together, except for the landscaping.  One of the byproducts of the new garage ended up being the slab of the old garage, which we left to use a basketball court, etc.  The kids love it and spend a lot of time riding their bikes around on it.

For Easter we bought Lincoln a small electric four wheeler and Zia a new bike.  The four wheeler has easily been the favorite and gets a lot of use.

My dad, Amber's dad and I went to an auction in Buffalo one morning.  Those guys sure do talk fast and it gave me a headache after a couple of hours.  The people at the auction were almost exactly as I had pictured them.  Also, I did not buy anything at the auction.  Just like eBay, it's difficult to get a good deal.

And this is a roadkilled pheasant.  They're pretty amazingly colored birds.  That is all about the dead pheasant.

Zia and Lincoln have a name for this.  I think it's the Tiger Train.  I forget.

Zia and a friend playing outside.

We finally got around to burning all the brush piles.  It turned into a picnic.  Grandpa Mark was out there for about 6 hours.

Another picture of stuff burning.  This is a winter's worth of sensitive documents in the fireplace.  I thought it sort of looked like a monster.  Like Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock or something.

And as a totally inappropriate closer, I'm going to include this scan of two recent Archie comics I bought for Zia.  Maybe they should make these sexier so I buy them, huh?  And underneath it I'm going to put this picture of the kids.  It's going to be great.

I know what you're thinking: two blogs in one week!  But this isn't a blog.  It's science.

One year ago Sunday I started recording the weather every day on a free wildlife calendar we got somewhere.  Each day I determined whether the weather/temperature was Nice, Passable or Crappy.  I also noted whether it was really windy, when there were storms, and sometimes, particularly if it was really hot or really cold, I wrote down the temperature.

I judged whether a day was Nice, Passable or Crappy with a lot of leeway depending on the season.  For example, 30 degrees in the winter is nice.  30 degrees in June is crappy.  Windstorms, thunderstorms with wind, blizzards, excessive rain - all those things instantly receive the Crappy rating.  Also, days when the temperature reached above 88 or so degrees received the Crappy rating.  This is because, due to physical handicaps I can't go swimming and the hot weather is uncomfortable for me in other ways.

After Amber say the results I tallied she said, "I can't believe you rated that many days 'Nice.'"  So, you see, I was very objective.  SCIENCE.

I should also note that last winter was cold and awful, and that this winter has been pretty nice.  So, I think we can safely say that those two extremes have balanced themselves out.

The results:

Recorded weather for 339 days out of 365.  The other days I was out of town.

October was the nicest month with 17 Nice days.  February and August were the two worst months with 17 and 22 Crappy days respectively.

In Ranchester during 2011 (and one month of 2012!) the weather was 31.26% Nice, 28.6% Passable, and 39.8% Crappy.  It was windy (winds at least 35 mph, as high as 68 mph) 43 days of the year, or 12.7% of the time.  It was -10 or colder 11 days of the year, and probably more, since I did a poor job at recording temperatures.

So, there you have it!  Crappy weather wins!

We drove to Billings the night before because we had an early flight.

All through this trip Zia made friends with kids where ever she went, particularly when she went swimming.  These girls were her best friends until she made new best friends the next day.  We're not sure where she got this skill.  Not from either of us.

How come vacations always start out like this?

Early morning in Salt Lake.

So excited.

We arrived at the resort in time for the kids to swim after dinner.

Day One: Magic Kingdom.

The Buzz Lightyear ride.

I thought I was totally killing it on this ride (a shooting gallery that keeps track of your points) after I maxed out the score.  But later in the day I saw two old ladies walking around with buttons saying that they also scored the maximum points on the ride, so...must not be much of an achievement.

Asto-Orbiter

I have no idea why the Tomorrowland Speedway is still there.  It's old.  It's smelly.  But for some reason we took pictures there, so maybe that's why.

Here are some things I noticed during my visit.

- The rides are very short, the lines can be long.  Like 2-4 minutes short.  That wouldn't be a big deal, but people will wait up to an hour to ride.  This is the case with the new(er) Toy Story Mania ride in Hollywood Studios.  We waited 30 minutes for that one, by far the longest the waited for any ride, and it ended up being a few minutes long.  Otherwise, the waits weren't bad at all and we used the Fastpass tickets for the lengthy ones, so no biggie.  But anyway, really short rides.  Like Pirates of Caribbean.  I remember that one from my last visit when I was twelve.  What I didn't remember is that it's only a couple of minutes long.  If you blink, you'd miss it.

Part of the TS Mania line.

- Video screens have replaced a lot of the animatronics.  Rides like Seas with Nemo, Journey to Imagination (which, sadly, is completely different than the version I remember from twenty years ago), and Toy Story Mania basically are just you driving by video screens in glorified carnival carts.  Even the Mexico ride in Epcot is mostly just video panels now.  Lame.

- Sometimes you can walk a long ways in Disney before you hear someone speaking in English.  Everyone seems to be from Europe or from South America.  And you know how everyone always claims that Americans are such bastards when they travel overseas?  Yeah, you guys act the same way when you come to America.

- There are a lot of fat people at Disney.  Maybe there are just a lot of fat people period.  If you want to make money in the future, invest in scooters.  Just like the movie Wall-E.  There are numerous other blogs about this.

Haunted Mansion was my favorite one, but the kids were NOT so sure, and wouldn't go on it with me again.

Another aspect of Disney World is the character meet and greet.  Generally you will be in a line with a bunch of unruly, entitled Brazilians.  And then the lady before you will take 40 pictures of her kids with the character with her cellphone.  And then she'll make the professional photographer take pictures of HER with her cellphone.  Unbelievable.  Happened every day.

This is how Pluto signs autographs.

Parade.

Oh, let's just throw in a couple of fat people pictures.  I wish I would have taken more.

So, this guy had an Angry Birds shirt on.  I stalked him for a couple of minutes, but I could never get a picture of the front of him.  But man. It was something else.

Day Two: Hollywood Studios.

We ended up going to Hollywood Studios for two days.  The kids really liked the Star Tours ride.  Zia was selected as the Rebel spy during one of our rides, and Amber picked for another.  So, I guess we have a lot of rebel spies in our family.

Kids waiting for Star Tours.

Why buy a shirt when you can just pose with it?

The Indiana Jones stunt show was exactly the same as it was when I saw it twenty years ago.  Exactly.

What the crowd looks like for that show.

Lincoln swimming at the hotel.  He only comes up for just barely long enough to catch his breath.  He's a lifeguard's worst nightmare because he always looks like he's drowning.

See that douche bag behind Lincoln?  His wife used an iphone to check stats on a basketball game and relayed every single point, foul and substitution across the water to him for 20 minutes while he ignored his son.

We rode buses to Downtown Disney because Lincoln really wanted to go to the Lego store there.  Never mind that you can buy Legos at Walmart back at home.  He HAD to go there.  Downtown Disney is sort of a shopping area, but no one is actually shopping.  They're all just walking around.  Tons of people.  We got some Legos and got out of there.  60 minutes of bus riding for that.

They don't look worn out, do they?

Some resort architecture.

Zia enjoying a desert that she can paint and eat too.

Day Three: Epcot

Out of all the parks, Epcot was a little disappointing to me.  Rides like Journey to Imagination used to be great.  Now it sucks.  Horizons is gone.  Spaceship Earth was never very exciting even though it looks exciting.  Luckily, there are some good new rides like Soarin' and Test Track to fill the gap, but it still feels a bit dated.  And I never did like the World Showcase.  So much walking.  So little payoff.

Zia took this picture of a Hannah Montana prop.  I don't know anything about it.

Somewhere in Epcot you can taste pop from all over the world.  Beverly was BAD.

Big lemons.

A napkin.

We ate at a restaurant with a fish tank.

Dessert with bloody skid mark.

Really bummed this picture isn't better.  Because man, my face was funny.

If only there was a black metal church burning ride.

Spot Amber!

Day Four: Animal Kingdom.

AK is the newest park.  It is really beautiful and the amount of detail that Disney has put into the villages and buildings is incredible.  I didn't do a very good job of photographing that sadly.  AK also has some great thrill rides like Dinosaur and Expedition Everest.

Lincoln went on Dinosaur.  When the light can back on and the ride stopped, I looked at him: His eyes were shut tight.  I don't think he saw many dinosaurs!

AK also has a retro dinosaur carnival style park.  This ride sort of made me sick.

You can pet goats at AK.

And they've got llamas!

We watched some kind of pig get spayed in the operating theater.  Pretty neat, actually.

Some images of the details in the buildings.

AK has an animal safari ride with real trucks.  Very impressive and fun.

We did talk Zia into riding Expedition Everest (AK's rollercoaster).  Here she is being nervous about it.

Walked back to Epcot for the fireworks and dinner.

Day Five: Went back to Hollywood Studios and flew home.  A very long day.

Overall, we had a very fun time.  Disney is what it is.  It may be evil in some ways, but the amount of thought that they've put into every aspect of the parks is amazing.  Also amazing is that everyone who visits there comes away feeling like they've really experienced all sorts of things and happened upon special events.  I know it's all an engineered facade, but they've really got it down pat...

I don't feel like I've taken very many pictures lately.  It's winter.  So there are three things to take pictures of: 1) winter 2) the kids and 3) the cat.

Zia turned 8.  She had a cake and friends over.  I would put pictures of her friends up but I don't have legal permission.

Halloween happened.  It was raining.  And once again, we were utterly confused by when and where people in this area trick or treat.  Seriously, we have never seen one of Zia's friends out trick or treating.  Did I mention that people out here are weird?

Community center carnival.

Amber hit a deer on the way home from work one night.  It totaled the VW, a car we bought in Fort Collins 10 years ago.  We really liked that car and took a lot of fun trips in it.  It was sort of like our child before we had children in that sort of way that childless people personify dogs and cats and vehicles.  Sadly, the deer damaged a lot of parts on the engine as well as pretty much everything on the front end of the car and the windshield.

The deer didn't live.  Big surprise.

So, we had a buy a new car.  We spent a day in Billings and bought a used Subuaru.  It wasn't really what Amber wanted, but she didn't really know what she wanted.  Here is an obligatory new car picture.  I should note that we no longer personify our cars.  They're just cars.

Our new garage for the new car is somewhat finished.  After months of delays, the contractor finally got started, but of course, by then winter also got started.  So, now we have a garage that we can park in, but it doesn't have any masonry work or siding yet.  I don't know when that is going to happen.  It might be awhile.

And then it was Thanksgiving, one of my least favorite holidays.  But, you know, they're all starting to run together.

We drove to Red Lodge to have  Thanksgiving with my family.  The snow pile was played upon.

Lincoln always gets photographed with his Thanksgiving dinner.  This is because when he was 1 he really liked his Thanksgiving meal and now he's doomed to repeat that photograph foreveeeeeeerrrrr.

We went skiing.  It's very expensive to take the kids skiing.  Putting them in lessons might buy you 4 or 5 runs max, and then you have to pick them up.  It's 10:30.  They're tired and cold, and the day is over.  They had fun though but skiing is sure not like it used to be.

This girl is Lincoln's instructor.  I do not know her.  For completion's sake let's call her Beth.

GUESS WHAT?!?!  NOW IS THE TIME WHEN I POST PICTURES OF THE CAT!  Do you know the Adele song "Rumor has it"?  The kids sing that one "Booooooomer  Booooooomer  Boooooooomer  has it, Booooooomer has it."

Lounging:

Hunting:

Being annoying:

The school had their school concert.  At the risk of sounding awful, I'll go ahead and say that it one of my least favorite events of the season.  Also, these children are appearing without legal consent.

Moving targets.

Ballet recital came next.

OH I FORGOT.  MORE BOOMER.

Being weird:

There are only two colors to the landscape right now.  Blue (snow and sky) and a yellowy tan color that I like to think of as beer color.

Christmas was next.

Lincoln got a lot of Legos.  We literally spent days building Legos.  For his birthday, he probably does not need more Legos.

Santa installed a climbing rope in the ceiling of the living room, using a hole that already existed in the ceiling.  Pretty much everyone who sees this looks at us like we're nuts.  But it has been a lot of fun for her, particularly when she realized she didn't have to stop at climbing: she could swing on it as well.

Lincoln had a pretty bad cold for Christmas this year.  He has never been well for Christmas.

Amber's cake with some cupcake mushrooms.  I think this is after Zia had already destroyed it.

We had to reach pretty deep into our bag of tricks to survive Christmas break.  This is when Wyoming is really hurting for anything to do besides eating, drinking and watching TV.  We went bowling.  That was fun.  But it hurt my back.  That made me remember why I don't really bowl anymore.  Also, I suck.  Did you know that I bowled in a league for 2 or 3 years every Saturday in North Dakota?  I did.

We drove to my parents again for New Years.  I guess New Years is technically the fourth holiday, but I don't really count it because I don't have a very good relationship with it.  I don't like staying up late.

The kids wanted to go to the waterpark in Billings on the way to Red Lodge so we did that.  I'm going to go ahead and leave out the picture I took of the fat lady with ripples of back fat bulging out of the window in her swimsuit, but here's a picture of Lincoln.

We skiied.  Amber took Zia up in the afternoon too.  Zia even did the terrain park.  She was very proud that she did a jump and made it over the obstacle boxes without falling (no pictures of this sadly).

Morning light in the upper lodge.  Did you know that one of the chairs at RL fell off with two people in it last week?  It's true.  They both lived.  I think.  I better check.

And the snow pile got a workout again.  There is a lot of snow in Red Lodge this year.

And now I am caught up.  One last picture of Lincoln!  Happy holidays!

We went to Kansas back in, uh, September sometime.  It was a lot of traveling and Lincoln vomited all over the backseat of the rental van in Kansas City and it smelled like puke all week.  My mom traveled with us and we visited my granddad and family on that side for a few days at the Lake of the Ozarks, and then drove down to SE Kansas to visit my Dad's mom and uncle.

Denver Airport.

Fishing for crappie at the lake.

Everybody caught some.

The kids especially like tormenting the minnows with their godlike hands.

Going on a boat ride with cousin Parker.

We ate at Paradise.

Them fishes eat a lot of dog food.

Lots of places to shop in the Ozarks, but it's all just junk.  Seems like there used to be unique souvenirs, but now it's all just the same stuff from China.

These are pretty amazingly sweet though, aren't they?

While we were in the Ozarks we visited Bagnell Dam, and the Dogpatch area - somewhere I used to visit when I was a kid.  It's all kind of worn-down now.

I'm meltiiiinnnnng.

We also visited Ha Ha Tonka, a nearby State Park that features the ruins of a "castle" (a gigantic house that burned down in the 40s), a natural spring, and lots of neat karst rock formations including small caves and arches.

In Parsons, we visited Grandma.  She would probably be mad to know I took this picture.

We visited Big Brutus, a giant "shovel" stranded in the middle of the prairie, its job stripping the overburden for coal mining completed.  You used to be able to climb way up to the top of the beam, 15 stories up, but that's closed off now due to "insurance restrictions."  Heh.

Lincoln loved sitting in the driver's seat.

Zia climbs a tree.

Back at home, Lincoln gives Boomer some love.

Grape leaves along the Tongue River.

For some reason, Ian, Danlin, Amber and I decided to hike into the Box Canyon again this year.  We apparently didn't learn our lesson last year.  But this time it was much, much cooler and better weather for hiking.  It was still exhausting.  Danlin fell in the river, and Amber fell off some rocks, but nobody died, so it was Mission Completion.  We caught about the same amount of fish as last year.  Boomer was ecstatic.

If you look closely, you can see my head steaming in this picture.

Long way down.

Long way up.

I went to the pumpkin patch with Lincoln's preschool.  I was assigned an extra child.

And as if this wasn't already enough, Amber and I went to Jackson for our anniversary.  We drove through Yellowstone, and then spent 2 days in Grand Teton.  The roads were kind of sketchy 30 miles from our house.  We felt like we were driving into winter, and that's not really something you want to do.

But it cleared up.

The Shoshone valley near Cody is about as pretty as any of the areas we drove through.

Smokey the Bear welcomed us to Yellowstone.  Very exciting.

Pretty much everything can kill you in Yellowstone.  EVERYTHING.  There are warnings everywhere.  All the warnings convinced me that the average American has never even set foot outside of his car, or encountered exotic objects like trees before.   Mostly, I liked the warnings that had graphic pictures.

When people drive through Yellowstone, they drive really slowly.  You never know, you might see a deer!  I think the speed limit through the park is 35, and we averaged a healthy 55, passing more cars than we probably pass in a year.  I can't imagine what Yellowstone is like during the summer season (we were there 2 weeks before it closed entirely).  Oh, and park rangers really can stop you for speeding.  I learned that years ago.

The area of Yellowstone we drove through was scenic, but not exceptionally so.  Trees, burnt trees, a big lake, some mountains.  Pretty, but not much different than what we look at all the time.  We're snobs like that.  We saw an elk, some mooses, lots of chipmunks, a bald eagle.  Animals that don't require photographing.

We walked to Lone Star Geyser, a geyser that erupts about every 3 hours.

(Geysers are apparently worth photographing.)

We arrived at Old Faithful minutes before it erupted.  Amber watched it from the gift shop.  Haha.  This is as close as I got.  Did you know that Old Faithful has its own highway interchange?  It does.

The Tetons are awesome-looking.  But since they're set on a straight-line parallel to most of the major roads in the park, you get a real overdose of that same great view.  So prepare yourself.

Jackson is a very strange place.  A lot of Wyomingites don't "claim" Jackson as a part of the state.  It's more of an annex of California.  Even though it's right in the middle of some of the most beautiful scenery in the US, it's not very Wyoming-like at all.  It has 3 sushi restaurants.  It's full of fancy shops that are painfully, insanely expensive.  It also has a McDonalds, but it's "McDonalds of Jackson."  The grocery store is super nice, and has a sushicounter with 3 sushi chefs, as well as a 3-stationed frozen yogurt machine, just in case 3 people want frozen yogurt at the same time.

It also has the most dangerous Dairy Queen drive-through of all time.  It deserves a warning sign.

If you have millions of dollars and want to outfit your Wyoming vacation home, you can buy all sorts of expensive stuff in Jackson.  Like a sabertooth tiger skull for $50,000.

If you're on a budget, how about a giant gourd sloppily painted with a bald eagle for $800?

Everything has fur on it.  People still wear Uggs non-ironically in Jackson, too.

Gag gifts for your friends back in New York.

See this barn?  It's everywhere.  I predict that even I will take a picture of it here in a bit.

Yeah, not so much.

Jackson is powered by a huge labor force of Hispanic folks.  So much so that going into the Kmart (which looks fancy on the outside, but on the inside it's just another dumpy Kmart) at 9 at night feels like walking into a foreign country.  Very strange.  Even the lost cat signs are in Spanish.

Here's me under one of the famous elk antler arches.  Which remind me giant piles of clipped toenails.

We spent the next two days hiking in Grand Teton.  It's a strange place.  Giant spikey mountains, and a big, broad, flat glacial valley devoid of, well, almost anything.  It doesn't feel like the wilderness.  It probably does if you hike farther up into the mountains than we did.

This is near Teton Science School, where Amber went in 8th grade.

Um, was that there when we walked by earlier?

Gros Ventre slide area.

There's the barn!  Actually, it's not the same one.  But it's right next door.

In Jackson, we went to the Ripley's Believe it Or Not.  It was enjoyable.  Here's a bear about to get token out.

Really creepy, overgrown hillside cemetery in Jackson near Snow King.

When it was time to go home, we drove back through YNP, even though it had snowed the night before.  Yeah, tourists from South Carolina don't tend to drive very fast when the roads are like this.

We stopped at the Mud Volcano area.  What's not to love about Mud Volcanos?  Seriously, I know most of us would get into fistfights to defend the honor of Mud Volcanos.

JIMMY!  NOOOOOOOOOO!

Amber had some eel rolls.  From Jackson.

This may be the longest blog ever.  There's only one last picture.  I think.  I went to a punk show at Scotty's Skate Kastle.  It looked like this.

And thus ends the Fall Megablog.

Earlier this summer I noticed that some of the grasshoppers I smashed by the garage had something weird inside them, and the weird stuff was moving.  I shrugged and kept smashing them.  But then I thought, that's not normal anatomy.  I know my grasshopper anatomy pretty well at this point.

It turns out that the grasshoppers are infested with parasitic hairworms that prey specifically on grasshoppers (and praying mantises.  Or something).  The worms fill up nearly the entire body cavity of the grasshopper, and here's the weird part.  The worms then change the body chemistry of the grasshopper - as in they alter the chemical make-up of the grasshopper's brain - and cause the grasshopper to actively seek out water to drown in.  At which point, the worm exits the dead grasshopper and continues its life cycle.

The scientists aren't entirely sure how the chemistry part of this all works.  You can read about it here.  Tell me that's not the weirdest, grossest thing you're likely to find outside your garage any day.

The discovery of these worms led to some controlled experiments in grasshopper suicide.  Sadly, none of the test subjects were infested with the worms.  Half of them jumped into the water and died anyway.

Logically I can't post pictures of the kids' first day of school directly after the grasshopper hairworms, so here are some pictures of storms instead.

Kinda sucks when you have no garage and it sure looks like your car is about to get hailed on.

OK, that was refreshing.

The kids returned to school several weeks ago.  Lincoln caught a cold the first week of preschool, of course.  But you can tell from these pictures that he was very excited to be going.

Zia danced in the Ranchester Days parade.  It was a hot day.

Lincoln made a big catch.

Baby Elam comes to visit and gets some love.

Amber, Lincoln and Zia went on a horseback ride courtesy of her nurse's horses.

Two letterboxing  friends visited us from Wisconsin and I went on one of their many hikes with them.  They were nice enough to spend several days finding some of my boxes around the Sheridan area and we enjoyed having them.

The work on our new garage and new driveway started a few weeks ago, and then abruptly came to stop last week due to equipment troubles.  Which was kind of disappointing.  I feel a lot better hearing the machines moving around out there because winter is coming pretty soon.  But, they got the old garage torn down, the new driveway cut in, and the old driveway area filled with dirt.

Old garage and parking area.

Picnic in the mountains.

Lastly, we went up to Medicine Wheel today.  Normally you have to walk to Medicine Wheel.  It's not very far, but with the kids its kind of a hassle and it can be pretty chilly up there.  In the fall, they open the gate and you can drive right up to the Wheel.  I've been told this is so the hunters can use the area.

What's nice about going up there in the fall is that there are no rangers to tell you to stay on the paths.  You can explore the cool stuff around the Wheel without getting yelled at.

If you look closely, you can see Lincoln and Amber in this picture.  Big cliff to the right.

Some people having a sacred group hug at the Wheel.

Weird blow-down patterns in the forest.  Doesn't really show very well in the picture.

Mormon crickets are everywhere in the high mountains now.  This is a male.  The females are even bigger.

The area around Medicine Wheel is full of sinkholes and crevices.  Normally you can't really explore them as well as one would like.  But, no rangers.  I found one crevice that looked promising, so I went down into it.  It looked like this near the surface.

It went down quite aways, and I didn't have a flashlight.  Wouldn't it be weird to find something down here I thought.  (This is three images photoshopped together.)

Creepily enough, I thought I could see a skull down there.  The camera flash proved that it was more than just a skull.

Our theory is that the moose was crossing the area in the spring, when the snow was still pretty deep.  The crevice wasn't very wide at the surface, maybe two or three feet, and was probably covered with snow.  The moose fell down the crevice, maybe 40 feet to the bottom, and unable to get out, died there.  Pretty grim, but an interesting surprise.  Amber and I hauled the moose skull up out of the hole.  It was a little soggy and damaged from being down there in the wet snowy-ness, but it's drying out in the sun now!

There was a lot of flooding this summer.  That's what I left off with in the last blog anyway.

Zia named this part of the flooding that we drove through everyday the "excitement puddle."

We hiked to the top of Steamboat Point with Danlin and Ian.

Danlin is younger than the rest of us so she still does stuff like this!

Bat guano.

We went to the monster truck show.  We even rode in a monster truck!  I know, right?

Having a cook-out.  It's been established that no one actually likes s'mores anymore.  What's up with that?

A hike up the canyon.  Very full river, but starting to go back down.

The kids got one of these and like to go in circles on it.

Dressing up like adults, apparently.

And not so much.

Double Rainbow!!!!!

Double Umbrellas!!!!

And just a normal rainbow.

Granddad Cray came to visit!

And picnics were had.

Lincoln paints a pretend dinosaur poop.

The circus came to Ranchester.

We were forced to go to a car show because that's where the Home Depot kids' buildy booth was.

Alli and Kurt and the rest of the family came and visited for the 4th of July and we did stuff.

Tried to hike, but there was too much snow to get to the trailhead.

So we hiked up a big hill and had a picnic on an uncomfortable slope.

Nice one, Alli.

Only a few people got hurt lighting fireworks, so maybe next year we will have a better safety plan.

The kids found out they can watch TV on the iPhone.

I didn't get hit by lightning yet this year.

Amber and the kids went on a couple of boating trips on the Big Horn reservoir, all of which I skipped because I don't like sun and hotness.

We saw a sunset that rivaled anything we've seen so far.  The pictures aren't going to do it justice at all.

Click it for bigger!

Cousin Penny and her family came and visited.

Dayton Days happened and I got forced into participating this year.

Boomer took some naps.  Some of them were embarrassing.

Picnic near the south fork of the Tongue River.

Rainstorm over the Wolf Mountains - a common sight in the evening.

We finally got to do a little hiking once all the snow melted.

An old shepherder's cabin.

Amber and I walked up to Black Mountain Look-Out while the kids were at my parents.  We didn't breathe hard at all.

And I'm going to throw in some pictures from the iPhone since that's what all the hip kids do these days.

Did I mention that the kids fought a lot this summer?  They did.

Gold Creek near the old Bald Mountain City site.

Lincoln and his bazooka.

We hiked down to Porcupine Falls.  This year Lincoln walked all the way up himself.  He was kind of a pill though.

Maybe we'll put this in the paper when he graduates.

This isn't actually the falls, by the way.

The next two pictures were taken by a possibly tweaking dude wearing only boxers with a heart design on them.  I'm not lying.

Lincoln with a friend who is also Batman.

And wow, I guess I'm caught up!  Maybe next time there won't be such a gap.  Or maybe there will be, you never know.

In Ranchester, the park has flooded twice in the last 2 weeks, and probably will again, more violently, when all the snow starts to melt later this week.  I don't think I've ever heard so many frogs around here.  The kids enjoyed exploring a place that they usually go to play when it's not underwater.

Wolf Creek, which is normally a small little stream, is also very full.  All the little creeks are like this, even ones that you wouldn't normally notice.

It turns out that living on a tall hill has a lot of disadvantages, particularly the wind.  But our house will never, ever flood.  So, lucky us.

"Hey kids.  Don't point the...oh, never mind."

We drove over the Gillette for god-baby Elam's birthday.  We also went to the Camplex, a place I went to a couple months ago.  The kids had never been there though.  They got very greasy.  Lincoln loved being in the train.  He smiled the whole time.

Lincoln's foot is on backwards in this one.

Elam lapses into Sugar Shock.

The other news is that after 8 months I'm finally finishing the painting I started back in October.  Maybe you remember the drawing for it.  It was a long, long time ago.  So long ago I had to dust the painting at least twice while I was working on it.  It was a frustrating process and the first oil painting I've made in 10 years.  I guess I learned a few things.  One thing I learned was that sometimes you have to suck it up and wipe off days of painting if something's not right (this is particularly hard if you only get a couple hours here and there and might not get to work on the painting again for days).  I also learned that if something looks bad or is incomplete in the drawing that badness is going to translate doublefold into the painting.  Next time I will be more careful.  Next time I'll probably also make a color rough of some sort.  I did make a color psd file, and then never looked at it again.

Ignore this.  I did.

I don't really want to put a picture of it up because I don't have a good way to photograph it or scan it.  It's much larger than it appears here: 40 inches wide, enormous by my standards.  It is oil on cradled birch panel.  Maybe I will try and get a better image of it soon after a few more small altercations.  I'm having trouble being done with it.  I guess you'll just have to believe me when I say what they always say on Ebay: "It looks much better in real life."

And now summer is here.  So no more painting for awhile.  Zia has 4 days of school left.  Lincoln has one day of daycare.  Hopefully it will do everyone a favor and stop raining...Amber wants to do some gardening.

Amber and I spent a day fishing on the Bighorn River near Hardin in Montana.  Little did we know that this river, helped by the Yellowtail Dam's flow, is one of the best trout streams in the US.  If not the best.  People travel here from all over the world.   It's an hour from our house.  You pretty much have to own a boat or hire a boat to float you down the 10-20 miles of tailwater.  It was cold and rainy, but the rain held off enough that it wasn't too miserable.  Amber caught a lot more fish than I  did, but we both caught a lot, which probably shows you how good of a fishing area it is.

Brown trouts are serious.

Rainbow trout are not serious.

We missed the morels by a couple of days along the river, but one of the guides was nice enough to bring us a bag the next weekend.  I have mixed feelings about morels.  They are interesting in that they're one of the few things you can't buy in a store, pretty much ever.

This is at a park that's in the middle of Sheridan.  The kids call it "exploring park."  It's pretty wild.  Here's Lincoln chasing a bunch of deer towards a city street.

Random Boomer pictures.

She fits right in.

It's been awfully rainy here for a week and it's supposed to rain for another week.  It's completely putting the kabosh on early season garage saling.  We did find one thing at a sale last weekend though.  It's an old self-published How-to-live-like-a-hippie manual from 1971.  Or 1973.  I'm too lazy to get up.  It cost 25 cents.  It must have 400 pages of handlettered, hand-drawn pages.  There's a lot of helpful advice for a quarter.

Did you know that marijuana plants respond to love?

Those dang crabs.  They are obviously a drag!

Who knew that burning a dead body in the woods was so simple!

And here's a bonus page from an insurance book about the deadly dangers of dogs.  Stand like a tree!  Be like a rock!  Well, which is it?

And that is all for now.  There's only 2 weeks left of school, and you know what that means.

Once we got to Thermopolis and checked into the hotel, we walked around the Hot Springs site.  Here's a giant algae-covered mineral deposit blob.  About a hundred years ago, this was some sort of fountain and now it's...this.  Thermopolis has also constructed a fake version of this blob near the high school.  But this is the real blob thing.  Pretty exciting to have that for your town mascot, huh?

There are some natural pools near the river.

I was too scared to go across this bridge.  Because it was scary.

The "Big Springs" that the water comes out of.

Anyway, so those are the natural pools.  You can't get in those.  There are three places to get into the hot springs: Star Plunge, Hellie's Tepee (sic?) Spa and the State Bath House.  In keeping with the style of the rest of the town, two of these three are semi-rundown and sort of old.  Like no one has thrown money at these places in 30 years.  There are a lot of handlettered signs in Thermopolis.  A lot of stuff that looks like it belongs in an old roller rink.  I go back and forth between thinking this stuff is great, true Americana and "Man, this place needs a face lift."  It's the kind of vacation spot you don't see very often anymore.  People come to soak in the water for their health.  Did you know that the water in the springs contains 27 minerals as well as "healing powers"?  Fat people, old people and cripples love the Hot Springs.  The water doesn't make you any less fat or old though, and the jury's still out on whether the water will magically cure your emphysema or not.

Star Plunge is the preferred swimming hole of Lincoln and Zia.

Hope you have flawless skin!

Since I can't swim anymore I spent a lot of time wandering around this fine establishment and viewing the swimming from a cagelike "observation area."  Fun.

Since Star Plunge is a fine family experience they have a whole cabinet full of brass knuckles and weird edged weapons in the gift shop!

I don't know what this thing is.  But it's awesome.  And I guess you can buy it if you were excited enough about it.

Amber and Lincoln at Star Plunge.  Zia is off talking to strangers.

After a sleepless night at the hotel (at least the weird news build-up was just bin Laden and we weren't under nuclear attack), we drove to the Legend Rock Petroglyph site.  To get in you have to get a permit and gate key in Thermopolis.

The petroglyphs were amazing.  There are supposedly 300 of them along a rock wall about 30 feet tall.  They're out in the middle of nowhere and if you ignore an oil derrick or two, it's easy to imagine that the landscape has changed very little in thousands and thousands of years.  The oldest petroglyph is believed to be 11,000 years old with the majority of the images around 2000 years old.  What do they mean?  No one really knows.  Some of them are representational - animals, human figures, etc. - but a lot of the largest petroglyphs are bizarre anthropomorphic images: strange humanoids with writhing lines extending from their bodies, spirals in their stomachs and horns on their heads.  Lincoln was positive these were aliens and really, that's as good a guess as any.  Maybe they are animal-gods, creation myth figures, just weird doodles, who knows.  But being out there with nothing but desert around you, looking at those cosmic-looking things was a little spooky.  We had a fun time walking along the wall looking for different petroglyphs.  There is some vandalism at the site, which is sad, but the majority of the large images are intact.  Anywhere else in the US this would probably be a major site, but in Wyoming, in the middle of no where, there isn't much besides the gate to prevent people from coming and messing with things.  I guess time will eventually erase all things if the teenagers don't get there first.

So, here is a whole big pile of photos.  If you're not into them, you'll just have to get your scroll on.

Small figures inside bigger figures.

Thermopolis also has a dinosaur museum.  It's "highly rated."  It's not too big, but pretty good by Wyoming standards for sure.  A lot of the exhibits had placards with seemingly out-of-place humor on them.  Or was that just me?

Brittle Stars gonna party like 1999!

"Um, I don't know what this is.  Should we put it in the museum?"  "Yes, absolutely."

Of course it's the weirdest.  It's from Japan.

I'm sure the person that spent years preparing this fossil would be thrilled to know it's labeled as a "Slab o' Crinoids."

MASS DEATH.

After the dinosaur museum, the kids requested swimming again so we went to the Tepee.  Another poorly planned entryway.  The kids ate ice cream out of freezers like this all over town every 2 hours.

And then, we drove home.

With a stop for more ice cream at Burgess Junction.

The End.