man up, please

for the past two years i have been left out of the boy scout summer activity. i had gone to scout camp or high adventure for the past 10 years prior to this most recent history. my responsibilities at church no longer require that i accompany the boys; in fact they require that i participate with the young women instead.

recent events perpetrated by the boys themselves have made me less saddened by my having been left behind.

last summer, a group of boys decided to have some fun with one of the raccoons that had been frequenting their campsite on previous nights. they stoned it to death and began the process of skinning it. the boy with the knife slipped in his work and skinned himself by slicing up his thumb. i don't believe in karma, but it is an interesting situation. i assume the raccoon was left to rot where it was, so that's nice.

this year they went to new mexico. i heard stories of some of the boys being unwilling to help with any of the chores around the campsite. as i understand - setting camp, cleaning, cooking, and packing up are the responsibility of everyone in the camp. additionally, only two of the boys were willing to go on the hike up to a mountain lake. i should be ashamed to be so weak and lazy. i'm sure i don't know what to say.

while it makes me sad to hear of the less-than-stellar behavior of the some of the current crop of boys in the ward, it does remind me of how great my son is and how i want him to behave when he is older. at eight he has already accomplished some pretty difficult outdoor adventures that these boys 10 years his senior might likely not attempt. it also makes me less concerned about missing next year's trip.

i sure am proud of jackson. he's a good boy.

light the homefires...get my slippers...make a pizza

in 1996 charlotte and i prepared to celebrate our 5th anniversary. due to educational and financial concerns, we had not been on any kind of a vacation in several years. though we didn't have a huge amount of money, i had finally begun a profitable line of work and we had a large list of choices of vacation destination. after a little discussion, we decided on walt disney world. to be honest, i'm not sure why it had so much allure to us, and i sure don't know if i would make the same decision today. nevertheless, we made our plans.

we went in june of 1996 and had a spectacularly good time...so much so that we decided to return the following summer. during that second trip, we noticed a good number of kiosks around the resort advertising the disney vacation club. we decided to take a tour and see what was offered.

once we heard the selling price, it took us all of 10 seconds to decide that this was something that we would love doing for a very long time. we were not wrong.

because of the membership in the vacation club, we have been fortunate to invite along others and introduce them to walt disney world. it has been alot of fun and we were in orlando again last week.

this trip was a little different than others. for the first time we were able to bring our little girl. she seems to have had a good time and i hope she will enjoy returning as often as the rest of the family does.

ethan went with us this year. he and jackson had a great time together when they weren't vying for supremacy. unfortunately for ethan, jackson won all of these competitions since he is more than two years older. though life with uncle chris and aunt charlotte is a little different than what he is accustomed to, i think he had alot of fun and was glad to have gone. he was probably relieved that we only went on one waterfall all week.

jackson rode some rides that he had never considered in the past. big thunder mountain railroad and dinosaur were near-total failures whereas splash mountain and maelstrom were total successes. he also loved eating at the hollywood brown pinewood derby.

we enjoyed riding alot of the old standards, but being disney, there are always new attractions for those who return often. toy story mania at disney's hollywood studios (even the name is new) is a cool mixture of midway games and three-dimensional virtual-reality that we all loved. new hotels and attractions certainly keep things fun for us, though we really are drawn back by the things we have been doing for years.

while our week away was lovely, the ride home was awful. jackson got sick along the way which required us to stay the night in the grossest motel in the lower 48, and added 10 hours to our already 18-hour drive. i wish i could adequately convey the joy of pulling onto the shoulder and throwing open the door just in time to let out a boy with regurgitation on his mind. it is just up the list from not being able to get the door open in time. the three hours we wasted crawling through road construction reminded me of the reasoning behind my typical night driving. eventually we got here and we happy to slouch into our own comfortable home.

it's very nice to go traveling, but it's oh so nice to come home.

it's strange how we just got home, and i can't wait to go back. how very bourgeois of me.