American West Heritage Star Party

The American West Heritage Center in Wellsville, Utah, Cache Valley, hosted a star party last night for the Perseid Meteor Shower. Sara invited us to go with her and the kids while Jared was playing in a dusk-to-dawn volleyball tournament (they call that playing?).

The Heritage center is an old farm with a bunch of farm kind of stuff to do. Jackson and Tanner rode the ponies. This is Tanner. He didn't like the ponies so much because he didn't like the helmet he had to wear. I think he would have been okay if he could have worn a helmet that he picked out, but this is the only one that fit him.

I think Jackson liked the ponies.

The farm animal section had goats, sheep with a ram that rammed the gate, and some peacocks.

The goats got a bit aggressive when someone with hay came inside the pen.

Across from the animals was this train. The engineer drove it around a big loop three times at a pretty high speed.

Chieko is sitting by herself, because Sara and the kids are in the caboose.

The caboose was a little scrunchy, so after Sara pried herself out, we road the train again in the open cars.

At the end of our evening (we left about 10 p.m.; the party went on until midnight), we attended a Glow in the Dark Tea Party in the Opera House, where we ate cake, cookies, and cucumber sandwiches with lemonade under black lights and with those glow things that you can make into bracelets. But we were told to leave the glow sticks on the table when we left. Tanner got hold of a broken one, and after that his hand and a spot on his nose glowed green for a while.

Before we left, Sara needed to feed Annabelle, so Jackson and I sat on the top rail of a fence cowboy style and looked out over a field at the stars while we waited. We saw an animal streak across the field that might have been a coyote, or a very fast house cat.

Up in this relatively dark valley, we could see the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and I spent some time explaining to Jackson what the Milky Way is--like two dinner plates sandwiched together and spinning through space. The earth and our sun are on the dinner plates, and when we look out toward the edge of the dinner plates, we can see millions of stars that look like a band of milk. And so on. My explanation was rather lengthy.

At the end, Jackson said, "You know what, Grandpa?"

I said, "What?"

Jackson said, "When you talk you shake this rail."

Oh, and we did see a couple of meteors streak across the sky right after we came out of the tea party.

PS Our prayers are with little Owen.

Caleb's Baptism

On Friday, July 16, we flew to Oklahoma City to attend Caleb's baptism on July 17.

This is Oklahoma City from the air.

And this is Caleb's baptism party (not a party party, but the people who attended the baptism). But there was also a kind of party, or refreshments following the baptism. Several members of the ward also attended, in addition to the bishop, primary president, full-time missionaries and one of the ward missionaries. Brian baptized and confirmed Caleb. Jamie played the violin, Brian spoke about the Holy Ghost, and I talked about baptism at the meeting. The bishop, primary president, and ward missionary also shared some thoughts.

Caleb got hold of my camera and took this self portrait.

Oklahoma City doesn't have a lot of famous sightseeing stops, but the most well-known is the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that Timothy McVeigh, a militant nutcase, blew up using a fertilizer-and-nitromethane (racing fuel) truck bomb on April 19, 1995.

This is a picture of the building just after the bombing (I got this from Wikipedia).

Of course the original building has been torn down. This building, which is now a museum, was across the street from the Murrah building and still shows the damage it sustained in the explosion.

Each of these chairs represents one of the 168 people killed in the bombing. The small chairs represent the 19 children under the age of six who were in a day care in the building.

This reflecting pool is the site of the Murrah building. Those three children at the base of the monument are Kali, Emi, and Caleb.

Same kids up close. Same reflecting pool.

Driving around Oklahoma City, we saw a lot of neighborhoods, and they all looked like this from a distance: tall asphalt-shingle roofs. The houses here don't have basements, so they have tall attics for storage and living space. We drove into the area where the Austins are going to move soon, and we noticed that several homes in the neighborhood were having their roofs replaced. I don't know if that was due to the severe hailstorm they had in May or the severe humid heat they have all summer long every year.

Speaking of the May hailstorm, Brian rescued their Sequoia just before the hail hit hard enough to do damage, but a lot of cars didn't escape the pummeling. We saw billboards and signs on trucks everywhere advertising hail damage repair.

To see the hailstorm, click here to watch a 10-second video that I got from YouTube.

We drove out to the Express Clydesdales ranch, where we visited these big horses (this is Big Jack) on a beautiful ranch at no cost.

These work horses are famous for their huge size and furry feet. I am almost as tall as Big Jack's shoulders.

Brian and Caleb petting one big horse.

Caleb and Emi in the Express stage coach.

Another must-see spot in Oklahoma City is Pops. This is a gas station-convenience store-hamburger joint with more than 500 different flavors of soda pop, including flavors like Monster Mucus, Bug Barf, and Apple Beer from Utah.

We tried black cherry cream soda that was really good, and a ginger ale that was also very good. We also tried sarsaparilla, a Route 66 Cream Soda because I wanted the bottle, and some others that I don't remember. We didn't drink them all at once. We put them in the refrigerator in our hotel and savored them one by one.

Nobody could complain that they couldn't find a flavor they liked.

We stopped at a steakhouse called Cattlemen's Cafe next to the Oklahoma Stockyards.

The steaks were really good. I guess the spaghetti was, too. We also had yummy BBQ spare ribs at Toby Keiths. If there isn't a lot to see in Oklahoma City, there is a lot to eat. Chieko and I also discovered The County Line, a Texas beef BBQ restaurant from Austin, TX. Next time we're in OKC, we need to stop there.

After church on Sunday, Chieko and I snuck away to the Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. There was a lot of great artwork, paintings and sculptures, but we weren't allowed to take pictures of those. Chieko sidled right up comfortably to the bar in the western town.

She didn't seem to notice the sheriff in town.

When she strolled right from the bar to rob the bank.

That didn't turn out so well.

Here's a guy teaching another guy to shoot a gun.

And here I am in the courtyard of the museum.

This sculpture depicts Abraham Lincoln contemplating the state of the country near the end of the Civil War (if I remember correctly).

This bronze sculpture is Wild Bill Hickok.

The End of the Trail represents the end of Native Americans' way of life with the encroachment of the Old West. James Earl Fraser created this sculpture for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. He won a gold medal for the piece and hoped to have it bronzed. However, WWI broke out, and bronze became scarce, and the sculpture was broken apart. Residents of Tulare County, California, rescued the artwork and had it restored in 1919, and the Cowboy Museum acquired it in 1968.

I think Caleb took this picture of Emi.

He also took this picture of Kali.

The Oklahoma City Temple is near the Express Clydesdale ranch.