Where to begin, where to begin?

Last Thursday I went to work as usual.  While there I learned that one of my former female co-workers had died and that her funeral was tto be hat same day at 11:00 AM.  Needless to say, that had a rather sobering effect upon me.  I was just overwhelmed to think that someone I know was suddenly gone.  The only way we knew was someone happened to see the obituary in the paper. 

Thankfully, Shanna called me a short time after I heard the news with a little news of her own.  We're happy to announce the pending expansion of the Ormond tribe.  Expected time of arrival is sometime around the last week of January.  I've been walking with my head in the clouds since.

Shanna just finished telling me some great blackmail stories about our kids.  These stories feature the acclaimed actors of "All Our Children", Jonathan (7 yrs), McKenna (4 yrs) and George (3 yrs).  The opening scene has all three in the downstairs changing into swimming suits.  Suddenly, Jonathan exclaims in amazement, "McKenna, you're missing a penis!"  Of course, as far as she's concerned, it's a "peanut" and it's quite alright that it's missing.  The camera fades to George who has been sent to sit on his bed while Shanna gets some clean clothes for him because he has, once again, managed to get side tracked on the way to the bathroom and has had all his wet clothes stripped off.  On returning to the room George excitedly announces, "Look it's bigger!"  Oh the joys of self discovery!

Well, it's been ages since I've written anything.  Shanna's pull the muscles in her lower back, either from an evening bought of morning sickness or because of the saggy air mattress we used while camping on the Boulder Mountain last week.  No fun either way.  Anyway, she called the doctor's to find out if there was anything that she could take, knowing that they would tell her no because she's pregnant and that is exactly what they did.  Kat, a good friend of Shan's, mentioned some all natural anti-inflammatory sold by Usana.  Well, Shanna decided to call the doctor's office first to clear it with them (jury's still out on that one) and told me about it last night.  She finished off the description with, It is all natural..  My mind quickly held several interesting conversations on the subject of all natural, — which is not the same as au naturel mind you — and my whole argument was delivered with these simple words:  Yes, and so is hemlock.  She quickly agreed that all natural may not be all it's craked up to be.  That phrase just makes me shake my head.  Folks, just because it's all natural doesn't mean it can't kill you.

Have you tried the new Mozilla browser?  I've been using it extensively since its release and I have to say that I am very impressed.  It does have some problems (if you open too many tiled windows the tiles run off the edge of the screen and there is no way to get to them without closing windows) but still I give it very high marks.  It can prevent those annoying pop-up windows, use tabbed or multiple windows (the two features I like the most) and sticks very close to the W3C standards, better than either IE6 or Netscape 6.  It also tries to to return to the days of small downloads.  Granted, ~10MB is still no small download but it sure beats the 18+MB downloads for Netscape or IE.  Anyway, give it a try and tell me what you think.

Happy Birthday Shanna!

I just want to wish a very happy birthday to the most wonderful woman in the world.

This was supposed to be a very relaxing weekend but it's been anything but that.  We left for Payson Lakes on Thursday night with neither Shanna nor I feeling well.  By last night we both felt so poorly that we packed everything up and just came home.  The kids didn't even complain, a fairly convincing vote that just bagging the vacation was the right thing to do.  Not long after we returned home, I received an emergency memo from local church authorities at the request of city officials.  It appears that one of the city's main water tanks had drained almost completely.  The result being a complete ban on watering until Monday and then a mandatory watering schedule which allots each neighborhood two days a week for any types of outside watering.  I'm not concerned about the restrictions as I can deal with those, it's the glaring fact that government in this state doesn't really care about conserving water.

Pleasant Grove City is a good example of the double standard on water conservation in this state.  Here in Pleasant Grove we are installing a secondary water system.  The first farce...I mean phase was installed a couple of years ago and the second phase is due to be installed sometime in the near future.  The city touted how this new system would save so much money and our culinary water system wouldn't be taxed so heavily.  The impression that most people have is that the money savings will come because we aren't using up our precious culinary water and if we aren't using culinary water we must be using recycled water, right?  Wrong, very wrong.  This amazing system simply uses untreated culinary water and the monetary savings comes only because the water is untreated.  If our secondary water system used recycled water the city wide ban and schedule wouldn't have been extended to the secondary system.  Using recycled water would still save the money from not having to treat the water and would save millions (literally) of gallons of culinary water.  Perhaps that's the problem, cities would stand to lose a large amount of money from the reduced demand for culinary water.

I work at a waste water treatment plant and the biggest frustration we deal with on a regular basis is the 50 or so million (yes, that's million) gallons of recycled water per day that we pump into the river every day of the year.  Just for the 92 days of June, July and August that is about 4.6 BILLION gallons of water recycled and pumped into the river.  While we are the largest reclamation plant in the state, every plant in the state pumps or should I say wastes recycled water into local waterways every day.  Water that could at the very least help dramatically lessen the impact of our water problems in this desert state.

As to the quality of the recycled water we produce, the river is a source of irrigation water all along its course.  The EPA sets water quality requirements for rivers and the only place the river ever comes close to meeting those relatively low standards is after our plant dilutes it with our recycled flow.