Rocktober

At serious risk of making this a bi-annual camping report, shall I simply say our camping trip during General Conference this October passed mostly without incident. The most exciting part was when we thought we may have found a dead body under the wheel of our car.

Ham radio in hand, we drove past Hope Campground hoping beyond Hope (heh) we would find a good dispersed camping site. We found a few, but after parking the car and getting out, we found a most foul odor. Looking down, I saw a partially buried black trash bag. I've been following a few local missing persons stories, so my imagination started running away with it. Naturally, I made Natalie find out what was in the bag.

Reluctant, for she didn't want to be "scarred for life" or some nonsense such as that, she poked the bag open with a stick. Digging, she thought she saw some twine which she could only imagine coming from remains of rope. That was enough for her, and we started toward a park ranger's truck we had passed just 50 feet away or so. There was no ranger at the truck, though, so we decided we had to look further into the bag to decide if we had a potential situation or not. I would try to raise someone on the ham repeater if we found something awful.

So we went back and Natalie continued to dig into the bag with a stick. This time, she fished up a bone. I'm no anthropologist, so in my mind, any bone was human. *Gulp*. Natalie spotted the ranger returning to the truck where we approached him. He assured us it was the remains of a raucous BBQ, which apparently was not uncommon in the area on Friday/Saturday nights. He advised against our overnight stay for the reason of the wild parties and we decided to leave too. We eventually went back to Hope, paid the fee, and stayed the night. I could hear the partying well into 4am that night. (I'm glad we left the dispersed option this time.)

So we enjoyed a wonderful conference with a bit of rain, a lot of peach cobbler, and only a single fox sighting.

As a further update on our lives, as Natalie has been working and I have 21,400 years of school left, we've been looking to buy a house in Provo. We hope to get a place with an income property so we can neutralize our net living payments as much as possible. Hoping to make use of a good Provo City grant, the neighborhoods from which we can choose are limited and our funds even more so. There are no current prospects and we've had to let a couple go. We'll continue looking and exploring other options should this continue to be unfruitful.

We will be in Cincinnati for Christmas this year. We'll be flying out of Provo, which I expect to be extremely nice. I've never not had to drive 1+ hours to get on a plane. We can catch a ride without much hassle and no need to even think about long-term parking. It should be a good trip. We hope to skip down to North Carolina for a bit, but we'll see. Without car arrangements just yet, I can make no promise.

Our very latest development is the possession of bicycles. We got them a couple weeks ago hoping to cut down on gas costs. I've been loving it. I ride mine everywhere. Natalie has done quite well too but had to leave hers at work the other day when it was raining and we haven't had much of a chance to grab it.  I don't expect we'll see much savings until next spring after the snow is gone. But I'm getting practice riding up to campus and disciplining my determination to keep pedaling.

That's about it. ::Gentrys out::