An Emergency Room Worth Waiting For

And now something that has vexed me for a while now:

If you have traveled north or south on I-15 lately, you have undoubtedly seen these billboards. Through the magic of modern technology, these billboards are able to tell you precisely how long the wait is at the specified Emergency Room.

Although impressive, I wonder how this is valuable to anyone. I have never been on the freeway and thought to myself "I'm bored. Where should I go at this very minute? Hey, the emergency room wait is only 12 minutes! Let's stop by."

I think of situations that require an emergency room as ...well, emergencies. When you have half a tank of gas you may look around for the best price per gallon and then make your decision accordingly. When you are on zero miles to empty, you have a gas emergency. In this you situation, you head for the nearest gas station, regardless of the price, and pray that it is downhill. Accordingly, if I fall out of a tree and break my arm I'm not inclined to "shop around" for the ER with the shortest wait time.

"What? Your water broke? Sure the ER here in Orem is right here, but look at the wait! There is an ER up in north Ogden where the current wait time is only five minutes."

Pictures From My Phone

It has been a while. I thought finishing school would open up the blogging channel again, but it hasn't really helped -- mainly because I have not really found anything I want to write about. And when I do, I am not close to a computer.

A lot has happened in the last several months. But I don't have the time or desire to tell you all about it. However, my phone has been with me the entire time and snapped a few fuzzy pics. Maybe it will serve as a proxy for me telling you about my life.

So here we go:

Back in July we went to the 4th of July parade in good old K-town (Kaysville). This is Cayden waiting for the floats candy.

This is a skunk. Hard to see -- I know. I took this picture of our dark patio, through a glass window...with a camera phone. While we were up at Bear Lake with Suzanne's family we left our trash bag out on the patio one night. It was found by two skunks. The funny thing was we were able to watch the entire thing unravel right through our sliding glass door, but we were powerless to do anything about it. We tried banging on the door gently as we wanted to scare them away, but not really "scare" them. It was not worth the risk of opening the door to shew them away. These were skunks, not cats. We even tried laser pointers. No luck. We went to bed and cleaned up the mess in the morning.

Mike Smith and I up behind Timp on one of our several Alpine Loop rides. This is a real climb and we are real men.
I got the "blue screen" of death on my work computer a while back. You techy readers and ISYS majors can let me know what's wrong. Maybe my kernel's infected or corrupted...I was just checkin' the specs on the end line....I'm retarded. At work I have two 20" screens right next to each other, so the BSOD is even more intimidating.

See.

A month or so ago I took a business trip to the DC area to visit a couple of clients, one of which was Gannett, the parent company for USA today. If you have ever stayed in a Hampton Inn, then have unknowingly paid $0.75 for a USA today. Don't believe me? Check your last hotel receipt. Anyway, this is their headquarters. And they say there is no money in publishing.

Oh, we had a baby in July! Cole Douglas Blair is now over a month old. Yeah, I know...I'm not very good at communicating stuff like this. I need a social agent. Anyways, Cole is cute as a button and likes to cry at night. Older brother Cayden is adapting well but was slow to warm up to younger brother's name.

"Mom, Cole is the name of a store!"

A couple of weeks ago we enjoyed Lindon days. We moved to Lindon too, by the way. Part of Lindon days includes a free car show, which is right up my alley. Because they are cars. And it's free. Check, check. For those of you who argue that the Ford Crown Victoria has not ever changed body styles, I submit that you are wrong. This is a late 50's model. The paint job may not be stock.

An evening trip to Wal-Mart yielded this strangely peaceful picture in the parking lot. It looked like something serious was happening that involved pillars of light and everyday low prices.

And finally: the helicopter. In Provo, we shared a backyard and a series of abused toys with Cayden's best friend Parker. In Lindon, it is just the C-Monster, so we felt like we needed something for him to do in our seriously large backyard. On KSL.com we found one of these Lifetime helicopters that someone obviously felt too intimidated to attempt to build.

I brought it home in a box and put it together one night while Cayden was asleep. I started shortly after Cayden went to bed. FOUR HOURS later, the helicopter was finished. Now Cayden tells all his friends about the helicopter his dad built. So it was worth it.

In this pic, Cayden is cleaning off the propeller. I am pretty sure somewhere in the 100-page manual that came with this helicopter there is a picture of a child doing exactly this, with a big red X through it. It is kind of amusing -- the top of the helicopter reads "Stay clear while propeller is in motion." Good to know in case this thing actually takes off.

So that's it. Pretty much everything that happened in the last three months is included in these 10 photos. Now you are caught up. See you in 3 months.