Weekend With Three Nephews

Last Friday and Saturday, I had three of my nephews over, aged 9, 7 and 6. We had a great time.

I over planned the time. The first thing on our agenda was to go on a round trip five mile hike to Carbon Glacier along Carbon River in Mt Rainier National Park. It is about an hour drive from their parents house.

This is a hike I took many times as a kid and a few times as an adult. It has been over ten years since being up there.

I didn't check the conditions before leaving (I am a guy) so didn't realize that the spring rains and flooding of Carbon River had washed out the road and most of the former trail.

Instead we parked at the ranger station at the entrance to the park. We chose to hike to a waterfall 3.7 miles up the road. Thinking the trail is flat and follows mainly the road I thought "no problem". Little did I realize small bodies have a little trouble with this distance (7.4 miles).

Joel, the seven year old brought his own pack. He was well prepared for he had a lot in there. When I asked why he had a library book and a Dr Seuss book from home, he said "I brought them in case I got bored".

The start of Mt Rainier is out of this picture on the right. It is one of those situations that you are too close to see much of the Mountain anyway.

These makeshift log bridges, made by the Rangers, were our method of getting over Carbon River. We had to go over four of these to get to the base of the waterfall. Every winter these log bridges get washed away and they build new ones in the spring.

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The water running in this river is Glacier fed and looks like a mixture of 1/2 chocolate milk and 1/2 water. The water was probably 34 degrees. Walking across this bridges, with the cold from the river and the heat from the sun, gave you that feeling you get walking from the parking lot into an air conditioned mall on a hot summer day.

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One of the boys panicked on the third bridge so we headed back; we saw the water fall from a distance. Nathan, the nine year old, took my big pack and the other boy took the small pack and I carried a 53 lb boy across three bridges.
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Then we headed back. The younger two started whining about the distance. Five minutes each on Uncle Otto's back and we made it back to the car. Then off to McDonald's in Enumclaw WA.

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We then headed to, a closer to home, "drive to" waterfall, Snoqualmie Falls. They wanted to go down the trail to the base and Uncle Otto deferred for another time.

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We then headed home for Croquet and basketball. It was the first time they had played croquet and the rules seemed strange to them.

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We then shot baskets on a 6' 6'" hoop in my driveway. Then Apples to Apples before going to bed. Dale hasn't learned to read yet so he chose not to play. His brothers says he usually throws cards in blind and ends up winning.

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One of the boys was extra clean that evening. I think he drained the city water tank with this one shower.

Saturday we went Putt-Putt golfing next to a country club. The night before some prankster put dish soap in the decorative waterfall and stream running through the course. There was white bubble foam everywhere. A couple times we had to run back to the club house to get new balls for the foam covered anything close to the stream. I have lost golf balls before but never in foam.

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We had a territorial view of Lake Washington, Mercer Island and downtown Seattle as we hit golf balls on an 18 hole grass putt-putt greens. There were no wind mills at this Putt-Putt facility.

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I didn't know one of the boys was left handed until he attempted to use the back side of the putter. Back to the club house we went for a "lefty" club.

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They had trouble with "the farthest from the pin hits first" rule. They felt that whoever hit the best shot should go next. We finally got that rule under control.

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One of the boys was having the most trouble with this game, he even once pounded his putter into the ground in frustrations. I gave him a warning and he settled down. Like a typical golfer he finally hit a great shot on hole 15 and then said, "I am pretty good at this".

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Another trip to McDonald's and then off to the "Kung Fu Panda" Movie. At about three that afternoon, they were back to their parents and their sisters.

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Things I heard all weekend:

"It's my turn"

"Can we eat at McDonald's again?"

"Can I have this?"

"Can I wind up the Grandfather clock?"

"You look like our dad".

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One time comments:

"Can I pee in the shower?"

"Can we climb out your sun roof?"

"Why do you have the same last name as us?"

"You're too old to get married"

"Don't you have any bubble gum toothpaste? This adult toothpaste tastes terrible"

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This past week, I think my brother and sister-in-law are tired of hearing about their son's "Uncle Otto" weekend.

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Uncle Otto took a few days to rest up from this weekend.

In the World But Not of the World

Last weekend I decided to attend a secular singles event. I heard about it from a woman I met at a business networking luncheon. I passed it to a friend and we recruited others. The others couldn't make it so I went with my good friend Laurie.
It was a unique evening. As we were looking for parking all we saw were well dressed women and no men. When we got inside it was pretty close to the same, maybe 300 women and 50 to 60 guys.

I don't know if others of you get this feeling when you go into a Casino but those were the feelings I was getting as I was there that evening. Like this isn't where I belong

Fortunately the first two women I met were Christians: I was probably 15 to 25 years older than them. I talked with them for a long time and then Laurie joined us. One of these two gals said "it is like a boob fest around here".

I felt out of place as I talked with others; I talked with a few women I knew through my Christian circles. They wished they hadn't come. Other than them I didn't meet any other Christians.

What was hard was the MC for the evening was a 6" black woman, who used to be a man. He/she had a woman's figure and had a "potty mouth". This person had picked a stage name of "Poisoned Waters"; this name was so fitting.

It was difficult to listen to him/her. Most of the audience was very accepting of this person.

The celebrity portion of the evening were local sports figures, TV news anchors or weather people, actresses and business owners. They had collected donations from local businesses and the audience bid on a date with the celebrity along with the donated items.

The first Package went for $500 and the last package went for $5,200. There were a lot of sensual overtones to the auction. With the ratio of men and women being skewed, the women bid up the men dates way beyond reason.

One bright spot was a local TV weather woman who made it clear she was a Christian. The items she had collected were also amazing. I didn't plan on bidding so I was too slow on the draw with my number "901". I felt they prematurely closed bidding on her package. That segment was then over.

Then the evening got tacky. Three firemen volunteered to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, It became like a "Chip and Dale" routine. Then two women volunteers to be auctioned off for dates. The overtones to this portion got bad, I started getting ready to leave.

After attending this I decided I need to be more ambitious in my Christian circles and stay away from these secular events. I also plan on staying away from places that give me that "Casino Feeling"

I received a group of pictures from someone connected to this event. The picture below was the only one I felt was conservative enough to post. The others showed a lot of skin. It was held in empty space on the 35th floor of a Seattle downtown high rise.

What gives you that "Casino Feeling'?

Picking Partners, Part II

Here is more information about picking partners:

Multiple studies show that women prefer tall men. Most conclusions in these studies talk about height being connected to resource potential.

According to David Buss, University of Michigan, author of "The Evolution of Desire", he asked 10,00 people in 37 different cultures what they considered most important in choosing a mate. He found that that everyone is looking for a partner who offers the best shot at successfully producing offspring. Age of a woman and resources of a man, that he is willing to share with her and the offspring, play a large role in mate selection.

Quoted in the book "Blink" (2005)The average American male is 5' 9", 14.5 percent of all men are 6 feet or taller and 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller.

Quoted from WIRED in the July 2008 Readers Digest, "In the world of online dating , a five-foot-eight-inch man has to make $146,000 more a year than a six-foot-tall man to get the same number of dates."

"Marrying Up" and "Marrying Down"
Historically, if you "married up," you married someone taller, older, richer, or better educated than yourself. Most women married up, by choice. Fittingly, most men preferred shorter, younger, poorer, or lesser-educated partners, so "married down." People generally now reject such class distinctions, They say they want to "marry sideways," or words to that effect. Current studies indicate the the "marry up" and "marry down" patterns still exist. It also shows that women, not men, do most of the matrimonial choosing.

According to John Money: John Hopkins University, by the time we are eight years old, our "lovemap" has already started, "the pattern for our ideal mate has already begun to float around in our brains"

In picking cars the saying goes, "women buy chassis and the men buy engines". When it come to women and men picking mates, women buy engines and the men buy chassis.

The more education a woman gets diminishes her chances of marriage. Studies show a highly educated woman , if typical, doesn't want to marry a not so educated man, if she can help it. So when looking over potential mates, she finds fewer eligible men to choose from.

"A man falls in love with his eyes, a woman through her ears". British journalist Woodrow Wyatt said it . His aged belief, not uncommon, holds that a man is attracted to a woman by what he sees in her appearance. but a woman is attracted to a man by what she hears - from him and others - about his personality and status.

My (Otto's) summary of "Getting the Love you Want" by Harville Hendrix, PhD. We are attracted to those that are similar to the parent we have the most difficulty with.

Similar to the above, a counselor friend told me, "95% of the time you will marry a person that is like your problem parent."

Sincerity: look for this in a mate; if the person doesn't have sincerity none of the rest means much.

Picking Partners, Part I

I have a file titled "Picking Partners" with articles, quotes and statistics. There are too many for one blog posting so I decided to break them out into two or three. More coming soon.

Turkish proverb, "Who seeks a faultless friend remains friendless"

Love and War authority Theodor Reik said no woman is ever really surprised by a matrimonial proposal. Nor even by any sort of romanic overture. The female of the species always sets the sex stage, except in criminal behavior, for either stop or go. And she usually rehearses the proceedings in her mind.

When two stangers meet, a man and a woman, it's the woman who decides whether they will speak. Even if she doesn't speak first, she let's him know . With a glance, a smile, a gesture. -LM Boyd, Seattle Times.

Women pick men, men pick types. when a woman recalls the loves of their life, she may well realize none of her men were like any of the others. When a man looks back, though, he often sees a distinctive similaritiews in girlfriends of his past. Some others claim, most, though, just match up with someone they accidently meet and, then try to make it work.

Oscar Wilde, "Men always want to be a woman's first love; women like to be a man's last romance."

Seven out of ten women prefer the appearance of men, "clean-shaven", according to most recent surveys.

In a Stanford study, highly emotional women and highly intelligent men commonly fall for each other.

At the University of Pennsylvania they studied over 10,000 daters and found that what people said they were attracted to and what they were actually attracted to were way different. Most knew "it" almost instantly, when they saw it. Men and women, when assessing compatibility, within moments of meeting, using primarily cues of height, weight and attractiveness. The researchers were surprised that religion, education and income played very little roles in their choices.

At the University of Liverpool, researchers found that we are attracted to people that look like ourselves or like our families. Call it narcissism but when men and women viewed digitally altered human faces they were drawn to the familiar. This may explain the common phenomenon of couples looking like they could be siblings.

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour."

Family Bible Camp

I spoke with my parents this week and they talked about their summer schedule. The last week of June they will be going to family camp for their denomination. This is the same camp I went to when I was a kid. Back then it was always over the fourth of July, we went to family camp at Warm Beach Camp (now called Warm Beach Conference Center).

With fireworks banned on the grounds of the camp, firework displays were only things I heard about from others or saw on TV. When I finally saw a fireworks display it was 1976, the bicentennial year. That display was so huge that every year since I have been disappointed.

Back to Bible camp, below is a poem I wrote when I was 18:

WARM BEACH FAMILY CAMP

Stanwood, WA

-Every year we come to camp and see all of God's beauty, everything looks so luscious

And to prove to others that we could all make sacrifices, we left at home our electric toothbrushes.

-When you are a counselor at camp they tell you the rules and then they give you liberty

And then they put you in charge of of eight young men who are going through puberty.

-The A-frames are OK but they are not the greatest sensation

It is nice they keep out the rain but have you ever tried to sleep with flow through ventilation.

-Every year we would come to camp, mom, dad, and seven children, in a VW van, it seemed so far

Every year I would ask my dad, "dad, when are we going to get a real car".

-Every year the pastors would get up on front of the folks

And then insult every one's heritage by telling Norwegian Jokes.

-At every meal we would sing the table prayer, as a small child I would close my eyes and move my lips

And pray to God I wouldn't get on KP for these Norwegians don't leave any tips.

-The food at camp has been pretty good, except for that one year where the cook quit and head groundskeeper took control

That year it was really sad, the food took it's toll.

-That year we all agreed the food was pretty poor

All I noticed that they did a bang up business at the candy store.

-Every year they had the married/singles softball game

You never knew who would win and the score was rarely the same.

-The young women would root for the men that were single

for they were the men that made their hearts tingle.

-Over time they change their tune

But that is normally after they have been on their honeymoon.

-Every year I would fill out the camp registration form and sign my name with a pen

And every year I would have to to ask my mom, "how in the world do you spell the Lutheran Brethren?".

-Whoever designed Cedar Lodge must have been pretty clever

It's a nice building but if you had to go to the bathroom you would have to walk forever.

-They should be ashamed, why they put the bathrooms so far away, they made a huge mistake

For many times as a child, on the long walk, I came so close to making my own lake.

-Memories of camp lingered in my mind all year long, the fond memories I couldn't dodge

For example whenever I smell coffee it reminds me of Cedar lodge.

-We always hated to see it end but Sunday came and we all had to go home

I have also reached the end here, for this is the end of my poem.

Hawaiian Guests

A year and a half ago my friend Jim married Valerie from Hawaii, they had met in college, 33 years previously. This past week, for three days, I had Jim and Valerie and five of their friends from Hawaii stay with me. They were on a ten day vacation, one of the goals was to tour universities for seventeen year old fraternal twins, Kameron and Micah.

We went to an afternoon Mariners game, with the stadium full of people playing hooky from their jobs, toured the University of Washington, (I am an alumnus) went to Jim's family gathering, had lots of great food and played games until late.

I was surprised by some of the differences between their lives in Hawaii and mine in Seattle. They had trouble drinking water for it was so cold coming out of the tap. Also Kameron had to buy long pants for the trip. One of the men, Chad, asked what the big machine was in a hall closet, I told him it was my furnace. He asked where my air conditioner was and was surprised when I said I didn't have one.

In my house I have white towels on all the towel racks in my bathrooms, these are for decoration and for guests. Most of my guests wanted to use my everyday mix-matched towels over the pretty white ones.

Having them here gave me a perfect deadline for getting household projects done. The night before they arrived I finally caulked the shower in my master bedroom. It had been a year since I had removed the old caulk. It took me two hours, procrastinating a year on a project that finally takes two hours, wow.

The morning before they arrived I cleaned out the ashes from my wood stove fireplace insert. I put the ashes in a thick black plastic bag and put the bag in the garbage can in the garage. I had left too much air in the bag so the lid of the can wouldn't close. To deflate the air I put a small hole in the top of the bag to let the air out.

With this scent of ash on my clothes and the ash aroma in the garage, their was no convincing Chad that I didn't smoke cigarettes. He had no reference to fireplace ash smell so there was no way I was going to win that argument.

A month before they arrived, I ran water in my laundry room utility sink and then left the room. When I heard sounds that sounded like a waterfall I ran down and saw water everywhere. I used every towel and rag in the house to clean up the water. Some of the water went into the adjacent guest room. I soaked up the low spots and ran fans for a couple of days.

A few days latter the room smelled of mold and mildew. I also realized it had had a mild smell of this for a while. Seattle usually doesn't have much problem with mold and mildew because of our moderate temperatures.

The next week entailed removing carpet and pad, then two coats of chemicals and then four coats of sealer. Then I had to touch up the walls and then new carpet and pad were put in a week ago Friday. The room now looked fabulous.

The carpet then had a strong carpet rubber smell, it smelled like a tire store. The carpet people assured me that the smell would go away in a few days. It was almost gone by the time my guest arrived.

I had a great time during their visit. I promised Jim and Valerie I would visit them in Hawaii within the year.