Cooking Disaster

Okay, so sometimes I can be pretty dumb, and this was one of the dumber times. Bethany and I were getting dinner ready (some kind of cheesy potato stuff in a casserole dish). The potato stuff called for boiling water and so I started up a burner (or whatever they're called when they're electric). Well, it seems that I started the wrong burner by accident, and it was the burner under our glass casserole dish. I noticed my mistake after about a minute, and promptly removed the casserole dish and put it on another empty burner. About ten seconds later, it exploded all over the place! I don't have a picture of the point of explosion, but I think this will help illustrate:

I did manage to get a picture of the aftermath of the explosion. Shards of glass were all over the place. We're lucky we didn't get any in us. It was pretty crazy.

I guess there's a lesson to be learned here. For me, it's to always make doubly sure that I'm starting up the right burner. I think the other thing I'll take from this is to be careful not to rapidly change temperatures on glass cookware (that, or completely avoid glass cookware).

Ant Weirdness

Okay, so I've gotten really lazy with this whole blogging thing. It's a good thing nobody reads this right? Anyway, we had this really weird thing happen to us this Sunday. On Saturday night I had noticed a couple ants crawling around my computer area (one was on my laptop). "Uh oh, I must have left something out!" I couldn't find anything though.
Well, the next day, before church, I noticed even more ants. I decided to do a little more detective work and found a very small line of ants, but I couldn't see were they were going. "What random half-eaten snack could they be munching on?" I thought to myself for dramatic effect.

It was dark in that small nook where I found their line, so it was hard to make out the odd shape that I saw on top of my external hard drive power supply (say that three times fast!). What was it, a small mound of dirt? Had they moved all the yummy snackage to this one convenient spot? Well, in a way, they did (that is, if you like that sort of thing--and some people do!).

On closer inspection (by which I mean taking a photo of it with my camera) -- I'd like to take a moment here to increase the dramatic effect of my story, and to point out how I could have told this in like two sentences, were it not for my need to keep you from seeing the pictures below, so as to increase the suspense -- I found that the yummy snackage was in fact ant larva. Yes, yummy, yummy ant larva. Behold:

Apparently, the ants, desperate to get out of the chilling cold of the St. George climate (yes it does get cold here, and no, I am not a baby!), had discovered a wonderfully consistent heat source for incubating their little hatchlings. Who knew that whenever I turned on that hard drive to transfer all our Tivo recordings, I was actually creating life?! Seriously, they're kinda cute aren't they? You can even see their widdow biddy baby eyeses! Pretty cute, right?

Of course, it was not to last--we had nowhere to keep them, and how were we supposed to feed all those mouths? So, we promptly sprayed the whole thing with raid before scooping all their baby corpses into a box to be picked up with the trash tomorrow morning. :)

The end. Until next time (or whatever).

Trip to Lehman Caves

This year we all went to the Great Bason National Park. We had an incredible experience on the way there, however, and that's what this particular post is about.

There was a sever weather alert for Southern Utah for strong wind. We get those all the time, so we thought nothing of it really; but half way to our destination, just past Milford, UT, we ran into the largest sandstorm I've ever been in (I don't know that I've been in too many, though).







The storm went on for miles, and there were several times that visibility went down to zero and we had to stop completely. About half-way through, Neal and Janet came upon two bikers whose bike had tipped over in the wind. They were getting sand blasted really bad. Unfortunately, neither Neal, or us, had room for them in our cars. Ryan and Brandy, though, had their mini-van, and when they came up to the bikers (Stevi and Craig), they were able to get them to safety.

We stayed with them for about an hour. I helped Stevi call the police to see if they would be able to get the bike out of the storm. Ultimately, we needed to get going to our campsite, so I loaned Stevi my phone, so she could keep in touch with the police, etc.

Shortly after returning home from our 3 day trip, Stevi sent my phone back to me in the mail with this letter attached. I am posting it here for the Cramer family to see it.