Dad’s Weekly Report

Dear Family,

Sandy and I had a great trip at the first of this week. On Sunday after church we drove out to Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. We found a nice little motel there and stayed the night. It was great to get away. The next morning we took the bridge across the river to the Washington side and drove up the coast to Westport. We stopped along the way and walked on the beach for a while. The tide was out and the beach was long, flat sand. There were quite a few people driving up and down the beach. I was tempted to take our car out on it but I am always afraid that I will hit a soft spot in the sand. We had bright sunny weather, cool but not cold and very little wind.

At Westport we found an old light house. They claimed that it was the tallest lighthouse in Washington. Here is a picture of me at the lighthouse. We climbed the spiral staircase up to the top of the lighthouse. There was a great view from there of the Olympic Mountains. When the light house was first built they used an oil lamp, .later replace by an electric bulb. The lamp was focused by a 3^rd-order Fresnel lens. They opened the lens so that we could see the electric light. Here is a picture of the inside. Can you see the light bulbs? There are two, one is a backup. Now the coastguard has a small light mounted on the outside of the building so the wonderful big lens is not used. When it was in use they floated in a 20 gallon tank of mercury. The tank of mercury functioned as a bearing so that the whole assembly, which weighs 4 tons could rotate easily turned by a clockwork powered by weights on chain.

At Westport there was small maritime museum. At the museum there was another lighthouse lens. It is a first order Fresnel lens and the whole assembly is 18 feet tall. Here is a picture of it. It is a shame that these wonderful lenses are no longer in use. I am glad that they are still here for us to see. They were both made in France and are beautiful.

We had a nice meal of clam chowder and batter fried fish before returning home. We made a loop returning via Aberdeen and I-5. We got back about dinner time.

The rest of the week was pretty ordinary here. I have been working on the table for our new TV. I have the top made and am working on the legs. I just have to cut one more slot on one of the legs before they will be done.

I got some direction on building the Suffolk latch at the fort Saturday. I tried many times to make a part but was unsuccessful. So no progress there. Our new Lazy-Boy recliner came in. Yesterday I brought it home and took the old one to the DI trailer. It is nice and comfortable, but it is tall so that when I sit down my feet don’t touch the floor.

Yesterday, I also bought some presents for Sandy’s birthday. (Her birthday is this coming Saturday.) She wanted sewing supplies to go with her new sewing machine. Well that is all the news for this week. Please take care.

Love,

John

I have recently been typing some letters that I sent my dad during the early 1980’s.  I came across this letter from Ruth, (who was 14 months old.  It was dated August 1981.

Dear Family,

I hope that you all had a great Valentines Day. I bought Sandy a dozen yellow roses on Thursday. I thought I would be early to beat the rush. However, even though we put them in a vase with water and the little packet of powder, the leaves immediately wilted and started falling off. The flowers looked good until this morning when I noticed that some of them are also getting bad. We invited 8 couples to come over for dinner last night before the big Stake dance. Only two couples came. We had bulgogi and our friends brought salads. It was a nice dinner, much better than the dance. The dance was held at Camas High School and was put on by two Stakes. It was promoted heavily and lots of people were there. Mark Gilbert’s band played. Wes will remember him. I don’t know if the acoustics were bad or if the sound system was bad but you couldn’t hear the music. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t loud; it was so loud that you couldn’t talk to each other but it just sounded like noise. You had to listen real closely to hear what they were playing. So it was basically crowded and noisy. The food was good.

This has been a bad week for me at work. I have no work to do so I spent much time looking on line for jobs. I have applied now for 9 jobs, in Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. So far I haven’t heard back on any of them. I still guess that I will lose my job in April. The best case for me would be to find a job that started after I was laid off. Then I would get 6 months severance.

I have started to build a table to put our new TV on. So far I have made the legs and I just finished gluing up the top. As soon as I sand the top smooth I will start building the cabinet. My plans call for a tray that tilts forward and contains room for DVD’s.

For the last two weeks at the fort I have been working on a Suffolk Latch. It is a latch for a door. Here is a picture of this type of latch.

And here is a picture of what I have made so far.

I don’t know how to make the piece that has the thumb pad on it. Hopefully Bill will be at the fort next week and I can ask him.

Let’s see what else happened the past couple of weeks:

I finished typing up some letters that I had sent to my dad during the early 1980’s. It was fun to read about my children being born and when they were little. We rented our apartment to the twin sister of Sister Sloan Copa, (she teaches Gospel Doctrine in our ward). Have you ever heard of an odder name for a woman than Sloan. Well her sister’s name is Sheridan. She will move in, in a week or so. Marice Langford, who is an older man that we home teach had cancer surgery. So we have spent a lot of time helping him and his wife. Unfortunately he went back in the hospital on Friday. He got infection in his incision. Tonight Sandy and I will dive to Astoria and spend the night. Then tomorrow we will drive up the Washington coast a ways. Hopefully it won’t be raining and blowing all the time.

Well that is all the news. I hope that all is well with you. Call when you can.

Love,

John

1 February 2009

Dear Family,

This has not been a great week for me. Early this week about 150 of the people I work with at my job were told that they would be laid off. Most of the work that I was doing was for these folks and that left me with basically nothing to do at work. So I think that it will eventually result in my losing my job as well. I guess that is a good possibility. I talked to my boss and he doesn’t think so but I am not so sure. Anyway this week I applied for two other jobs. One is with HP in Houston, TX. The other is with the Leatherman Company in Portland. Both of these jobs are doing similar things to what I am doing now, so I feel qualified. However everyday we hear of companies laying off people so I know that there are is a lot of competition for all open jobs. I just hope that I will be considered.

Other things about the week: I got the front fruit trees trimmed. Here is a picture of them now. Notice the heavy frost on the ground today. We filled up our big yard recycling bin twice with the branches. We cut up the branches into small pieces so that they would fit in the bin. That took most of the time. I cut out a lot more out of the plum tree, (the one on the left), than I have in the past. Last year the tree was too tightly packed with leaves and I am hoping that this will make it more open and easier to spray. Perhaps this year I will spray the apple tree to keep the worms out of the apples. I am really happy with the shape of the trees. They really look nice in the front yard. I hope that the plum tree has plums this year. Last year there were hardly any.

Here is another picture. A few weeks ago we had a power failure and had to sit in the dark for a few hours. We tried our kerosene lantern that we had and it was terrible. It smoked and hardly gave off any light. So we decided to buy a good kerosene lantern that would give off good light. Here is the one that we bought. It is supposed to give off light equivalent to a 60 watt bulb. I think that it is quite a nice looking piece as well. Indeed it gives off a nice light. Perhaps tonight we will turn off the lights and try it out as we have our usual Sunday night, just the two of us.

This past Monday night we had our family home evening group at our house. We had about a dozen people there. Sandy and I gave the lesson on the apostasy and the restoration. It is a great group of people and we have great discussions. It is interesting that most of them are converts and it is great to hear their testimonies.

Well that is all the news today. I hope that you are doing well in these hard times.

Love,

John