New trailer

 Last month, I reported that my parents traded in their trailer for a new tent trailer. This week (Wednesday to Friday), we took it up to Moosehorn Lake for our first camping trip in it.

It is very big for a tent trailer. When we open it up, it is very tall; my parents bought a ladder to use in it. I'm the tallest member of the family, and sometimes even I have a hard time reaching the tops of the zip-up windows or hanging the door on the ceiling.

My family has been going to Moosehorn for longer than I have been around. It's been an August tradition, though there were many years that I could not go (school and work).

The pink flowers are fireweed.

 Our campsite was not very shady, as many trees had been cut down. There were little plastic cone things to protect saplings.

There's really not much to say about our trip. We spent a lot more time inside the trailer than we did in the last trailer, since the tent trailer is more spacious and open than the regular trailer was. And that's really why my parents wanted a tent trailer.

 My dad didn't feel like hiking Bald Mountain, but on Thursday evening we walked along the Fehr Lake trail, which is across the road from Moosehorn. We didn't go as far on this trail as we did last trip.

 As we walked along, I noticed what I'm pretty sure are glacial striations. These are parallel lines in a rock where pebbles were stuck underneath a glacier, and as the glacier moved along, it scratched the rock.

 We also saw a fox, but I didn't get a good picture of it because it was running away from us. We saw deer, too, but we see deer in our yard and neighborhood all the time. Seeing a deer is like seeing a spider. Who cares?

I went out on Moosehorn Lake in our inflatable boat a few times. 

That's my dad on our boat.

One of the tiny trees in a protective cone.

Since it was our first trip, we didn't know that we would run out of water in our tank. But we also weren't very careful with our water.

Trailers really have gotten nicer over the years. The first one we had had a pump faucet; now we have regular faucets with hot water. Ours has an oven, a microwave, a fridge, a sound system, floor lights and ceiling lights, a heater, an air conditioner (which we didn't use), and I know it has other things. Sorry I don't have pictures to show you this time. My mom wanted to make a dessert to try out our oven, and the only desserts I have right now are made from our own fruit, so she made a cherry pie. Right before she put it in the oven, I remembered that fruit pies spill over and make a mess. I put aluminum foil in the oven to prevent spilling, and it helped, but we still did get some burned on the new oven, which my dad wasn't too happy about.

Because of camping, I didn't do as much running this week. On Tuesday, I was running down North Canyon when I heard a rattlesnake rattling in the brush. Since it wasn't on the trail, I just kept going to get away from it—I thought it might be riskier to stop and find it, as long as I knew that I wasn't going to step on it. As I kept going, the rattling got louder! Ack! But I made it past. I guess I think that if it's in the vegetation, and I'm on the trail, there's a barrier of plants between it and me. If it wants to attack me, it will have to go through the plants. And hopefully it will feel less threatened because it is shielded by plants.

A month or two ago, I noticed that my phone's screen is coming off, and since I've had it more than two and a half years, it's time for a new one. But getting a new one has been a hassle. The Sprint store in Bountiful closed. So I went to one in Salt Lake, where the salesman wasn't very helpful. I am planning to get a Samsung Galaxy a71 (because of his suggestion, and because I need a good camera for my candy reviews), but that store was out of stock at the time—and I didn't want to go back to the unhelpful salesman. Then I learned that T-Mobile stores will start servicing Sprint, and there's a T-Mobile near my house. So I went on July 31, but they couldn't do Sprint until August 3. So I went back on August 3, but they didn't have the phone in stock. I went back yesterday, but they were unable to get my phone activated through the Sprint account. At one point, the manager called Sprint on my phone pretending to be me, then he gave me the phone to talk to their sales rep to see if I could get my phone activated at the T-Mobile store or get it sent to me. Actually, I'm really not sure why he was calling them. Call centers are a universally negative experience. The sales rep had an Asian accent, and it sounded like her headset kept getting away from her mouth, so it was very quiet and hard to understand. I think it's great that nonnative English speakers can learn English and get jobs, but it certainly makes for a difficult experience. But when I would ask questions, she would go off on things that were unrelated. For example, when I asked how I would activate my phone once I received it, she was going off about transferring my information with a USB and getting a protection plan. That's not what I asked! And I couldn't understand half of what she was saying anyway! Finally I told her just to cancel it, that I would go to a store in person and get a phone. But even then she kept going on about adding more lines to the account. It was so frustrating! After an hour and forty minutes in the store, I still left without a new phone. I'm not mad at anyone; it was basically the first time the T-Mobile employees were trying to activate a Sprint phone. The call center woman, I'm sure, was just doing what she had been trained to do. So I guess if I'm mad at anyone, it's the Sprint policymakers who give their call center employees big lists of things to ask and say. They are not helpful! It's also frustrating that the Sprint/T-Mobile merger is supposed to be in effect, yet the process is still so clunky. So hopefully this coming week I'll finally get a new phone, somehow.