Boys in cars

As a contingent employee, I don't have many vacation days, so I got a rare, short vacation this week.

My three nephews--Preston (10), Franklin (7), and Nathaniel (5)--were visiting us from California, but it was time for us to take them back home. On Tuesday we got up early and drove until we arrived at their home in the Bay Area. I sat next to Franklin on the ride, and he has a real problem with throwing up. After eating some trail mix, he threw up in a bowl, and he was delighted that he "puked a rainbow" because of the M&Ms. I was able to take my laptop and do some work in the car. But don't worry that I was doing boring stuff on vacation, because it was something that was interesting, and I found a few gems in these 1850s letters, such as "the sun hot enough to bake one’s brains" and"We came to a wet marshy place, and could discover marks of the feet of the lion and the tiger; having no weapons of war with us, we concluded to beat a speedy retreat."

On Wednesday, we considered coming back home, but we didn't. We went to Muir Beach and waded in the salty water and looked at various shells and barnacles.

We also went to an overlook and thought we saw a whale, but it was just a rock.

Then that night we went to the drive-in to see Minions, which I think was the first time I'd been to a theater this year. I hadn't seen the Despicable Me movies until the previous week. I thought the Minions weren't the best part of the movies; they were just there for marketing purposes (especially in the first one), so it's hard to have a movie all about them. It would be like making a movie about Olaf from Frozen. But props to Minions for throwing in a reference to Bewitched, the queen of all 1960s shows.

Thursday we drove back to Utah. It was a much quieter car ride. At a random rest area in western Utah, I did a quick run up a small trail in the desert.

On Friday, I had a work party up in Parleys Canyon. I know hardly anyone in the Church History Department, so I was sitting by myself. Then some employees' wives invited me to sit with them, which was probably more awkward then sitting alone. As I went to leave, my car wouldn't start! The battery was fine, so I recognized it as the same problem as happened at Halloween. I was annoyed that the rare time it didn't work, I happened to be up in Parleys Canyon, which also happened to be the time that my mom's cell phone was dead, which also happened to be a (not-so-rare) time that my parents ignored the phone because they were watching a movie, which also happened to be a time that our answering machine was full. I had to call my sister to go tell my parents to come get me.

At Halloween, we couldn't get it to start, but the next day my mom got it to work. Saturday we went back to my car and I couldn't get it to work, but once again my mom somehow got it to work! Although it was working, I still took it in to get repaired, because I'm tired of getting stranded.

Last night I ran the longest I've ever run continuously, an hour and twenty minutes.

Then I had really weird dreams last night: our cat taking a bath in the toilet, hanging Christmas decorations with a drone, watching a family video from the 90s in which a strong windstorm hurled a van over our family's vehicle, my mom driving a Jeep through a four-foot puddle, a trail with signs warning of a baby murderer, a bus driver who loved Boyd K. Packer, and a party game that consisted of picking up balloons with your teeth.