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Great Basin National Park
This summer the four Jensen brothers (Jon, Jeremiah, Caleb, Charlie) and our families had a reunion camping trip in Great Basin National Park, near Baker, Nevada. None of us had been there before, but...
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Biking alongside Warm River in southeast Idaho
Last night I went camping with Seth's scout troop at Warm River campground, northeast from Ashton, Idaho. It was raining plenty on the way there, and kept raining all night until maybe 5 this morning....
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Hoping for Housetop, settling for Baldy Knoll
Yesterday I wanted to finally hike to Housetop Mountain, on the southeast side of Fox Creek Canyon in Wyoming, not far from our home in Teton Valley, Idaho.I followed an old logging road that is mostly...
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Taylor Mountain hike with Cross Country team from Teton High School
Two weeks ago I went on a nice hike on the north side of Teton Pass (between Victor, Idaho and Wilson, Wyoming) with Lillian and Seth and their cross country running team from Teton High School, headed...
View ArticleWorld domination via spam
I get a fair amount of spam despite spam filters. Sometimes it's so bad it strikes me as good. Here's one example:Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2017 06:28:20 -0700From: Lucifer <spham2@une.edu>Reply-To:...
View ArticleThe Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter -- And How to Make the Most of...
I realize that I'm nowhere near my twenties anymore, but this book is fantastic and has joined my short list of required reading for my kids and anyone who has anything to do with young people. I read...
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Pre-Eclipse Activities, August 2017
Vera and Glen brought a cotton candy maker that Mira really enjoyed. She is forbidden (by me) from eating cotton candy unless it's freshly made and she witnesses it. (That's just how cotton candy is...
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Total Solar Eclipse, 21 August 2017
Photo by our good friend Chad Roberts.*This is what I wrote in my journal not long after we saw totality in our front yard for about 2 minutes 19 seconds:That was one of the most amazing things Iāve...
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More of Chad's photos of the eclipse, 21 August 2017
These are small, low-quality versions of the photos. If you're interested in high-quality files, you can contact Chad directly. His email is included in a link at the bottom of the post.Stepping to...
View ArticleSidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie
I thought it would be fun to read this series, since there is a British TV show based on it that looks interesting. But after reading the following, I'm done: Hildegard Staunton was paler than he...
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The Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part One
Our local library (where I'm lucky enough to work part-time) is doing a program this year called The Ultimate Book Geek Challenge. The challenge is to read 50 books in 50 weeks and they have to fit...
View ArticleThe Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part Two
I have finished my fifty books for the year ā in fact, Iām up to fifty-six, I think ā and this is a surprise to me. I had been reading less in the last few years, so I wasnāt sure Iād make it to fifty....
View ArticleThe Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part Three
Category 10, Vintage mystery: The Bookman's Promise by John Dunningš§I admit that this isn't really vintage mystery, but I'm justifying it because 1) there were too many mystery-type categories in this...
View ArticleThe Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part Four
Category 18, Short Story: "Novostroika" by Maria RevaThis was quite an entertaining story published in The Atlantic in December of 2016. (We had a subscription to The Atlantic for a year around then...
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The Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part Five, Or, An Aside about My Sisters...
Category 34, About a city: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan GlaserHere's the story of how I came to read this book. Six of us Jacobsen sisters went to New York in September so we could...
View ArticleThe Ultimate Book Geek Challenge, Part Six
Category 35, Set in the summer: Idaho by Emily RuskovichThe main event of the book happens during the summer, I think. Or it could be fall, but it felt like summer when I was reading it. There's also a...
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Caucasus trip 2019, part 1
Dad (Jon) and I are roughly three weeks into a month-long trip around Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. We started in Armenia, made our way through Georgia, across the Black Sea to Ukraine,...
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Caucasus trip 2019, part 2
This post chronicles part 2 of my dad's and my month-long trip in June 2019, aka the part where we're not in the Caucasus anymore. You can find part one over here.In part one I mentioned that we took a...
View ArticleJesus and the woman taken in adultery
Biblical scholarship has long been aware that the gospel account of the scribes and Pharisees bringing the woman taken in adultery to Jesus was not included in the earliest manuscripts of the gospel of...
View Article2019 in Books
Books I read or listened to in 2019, audiobooks denoted with š§: The Witch Elm by Tana French š§: I like her books. Good characters, good stories. But they always seem to go on a little longer than Iād...
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