This was a nice, sunny Indian summer day in the park. We started the day by getting caught in a traffic jam. Fortunately we were at the front end of it because there was a mother grizzly and her cub right by the side of the road and we were up close and personal. So awesome to see them and it was the first time for us to actually see bears in Yellowstone! Woo-hoo!
Following in Scott and Sue’s footsteps, Mark graduated from BYU yesterday with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music with a Sound Recording Technology emphasis. Mark has wanted to study this since his early days in high school and now it has been fulfilled! Congratulations, Mark! We are so proud of you!
Mark leaves for his final tour with Young Ambassadors soon and then will be continuing to look for his dream job and work on enhancing his recording studio.
Here are some pictures from the last couple of days:
This is my annual post whining about snow falling in late March on my blooming crocus and daffodils.
I should be used to it, but I’m not.
Some of you know that I run another website called Outdoor Cooking Magic where I write about cooking outdoors. I like to cook on the grill, smoke in my smoker, cook with Dutch ovens, and cook over a campfire. I put recipes, tips, reviews of products, news, and other information related to outdoor cooking subjects on this website. I recently participated in the 30 Day Challenge, which is run by a very smart guy named Ed Dale. He teaches about how to start a business online and make your first dollar. It’s an annual event and I’ve participated several times in the past years, always learning lots of new things to help with my ventures on the Internet.
This year the challenge was teaching us how to write an ebook that would be put in the Kindle Store on Amazon in 30 days. I’ve been working hard the past month and last night published by first book on Amazon in the Kindle Store. It’s called Grilled Vegetable Magic. It’s been a fun process and there is something satisfying about having a product published on Amazon. Things are so different these days and publishing is truly open to anyone that wants to do it. I’ve also started a companion website called Grilled Vegetable Magic where I’ll focus on grilled vegetable topics.
My sister, Christine, also participated in the challenge, and is very close to having her book published as well. She loves to make custom costumes and she has written an awesome book about how to create and design a Halloween costume. I’ll put up another post when she has her book done. It’s pretty timely, with Halloween right around the corner.
I’ve also brainstormed another 20 similar books that I could write, so that is one of the by goals over the winter, to get several more ebooks written.
If any of you would like to participate in the Challenge, and get that book that you’ve always wanted to write done and out in the Kindle store on Amazon, they’ll be leaving the training material up for another 60 days. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Since it’s nigh unto impossible to see grizzlies or wolves in the park, (although various Playmill actors have seen both this summer), we took a little trip to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana. It’s actually an impressive facility where injured animals or animals that can’t survive in the wild are able to live out their lives. One of the programs there reads like this:
Keeper Kids – Join us for an exciting activity especially designed for kids ages 5-12. In this unique program, kids first learn about grizzly bear eating habits and then accompany the naturalist and animal keeper into the bear habitat to hide food for some of our resident bears. After the food is hidden, kids get to learn how bears use their sense of smell to search out food.
So the kids go in the enclosure, hide the food, then watch the bears digging all over to find their food. It was fun to watch the bears turning over rocks and logs and fun to watch the kids exclaim when a bear found the food they had hidden. I should mention that at no time were there grizzlies and children in the enclosure at the same time. In case you were wondering.
The center has two wolf packs with different Alpha wolves and the walkways are quite close to the enclosures so we got some great close-up views.
Brian took our picture on the bear couch in the gift shop. Evidently it’s the thing to do because everyone was getting their picture taken there.
