The day of David

(I was about to call this post "David Day" meaning a day that was for David -- but then we know a person with the name David Day, so that was weird. So "The Day of David" instead.)

Before leaving to visit David and his family, Josie and Rachel needed to say goodbye to their hosts for Sunday night, Lavon and Dennis.

Lavon sent me this picture of the two of our girls with two of her granddaughters, Miley and Sadie Adams, daughters of her daughter Heather, who has been a close friend/cousin to Nancy during their growing-up years. Miley is wearing the hat, beside Josie, and Sadie is beside Rachel.

While they were enroute to Airdrie, to visit David, their “check engine” light came on. That is no fun!!

The first picture I received from Josie was this cute picture of Rachel holding her little baby cousin Chloe! Aren’t they so cute!?

Then I had to wait for more photos!! It is hard living vicariously through others—so much waiting! But it was worth the wait. David sent lots of photos.

Josie has a turn holding Chloe:

     

Millie got in on the action:

 They went out for lunch somewhere. Millie was the photographer for this photo of David sandwiched between Rachel and Josie. I am impressed with Millie's mad skills clicking the button on the phone! Pretty great for a girl who is almost five!

These ice cream enjoying photos of Ethan are adorable!! Well, he is adorable, and these are good photos of his adorableness!

Then David led the girls to a Canadian Tire, so they could check out the reason for the “check engine” light to come on. I was a bit annoyed because Josie messaged me that some Andrew said to take it there, where the diagnosis was going to cost $287! Which I knew would happen because my check engine light in the KIA used to come on all the time—if I went over a bump, if I got gas and the gas cap was a tiny bit not tight enough—and I knew not to go to Canadian tire. I told Josie “If the check engine light is flashing, then it is a problem. If it is a steady light, it isn’t.” (Because Google told me that.) And she responded, “It’s not flashing, but Andrew is her dad so we are doing what he said.” OHHHH!!! THAT Andrew!! Oh, silly me.

However, they at least knew what was wrong—“We learned that the car is running cool. Like something is not right so it’s running more coolant. So it will need something replaced but we are fine. And also both brake lights were out.”  That is good to know—they could get a ticket for not having working brake lights. So it was good to get that fixed.

And as for David, he took his children back home, where they immediately set up the Hot Wheels track that was David’s when he was small! Which I fortunately FOUND so it could get taken on the trip!

They hooked it up to a newer Hot Wheels set:

I am so glad they all got to be together! If only for awhile, getting together is so good. 

Three Provinces

 When Josie and Rachel started planning their (extended) Labour Day weekend trip to Alberta, they looked at maps, of course, and noticed that Grassy Lake is pretty close to Saskatchewan, and that Banff, a place Rachel particularly wanted to go, was very close to British Columbia, so they decided to make it their goal to at least set foot in all three of the western provinces. And they achieved their goal!

I already talked about their Friday on the farm, but I did not say that Josie got to drive the combine! Rachel did not--they each rode along with different farm drivers, and Byron let Josie drive, while Craig did not suggest such a thing to Rachel. (While Rachel is probably a more experienced driver than Josie is--driving to Athens from Peach Tree Corners in freeway traffic a couple of times a week for several years--Josie did spend part of a summer working on the farm, and they would throw her the keys to the truck and tell her to run and do this or that, and so Byron had that experience with Josie, while this was Rachel's first time on the farm since she was 11 years old.)

Saturday, they drove to Medicine Hat, and then on to Saskatchewan--since I was stalking them on "Find my" I think they got close to Maple Creek, so they went a few miles into Saskatchewan, but it is mostly just prairie, scenery wise there, and then they turned around and went back to Elkwater Lake which is in Alberta, but in a BC/Sask shared provincial park, Cyprus Hills Interprovincial Park.  It is beautiful there--a green oasis that arises out of the prairie with trees in abundance. 

One year we drove there, Bruce and I with Patrick, Josie and Rosie, and we entered Saskatchewan through the park road, which was pretty terrible, and in fact it is recommended by the park that you not drive that way, so I passed that recommendation on to Josie and Rachel. I know we took "Welcome to Saskatchewan" pictures then, but can I find them? A-ha! July of 2017! They are in that post. Our welcome sign was old and wooden on that off-road trail we drove through.

For Josie and Rachel, it was the official Trans Canada Highway welcome to Saskatchewan sign:

Josie sent me this picture, and I asked "was the sky alive?" so she sent me some sky pictures.

Beautiful!! Here are some more pictures, to prove the point that Rachel was also there:

Notice all those stickers on the sign top right above Rachel's head? Why would people do that? Like, is it YOUR sign to put stickers on? No, it is not. (Remember this picture for later!)

And Josie sent me one photo from Elkwater, the lake in Cyprus Hills Interprovincial Park.

So, that was their Saturday visiting Saskatchewan day, for us all to live vicariously by looking at the photos.

Sunday morning, they grabbed a photo opportunity with their kind hosts and cousins, the Eric and Jocelyn Torrie Family. They had set a timer, so everybody was not totally ready, but hey, they are all there, present and accounted for.

I thought they got a bit of a late start on Sunday morning, since they wanted to get to Banff! But it was not my trip, so I have no say in the matter!

Josie sent the family High River pictures, so clearly they spent a bit of time there. First, the Happy Face Barn!

The lakes, but I don't know if this picture is of Emerson or Sunshine:

And the house of our children's growing up years in High River, 908 16th Street. It was a good house. Probably my second favorite, because the house we live in now is my favorite. 

Looks like it was a bit rainy--Josie said it was more a mist than a rain.

And then they were on their way to Banff. And Josie drove all the way from Grassy Lake to Lake Louise. (So I said, from Colleen Louise (since she is usually in Grassy Lake, though not this year since she is in Cebu) to Lake Louise, courtesy of Josie Louise!)

And here they are at Lake Louise!

Isn't this a lovely picture of Josie and Rachel enjoying their mountain surroundings?

So, remember the stickers on the top corner of the "Welcome to Saskatchewan" sign? Well...the "Welcome to British Columbia" sign takes stickering to a whole new level.

It is so sticker-covered, you can't even read the sign!! Rachel is NOT impressed...

But sometimes you just have to laugh at the absurdity of things!

And goal reached! Made it to the third of three provinces--and they just had to drive back to Okotoks a few hours away, where they were spending the night with Lavon, our cousin.

Monday to Friday

 What has happened this week? Quite a lot!

I will start with my dream on the night of Sunday to Monday...on Saturday, I had done a lot of work in the house (and yard) and was looking while cleaning downstairs for David's old Hotwheels Loop-de-loop from the late eighties. Our children have had a lot of fun with it, and also grandchildren, and now David's car/truck-obsessed son is almost three, and David thought it would be fun to have his Hotwheels set for Ethan. AND I COULD NOT FIND IT!! I asked Nancy, Patrick, and Josie when they had last seen it, or if I had even maybe given it to Nancy, which I did not think I would do because it was David's...and their last memory of it was in the other house. I knew that it was in a laminating film box that I got when I worked in the IMC when we lived in High River, when the box it came in was too broken to continue using. Anyways, since the girls were leaving to Canada on Wednesday, I needed to find it!! I was praying about it, and then I dreamed I found it!! Hurray! Dream me was so happy. I just needed to get a ladder and shimmy across the attic floor...

Then I woke up. I dreamed a house I had never seen before. No attic like that in this house!! Sigh. Not helpful. So I ordered a 1970s Hotwheels Loop thing online in hopes it would get here in time if I did not find David's set. (It arrived today, Saturday September 5.)

On Monday Sabrina, the new music cataloguing specialist, had her first day working at the library, and I was assigned to go to lunch with her in Janice's place, since Janice was away attending her uncle's funeral in Tennessee. Nick, who is Sabrina's assigned mentor, and Jeremy, who is the assistant university librarian over IT and Metadata (cataloguing, basically) also came along.

Monday evening I found David's Hotwheels set!! Hurray!! Now I will have an extra Hotwheels set which I can give to him another time! (The one I ordered did not come with a clamp, but you can still buy those separately, so I did. It works together beautifully, and is fully compatible with his 1980s set!)

On Tuesday, one of the viola students, Mason, (who also works for Janice as a student cataloguer with his desk beside Rachel's) emailed me to ask about finding the two viola sonatas by a British composer named Leonard Fowles. We don't have anything by him in our library, and since reference to his viola compositions are in a document called "British Viola Repertoire" by Valerie Dart, I recommended he contact her (giving him her email address--she lives in Australia) or perhaps Tully Potter (a rather famous music historian who consults for The Strad, among other things he does) whose email address I already shared with Mason in the past. But then I thought, maybe I can do some searching and see if I can find a British library that might have these in their archival holdings (there are no holdings in WorldCat, so maybe they are unpublished?) to suggest to him.

That resulted in me sending this email to Jeremy, the AUL referenced above, because he is trying to train us all on AI:

"Hi Jeremy,

 Just sharing this because it is so interesting…and disconcerting…

I do not think that we have the Leonard Fowles papers in our library, but in trying to help a patron find where these might be, I saw that the AI overview supplied by Google says:

 “The original music manuscripts and papers of the English violist, organist, and composer Leonard Nowell Fowles (1870–1939) are located at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. [1]

Specifically, they are preserved within the Primrose International Viola Archive (PIVA), which is housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections library inside the Harold B. Lee Library on the BYU campus. [1]

Collection Details

• Core Materials: The collection features his unpublished musical scores, which include important late-Victorian British string works such as his Viola Sonata No. 1 in G minor (1894) and Viola Sonata No. 2 (1896). [1]
• Provenance: Fowles' un-archived personal materials were gathered after his death from papers preserved by his contemporary, the prominent English violist Alfred Gibson, before ultimately being acquired by the university's specialized archive. [, 2]”

 I was just flabbergasted by this!! A great example of AI getting it wrong!!!

 The only reason I can find that makes any sense at all for this complete fabrication on the part of AI is that we have the list called “British Viola Repertoire” which was compiled by (a friend of mine) Valerie Dart in our collection, and Fowles is listed in that document. Which someone uploaded on the internet, too, but I don’t know how that would connect back to BYU Library?

 If you search in scholar search for his name, you get only false hits. If you search for his name in parentheses, you get no hits. We have NOTHING by this composer. So, Google’s AI is way off base."

He responded:  "Wow! That’s a crazy hallucination. I’m wondering if Google’s AI was making assumptions and false connections since the search was coming from a BYU IP address, BYU owns PIVA, and the long PDF that they referenced has Fowles and PIVA within the same document (even though they are many pages apart). It’s so hard when we lose all control of how data is used, interpreted, and displayed by these AI agents!"

Weirdly, when I tried asking the question again in a Google search (though I may have worded it slightly differently) the AI overview said there is no archive that holds Leonard N. Fowles materials. 

The Misinformation Age we are in.

Wednesday was the day Josie and Rachel left on their road trip. I had gotten Canadian cash, specifically ordered ahead of time because that is the way the banks here roll, and then I FORGOT TO GIVE IT TO THEM!! AARGH!!!

However, the important thing was, they made it safely to my niece Elizabeth's home in Rexburg, Idaho, where they were going to visit with her and spend the night. They left earlier in the afternoon specifically so they would have time for a good visit in the evening, because on Thursday Bridget, E's daughter, had an early morning dance practice (at 6:30 AM) and then Elizabeth had a choral practice starting at 9:00 AM, so Josie and Rachel planned to get up with Bridget and get an early start themselves on Thursday.

I told Josie to send me lots of pictures so I could live vicariously through her. She sent me two pictures from Elizabeth's house:

Thursday Actually, I spent both Wednesday and Thursday occasionally tracking on the "Find My" app to see where the girls were on their journey. I happened to look (on Wednesday) just as they were correctly taking the right lane to take them to Pocatello, instead of not noticing that and heading for Boise. I have made that mistake a time or two!! So I was happy to see their little blip heading in the right direction!

Also On Thursday, twice random students greeted me brightly and asked my name and where I was headed. Weird. A young man in the morning when I was headed to the library (and so was he) and a young lady in the afternoon when I was headed home (and so was she). 

Friday was Joe Everett's funeral, which so many library full time people attended that I don't think there were very many of us in the library! The students were running the library, which honestly they are well-equipped to do, and they do it every night from 5-11:45 and all day Saturday, so we were probably not even missed. It should be noted that also our university president and our academic vice-president attended the funeral and stayed for the whole thing, and it was fully 1.5 hours.

Adam, the linguistics librarian, drove his van and Janice and I and Bob and his daughter Rachel all rode with him. The funeral was very sad and very joyful, both. 

The speakers were Joe's younger brother Chad and his (Joe's) six children. They all shared wonderful memories of Joe. Joe was a true nerd, so the theme of the funeral was sort of "the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take"--a quote from Gandalf the White in LOTR. 

There was a lot of music. The Mapleton Chorale, of which Joe has been a member for many years, sang Baba Yetu. ("Baba Yetu", the hit theme to Civilization IV - composed by Christopher Tin and featured on the double Grammy-winning album 'Calling All Dawns'. First video game piece to ever win a Grammy award, for "Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)". Performed by the Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Ron Ragin (ronragin.com) sings the solo.) During Joe's lifetime, he had been the soloist for this song when the Mapleton Choir performed it, but he was just listening for this performance, and another guy got to sing the solo. (Babu Yetu is a setting of The Lord's Prayer translated into Swahili, fyi.)

The family--several of Joe's children plus others--sang "Into the West" also from LOTR. Guitar and clarinet and voices. It was lovely. In The Lord of the Rings, "going into the West" means crossing the Great Sea to Valinor (also called the Undying Lands or Aman), the sacred realm where the gods (the Valar) and immortal beings dwell. Unsurprisingly given what a great vocalist Joe was, so were his children. 

This talented family also performed a nonet of "Come thou fount of every blessing" on strings -- one cello, and violins and violas. Nine guys, including one of Joe's brothers-in-law and sons and nephews. 

Joe had been born in Germany (his dad was in the military) and then returned to Germany as a young man. His three siblings all attended American school, but he had a goal to learn German, so he attended German school and insisted that his teacher NOT speak to him in English so that he had a fully immersive experience. And then he served a mission to Russia, so he became tri-lingual. 

Joe kept a diary for most of his life, and his children have been reading his diaries. Several of them read his diary for the year that they were born, and quoted from it. One of them quoted this, which was also printed on the funeral program--this was from a time in life when Joe and his sweet wife Judith were very concerned about a contemplated move: "...no purpose or plan that we make for ourselves would be greater than the plans that He (God) has laid for us. Thus, we should take joy in this, and let befall us whatever may befall us, knowing that if we love God, then whatever will befall us will be for our good."

There was much of acceptance and hope and faith and testimony about the funeral, and not doubt and despair. Still, I worry about Joe's sweet wife Judith--he only worked at BYU for 8 years before his wholly unexpected death. I hope she will be okay financially. I mean, if you quit after 8 years, you don't get retirement benefits. IDK what happens if you die too soon! We at the library gathered enough money to buy flowers and have enough leftover for a $550.00 gift card. I hope that will help.

Our car pool companions Adam and Bob had both been very concerned about it being past 12:30 when the funeral was over, past lunch time. We three women traveling with them assured them they could stop to eat, we were okay to stop or go, whatever! We stopped at a little cafe in Springville, Ginger's Garden Cafe, and I tried the apple-beet salad, and it was lovely. (I beyond tried it--I ate the whole thing!)

Josie called me from Alberta, a bit upset that there were too many kittens on the farm that were destined to die, and she could not rescue them!! And she sent me some lovely Alberta sunset pictures:

And some pictures of Colleen's grandsons playing:

I will end with sharing the soundtrack (if you click on this link) from TetherGeist, which is a video game, "combat-free, high-difficulty 2D precision platformer developed by O. and Co. Games and Out of Space Games." This game is by Joe's daughter Rachel (art), her husband Noah, and Jordan Ottesen (music). It was just released in May on Switch and Steam. (I did not learn this at the funeral. I learned this from his daughter's Facebook page which I stalked because I knew she was an artist and I wanted to learn more about it!)