Tiny Pineapple

 The Last of the Hot Chocolate

It was cold.

It was very cold.

We knew it would be cold.

We didn’t know it would be that cold.

The girls were dressed in nice school clothes to start with, but I brought along multiple changes of clothes and shoes, as well as a big, warm blanket in case the girls got chilly while they were standing around. Unfortunately, when we got to our first stop, I didn’t think we’d be gone very long, so I left everything in the car as we set off on foot and started climbing.

Big mistake…because when we got to the top, the location was so nice we ended up staying for quite a while and froze our tookuses (or should that be “tooki”?) off in the process. With their practical winter clothes packed snugly in the car, the girls gamely navigated the snow field in their school shoes, occasionally breaking through the frozen top layer and disappearing up to their thigh in the snow.

Fortunately, Wynona’s husband had come along as our Sherpa guide and had packed a quilt and a Thermos full of hot chocolate up the mountain. So, after a while, more out of necessity than anything else, she wrapped the girls up in the quilt and gave them some hot chocolate to try to warm them up.

(The photo above is Emma finishing off the last of the hot chocolate and looking quite pleased with herself…and Zoe looking a little less pleased.)

Apparently, the quilt was almost an afterthought, but it saved the day. And just as we were heading back to the car, the sun broke through the clouds and Wynona asked the girls to stop one last time so she could take a few final pictures…and I am so glad she did.

 The Quilt (B/W)

We were near the top of Emigration Canyon, where Brigham Young famously looked out over the Salt Lake Valley and proclaimed, “This is the right place,” but I’ll bet you even he didn’t have lighting that dramatic.

 The Quilt (Color)

Just look at those faces. Hypothermia has never looked so cute!

We’re having some official “family photos” taken tomorrow. At least, that’s what I’m telling the girls.

In reality, I’m taking the girls up to Little Dell reservoir where they will have their picture taken by an outrageously gifted photographer while I stand to the side and worry about whether, years from now, they will look at the photos and say, “Dad, I can’t believe you used to dress us like that! What were you thinking? We look like feral children just back from a successful raid on a thrift store dumpster!”

To appease the girls, I’ve agreed to sit in on a couple of the shots, but future generations will look at those photos and wonder why two beautiful young girls would want to have their picture taken while standing on either side of a giant boiled parsnip.

Seriously, I’ve got two highly photogenic daughters, but me? Not so much. The girls always ask why I’m not smiling in the pictures on my drivers license or employee ID badge, and they don’t seem to understand when I explain to them that if I attempt even the most simple of smiles when I have my picture taken, it always comes back looking like I’m wearing a partially-melted latex clown mask.

The weather is going to be dicey tomorrow, so we may all end up looking like drowned cats. But, even then, they would end up on Cute Overload with an adorable caption like “Soggy Kittehs!”, whereas I would only show up in Google searches for “waterlogged stray with mange.”

This weekend I’m holed up in a quiet hotel at an undisclosed remote location trying to hammer out Chapter 6 of Her Majesty’s Gardener. Unfortunately, one consequence of being holed up in a quiet hotel at an undisclosed remote location is that my internet connection sucks. Posting the names of the lucky winners of the Debra Fotheringham Autographed CD contest has been hampered by the fact that my Novatel V640 EVDO ExpressCard is doing a rather convincing impersonation of a 2400 baud modem.

But now, without further ado…because I think we all have far too much ado in our lives already…

The Lucky Winners Are:

• Chelsea
• bennion
• Emily
• s’mee

I’ve notified each of the lucky winners via email, but in the unlikely event that one of our lucky winners is unable to fulfill their obligations as a lucky winner, one of you unlucky non-winners may be asked to assume the role of lucky winner in his or her place.

Winners were chosen using RANDOM.ORG’s True Random Number Generator (TRNG), which, unlike Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNGs), uses atmostpheric noise to generate truly random numbers.

I was originally going to use LavaRand, which used a lava lamp to generate random numbers. (See Patent 5,732,138: “Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system.”) Unfortunately, SGI’s LavaRand web site is no longer online and, perhaps more importantly, one of the contestants claimed to be able to control illuminated liquids with his mind, so in the interest of fairness I had to find another solution.

Anyway, congratulations to the lucky winners and stay tuned for another contest in March. (Prizes and details to be announced shortly.)