Sunday, June 30, 2013

I have camped with both girls and boys.  There is a difference.  I might start with the obvious….girls smell better.  More than this, however, is an attitude.  Boys are rough and tumble and often try to out-macho each other with the faster climb or the heavier carry or the more dangerous passage.  Girls are just more into being together and having fun together and enjoying the relationships that they have and that they build.  I just returned from our ward’s annual Girls’ Camp. 

The camp was held at Caines Head, Alaska with a total of 18 girls ages 12-17.  7 of the girls completed an overnight hike requirement this past Monday, hiking to Lost Lake, while the other 11 began their experience on Tuesday.  I met them in Seward on Tuesday where they had arranged to have their gear hauled out to the camp site on a water taxi.  A member of the ward with a boat ferried the girls and their 5 leaders to the beach and I rowed them ashore in a rubber raft.  Later in the afternoon, the overnight hikers showed up.  The gear had been deposited on one end of the beach and the camping site was on the opposite end, so we cheerfully hauled many hundreds of pounds of ice chests and tents and cooking paraphernalia about ¼ mile round trip down the beach.  And I mean cheerfully.  Bill, my compatriot in chaperoning the exercise, and I were among the first to arrive and by the time the second boatload of girls appeared, most of the gear had been moved.  The only one grumbling was me, and I kept that to an internal roar, but the girls were happy to help.  I tried to manage one joke per trip just to pass the time, but with chattering girls, the time passed quickly anyway. 

After everyone was present, tents were set up and dinner was cooked and the evening ended with a devotional around the campfire. Boys can have a spiritual devotional, but girls really set the example, and every evening was a spiritual treat.

Caines Head is about 6 miles out of Seward Harbor and features magnificent views of glaciers and the mountains of Resurrection Bay.  The beaches are covered with round flat black shale rocks that have been tumbled by the ocean and make excellent skipping stones. 

The highlight of the second day was sea kayaking.  The girls had prepared by practicing in a swimming pool, but were a little awed by the freedom out on the ocean, and of the whales that were surfacing as little as 50  yards away.  Bill and I had been tasked with building a sauna and then heating rocks up in the fire and transporting them to the sauna so that the girls could get in a little “pamper-time”. The Bishop joined us in the afternoon and was able to stay until Friday.  The evening ended with a campfire and devotional.  

Boys pride themselves on culinary delectables when camping like “suicide stew”, but the girls eat as well as I eat at home.  They helped prepare the food, purified the water with water filters and washed the dishes without complaint. 

Caines Head is the site of the ruins of World War II defensive emplacements that protected Seward from the Japanese.  On top of the point, about 2 miles up a trail from our camp site, is Fort McGilvray. It originally featured 6 inch guns and was the destination of our hike on the third day.  After we arrived at the fort and had a chance to look around the pitch black tunnels, a group of younger kids showed up with their leaders.  Our girls “adopted” them and spent the next 1 ½ hours playing games with them in and around the fort. We held another campfire sing-along and devotional that evening, and  Friday the girls worked on their camp certifications. Bill and I heated up the sauna again and the girls had  another steam bath. 

After dinner around the campfire, camp awards were presented, a devotional was held and the evening ended with a testimony meeting followed by Dutch oven peach cobbler.  The spiritual level and the love the girls expressed for the Savior and for each other was humbling and impressive.  The nurturing they have received at the hands of their parents and their young women leaders is preparing a generation of women that will be dynamic leaders as well as wonderful wives and mothers.

Saturday morning consisted of breaking camp, hauling the gear to the other end of the beach, and hiking the 4.5 miles back to the cars for the drive home, with an ice cream stop in Seward.  I don’t love smelling like smoke and going showerless for a week and living in a tent like I did when I was a bit younger, but I do love being with these beautiful young women.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Digital is the buzzword of the times.  Analog equates to a backward way of doing things.  Digital, when not applying to fingers, refers to a way of describing things with digits, i.e. a group of 1’s and 0’s that, according to a given pattern, represent the “thing”.  This representation (data) is made of of bits (1s and 0s) which are arranged in groups called bytes.  The bigger the byte, the more complex the arrangement of 1s and 0s possible and the more information it can store, transmit, or process. Analog, in electronics, refers to adding frequency or amplitude information to a electronic carrier wave to represent a “thing”.  A digital representation is generally much more accurate than an analog and has the advantage of being able to be altered with a computer to change the essence of the “thing”.  A digital photograph can be “photoshopped” to change everything about the photo, including the content.  Digital music can be altered by using a computer to change the music itself.  An analog copy can’t be predictably changed (a phonograph record can be scratched, but only improved by re-recording from an original) In dentistry, the digital revolution has impacted us in many ways.   We now have computerized recordkeeping, digital x-ray (the image is 1s and 0s arranged by an algorithm to show an image like a traditional x-ray film on a computer monitor) and digital photography.  The latest addition to our armamentarium is a digital scanner.  Traditionally, we have made an impression of teeth with an impression material, and then either poured the impression with plaster to make an analog plaster model, or in the case of Invisalign, we have sent the impression to the Align Technology lab where they digitally scan it and then they return the 3-D image to us.  We then make the changes that will be translated into a series of clear plastic trays (aligners) that fit over the teeth, putting pressure on them and causing the bone around them to remodel and the teeth to move into a better position.  Every 2 weeks, another aligner continues to move the teeth toward a final position where the teeth fit perfectly.  The good news now is…..No More Impressions For Invisalign.  Our scanner allows us to scan the teeth in the mouth so that we can have the 3-D image immediately.  This saves us time and saves our patients from having to have very precise but gooey and not-so-tasty impressions made of their teeth.  We are excited to have this new tool available so that we can be of better service to you, our patients.  Incidentally, for over a year we have been using a different scanner to make a digital record of the archived pre-treatment and final models we have been storing for 15 years.  As we scan those models, we are attempting to contact the patients to offer them those original plaster casts, so if you get that call, come and get your piece of personal history.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

It was all our daughter Rebecca’s fault.  She worked as a biologist on the north slope of Alaska 10 years or so ago counting birds.  It’s tough work, but I guess someone has to do it.  She has also counted birds in Prince William Sound and assisted in dissecting dead Sea Otters, but when she wasn’t counting birds in Barrow, there wasn’t much else to do, so she watched television. When she came home, she told us that we really needed to watch  “24”.  At that time we really weren’t TV watchers.  We get only sporadic and poor broadcast reception, and have resisted cable or satellite because we didn’t need a reason to watch more TV.  Whenever a TV would go on in our home in the past, you could hear a loud sucking sound as the time and brains were sucked away together.  We didn’t start watching “24” immediately, but after her occasional admonitions, I found the Season 1 set at the library and we began watching it.  We were indeed sucked in.  At that time, 3 seasons had been released on DVD and we set about watching those three seasons.  If you haven’t seen the series, the concept is that an anti-terrorist team with the reluctant help of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has to alleviate a crisis in 24 hours.  Since most seasons of regular programming have about 24 episodes, it is convenient to show one hour of the crisis per week.  When you cheat, however, and have the entire season on DVD, you can watch more than one hour a week.  And if you are truly inspired, you can veg away an entire day and see the entire crisis resolved in the same time period.  Now I don’t know that we ever devoted an entire 24 hour period to a single season, but we did watch Season 3 in 48 hours.  Okay.  I’ve confessed.  We became addicted.  But because we didn’t get broadcast television and were without cable, we would impatiently wait for the next season to be released on DVD, and then buy it and watch it.  And then while we were waiting for Jack Bauer’s exploits in a new season, we began to sample other shows.  We watched all the seasons of Jennifer Garner in Alias.  Then we tried Grey’s Anatomy and are still hooked on it as Season 9 just finished.  The girls in my office got us watching White Collar and Castle and Psych, and we follow Grimm and Once Upon A Time, watching them online and after the fact.  Now we really don’t waste time that we would be doing anything productive to watch any of these shows. Only sleeping.  We usually don’t even start watching until about 9 PM, but then the sucking noise is just the juice we would normally have the next day leaving our bodies.  Or rather,  leaving my body.  I start seeing patients at 7 AM while my beautiful wife has a little more recovery time in the morning. And that is why she is always so beautiful….she is entertained in the evening and rejuvenated through the morning.   

Monday, June 17, 2013

Why would anyone want to write about the weather?  Well, the weather makes a big difference in our lives, and in fact often drives our lives in one direction or another.  For example, my Dad was raised in rural Iowa, and helped a friend drive his belongings to Arizona where he was relocating.  He had a revelation in Arizona, and hurried back to Iowa to let my mother know that it was warm in Phoenix year round, comparatively.  No more shoveling snow or sliding around on the ice or shivering in your snow filled boots.  Mom must have loved Dad, because she packed up the house and my sister and I and we were off to Phoenix.  The trade wasn’t without sacrifice, however.  I’m sure my Grandmother only let her go kicking and screaming (not really, Grandma was pretty sedate), but the house we moved in to had only a swamp cooler and, in case you were unaware, Phoenix is HOT in the summer, from May to October.  Some might argue that it’s a “dry” heat, and it is, again comparatively, because Iowa in the summer is not only hot, but dripping with humidity which does suck the juice right out of you.  The “dry” heat you always hear about isn’t quite like that, but when the temperature is over 110 degrees, hot is hot.  Beverly and I have been privileged to enjoy many different climates, from the desert weather in Tucson to the snowy winters and humid summers in Boston, to the bone-chilling cold and hot and humid summers in  both Georgia and Kentucky.  The Kanto Plain in Japan boasted fairly temperate weather, and Mannheim, Germany was very similar, except for the noticeable lack of sunshine.  When I was at a dental meeting while serving in the Army, I met an orthodontist who was stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.  He pulled out a picture of himself,  beard and hair frosted white, standing next to a thermometer which read -30 degrees.  I was stunned that people lived in those conditions by choice.  I didn’t realize that temperatures in Minnesota and Iowa and Michigan sometimes get that cold, and have since been educated by former residents.  According to my friend from the Great White North however, temperatures will stay colder than that for a couple of months.  (In fact after we moved to Alaska and I took a temporary job in Fairbanks 3 days every 3 weeks, I used to run after work at -40 and woke up many mornings to -50, but that is another story)   I asked him what they did with their cars and he said that have electric heaters in the cooling system and that they plugged them in and used thinner lubricants. Stores and workplaces often have plugs in the parking lot so that you can plug in your car while inside.  When they don’t have plugs, people will often either leave their car running or have a remote start with a timer that will restart the car on a schedule of your choosing to keep it warm.  Driving at -50 is a bumpy experience as it takes a while for the portion of the tire that is flat against the ground to round out again.  I had heard only great things about living in Alaska, and  I put it at the top of my assignment preferences while we were in the Army, but when we finally got an assignment, I called my assignments officer in a panic, because after talking to my Fairbanks friend, I only wanted to go to Anchorage.  Fortunately, that is also what he had in mind, and when Beverly and I arrived in Anchorage on a house-hunting trip in July, we discovered a beautiful land, cool and green and vast.  We bought a house and flew to Arizona to pick up the family and, with my parents in their 5^th wheel and us in our Suburban, drove the up the Alcan.  We arrived a few weeks later, moved in, and by the first of September, Dad was anxious to drive south because he was afraid of the snow arriving too early. Now, 20 years later, we can speak with a little experience.  We’ve decided that there really is no typical weather for Anchorage.  Summer can be cold (40s and sometimes 50s) and rainy and cloudy like it has been for the last 3 years, or it can be 70s and 80s and beautiful like it is this year and was only one other year that we can remember.  Winter can start in September, or not really arrive until almost November.  We have years with almost no snow until after Christmas and years with lots of snow before Halloween.  The mean temperature in January is supposed to be 10 degrees, but sometimes is -20, and sometimes 20 above with sunshine.  A few days after most snowstorms, we get a Chinook which is a warm wind that melts the pretty snow in the trees and makes the roads icy to drive on.  April usually hosts one last big snowstorm with a foot or more of snow, but this year we got that storm on May 18, and now, a month later, it is 90 degrees and people are complaining that it is too hot to sleep in the house. The weather is always something for some of the folks to complain about, but it is always another beautiful day in Alaska, rain, snow, or shine.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

As my Dad tells the story, they didn’t know what my name would be.  Dad came home and said, “We’ll name it Eldon.”  And that is my first and longest lasting contact with my Dad.  After that, of course, he became my idol. Anything Dad did, I wanted to do too.  Working on a car or building something or fixing anything, there was nothing that he couldn’t tackle, and that is how I modeled my life’s outlook. Because he was raised on a farm in rural Iowa in the 1930’s and 40’s, he learned how to do it all.  There weren’t a lot of options, and if you couldn’t do it, then it probably didn’t get done.  If you met his brothers, you would not be surprised that they are proficient in mechanics and construction and farming.  It would be convenient to say that those abilities are inherited, but it is much more realistic to believe that they are learned by observation and by instruction.  Working beside my Dad while he rebuilt the engine for our truck gave me the confidence to rebuild the engine in my motorcycle.  Confidence, practice, and common sense go a long ways in developing abilities in most fields of endeavor, and because Dad had those in spades, I developed them too.  I look at my sons and the men my daughters have chosen as their husbands and I see with appreciation those same attributes and skills being developed and honed.  By the time I took a firearms safety course, I had been hunting with Dad most of my life.  I saw the care that he exercised with his guns and developed the same respect.  I saw the patience that he demonstrated in training our dog as a hunter and the patience he showed in raising his children and it gave me a pattern to follow in raising my own.  I saw the curiosity and appreciation he had for the beauties of God’s creations as we traveled around America in the back of our shell camper on vacation each year, and have striven to give my own children the same sorts of experiences. If report cards mean anything, he wasn’t a straight A student in school, but in life he has proved to be worthy of straight A’s.  Dad recently celebrated his 86^th birthday.  Over the last several years as his health has declined, I see the challenges he has had to face as his abilities have lost acuity.  He works in his garden and around the house some, but I am still surprised to see that he has called a plumber or has had his oil changed at a garage instead of doing it himself.  I see in him the decline that all of us will face, and the sadness and frustration that it engenders.  When I was young, I thought that living ‘til 80 meant that I would have years and years after retirement to do the things I had put off doing.  Now that I am nearing 60 with the incumbent aches and pains, I realize that the worthwhile part of living has to go on every day.  There’s no saving it up, and in fact, the most worthwhile part of living is in raising a family.  It is an honor to be a father, and it is a privilege to have been raised by a great one.

Friday, June 14, 2013

About 3 weeks ago, Beverly started Invisalign treatment.  We have discussed her orthodontic treatment many times in the past, but she wasn’t a great candidate for braces because of the complexity of her malocclusion.  Treating her to an ideal position with braces would require either extraction of two teeth and completely changing her facial appearance-not for the better-or bringing her lower jaw forward with jaw surgery, also making a less-than-desirable change in facial appearance.  We finally took some impressions, had them scanned, and then played with the tooth positions on a 3-D computer model.  Using Invisalign aligners (a new one every two weeks as calculated  by the computer model) and a combination of “slenderizing”some teeth and wearing rubber bands from the top aligner in front to the bottom aligner in back to shift upper teeth back and lower teeth forward, we can straighten out her teeth, intrude the upper front teeth so that she has more teeth and less gums in her smile, and shift the upper teeth back so the front teeth don’t stick out and she will, for the first time in her life, be able to bite with her front teeth.  Beverly is maximally, almost neurotically, compliant.  I have to be careful what instructions I give her because she will follow them to the letter.  This is actually what we want with Invisalign patients (22 hour-a-day wear), but aligner kisses just aren’t the same.  She is also the most physically sensitive person I have ever treated, so I hear about every discomfort she suffers.  In this regard, I guess it’s a rare opportunity for me to be able to observe, first hand, Invisalign treatment day-by-day.  You might say I’m living with aligners vicariously. Her plan is a long one, with 41 projected aligners, but she is already thinking of how she might be able to shorten the treatment.  In fact, because her compliance is so good, she will probably be able to wear them for 10 days each instead of 2 weeks, which will cut months off of her treatment.  There is also an less common procedure that she wants to try.  When bone receives a traumatic injury, in order to repair itself, the remodeling rate of the bone doubles.  This is called the Regional Acceleratory Phenomenon (RAP).  By controlling the remodeling rate of the bone, you can control the speed with which you can move teeth.  A procedure called corticision involves causing localized trauma to the bone between teeth that are actively moving and thereby accelerating the remodeling rate and the tooth movement.  My wife is about the last person I would have expected to want a scalpel blade forced into the bone between her teeth under local anesthesia, but the fact that she does shows how eager she is to move the treatment along. And it’s unlikely she will sue me, so it’s a win-win.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

As one door closes, another opens. Beverly and I were recently called as Service Missionaries to work with BYU-Idaho’s Pathway program. Church Service Missionaries work from home with a specific responsibility, in our case with helping others get a college degree through a distance education program of BYU-I. The Pathway program is an introduction to college program for those who never went to college but always wanted to, as well as those who started college and never completed a degree. Students enroll in the program and then meet every Thursday night together for an hour of group-help time while they are enrolled in an online class through BYU-I. In the three semesters they attend during the first year, students will earn 15 hours of college credit and pay only $65 per credit hour They must maintain a B average, but the work group that meets together each Thursday is very supportive and helps to achieve that standard. Students with previous college may have some or all of their credits transferred and accepted by BYU-I and applied toward their degree. Once they complete the Pathway first year, they then matriculate with BYU-I and become a continuing online student where they may complete their degree. Their cost remains at $65 per credit hour til graduation unless they decide to move to BYU-I and attend in residence. There is NO requirement for a high school diploma or the need to take ACT or SAT examinations. Students agree to strive to live the BYU-I honor code, have access to a computer with internet availability, and plan on spending about 15 hours a week on the course work. After the Pathway year, students can complete a certificate program, an Associates degree or a Bachelors degree online. Even though the program is only about 3 years old, in my own ward there are several individuals who have already completed or are about to complete the Pathway year and matriculate at BYI-I. Some already have enough college credit that completing the Pathway year will allow them to receive their degree. The enrollment deadline for the fall semester is August 14. If any of you Alaskans want to get started in a degree program or finish the one you may have begun long ago, please message me here with contact information and we will be glad to help you get enrolled and move a step closer to your college goal.