Football Season

Thursday, August 30, BYU, UofU, and Utah State had their first football game of the season.  Go figure.  Logan is the home of Utah State, so they are not very partial to BYU fans.  There are, however, quite a few BYU grads in Logan. 

The women in my family are the football fans: Grandma Mutt, Mom, me, and Jeanne.  My Grandpa Bjorgum was a coach at Eastern Montana (now Montana State, Billings) and had played football.  He coached everything at Eastern; consequently, Grandma Bjorgum became familiar with sports.  She loved following professional football, especially Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.  

My mother was a fan of the University of Washington Huskies when they were called the "heart attack" team.  They were called that, at least in our in house, because they always seem to come from behind to win in the last moments of the game.  Mom became a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs and Lenny Dawson when she and Dad lived in Kansas City.  She continued to support them when she and Dad moved to the Bay Area in California.  Then she also adopted the Oakland Raiders.  Grandma and Mom had their football rivalries.  

I liked football in monsoons.  It was so fun watching the guys slide down the field when they were tackled in the rain at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.  When I was back in the States I followed the Chiefs when I lived in Jeff City, Missouri, then the Raiders when I moved to Fremont, California.  I became a 49ers fan when Joe Montana and Steve Young were their quarterbacks.  I haven't kept up with professional football since the 1990s

Jeanne is not into professional football, but she loves BYU football.  She knows more about what is going on with that team then I ever did when I was following football.  

I think the only men in our lives that enjoyed sports were my grandfather and now Jeanne's husband, Jared.

Labor Day

No. 119 coming up the track.

September 3 was Labor Day so the LDS Employment Resource Center was closed.  We used the day off as an opportunity to go on a road trip.  We went to Promontory Utah where the East meets the West; the place the transcontinental railroad was completed.  It was about a 90 minute drive, approximately 60 miles on local highways.  We arrived there around 11am and left about 1:30pm.  We had our choice of parking places when we arrived, but there weren't any spaces available when we left.  For being in the middle of nowhere, it was very popular. 

Driving the last spike.

They do a reenactment of the "Last Spike" ceremony several times during the day in the summer with some history about activities leading up to the ceremony.  The last spike ceremony was suppose to have happened on May 8, 1869, but the No. 119 was two days late due to weather and a labor dispute.  The No. 119 was the Union Pacific locomotive from Omaha and the Jupiter was the Central Pacific locomotive from Sacramento.  The trains at the Golden Spike Historic Park are replicas and actually function; however, they don't let people on board.  The Jupiter burns wood so it blows white smoke from its stack.  The No. 119 burns coal so its smoke is black.  One of the rangers gave a little history of why the trains met at Promontory Utah in the auditorium of the Visitors' Center.  There was as much political maneuvering back in the 1860s as there is now. 

The cast.

Okay, here is something you don't see very often in California.

If you can't read the sign (sorry that it is blurry), it says:  FREQUENT CATTLE CROSSING NEXT 1/2 MILE.  Luckily we didn't come across any on our trip.  Too bad!  That might have been fun too.