First post

Family & Friends,
This is my first attempt at writing a blog. The first post will be the text of an email that I attempted to send to a bunch of you last Sunday. It contained the pictures that I hope to upload here. Monday morning I received an email saying that none of the messages were sent because I had too many recipients and had exceeded my daily bandwidth limit. This was from the Internet cafe in Gardiner where the bandwidth limitation is much less stringent than here at Mammoth Hot Springs. It is now Tues. evening, and I'm trying the blog route. We'll see how it works.

Here is the email I tried to send Sunday.

Family & Friends,
Here is my first attempt to send a few pictures. They are all in the environs of Mammoth Hot Springs, where we are located. You can see our dorm - the weathered wood building behind the elk. You can also see the luxurious accommodations - our dorm room and bath.

L's first day of work (and my third) was yesterday. It takes time to get used to being on your feet for 8 hours - especially at our advanced age and at 6000+ feet altitude, but we are adapting.

My job isn't yet wonderful, since I spend too much time at the dishwasher station and carrying hot/clean dishes around the wet kitchen floor. However, the sous-chef says that won't last too long since I have "talents". I think I will graduate to learning much harder tasks - like making sandwiches. Currently, I think I'm their only dishwasher with a Ph. D. in Math. Stay tuned.

Of course, the reason we came is not the jobs, but for being in the park, and it is glorious. There are snow-capped mtns outside our window!

Love to all,

Doug & Lorraine

I'll probably have to wait until tomorrow (Wednesday) morning when I can go to Gardiner, MT, to upload the pictures and send an email out telling you that the blog exists.

It is now Wednesday and I have uploaded the pictures. I see that they have gone up in the reverse order from what I intended. Too bad!

Our trip out was very much fun. We never even put the book-on-CD on because we were enjoying the trip too much. Our stays with Kay and Bob Shewanick, Phyllis and Jerry, and Jack and Susan Church were lots of fun. I'll try to get out some pics from that later.

There are more big animals in the Mammoth area than there were in the 60s. There are elk around all the time and frequently Bison roam freely. Lorraine was almost run down by 3 large bison on her way home from breakfast the other morning. They are huge and pretty dangerous. The rule is that you stay 25 yards from bison or elk. Unfortunately the bison don't always follow the rules. You're not in Virginia anymore, Lorraine!

Coming home from work after 10:30 pm, when it has finally gotten dark, is very interesting, because you can't see where the animals are. The Park has rules about "light polution" that keep it very dark.

My next post will be about the Elk that I saw being born on Sunday - with pictures of the whole process. It was amazing!

Regards from "Camp Yellowstone"
Doug & Lorraine