Hi everybody:

I realized the other day that news from Idaho has been sparse at best, so here is our family update.

Casey has been extremely busy with work, taking on lots of new responsibilities and tasks as asked and needed. She had training in Colorado earlier this year to become the point person on a new travel reimbursement system. As the lead trainer, she has to field lots of questions and has had to train most of the other personnel at the fire base. That has kept her very busy, and has lead to some headaches as the glitches in the new system burp their way out every day. She has been getting much deserved kudos for handling things smoothly and for leading the way in problem solving some of the glitches. Freya and I are quite proud of her. With a potentially busy fire season ahead, I don't anticipate her workload slacking off anytime soon. She is taking time to work out several days a week at the base weight training area, which has been really good for her. My schedule is pretty flexible this time of year, so I should be able to flex my time to accomodate any short notice schedule changes.

Miss Freya continues to be the high point of our lives. At 29 months, her vocabulary is quite enormous, and seems to grow a bit every day. The terrible 2s are evident on some days, but she continues to be a sweet little girl most of the time. We just finished two weeks of swimming lessons at a neighborhood pool on Thursday night. Freya's confidence grew throughout the two weeks, and she was a pretty confident little girl by the time the lessons were done. It was a parent and me class, just the same as we took last summer. It was nice for Casey and I to be able to be in the water with temps. in the 90s. School continues to be fun and enjoyable for Freya, and she is starting to bring home many wonderful art projects. We may need to invest in another major appliance to put her artwork on! I am going to Freya's school to talk about animals two weeks from now. I am looking forward to having a bunch of two and three year olds looking at animal hides and antlers. I will likely get some interesting questions. A video from swimming lessons is attached for your viewing pleasure.

The Fish and Game business continues to be busy for me. I am going to be interviewing again for the position of Assistant Chief of Enforcement for the department. It would be major pay raise, some more regular hours, and a major challenge as far as having to learn many new things. My main responsibilites would be hiring new officers and coordinating the statewide training routines for our existing officers. I will have fierce competition, but I will give it my best shot. I still have a pretty secure day job to fall back into. Last night, one of my cohorts and I floated the Boise River on catarafts to check fishermen. Not really tough duty, but we do usually run into some strange characters. On our last group of the night, a guy who were nabbing for fishing without a license had an outstanding felony warrant for failure to register as a sex offender. The arrest went without incident. The bad guy commented to me that Idaho is just not a very welcoming state. My partner and I were working undercover and wearing Tevas and shorts, so I'm guessing the uniformed officer that came to transport the bad guy had to do a double take.

We have been in the midst of a heat wave, and the temp will be pressing triple digits today. Lots of backyard time with the hose. Our garden is doing well, and Casey and Freya planted two wonderful flower gardens adjacent to our patio. The flowers are really nice, and they have done a great job of watering and keeping them alive during our sweltering heat. We would trade some heat for some of Wisconsin's record June rainfall, we could have used an inch or two of it! We hope that everybody is doing well and enjoying summer. Love to everybody! Matt, Casey and Freya.

And here's Freya out earlier today, washing her ride: