Weekly Review June 7 '13

I didn't take a single picture this week.  I would have taken some yesterday, but I forgot my camera.  Oh well!  Hopefully this post will be fairly short.  Not that we sat around doing nothing all week...but most of what we did isn't too notable.  I do think I got my wish from last week, though--this week wasn't quite so exhausting.  And I am even writing this post on Friday morning! 

While I'm writing I have eggs boiling.  I need to make a bunch of egg salad sandwiches for a RS activity tomorrow.  We usually have our meetings on Wednesday nights, but this time we are doing it on Saturday morning.  We are having a "Retro" activity with two classes--one on how to make pie crust and the other on making aprons--followed by a luncheon of finger sandwiches, jello salads, and pies.  We are also encouraging everyone to dress like June Cleaver and we are having contests to see who can make the best jello salad and who can make the best pie.  I did not come up with any of these ideas myself, but I'm getting a kick out of the whole idea.  (Except I have nothing to wear--I have the pearl necklace, but no dress or high heels to go with it.)  Hopefully it will go well and everyone will have fun and learn something.  We invited the YW to come, too.

Sunday was not very restful.  I had Ward Council, then regular church meetings, then a meeting to start planning an upcoming service project, then dinner (Frank cooked the whole thing--bless him!), then choir practice. (Did I mention that Jared has been coming to choir practice with me the last month?  He has, and he's been doing a good job.)  Then I went with Frank to a member's house so that he could look at her air conditioner which was not working to see if he could figure out what was wrong.  (This is the member we helped move last week.)  Luckily, he figured out what was wrong and it was an easy fix.  I think after that we had family night and I wrote to Scott.  By then it was after my bed time.

Monday morning I ran errands and did a food order.  Then I had presidency meeting that afternoon.  We were minus a secretary because my secretary just got called to be the new Primary president the day before.  I did know it was happening--as a matter of fact, I knew she was probably going to be called before she did!  But I was very, very sorry to lose her.  She's been a great secretary!  The new one hasn't been called yet, but hopefully this Sunday she will be.  Tanner started his Driver's Ed class after school on Monday.  He has it every weekday from 3:00-6:00 this week and next week.  He can walk there from school, thankfully, but so far that's only happened once because of heavy rain or in the case of Tuesday because he didn't go to school that day.  Why did he stay home Tuesday?  Because he wasn't feeling well, for one thing--he's been battling cold symptoms off and on.  But also because he had a paper to write and he hadn't been able to finish it Monday evening.  He procrastinated again and I would never have let him stay home to get caught up if he hadn't been feeling sick also.  I let him sleep in so he could get all rested up and then he worked on it until Driver's Ed.  He worked on it more afterwards but he was still up until midnight that night getting it done.  Guess who got to stay up with him?  At least I had a good book to read.  I'm hoping Tanner is just tired and that he will do better when school starts again this fall.  He's really been slacking off the last few weeks.

I think I got side tracked--for FHE activity on Monday Seth chose to play Mario Kart and we had creamsicles for treat.  I always know when summer vacation is almost here because I feel this compelling need to buy lots of popsicles!  I think I bought 6 or 7 different varieties on Monday.

I spent Tuesday morning at Seth's school doing volunteer accounting work.  That should be the last time for this year.  In the afternoon I got caught up on household chores and phone calls.  That evening one of my counselors and I went to visit two sisters who just moved into our ward.  One of them lives in walking distance from me--how cool!  Tuesday morning Frank had two interviews for Marriott jobs.  Although he has accepted an offer from Xerox, he would still prefer to stay with Marriott so he posted for a couple of their open positions.  He says he felt really good about one interview and the other one he thought went terrible.  Hopefully we will get official news on them next week.

Wednesday morning I went to the choral concert at Seth's school so I could hear his class sing a song.  He was actually kind of excited about it and talked about it a lot, so I felt like I should go.  After the concert, I got my hair done.  Then I went shopping at Wal-Mart.  By then the kids were almost home from school.  I made dinner and gathered up all the things Seth would need for field day the next day--water bottle, hat, sunscreen, etc.  That evening the boys had quorum activities for YM.  I was supposed to have my monthly meeting with the bishop but he hurt his back and couldn't be there.  I also helped cut out pieces for the aprons we are sewing at the activity tomorrow.  The girl in charge of the class is very talented and she picked out some really cute retro-looking fabrics.  I'm excited to make one of the aprons!  Oh, and the other thing that happened Wednesday evening is that I met the new missionaries and--surprise!--they are Elders.  They decided to send us a second set of Elders instead of Sisters at the last minute.  Nothing against the Elders, but I'm not too happy about it.  I had so many great ideas of things the sisters could do to help with the sisters in our ward.  Oh well...maybe someday we'll get sisters again.  I texted one of my counselors that evening "Whoa!  I can't believe they sent us another set of Elders instead of Sisters!"  Her reply: "Yup.  They're going to love the feminine hygiene products in the 72 hr kits!!"  That made me laugh out loud...we were asked to put together 72 hour kits for the new "sisters" and this counselor is the one who put them together.

Sometime on Tuesday I realized that our air conditioner wasn't working.  It had been running almost all day and the house wasn't getting cooler--as a matter of fact, it was getting warmer.  Frank looked at it when he got home and figured out that the fan in the outside compressor wasn't turning.  He called around trying to find a part and finally gave up and called an A/C place to come look at it.  They couldn't come until the next day but luckily our weather has not been nearly so hot this week.  As a matter of fact, it gets down into the 50s most nights so we were able to open some windows that night and it wasn't too hot.  We had visions of thousands of dollars being spent on a new air conditioner (our house is almost 21 years old after all) but thankfully when the guy came to look at it he discovered a very minor problem and the whole thing, including the fee for the service call, cost us less than $200.  Whew!  We were happy about that.

Thursday I got Seth off to school, wondering if they were really going to have field day since it was cloudy, somewhat chilly, and there was an 80% chance of rain...supposed to start in the morning and get heavier in the afternoon.  It turns out they did have field day--the rain came later than predicted so they were able to do most of the activities and only had to quit a little earlier than planned.  Meanwhile, I went to the temple that morning.  I was just able to squeak into the 10:00 session, which was nice since I haven't been able to do an endowment session for a while.  It's always so wonderful to be in the temple and I am always in awe about the great generosity of the plan the Father has for all his children.

My friend Paula Bergeson and her family have been in Virginia the last week and we had arranged to meet at the temple around 12:30.  After I finished the session, I knew I had extra time so I stayed in the Celestial room and read scriptures for a while.  Then I changed and put names on the prayer roll--I can always think of about 20 people who REALLY need it.  (The world is getting to be such a hard place to live, isn't it?)  The funny thing was, there was one sister in my ward that came to my mind...I put her name down not really knowing why, but then later that day I found out why and I was so glad I had followed that little prompting!  Anyway, after I came out of the temple I walked over to the visitor's center and ate my lunch on a bench outside while I waited for Paula to get there.  They were running a little late, but they made it and I enjoyed visiting with Paula for an hour or so before I had to head home.  We'll get to have a longer visit when I'm in Utah this summer.  I appreciated that she put forth the effort to see me!

It started to rain while I was driving home and got fairly heavy at times.  It's been raining off and on pretty much ever since--I think we are getting the outer edge of tropical storm Andrea.  I've been having trouble with my hearing for the last month or so and I've attempted to clean out my ears several times with little success.  My right ear in particular has been really bad and since swimming last Saturday I really haven't been able to hear much in that ear--it felt completely plugged up.  Yesterday afternoon I decided to try again and this time I just kept flushing it out, over and over again.  I went through nearly three sinkfulls of water without getting anything out but finally near the end of the third sink I was successful!  I can hear things that I had forgotten even made noise--like the tiny crinkling sounds a towel makes when you are wiping off your face.  So nice to be able to hear again. 

Last night I went visiting teaching with another sister in my ward whose companion couldn't go with her.  She was visiting a less active sister that I wanted to see anyway and I was really glad that when we got there, her daughter who just turned 18 was there too and joined us for our visit so I was able to get caught up with her and tell her that I just assigned her some visiting teachers as well.

Jared was up late finishing a project last night.  (Procrastination seems to run in the family, unfortunately.)  Tanner didn't get up in time for Seminary this morning so I took him to school.  (If it hadn't been raining hard, I would have made him walk!)  I got the budget caught up this morning and now I can move on to making sandwiches and jello salad.  For once, I am getting through my list rather quickly--which is good, since I have a lot on the list for today.

The other thing I've been doing in snatches here and there whenever I get a chance is to read the book we are reading for book chat.  I just got it from the library on Monday morning and I'm about half way through it's 400 pages.  It is a very fascinating story called The Thirteenth Tale.  It's almost a mystery, but better than most mysteries in my opinion.  I'm finding it particularly interesting because one of the main threads running through the story are two different twin relationships.  It's a little dark and maybe I'll be disappointed about how it all turns out in the end, but it's definitely entertaining me.

We are going into our last week of school now and I think I am even more ready for vacation than the kids are.  Next week on this day we'll be done.  :)