Weekly Review October 24 '14

This was another reasonably busy week without a lot of things to write about since most of the things that filled our time were the normal things.  In general, I'd say that things have been unusually quiet for several weeks...which makes we wonder what is coming!  I'm trying to enjoy it while it lasts.

On Saturday our neighbor (who is a professional painter) came over and painted the bathroom.  Then on Monday he came back and did a second coat.  It looks nice!  I will have to include some pictures next week.  He still plans to come back sometime next week to paint the trim, but in the meantime we can get the bathroom put back together.  We bought a new light fixture and Frank installed it but we haven't purchased new towel racks or anything else yet.  We're hoping to do that soon.  Frank also installed a new fan in our master bathroom this week because the old one suddenly quit working.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easy that was to do (at least, Frank made it look easy!) and how inexpensive the new fan was--only about $16.

On Saturday Erin & Dan stopped by our house on the way home from Pennsylvania.  They went there last weekend to celebrate Erin's birthday...among other things, they took of tour of Fallingwater...a really cool house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed.  I remember seeing a picture of that house when I was a little girl and I have wanted to see it ever since, and we had hoped to join Erin and Dan on this trip, but as it turned out we couldn't find anyone to stay overnight with Jared and Seth.  Plus Jared had a play so we needed someone to stay with Seth while he was gone as well.  Maybe we will make it up there some other time!  Anyway, Saturday was Erin's birthday so they stopped at our house to have cake with us:

Dan let us know that Erin likes spice cake, so we tried making one for her but I was disappointed in how it turned out.  Not as flavorful or as moist as I had hoped!  But the cream cheese frosting was pretty good!  We enjoyed seeing them, though.  After they left, I stayed up until midnight watching the first half of the BYU game.  I went to bed at halftime feeling pretty confident that BYU would win so it was pretty disappointing to find out when I got up Sunday morning that BYU lost!  I hope they manage to win another game before the season is over.  I definitely see some promise in the team, but they can't seem to hold it together for a whole game for some reason.

I did spend a lot of time on Monday doing RS stuff...phone calls, emails, etc...but other than that and a visit on Tuesday it was a very light RS week.  I used my extra free time to do a major cleaning up in Seth's room, which has been long overdue.  I got most of it done in a couple of hours and ended up with a small bag of trash and two big bags of stuff to give away.  The one thing I wasn't able to get done in those couple of hours was the big Lego mess on his desk.  I decided the best way to cope with that mess was to put the sets back together.  So the following day I built two of the sets and Jared helped me out by building another one.  We still have 3 or 4 sets to build, but at least we made some progress.  Seth is enjoying playing with them more now that they are all together again instead of in pieces all over his room.  He is also enjoying that he can find his toys easier!

I had a follow up visit with the cardiologist on Tuesday which seemed like a waste of time and a co-pay because they already sent me a letter and called me with the results of the tests.  So the doctor really had nothing to tell me that I hadn't already heard.  But he did say that overall, in spite of the few problems, that my heart is quite healthy and I don't need to go back to see him for about 4 years (unless I have some more major symptoms) so that was good to hear.

I had book club this week...finished the book on Sunday and it was pretty good.  I went to the library to return some books, reserve the next book that we are reading, and get some books that Seth needs for a school project.  He has to do a report on a country.  He finally chose to do it on England.

Today I spent a lot of time doing this:

I'm updating the budget, as I do every Friday.  Frank was working from home today and he snuck up on me to take some pictures.  But since I have very few pictures of myself, I decided to put it on here.  Plus it's good to record the everyday things we do, right?

I took a break to go with Frank to lunch; we went with a few other people from our ward as well and that was fun.  Tonight Jared has a couple of friends over for an early birthday celebration.  We had pizza earlier and we are going to have his cake pretty soon.

The only other thing I can think of to mention this week is that yesterday a plane and a helicopter collided in midair near the Frederick airport.  Maybe you heard about it...I noticed it made the national news this morning.  The airport is only about 2 miles from our house...at night we can see the glow of the flashing runway lights just over the hill from our house.  We heard a bunch of sirens yesterday afternoon and wondered what it was all about but figured we'd never find out.  Then a few hours later Frank read about it online.  The plane crashed into some trees which are right behind a building where one of Frank's clients have their business.  The helicopter crashed into a storage lot nearby.  Unfortunately, the 3 men on the helicopter were all killed.  But the good news is that the 2 men on the airplane received only minor injuries and they are ok.  They were taken to a trauma place in Hagerstown after the crash but were treated and released last night.  Plus, no one on the ground was hurt either.  There are a lot of stores, restaurants and busy roads just south of the airport, but fortunately they both crashed north of the airport in an area that has some open fields and fewer buildings (and not far enough north to be in our neighborhood!)

That's really all I can think of for this week!

Weekly Review October 17 '14

It is late Friday night, and I am waiting up for Jared.  He is running tech for a play at the high school.  It's a small play done by the Advanced Theater Studies class called Laramie.  They had their first performance last night, and according to Jared it went really well.  

This week was quite busy, but if I don't include a lot of unecessary details this post won't be too long!  Last Friday morning when I helped in Seth's class his teacher talked to me a little bit about his progress in math.  She confirmed what I thought...he's really not struggling with math.  She was surprised by his low score on the Global Scholar test, so she asked what had happened.  Turns out that he only did a few problems and then decided he didn't want to do anymore!  He can be stubborn like that sometimes.  His teacher did also agree with Frank and I that having him in math intervention might be good for him even though he isn't really struggling with math concepts.

We had an enjoyable evening with our carpool family (the Caraballos).  We made homemade pizza and they loved it!  We enjoyed visiting and getting to know them better.  

On Saturday we went to see Meet the Mormons, and enjoyed it a lot.  I had a special leadership meeting in Virginia that evening, done by a member of the General Sunday School Presidency.  It was really good, but I was up late and then I had a busy Sunday with the usual early morning start for Ward Council.  I taught RS and everyone was tired & hungry and kind of zoned out so it was hard to get participation.  I wasn't too happy about that.  That evening we had a "cottage meeting" which is something our ward does once a month.  The intention is to create an atmosphere where a basic gospel doctrine can be taught in a very non intimidating way.  So they have the meeting in someone's home, casual, with refreshments.  They show a brief video from lds.org and then have a short discussion.  The idea is that ward members can invite non members or less actives to attend this meeting.  This month's meeting was focused on the women, so we've been encouraging the RS sisters to invite friends and less active sisters to attend.  Well, I'm sure some of the sisters did extend invitations (I did) but unfortunately none of the invited made it.  So the meeting was attended by just active members, but at least we tried!  And it was very nice anyway.

I can sum up most of the week pretty quickly.  We had the Elders over for dinner on Monday and the Sisters over this evening.  I did two food orders, both for young single men, so Frank came with me for one and I met the other one at the church to do his.  I did some necessary clothes shopping on Monday.  I went to the temple on Tuesday (it was soooo nice to do that again) and met Frank on the way home for lunch.  I spent Wednesday afternoon doing visits with the Sister missionaries.  We left notes on two doors (less actives), visited briefly with another sister's husband, and were finally able to actually visit with two other less active sisters.  We had a really good visit with the first one, the second one was good too but it was just a short visit.  On Thursday I had a presidency meeting.  Today there was no school.  I took Seth to a pumpkin farm and I got my hair done.  That is the summary of the week!  

I wasn't sitting around in between all of those things.  I had lots of miscellaneous RS stuff to do along with all the usual household chores.  I also looked into what Tanner will have to do to get a mission deferment...he's thinking he definitely won't go back to school Winter Semester and is starting to work on his mission papers...and filled out a passport application for him too.  In between everything else I tried to get some reading done on the book chat book.  So far it is pretty good.

I will finish up with picture of our trip to the farm today.  It was a perfectly beautiful day to be outside...sunny, warm, a little windy.  We've had quite a bit of rain this week (it rained really hard on Wednesday) but fortunately the farm wasn't too muddy.  It was a lot more than a pumpkin patch, too.  They had a ton of other activities like hayrides, a corn maze, big slides, food, etc.  We did come home with a couple of pumpkins.  Here's the pictures:

   

(The bright things at the top of the picture is my hair!  It was windy and my hair kept blowing in front of the camera lens.)

(Big bouncy "pillow")

Corn maze:

Waiting for the hayride:

Views of the farm:

On the hayride:

In the pumpkin patch:

 Big slide:

Fun day! :)

Weekly Review October 11 '14

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day so I am writing this week's post a day early.  I'm also trying to watch the BYU football game at the same time, so if this post doesn't make any sense, you will know why.  I'm realizing that my expectations for this game are completely different than last week's game.  I'm not expecting us to win, I'm just hoping we don't lose miserably.  You all know what a sad disaster last week's game was!  Since it started late in Utah, it started REALLY late out here.  I was trying to hang in there with my team but after the first interception of the 3rd quarter (around 1:00 am out here) Jared and I decided to go to bed.  (Frank had already given up.)  So I was pleasantly surprised the next morning to find out that Utah State actually hadn't scored any more that game, and we had scored another field goal.  So even though we lost, we didn't lose by as much as I expected. I just hope our team can recover somewhat from the loss of our star quarterback!  And of course I hope he recovers and can play again next season.  It's a bigger bummer for him than for anyone else!

Also on Friday (before the game), we had the boys in our carpool family come over to play for a while in the afternoon.  I returned my holter monitor as well and Frank and I went out that evening.  Originally, we were going to go out to dinner but then we ended up going out to lunch instead so neither of us were hungry that evening.  (Frank had set up a lunch for guys in the Elder's Quorum to attend that day--he's been trying to do that about once a month.  I hadn't planned to go at all, but one of the guys called and said he was bringing his wife because she needed to get out of the house, so I went also to keep her company.  We got our own table so we weren't "crashing" the Elder's Quorum lunch; it was pretty funny!)  Anyway, when we went out, we picked out paint for the bathroom and then went and got a new laptop for me.  My laptop is several years old, the screen is starting to have problems, and the plug is also having a lot of problems so that it often won't charge even though it's plugged in.  So we decided we'd better get a new one before the old one gives up completely.  Ironically, I'm still using the old one right now--just haven't had time to move everything over from the old laptop to the new one yet.

We did not end up painting the bathroom on Saturday after all.  We decided some parts of the wall needed more layers of spackle on them first, and those places needed to dry before we could paint.  That part is done now; we need to sand and then I think we can paint.  Hopefully we'll find some time to do that soon!  In the meantime, we had a wonderful weekend enjoying General Conference, and it was nice to be able to concentrate on it.  On Saturday the Sister missionaries joined us for the 2nd session and then the Elders came over for dinner afterwards.  They went with Frank and Jared to the Priesthood session, too.  On Sunday, Erin and Dan joined us for the 2nd session and we ate dinner during the second half of that session.  All of the talks were outstanding, and it was awesome that some of the speakers were able to speak in their native tongues.  I'm already enjoying being able to listen to the talks again.

This week has been fairly busy with RS stuff--lots of people to call & emails to send.  One family in the ward is currently in crisis...such a sad situation!  Not much I can do about it, unfortunately, except be a support and a listening ear.  I am also teaching this Sunday so I've been working on my lesson, I had my monthly meeting with the bishop, and we had our monthly evening meeting this week too.  For our meeting, we had a cultural night where four different sisters shared information about their native countries.  They all brought food for us to enjoy as well.  The great thing is that a couple of them are somewhat less active so it was really great to get them involved.  Besides that, it was a fun and interesting evening, we had good attendance, and I think everyone who came had a really good time.  So I was very happy with how that turned out.

The DC temple has been closed for a month and just reopened this week, so I really wanted to go.  I planned to go on Wednesday, but I haven't been feeling really great and then woke up that morning with a runny nose and bad headache.  Since we had our RS meeting that evening, and I had a really busy couple of days coming up after that, I decided I'd better stay home and try to get some rest.  I certainly didn't sit around all day, but I did take a short nap and I also tried to do things that I could do sitting down.  So I got a decent amount accomplished, but also got some rest.  I did also watch a movie--something I don't do very often at all.  As a matter of fact, I think the last time I watched a movie was the last time I was sick!  I watched Big Fish...we had it from Netflix and Jared had already watched it, but I wanted to see it before sending it back.  It was an odd movie, but I did expect that, and it was a pretty good movie too.  I enjoyed it.

Today I am still not feeling terrific, but I'm not really feeling all that bad either.  Actually, this morning I felt pretty normal but I had a busy day and by afternoon I was not feeling as well.  I actually think it might be allergies, though.  I need to start taking allergy meds again and see if it helps.  This morning I went to a sister's house to hold her baby for her so she could get some things done.  She is having a baby shower for a friend, and she has four kids under the age of five, including a 2 month old who wants to be held all the time!  She was able to get some things done while I was there, though.  The baby is sweet (of course!) so I enjoyed holding her.  Everything else I did today is not really worth noting...just a lot of household chores.  I was doing extra of those, too, since I was trying to get ahead on a few things like this post and the budget.  Tomorrow I am volunteering in Seth's classroom in the morning and we're having the carpool family over for dinner after school so I knew I wouldn't have time to get those things done tomorrow.  Saturday is going to be busy too.

Frank had a busy week also.  He went to the dentist on Monday and on Tuesday he got the stitches out of his knee.  He is able to move it around a lot better now and he doesn't have to keep it dry anymore either, so that has made life quite a bit easier for him.

Jared has a play coming up at school, so he has stayed after a few times for rehearsals.  He has not been feeling his best either, but like me he has kept plugging away.  Tanner has had mid terms this week so he's been pretty swamped but when I talked to him yesterday he had earned a 92 on his first midterm.  He also said he has over 90% in all his classes so that was good to hear!

Seth is not doing quite so well in school.  He is still having a lot of trouble with focusing, so he isn't getting a lot done.  Last week I got a report on an assessment he took called the Global Scholar test, and he did very well on the reading (above average), but he was below average on the math.  Then this week we got a letter from the school letting us know that since he scored so poorly on the Global Scholar test, they are putting him in math intervention for the year.  Seth actually likes math and I don't think he is really having a lot of trouble understanding it, so I think it's likely he scored so low because of lack of focus, not because he is really struggling in math so much, but I could be wrong.  At any rate, Frank and I both think putting him in math intervention is not a bad idea because if nothing else, he may get more one on one attention, which will help him focus, so he will hopefully learn a lot more.  I am interested in talking it all over with his teacher...I have been very worried at how little he seems to be accomplishing this year.  I am also making more of an effort to work with him on an online math program that the school provides for all the kids.  We did some of that tonight and he also did some reading on another program they have.

I got back the results from my 22 hours on the holter monitor, and as I expected they didn't see any atrial fibrillation happening.  I did have a few extra beats now and again, but that is all.  I have a follow up appointment with the cardiologist in a few weeks.

Well, now the second half is starting and I've run out of things to write about, so I will sign off and go focus on the game.  Even though BYU is behind, I am glad to see that the team seems to be pulling things together a lot better than they were in the first quarter.  Maybe the rest of the season won't be as bad as I feared!

Weekly Review October 3 '14

I'm going to start this week with a random picture:

 I would like to live in this house!  I mean, look at that view they have behind them!  (We took this picture on the drive out to Circle of Hope a few weeks ago.  It's a beautiful drive.  The Circle of Hope is the place where Tanner did his Eagle project and where hopefully Jared will be doing his.)

The rest of this week's photos are a bit graphic, just to warn you in case you don't want to look.  Since most of you are on facebook, you already know that Frank got some stitches in his knee on Saturday.  If you haven't heard the story, we were at a cemetery helping with a service project for the Day to Serve.  Frank was helping clear brush with a chainsaw--he just got one recently from his friend that moved to Alaska.  He had just replaced the chain that morning and while he was working the chain came off.  The saw shut off, but the chain still caught him on the knee and cut 4 gashes in it...two of them were fairly deep and required 5 stitches.  Seth and I were elsewhere in the cemetery helping to paint a fence.  Frank actually kept working for about a half hour but then he started to feel a little dizzy and sick, so he came and found me.  That was the end of the service project for us!  I found Jared (painting a different fence) and dropped he and Seth off at home, then took Frank to the doctor to get the stitches.

Here's some pictures of the pants he was wearing:

And here is the wound and the stitches, as of this morning:

Frank has spent a lot of time the last week like this:

Except not always a smile on his face!  He has mostly been able to go about his normal routine,,.he can drive and everything...it's just been awkward and uncomfortable a lot of the time.  Walking in particular, since obviously the knee moves a lot when walking!  The first night he didn't sleep well at all because his knee was throbbing and it was hard to find a comfortable position.  He's done better since then.  Yesterday morning one of the stitches popped open so he had to go back to the doctor to have it looked at.  She put a different band aid on it that was supposed to be super strong but it's already fallen off!  So that was definitely not worth the $25 copay!  I guess she did also put some of that super glue stuff on the wound which is helping to hold it together at least.  He has to keep the wound dry so he wraps it in saran wrap before showering.  The stitches are supposed to come out on Tuesday.  All in all, we know it could have been a whole lot worse so we are grateful for that!

On Sunday in spite of the fact that he slept so poorly, Frank did get up and go to church--mainly because he just got called to be the Gospel Doctrine teacher and he was teaching his first lesson.  Didn't take them long to give him a new calling!  He went home after his lesson, though.  My new counselor didn't get sustained because she wasn't there.  But they did call her and she accepted, so I'm happy about that.  She won't be sustained for another week because of General Conference, which is a bit awkward, but I'll manage.

RS has actually been fairly calm lately.  I'm afraid to say that!  I mean last week I said "boring is good" and then the next day Frank got stitches!  So hopefully I didn't just do myself in.  I did go on several visits this week and it was good to get out and see some of the women in the ward.  One is going through a divorce, one has a new baby, and one just got out of the hospital.  Hopefully we lifted their spirits and helped them a little.  Other than that I had emails to send but there wasn't a lot going on.

It was a moderately busy week with a number of errands.  Jared went to the orthodontist, Snickers went to the vet for a routine vaccination, and both boys got haircuts.  I went to the library to pick up the book chat book...have only made it through the introduction so far, but it sounds really interesting.  I finished up the baseball sewing...glad to have that done!  This morning Frank and I got up at 4:30 am to make cinnamon buns / monkey bread for the Seminary class...they have a new thing this year where they have treats every Friday, provided by one of the families.  This week was our turn.

Yesterday I went to the cardiologist so they could hook me up to a holter monitor for 22 hours.  I have to return it this afternoon.  It's a little awkward but not bad at all.  I haven't felt my heart do anything unusual since they hooked it up, so I doubt they are going to get any data to analyze, but they wanted to try it anyway.  I got the results back from my echo and I have something called "mitral regurgitation" which means that one of my valves doesn't close properly so blood leaks backward back up into the upper chamber of my heart.  Actually, I've had it for a long time and already knew that issue was there...they just wanted to make sure it wasn't getting any worse.  The report said I have a very mild version of this problem, so I'm guessing it hasn't gotten any worse, and it isn't anything to be worried about--just has to be checked annually.

My other project for the week was scrubbing down the walls in our main floor bathroom.  Frank removed the wallpaper about...let's see...it must have been 3 1/2 years ago!  Then we got busy and distracted and didn't get back to it for a long time.  Scott was supposed to scrub the walls (to remove the little bits of glue still on the walls) before he left on his mission and never finished.  So anyway, it took me another year and a half to get to it, but I finally did it myself!  That's because we really want to paint it while we listen to General Conference tomorrow.  With Frank's help, I also removed all the towel racks and so forth from the walls.  We hired our neighbor (who is a professional painter) to come over yesterday to fill in all the holes left from the towel racks etc, as well as to repair the places where some of the wall came off with the wall paper and to fill in a larger hole where one of the boys pulled down one of the towel racks (by hanging on it) when they were little.  He's coming back tomorrow to sand those places down and then we can paint!  (Frank is totally capable of doing that kind of stuff himself but he was a little handicapped this week.  I was going to do it, but he convinced me to just have our neighbor do it instead.)  Frank and I are going to pick out the paint this evening.  After the painting is done, we are planning to get new towel racks, towels, faucet, mirror, vent cover and light fixture, plus add some kind of storage.  I am excited to get it all done!  Hopefully it won't take another 3 1/2 years.

The women's meeting on Saturday was wonderful!  I stayed home to watch it since I didn't want to leave wounded Frank.  Plus Seth was complaining that his stomach hurt (thankfully that didn't turn into anything).  I just love the spirit I always feel at those meetings; it's incredible!  I am looking forward to more spiritual feasting this weekend at General Conference. :)