Weekly Review March 13 '15

Hey guess what?  It didn't snow this week!  And as a matter of fact, we even got some temperatures in the 50s a few days which feels pretty glorious after weeks of highs in the 20s.  A lot of the snow melted and the river is way up.  The large banks of (dirty) snow created by the snow plows are still there and everything is muddy and the grass is brown so yeah--the world is quite ugly at the moment but I don't care!  I bet in a few weeks the grass will be green again and I already see green shoots starting to poke through in the flower beds.

We had a pretty busy week.  I mostly failed at exercising (except I did take Snickers for a longish walk yesterday)--I blame that on the time change.  I was waking up on my own with time to exercise before showering and picking up Jared from Seminary at around 6:50, but now my internal clock is waking me up an hour later.  Which gives me time to shower or exercise, but not both.  So I chose shower!  Hopefully I will adjust to the time difference soon, though.

We had stake conference last weekend and it is the first stake conference in over 7 years that Frank wasn't in charge of all the audio visual stuff so he wasn't running all over the building during the meetings making sure everything was working or solving problems that came up.  I think he enjoyed that.  However, we still didn't all get to sit together as a family because our ward was asked to provide the choir and Jared and I were singing in the choir.  As a matter of fact, Jared (as the assistant ward choir director) directed one of the three songs that we sang.  Fortunately, he was feeling well enough to do that.  (After his oral surgery on Thursday.)  All the stake conference meetings were good, although I always seem to enjoy the adult session on Saturday evening more than the general session on Sunday.

For RS I did one food order this week and we had our monthly evening meeting.  For the meeting, we were celebrating the RS birthday and we did that with a dinner and a talent / service auction.  For the auction, we asked sisters to contribute either something they made (such as a blanket or a baked good) or to offer a service (such as babysitting or a piano lesson or something like that).  Then everyone who came filled out a survey that earned them points, and then you could use your points to "buy" things at the auction.  It was fun, and we all learned a lot about each other's talents and abilities.  For my contributions, I made a batch of snickerdoodle cookies, I offered the service of helping organize a budget, and a friend and I together offered some basic sewing lessons.  I didn't come home with much because even though I had a lot of points (I got five points for each sibling, child, niece or nephew, just for starters!) I was helping auction the items so it was hard to bid on them at the same time.  But I did get an e-book that a sister in our ward wrote, and a men's haircut (for one of my men).  The food was yummy and a lot of people came so I was happy with how the evening turned out.

I have also spent some time this week helping to plan a luncheon for a funeral.  I can't remember if I mentioned a few weeks ago that a sister in my ward was in the hospital very sick and in a coma.  Whether I did or not, this sister passed away on Sunday.  She got an infection and went into septic shock and all her organs began to shut down...that's why she was in the coma.  So on Saturday her family made the decision to take her off life support and she passed away on Sunday.  She has had many health problems her whole life and this last year has been particularly difficult for her and I've seen her quality of life deteriorate quite a bit, so I am happy for her that she is out of pain and not caught in her body anymore.  She could not walk or talk very well so now I imagine her running from one end of heaven to the other, and happily talking as fast as she can!  I will miss her, though.  I learned a lot from her and I always enjoyed visiting her.  Anyway, the funeral is on Tuesday.  Her parents live in another ward in our stake, so the RS president in that ward and I have been coordinating efforts to put together a luncheon for her family.

On Tuesday I went with my friend Rebekah (she used to be my secretary before they called her to be the Primary president) to take her sewing machine to a place to get it serviced.  It was this cute little store up in Pennsylvania that is run by a Mennonite family.  It was about 45 minutes away, so she wanted someone to ride along with her.  We enjoyed visiting all the way there and back, and after we got home we went to lunch.  I enjoyed that a lot.

Frank hurt his back somehow on Monday.  Very similar to the way I hurt my back...just lifting up his leg to take a sock off!  He was in a lot of pain Monday and to my surprise still managed to go to work on Tuesday, even though he was still in a lot of pain that day.  He worked from home on Wednesday because he didn't have a reason that he needed to actually be in the office that day.  His back has gradually gotten better...improved a little each day...so now it isn't troubling him very much.

Meanwhile, Jared went to school on Monday but on Tuesday he had a bad headache and his mouth was hurting a lot so he stayed home.  He has been ok the rest of the week, though.  He had a follow up with the oral surgeon yesterday and everything is healing well.  He may need to have a little more gum tissue removed from the back right tooth, but we need to wait until the swelling goes down some more before the oral surgeon will know for sure.  It won't be as involved as it was the first time, though, if he does have to have that done.  He goes back in about 10 days so the oral surgeon can look at that again.

I sat down with Jared and did a lot of planning for his Eagle project this week.  Then tonight Frank, Jared and I went to Lowe's to price some materials and such.  We ended up talking to a guy there for quite a while and we are re-thinking how we might do some of it, so there is more planning to do, but hopefully we'll get all of that figured out this week.

This morning I volunteered to help in Seth's class.  Usually they have me help kids with reading but most of the kids had done their reading already so his teacher just asked me to help kids finish their work plans for the week.  She said to help Seth first, and she would send me other kids if they needed help with things.  I did help one child with reading and another one with some math, but I ended up spending most of the time helping Seth get his work plan done.  And for the first time ever, he got EVERYTHING on his plan for the entire week completed!  His teacher and I were more excited about it than he was, but I think he did feel good about it.

Tanner's work is continuing to be kind of ridiculous.  They said they would start scheduling him for more hours, but he was only scheduled to work one shift this week...yesterday.  Then it turns out that there was some sort of a mix up and they thought he had quit because he had another job, so he had been taken out of their system.  So when he showed up for his shift, he couldn't work (it takes 24 hours to put him back into the system).  And of course he isn't scheduled to work next week either since they made the schedule when they thought he didn't work there anymore!  But they are getting everything fixed, and they might even schedule him to work some hours this week.  Hopefully; we'll see!

In between everything else, I did a little bit of cleaning.  All my kitchen cabinets desperately need to be cleaned, so I had Tanner take two of the cupboard doors off so I could really scrub them.  They are a lot cleaner now but I also rubbed off some of the stain.  So I'm not sure if I'll do all the others or if I'll try to figure out another way to clean them.  Maybe I should just sand them all down and re-stain all of them!  That would be a much bigger project than I intended, though.

I have also been reading Count of Monte Cristo whenever I get the chance.  I'm almost halfway through now...it's over 600 pages long!  But I do enjoy it.

That's it for this week!  I need to stop anyway and convince Jared that he should really go to bed since he's taking the SAT in the morning.