Weekly Review March 3 '17

This last week has gone by fast. It feels like I was just writing the weekly review, and here I am doing it again!

On Friday we had the Blue & Gold Banquet as planned. It turned out really nice. For dinner we had planned to have a potato bar and I had to bake 10 potatoes for that. Normally not a big deal, but it turns out that it was about 70 degrees on Friday, so I wasn’t too happy about having to light the oven and leave it on for an hour or so. The house was so warm that night that we had to open windows! In February!!! We kind of laughed about it at the banquet—if we had known how warm it was going to be, we would have planned to have a salad bar or an ice cream sundae bar instead of a potato bar! But who expects it to be 70 degrees in February? The food was still really good, though, and there was plenty of it. I did end up helping Seth decorate his cake—we didn’t do anything fancy, just went with the “blue & gold” theme:

This is one of my Bears. I thought his "campfire" cake was really clever:

Seth carrying the flag during the flag ceremony:

I helped set up all he tables. I think it turned out looking nice:

(Disclaimer about all the Blue & Gold pictures: they are all kind of dark, blurry, and yellowish because I still had the camera on the “sunset” setting and didn’t realize it until after I took all the pictures.)

I got the slide show done in time and I think everyone liked it.

On Saturday morning I weeded our front flower bed. It looks WAY better now! The bulbs are starting to come up and a few little daffodils have bloomed already. I actually thought about mowing the lawn, too, but decided it wasn’t quite ready to be mowed yet. One of my neighbors walked by and commented “Gardening in February!!” Yeah, it’s crazy. That afternoon we had a big thunderstorm and the temperature dropped quite a bit (all the way down to the 50s!) It was a busy day; I did a lot of Cub Scout planning and practiced choir songs and updated the business finances and cleaned the kitchen floor. We had the Sisters over for dinner that evening.

We had ward conference on Sunday and it was really good. I picked up a special needs YSA in our ward and she sat with us in Sacrament Meeting because her dad had surgery last week and her mom and brother were staying home to take care of him. I took her home after church also as well as another teenage girl who lives near us, and I also missed the beginning of RS because 2 investigators needed a ride home also. So I was the ride lady on Sunday, I guess! I thought RS was particularly good; we talked about ministering to others and started out by discussing the way the Savior ministers and the teacher had us thinking about times in our lives when we have known that Heavenly Father and the Savior are aware of us personally. That is always a good question to ponder; I can’t do that without ending up in tears. Judging by all the sniffing I heard around me, everyone else is the same as me. I can think of several times that I have known that they were aware of me personally, and those are the sweetest moments of my life. On Sunday evening I had choir practice, as usual.

On Monday Seth got out of school 2 hours early; I’m not sure why they had a random early dismissal on a Monday! I was super busy that day because I had several things I needed to purchase for den meeting and I had to go to several different stores to get them all. One of the places I needed to go was JoAnn’s and while I was there I also got a lot of yarn because I have decided to make an afghan. Amy and Rachelle are both making afghans and Amy told me about it and it sounded like a cool idea so I am going to try it. If the first one turns out okay I will probably make some more.  When I told Frank I was making an afghan, his response was “do you even know how to crochet?”, which made me laugh. Well, sort of—I did learn how to crochet, but it was a LONG time ago and I haven’t tried to make anything since the scarf I crocheted while I was on my mission. (News flash: in 12 more days, I will have been home from my mission for 26 years.) Plus, I was never incredibly proficient at it. But that is one of the great things about the internet—if you want to know how to do something, you just Google it and there’s bound to be a YouTube video tutorial out there. I watched a couple of tutorials Wednesday night and I now feel pretty confident about crocheting again. As I watched, I was like “Oh yeah…I remember that!” It all came back to me. So we’ll see how it goes.

On Tuesday we had den meeting, and I started a new adventure with the boys called “Make It Move”. The first thing we did was to build “stick bombs”. Have you ever done that before? I hadn’t, until this week. It’s a pretty cool and fun little project, although it’s a bit tricky to figure out at first. Speaking of YouTube tutorials, I had to watch a few and then I spent a couple of days practicing before I felt confident enough that I would be able to help the boys do it. It’s hard to explain, but you basically weave together popsicle sticks in a certain way so that there’s all this potential energy built up, and when you pull one of the sticks out, the whole thing “explodes”—the sticks all pop up in the air. You can imagine the boys enjoyed that! It took a lot longer to do than I had expected, though, so we didn’t get to do some of the other things I had planned to do that night. I have one boy (besides Seth) who is really ADHD and he is really disruptive (without meaning to be) so it always takes a lot longer to get through things than I would like. I always feel kind of frazzled after den meetings, trying to keep 5 boys under control! (Although actually, 3 of them are little angels; it’s only Seth and the other boy who can be difficult and I had a talk with Seth right before den meeting this week and he really tried hard to be good and was much better than he has been).  Here are a few pictures of our "bombs":

(We put a stack of cups at the end to make the "explosion" even more fun.)

It happened so fast that only a few sticks are still in the air, although I took the picture right when he pulled the stick out.

Here's another one:

Just starting to "explode":

The other thing we did that night was talk about Rube Goldberg machines because we are going to build one and I wanted them to start thinking about it. Don’t know what that is? Don’t worry; I will explain! Rube Goldberg was an inventor, engineer, and cartoonist who lived in the early 1900s. He was famous for dreaming up really complicated machines to do simple things like scratching your back or using a napkin. So a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated machine that does a simple thing. (For example—ball rolls down ramp, hits dominoes, dominoes fall, last domino lands on a “see saw” which flips a small object into the air, which falls into a cup attached to a pulley, making the cup fall and cup on the other end of the pulley goes up and hits a bell, which makes it ring.) Our machine only has to have four steps, so it will be really simple. I went online to get some ideas, though, and came across tons of YouTube videos (yes, YouTube videos kind of dominated my week) of Rube Goldberg machines that people have constructed and there were some pretty amazing and elaborate ones out there. There was one that went through an entire house, and another that went through a huge warehouse. There is even an annual Rube Goldberg machine competition; who knew???! It was actually a lot of fun to watch those videos (Seth loved them too); I could have watched more of them if I had had the time. If you want to be really entertained, go look up Rube Goldberg machine videos! It got me kind of excited to do this project with the boys, although I don’t think it is going to be easy.

I didn’t do much that was noteworthy Wednesday; just the usual things and practiced choir songs and worked on our taxes, which are done except for filing. I can’t file electronically again this year for the same reason as last year—Fraank had a W-2 for the short term disability payments he received which only had an amount in box 12 and apparently you can’t file electronically if any of your W-2s have a zero in box 1. I have no idea why! But we are getting a refund, so I’m not complaining too much. Ironically, our refund this year is $1 more than last year’s. I thought that was funny! We had another thunderstorm Wednesday too and yesterday was windy and quite a bit colder (although still in the 40s). Earlier this week was quite warm again, after the weekend being a bit cold. Oh! I got some new shoes Wednesday too since my socks always get wet when it rains. 

Yesterday was mostly a quiet day, which was nice for a change. I wrote to Tanner & Jared (because Jared's P-day is on Friday) and I stayed up kind of late adjusting the chart for the afghan I'm going to make. I did get it finished, so I am ready to start that project now and will hopefully get started on it later today. This morning we had a very very light dusting of snow on cars and lawns (but not on the roads). It is windy and cold still. We will get some nicer temperatures next week it looks like, though.

I am happy to report that Frank is doing better than he was last week. His neck finally stopped hurting and he thinks that the last cortisone shot is actually helping a bit…his back isn’t hurting as much as it was either. It’s really nice that he isn’t groaning every time that he moves! So thank you for your prayers; please continue to pray for him! He has had a very busy week again with lots of work to do for his clients. He hasn’t had time to transfer all the stuff to my new laptop, so I am still using the old one but that’s not a big deal, and I am not complaining! All this work he is doing for clients is paying for missions and I am grateful. 

That is all I can think of to report for this week. To finish, here is a picture of Jared's missionary plaque, which just went up at our church building this week: