This week we got back into our regular routine, mostly. Saturday was quite busy. I had stake choir practice in the morning, as I have the last few weeks. When I got to the church for the practice, I thought the blooming trees next to the building were beautiful. I had to take a few photos:
After I got home from the practice, I did some sewing. In the past, I have done some sewing for a friend who used to be in our ward...fixing baseball uniforms for him. (Mostly hemming pants, adding elastic to pants hems, and sewing on patches.) He had a couple of pairs of umpire pants he needed hemmed, but he asked if I would be willing to show his 13 year old daughter how to do it. She has a sewing machine and has learned some sewing basics. So they came over and I showed her how to hem pants and we got both pairs of pants hemmed. That evening, we got a call from some other firends who used to live in our ward...they live in Winchester, Virginia now. They were just leaving the temple and wanted to know if we wanted to meet them for dinner at a restaurant in Frederick. We enjoyed getting caught up with them...haven't seen them in quite a while. They are excited to be getting a temple in their area soon.
Sunday we had all our regular church meetings, but in addition to that Frank and I had our first meeting with the food committee for Trek. It's going to be a fun group to work with! We have a menu planned and a list of tasks that need to be done, and divided up those tasks. Frank and I are going to help buy the food, among other things.
I did go in to help with taxes on Monday for a couple of hours. The site director emailed me on Saturday to ask if I could come in because a lot more people had made appointments. Gotta love all the procrastinators! I prepared a tax return for a woman who was separated from her husband, had a restraining order against him, and is currently living in a shelter with her two very young boys (both under the age of 2). In spite of the difficult situation she is in, she was very serene, patient, and kind. I was really impressed! When I finished and she thanked me, I told her I hoped things would get better for her soon. She smiled calmly and said "they will". I'm really glad I could help her in a small way.
On my way home from VITA, I picked up Seth from school. He had a doctor appointment that afternoon so I took him to that. It was just a check up for his medication. After that, we had dinner and family night. We played Mario Kart and somehow I managed to come in first on one of the races; I still have no idea how that happened! I ended up coming in 3rd overall which for me is really good.
Jared came over as we were finishing up family night so that he and I could work on editing my class movie. On Sunday they actually decided to move the movie night to next week, but we had already planned to work on it so we went ahead with our plans. We were up pretty late working on it but we got most of the main movie done; we still want to add a "behind the scenes / blooper" reel at the end. Jared is going to add some more special effects too. It's good that we got a lot done because Jared is quite busy with work and we haven't done anything else on it since Monday. We will be finishing it up this weekend.
Meanwhile, because the movie night got moved to next week, they decided to move next week's activity to this week and my class was in charge of that so I suddenly had a week's less time to prepare for that. Fortunately, I had most of it ready but I had been planning to tweak some things and get everything ready to go this week. Instead, I got it all ready on Tuesday morning. The activity was a photo scavenger hunt in downtown Frederick. I used a bunch of information from a scavenger hunt that Seth's school class did when he was in 8th grade. I put booklets together with photographs and descriptions of all the things they were supposed to find, along with a list of the rules and a map showing the boundaries. It took a decent amount of time, but luckily I did most of the work last fall (we were planning to do the hunt then, but decided to put it off until spring). I didn't have photos of everything so I had been planning to go downtown to take photos of those things but I just didn't have time so I didn't include those things in the hunt. It really didn't matter because I had a ton of things on the list already...more than they would be able to find in the time we had. I wanted the hunt to end at a soda shop that sells unique sodas and also ice cream, so that everyone could get a treat. Frank thankfully thought to suggest that we check the hours the shop was open...they close at 7:00 pm, which is when our activity was starting. I decided to check another place that sells pretzels and they were open until 9:00 pm. Again, Frank suggested that we call them to make sure if we showed up at 8:15 with about 20 people that they would be able to make that many pretzels. Fortunately, they said they could.
I think the activity went well and that everybody had fun. My only complaint is that it took much too long for everyone to gather at the church (even though we asked everyone to be on time so we could get started) and then to divide into teams and get everyone in a car to ride downtown and so forth. We didn't actually end up starting the hunt until close to 7:30. We ended up dividing into our classes...all the YM went with the bishop and 1st counselor, the older YW class went with their advisor and the YW secretary, and my class went with me and our class advisor. (The YW president couldn't be there that night.) Frank opted to take care of the pretzel order. He had the idea to print out the pretzel menu and have everyone choose what they wanted at the beginning of the hunt so that the order could be called in early and ready for us when we finished at 8:15. I'm really grateful that he thought through all these things! Especially because even though he walked over to the pretzel place and put in our order at about 7:45, we still ended up waiting until after 8:30 for them to get our order ready. It would have been a disaster if we had showed up at 8:15 and had to wait another 45 minutes.
Here's a few of the photos I took of my class:
We are going to put together a little slideshow with photos from all the classes to show at the movie night on Tuesday. (Jared is going to help me with that too.) It was a little bit challenging to go with a group for the hunt because I had to be careful not to help too much...I already knew where everything was! I watched them walk right past a couple of things on the list and didn't say anything because I didn't think it would be fair if I did. I still had a fun time, though. We tallied up our points at the end and the YM won, but they only beat my class by a few points.
I was surprised that on Wednesday my back and arms hurt a lot! My feet hurt too but I wasn't surprised by that...I forgot and wore my boots instead of more comfortable walking shoes that night. I didn't feel like we had walked all that far, but apparently it was hard on my back. I was mostly just sore on Wednesday, though. By Thursday I was feeling a lot better. My feet are still a little sore but nothing else hurts anymore.
I was busy on Wednesday getting caught up on household chores that I didn't have time to do on Tuesday (because I was preparing the scavenger hunt). Jared & Jessie came over for dinner that evening. We also played some games and went to get some ice cream. It was fun to spend some time with them!
Yesterday I mostly did the usual chores but last night I went to a "End of the Tax Season Celebration" for VITA. We met at a restaurant downtown and had pizza and appetizers. It was pretty fun. I'm glad that we finished up the tax season but I'm kind of sorry I probably won't see the other volunteers until next year. They are all really nice people! We each got a certificate of recognition from the Frederick County executive. Here's mine:
Last night they told us an estimate of how much money had been refunded to taxpayers because of our efforts and also about how much money the taxpayers saved because they didn't have to pay to get their taxes done. I can't remember the numbers anymore but they were a lot higher than I anticipated...in the hundreds of thousands. I'm glad I can help people who are struggling financially. I still remember what it was like to be worrying about every penny I spent. It's not an easy situation to be in.
Today has been a normal Friday so far. I've spent most of the morning getting the finances updated. I did go to Seminary this morning, which I don't normally do. I have been getting there about 15 minutes early for pick up every day this week so that one of the teachers could leave a little early to go get a medical treatment done. Today I was there for the whole class, though. I think I will be helping next week too.
The weather here has been unpredictable. One morning this week it was only 37 degrees and it's been somewhat chilly during the days but now today it is in the high 80s! It's going to cool back down tomorrow, but only to the 70s so I'm not complaining about that. Everything is blooming, there is pollen all over everything, and everyone's allergies are acting up. Mine haven't been too bad, thankfully, but Frank's persistent cough is back with a vengeance. Leaves are starting to appear on all the trees. A few weeks ago there were only blossoms on all the trees but now everything looks so green:
I will never get tired of our backyard view! It is always so beautiful.
I can't think of anything else to report so that's it for this week.
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