Last week when I wrote, I was leaving to go to the temple soon. I met Frank there and it was really nice to go to the temple together. We stopped on the way home to get a quick bite to eat.
On Saturday we spent the morning at Costco buying a lot of the non-perishable food for Trek. It took us 3 hours to get that done. We brought Seth with us to help and it's a good thing we did because we ended up with 2 full carts, plus a pallet so we needed all three of us to push the carts and pallet to the check out line.
(The orange flat cart behind them is the one I was pushing.) We met the couple who is the head of the food committee at their warehouse on our way home to drop off everything we bought. Yesterday Seth came with me on my regular trip to Wal-Mart to get groceries and we got another cartful of non-perishable items for Trek. I'll be dropping off those items at the warehouse in a few hours. Believe it or not, that's only about a third of the food we need for Trek. The heads of the food committee are picking up the rest of the non-perishable items from Sam's Club today (we couldn't get everything at Costco and we don't have a Sam's Club membership) along with most of the meat because we are going to divide it up among the members of the food committee to pre-cook and freeze it. We will be picking up another really huge order of all the perishable food from Sam's Club on the morning before Trek. It takes a lot of food to feed 200 people for 3 days!
We were supposed to have the Sister missionaries over for dinner on Saturday evening but one of them wasn't feeling well so we took food over to them instead.
On Sunday I was sustained as a Seminary teacher and lots of people congratulated me, which I always think is kind of strange. It's not like I applied for the job and won out over all the other applicants! 😂I was supposed to get set apart after church but the visiting member of the stake presidency who was supposed to set me apart ended up spending the entire Sunday School hour and beyond out in the parking lot with an upset member of our ward who was offended when the stake presidency member reminded us at the end of our testimony meeting that our testimonies should be brief and focused on Christ. I don't think these comments were even directed at the guy who got offended but anyway...he was really upset. I waited around for a while after church but finally gave up and went home.
Jared came by that afternoon to do some laundry and have dinner with us since they hadn't been able to come on Thursday to do laundry (they were detained by car trouble). Jessie didn't come because she had other plans already.
We ate a little earlier than normal because I had a Seminary teacher training meeting at 5:00 pm and Frank had a Trek food committee meeting at 5:00 pm also. (The Trek food committee meeting was obviously for me too but I couldn't be two places at once, of course.) Frank's meeting was online but mine was in person at the stake center. It was a very short meeting and it was about the new graduation requirements for Seminary students, so I didn't really learn much about what I am supposed to be doing. From what I've been hearing from other teachers in our stake, we don't get a whole lot of training or support from the local CES coordinator which doesn't leave me feeling very warm and fuzzy. But my ministering sister helped me a little bit with that...she visited me on Wednesday and it turns out that her sister in law is a Seminary teacher in a nearby stake and her sister in law told her where I can go in the gospel library app to find training materials. So I've been able to start going through that, at least.
I'm kind of jumping around though...on Sunday there was also some confusion about who I will be teaching with and the end result is that I came home feeling upset about all the uncertainty and not being set apart as I anticipated as well as some frustration about YW stuff and I had kind of a meltdown that evening. It was all just too much at once. I'm feeling better now, though.
I feel like I've been really busy this week with many different things. On Monday and Thursday I helped with some community service stuff. There's a group of local churches that provide free hot lunch for kids in the summer time at various parks in the area and every year our ward provides volunteers for that for a week and this was our week. On Monday I went alone but I took Seth with me to help on Thursday. His friend Henry (and Henry's mom) were signed up to help on Thursday so I thought Seth would enjoy helping that day. On Monday our RS president and my friend Sherrie were helping but there were several other volunteers and only about 20 kids showed up to eat lunch so we really didn't have much to do. We ended up talkng with each other most of the time which was helpful for me since Sherrie has been a Seminary teacher in the past. She sent me some emails later that day with some helpful information. According to her, there is a LOT I will be needing to do to prepare and get things set up over the summer.
On Thursday there were fewer volunteers so I felt like I was able to help more. Lunch is usually served in a pavilion at the park, but on Thursday it was moved inside to a nearby HOA building because the air quality is so bad here right now. You may have heard that we are getting a lot of smoke all over the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and some of the southeast because of wildfires in Canada. It was noticably hazy outside on Wednesday and on Thursday it was even worse and we could smell smoke in the air. We couldn't see the nearby "mountains" at all and even trees a short distance away looked hazy. Our area was on Code Red for air quality yesterday, which means that it is unhealthy for the general public to be outside. So fun! It does seem to be quite a bit better today and we've dropped to code yellow which is just moderate air pollution. Hopefully we are over the worst of it. Other than the haziness, we really can't complain about the weather around here. It has been cool at night and in the 70s or 80s during the day...very pleasant!! I guess we aren't getting enough rain, though. We're going to be in drought conditions soon, I think, if it doesn't rain. Seth hasn't had to mow the lawn in a few weeks because the grass isn't growing.
Okay, now back to Tuesday. We had a combined YM / YW activity that evening which was an end-of-the-school-year celebration and a farewell for the 2 YW and 1 YM who just graduated from high school and are moving on to college. They will be missed! We had a dinner and played "minute to win it" games and played dodgeball. There was a little slide show with photos of the graduates, too, and there was a little book for each one of them that we all wrote farewell messages in.
Trying to get Oreos from their foreheads into their mouths without using their hands:
After the activity, the Bishopric and YW leaders met together to discuss plans for the summer. I had talked to the YW president earlier that day and told her that it would make the most sense to release me from YW right before or after Girls' Camp. We are leaving for Utah the day after Girls' Camp ends and won't be back until 2 weeks before school starts. At that point, I will definitely need to be focusing just on Seminary and getting ready for that. The YW president agreed that this makes sense so I will be released sometime in mid-July. I don't think they are going to call a replacement for me until the end of the summer, though, because the Bishopric is supposed to get released in early September so a lot of things will probably shift around then. The YW president has two college age daughters who are home for the summer so they are available to help her with YW stuff. Anyway, our meeting was good and at the end the bishop commented "I'm really going to miss this group" and I couldn't agree with him more! We have had such a great time serving together and I feel super sad that it's coming to an end soon. I think that is one of the great things about the Lord's church though...He could do everything Himself and do a much better job than us, but instead He gives us the opportunity to participate in His work. In the process, we learn and grow and we also get to work with other people and come to love and appreciate them. It's the best!! I feel so grateful for that.
I already mentioned that my ministering sister came to visit me on Wednesday evening. Earlier that day I went to the fabric store to buy fabric and supplies to make an apron for Trek and I decided to get fabric to make another skirt, too. The skirt I made for Trek just isn't as long as I wanted it to be so I'm going to make a different one and this one will be longer. (I figure I'm going to need a lot of skirts when school starts anyway, for Seminary.) Last night, Jared & Jessie came over for dinner and as usual we played a game afterwards. We played Ticket to Ride again and this time Jessie won. Frank didn't play with us because he hasn't been feeling well. His back is hurting a lot and he feels nauseated too. He's not sure if it's a kidney stone or something else. Yesterday he was working from home because he had to go into the office on Wednesday for meetings (his usual work from home day) but today he took a sick day because he's feeling pretty rotten. I hope he feels better soon!
With all of those things, plus my usual household tasks, I have been really busy all week. In between everything else I have been reading The Color Purple and I am close to finishing it. (It's definitely a much easier read than Dear Theo!) It's certainly not a happy book and a lot of bad things happen and yet it's a good book in many ways.
Seth was supposed to be riding his bike every day this week but since the air quality has been so bad, he hasn't been able to do that. They actually recommended that everyone avoid exercising outdoors so he was off the hook and spent most of his days glued to a screen of some sort. I did have him help me with some household chores but it's the first week of summer vacation so I was pretty lenient and let him have a lot of screen time.
I didn't sleep well at all on Sunday or Monday nights so on Tuesday morning I ended up going back to bed and sleeping for a couple of hours. I've slept much better since then, though. I've been having a lot of trouble lately with my nose being really dry & sore and bleeding. This usually happens when I am in Utah but it's been happening a lot here at home lately. It's been really bad some days. I was able to get some saline nose mist at the store yesterday and that is really making a difference already.
To finish up, here are some photos from last week. A few of Seth with his cake and one photo I asked him to take on the last day of school. In his CTC classroom, they have a board on the wall that lists the names of all the kids who passed the different certification exams so I asked him to get a photo of the one with his name on it.
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