Weekly Review November 7 '25

Time for my weekly attempt to remember what we did the past week. I really should take notes during the week because I have the hardest time remembering! I haven't always been like this. I must be getting old and senile. Or maybe it's just lack of sleep. Or both! I did sleep a lot better this week, actually--I'm very grateful for that. On Saturday night I went to bed at 9:00 and I didn't wake up until 6:30. And since that was the night that we "fell back", it was actually as if I had slept until 7:30--10 1/2 hours! Wow, that felt amazing! The rest of the week I have mostly been sleeping until my alarm goes off in the morning and even though I usually wake up once or twice a night, I have always gone right back to sleep so that has been really great.

Back to last Friday...we had kids coming by to trick or treat for a couple of hours. Seth mostly took care of that for us and Frank and I watched several episodes of Once Upon a Time. I woke up fairly early on Saturday so I got up and read scriptures and also went outside to see the sunrise. There was one deer outside, very close to our yard. It looks a lot farther away in the photos than it actually was. It (she?) was close enough when I first went outside that I could hear it chewing.

I went to a stake choir practice that morning...it was the first practice for a Christmas program our stake is doing in mid-December called "Lessons and Carols". The choir director explained that it is patterned after a similar program they do at Oxford University every year. I thought I was going to be learning arrangements of traditional Christmas hymns, but it didn't turn out the way I expected at all. The choir will be singing 4 songs and I am only slightly familiar with one of them ("Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming"). I'd never heard of the other three and they are all somewhat challenging pieces so I hope that I can learn them. Also not expected...hardly anyone showed up for the practice. There were about 3 or 4 tenors, 3 or 4 basses, one other alto besides me, and also only 2 sopranos (one of whom is 8 years old). I've sung in a lot of other stake choirs, and we usually have a lot more people than that. It was only the first practice, so hopefully more will come tomorrow. The rest of the day was busy with household chores and Seminary lesson prep. Frank went with me to the church to help me make some copies and a few things like that. 

Frank and I had temple recommend interviews with a member of the stake presidency on Sunday morning. We had to go to the stake center for that. We went straight to our church meetings from there. I got to talk to Jared for a while that afternoon as I usually do. Seth was feeling sick so he didn't go to church. (He laid low all day but thankfully felt better on Monday and has been fine since then.) I had some set up I needed to do for my Seminary lesson on Monday, so Frank went with me to the church again to help me do that. We also went on a short walk together after dinner. Sunday evening sky:

My lesson topic for Monday was Faith in Jesus Christ to Build Self-Reliance. It focused on overcoming obstacles to attaining self-reliance by turning to the Savior for help. The lesson talked about obstacles in our way feeling like "mountains" and referred to a quote by Pres. Nelson about moving our personal mountains through our faith in Jesus Christ. I decided to put a "mountain" on each table (really a stack of 5 hymn books) and I gave each table 6 Lego blocks. When the youth arrived, I told them they needed to build something out of Legos to help them get over their "mountain". They could earn extra Legos for every question they answered throughout the lesson. That worked out well...I didn't have to call on anyone throughout the entire lesson. They kept raising their hands to answer questions because they all wanted to get Legos. It was great! I'm sad that I forgot to take photos of their creations at the end of class. Tammy did take a couple of photos during the lesson that she shared with me. She didn't catch me in good moments (I had my eyes closed in one and didn't look happy in the other one) but you can kind of get the idea. I had more fun than the photos show. 😂

The girl reaching into the bag of Legos had just answered a question, and I was listening to someone else answer a question. And yes, that girl on the end is on her phone and not paying much attention to the lesson...definitely happens 😅:

For Tuesday's lesson we played games to help them learn the DM scriptures so that was fun too and easy to prepare. 

We went on a walk every day this week, I think. The fall colors are so beautiful right now and the sky looks so pretty, so I keep taking pictures. Monday evening:

I took these photos Tuesday morning after Seminary. I startled the little bunny when I came home on both Monday and Tuesday mornings. I haven't seen it since then, but I'm kind of glad about that because I think it was eating some of our grass seed that was just spread out on Friday to try to help fill in the bare spots on our lawn.

On Tuesday Frank didn't do his temple shift--he decided he wants to take the next few months off to give his shoulder more of a rest so that it can heal. His shoulder is definitely better than it was, but it's not completely better and he notices it bothers him quite a bit for many of the things he does when he's working at the temple. We ended up going out for dinner on Tuesday evening because Scott called me around the time I usually start making dinner and then when I got off the phone I realized I had forgotten to run the dishwasher earlier that day so we didn't have very many clean dishes. When Frank suggested we go out to get something, I was more than happy to do that. I don't like cooking!

On Wednesday I got one of next week's lessons completely prepared except I need to make a few copies still. Pictures from our walk and the sunset from our front and back yards (after our walk) on Wednesday:

No idea what kind of bush (tree?) this is, but those purple berries look pretty cool.

On Thursday I got most of my second lesson planned, but I still have a lot of work to do on that one. 

Our ward bishopric made breakfast for our class this morning. It was really good! We had a very small class today, though--only 10 kids! Our numbers tend to dwindle a couple of months in as the kids get more tired and there has also been a lot of illness going around lately. Besides that, three of the kids went on a college visit to SVU today.  

After Seminary, I went to the temple. Since I didn't go last week, it felt like it had been a really long time since I'd been there! In spite of all my good nights this week, I still got a bit sleepy. I still enjoyed being there, though. Also, the mom of 2 of the kids in my Seminary class was there and we've been wanting to talk to her and been unsuccessful at contacting her, so that was a blessing that I was able to see her and talk to her in person. 

Pictures from our walk tonight:

The mornings have been quite chilly (this morning there was frost on my car windows) but the days have been quite nice, mostly. One day earlier this week it got up into the low 70s. It is cooler now, but still fairly pleasant. We are trying to enjoy the mild weather and to get in as many walks as possible before it gets too cold. We had a wind and rain storm in the night on Wednesday night although it was more wind than rain. The wind was loud enough that it woke me up, although I didn't stay awake for very long.

Seth didn't have classes on Monday or Tuesday because on Monday his teacher was sick (he only has one class that day) and on Tuesday they cancelled classes because it was election day. He forgot to check messages both mornings, though, so he found out there wasn't class when he got to class and no one was there. Maybe someday he will learn to check his messages every day! Seth worked most of the day today and he has a shorter shift tomorrow. 

I've done a little bit of reading this week...just some old favorites from my childhood. I've also been watching a few videos made by a British family where they watch videos about America and react to the things they are learning and the videos have been pretty funny a lot of the time. I keep wondering if an American family did the opposite--reacted to videos about England--if people in England would find that funny. I've learned a few things that I didn't know about England while watching these. For example, they said that the fall colors in America are way better than they are in England. They claim that in England most of the leaves just turn brown and die. Sounds pretty dismal, and makes me appreciate even more how beautiful everything is here right now.

To finish up, here is a photo I took of the house behind our house this evening. Apparently, our neighbors want to skip over Thanksgiving and go straight to Christmas: