Weekly Review March 1 '24

 Yesterday got busy so I'm late getting this week's post done. It wasn't a super busy week but there were a few extra things going on.

Last Saturday I figured out what I was going to do for this week's Friday Seminary lesson. I didn't get it completely done, but I had it all planned and just needed to do a few things to prepare such as make copies and cut out some things. I got the reguarl Saturday chores done too. We had the Sisters over for dinner that evening. They didn't have a car that day, so I picked them up at their apartment and took them back home afterwards (they live pretty close to us). We enjoyed having them over; one of the Sisters just transferred in so we got to know her a little bit. After dinner I spent the rest of the evening reading and managed to finish Nightingale, the library book that was due the next day. I liked it overall, although it dealt with difficult topics and a lot of sad things happened. At least it ended feeling hopeful, so I liked that. 

On Sunday I skipped choir practice because they are preparing songs for Easter and I'm not going to be home for Easter. However, when I talked to the choir director later at church, she asked me if I would be willing to come to practices to help the rest of the altos learn their part, even though I won't be here for the performance so I guess I'll be doing that. Frank needed to stay after church to help a sister in the other ward set up a television for their Primary's singing time, so we took two cars to church and Seth and I came home right after the meetings. Jared & Jessie came over for dinner as usual and we actually played two games instead of just one. We played a game called Dead Ringer first...I came in last for that game...and then we played two rounds of a game called Bank, and I won both rounds. Kind of funny! 

Monday's Seminary class was kind of funny because we had a record number of kids arrive on time but then several of them immediately put their heads down on the tables and went back to sleep. My team teacher took a photo because there were so many in a row:

One of the boys even started snoring...not really loud, but enough that we could hear him. That kept the kids who were awake pretty amused! (But it was a bit distracting too.) It turned into a perfect totally unplanned object lesson, though. The lesson topic was witnesses of Christ and for part of the lesson we talked about the importance of having more than one witness and how that makes something more credible. At the end of class when everyone was preparing to leave, a few of the kids were good-naturedly teasing the snorer. A little embarrassed, he tried to deny that he had been snoring and claimed it was one of the boys next to him that snored, not him. I immediately said "Sorry, Jayramiah...there's a whole class full of witnesses that can testify that you were the one who was snoring!" He actually fell asleep a couple more days this week (not when I was teaching) and snored some more. Maybe he has a cold or something! Hopefully he won't be as tired this coming week.

Seth had  a YM planning meeting on Tuesday evening. Frank was busy doing work for a client that evening so I dropped Seth off at the church and Frank was able to pick him up after he was done doing work for his client. I was grateful he was able to do the pick up so that I was able to go to bed! 

We had a guest teacher for Seminary on Wednesday, as we often do. We asked a member of the Spanish ward to teach since we have boys in our class from that ward. This guy speaks English fluently as well as Spanish...his parents came here from Spanish speaking countries but he was raised in the United States. He actually grew up in our ward and is the same age as Scott (they were good friends). He did a great job with the lesson...it's really awesome to see many different teaching styles and since he is a lot closer than we are to the age of the kids in our class he could relate to them in a different way than we can. 

I did my fifth VITA shift on Wednesday and it was even busier than last week. I'm not sure who is doing the appointment scheduling but whoever it is, they are not doing a good job scheduling appointments according to how many volunteers are working. I was the only volunteer scheduled (the director of the program is a paid employee, not a volunteer) until 1:00, but there were 4 taxpayer appointments scheduled every hour. How is that supposed to work? The director mentioned to his boss that we were overscheduled when his boss came in around 10:00 and his boss made some calls and found another  volunteer who was able to come in which helped a bit but we were still short handed and a lot of the taxpayers had to wait quite a while. Most of them were really patient and understanding about it, but it feels stressful to me when I know people are waiting, even if they are being nice about it. I'll be honest...I feel frustrated with the director because he isn't great at managing these situations (I feel like I'm the one apologizing to taxpayers and trying to keep track of who needs to be helped and who hasn't been helped yet when that should be his job) and I don't understand why he isn't checking the volunteer schedule and the scheduled appointments ahead of time instead of realizing that morning that we don't have enough volunteers scheduled. Okay, sorry...enough ranting! I ended up staying nearly an hour late to help with the backlog and I completed 5 tax returns and reviewed at least 2, so I got a lot done. I hope next week is better but it doesn't seem all that likely. Seth had YM that evening and they did some sort of scripture chase activity but I haven't heard a lot about it because I was asleep before he got home.

Thursday always seems to be the day I regroup and get caught up on things. I got caught up on all the chores and also prepared next Monday's Seminary lesson and finished final preparations for Friday's lesson. I haven't figured out Tuesday's lesson at all yet, so I will be doing that today. On Thursday evening I had book chat. We always have fondue at our February book chat meeting and it was delicious as always! We discussed The Book of Charlie and everyone really liked it. Now we will be reading The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith. I don't have a copy from the library yet so in the meantime I have been reading another one of the books that I got from the library back in January (I only have this one and one other left!). It's called Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. One of the main characters is an octopus, believe it or not! It's sort of a mystery and I like it a lot so far, except there's quite a bit of language. 

My lesson yesterday went pretty well. We did an activity where the kids were given two scenarios and they had to choose which doctrinal mastery scriptures would help the person in that scenario and explain why. They did a good job with that. Then I had a couple of puzzles for them to do which helped them review all the doctrinal mastery scriptures for this semester. One puzzle was a crossword puzzle and the other one was a tarsia, which is a bunch of smaller triangles that need to be put together to make a large triangle. They seemed to enjoy these puzzles and did well with them, too. We had to end early because one of the ward's bishoprics made breakfast for our class so we wanted to give the kids time to eat it. They brought a breakfast casserole and bagels & cream cheese. It was really good.

After Seminary I spent most of the morning / early afternoon updating finances. I did a couple of other smaller tasks and got started on this post but didn't have time to finish it. I also took a short nap because I only got about 5 hours of sleep Thursday night and Frank and I had a temple appointment Friday afternoon. I was meeting Frank at the temple (he was going there straight from work) so I knew I would be driving both to the temple and then back home, so I wanted to be alert. Yesterday was our stake temple day but we actually didn't attend one of the sessions specifically for our stake because they were all in the evening. Since Frank gets off work by 3:00, we decided to go to the 4:00 session. (We did see our stake president and his wife because they were coming up the stairs, headed to the first stake session, when we were coming down the stairs after our session ended.) It was really nice to be in the temple with Frank...I go alone fairly often but don't get to go with him nearly as often. Taking that short nap really did help too--I didn't get sleepy at all during our session or while driving to the temple and back. Our session was quite small; only about 16 patrons. That is really unusual, though. It must have been the time of day because the sessions I attend regularly in the mornings and the ones we sometimes attend in the evenings are always really full. We stopped on the way home from the temple to get some dinner. We tried one Mexican restaurant in Gaithersburg but the wait was really long so we ended up driving back to Frederick and going to Cafe Rio. 

That's about all I have to report this week and I have a long list of things to do today so I will just finish up with a picture from our front yard that I took yesterday. 

These little daffodils bloomed on Thursday. It's pretty early to have flowers blooming but we've had some mild days this last week so I guess they decided that it's spring. We've been seeing (and hearing) a lot more birds lately too. We still get plenty of cold days but overall the temperatures are getting milder so I guess spring is on its way. 

Weekly Review February 23 '24

 We had a fairly busy week. Last Friday I did get my second Seminary lesson done, which was good because Saturday was really busy. On Friday after dinner we went to the church to do some cleaning. It was our turn to help with that and we were actually supposed to clean on Saturday morning but I had a hair appointment that conflicted and because of the predicted snow it just seemed like it would be easier to do it Friday night instead of Saturday morning. We cleaned the chapel and sent an email to the member of our ward who is in charge of the cleaning to let him know what we did. 

There was quite a bit of hype about the storm coming in overnight Friday...we were possibly going to get up to 5 inches. I woke up around midnight and looked out the window and there was already snow on the ground and it was coming down hard. When we woke up Saturday morning, though, it didn't look like there was any more snow than when I had looked out the window around midnight. We got maybe a half inch of snow, and it didn't even stick to the roads or sidewalks. I'm not complaining about that...it made getting around a lot easier...it was just kind of funny after all the hype. 

As I already mentioned, I had a hair appointment that morning. The lady who does my hair is in my ward, so I always enjoy visiting with her while she works on my hair. Since I am letting my natural hair color grow in (gray!) she did a bunch of blond highlights to help blend the gray in (my base color has been quite dark, so we are lightening it up so that the contrast between the gray growing in and the rest of my hair isn't so great). The highlights she put in this time made a big difference...the gray is blending in a lot better. I'm actually pleased with it...I don't think it looks bad at all, and the gray color that is growing in looks like it's going to be a nice color. 

We had Stake Conference that weekend and Frank was helping with all the audio / visual technology stuff so he was really busy. We had a member of the seventy visiting...Elder Peter M. Johnson. He wanted to meet with all the tech guys about an hour before the Saturday afternoon leadership session started to test out all the microphones and other things, so even though Frank didn't need to attend the leadership session, he was still there an hour before it started and stayed for the entire time to make sure everything was working correctly. I met him at the stake center at 6:00 with some dinner, which we ate together before the adult session of stake conference started at 7:00. Frank was not able to sit with me for that meeting (or any of the meetings, actually) because he was helping with all the tech stuff but some members of our ward sat with me the adult session. Elder Johnson was the only "speaker"...he actually led a discussion...and it was really good.

On Sunday morning at 8:00 there was a special meeting for all the youth and their parents and leaders, so I took Seth to that. (Frank had to be there an hour before we did). They had given the youth a chance to submit questions ahead of time, so the whole meeting was Elder Johnson leading a discussion to answer several of those questions, and again...it was really good. Since we were already at the stake center, we decided to stay there for the general session at 10:00. We were able to save seats for Jared & Jessie and for Jessie's parents, so we were all able to sit together, which was nice. Jared & Jessie came over for dinner that evening and we enjoyed hearing about their trip and playing a game that they brought with them called Quixx. 

Monday was President's Day so Seth didn't have school and I got the day off from Seminary also. Unfortunately, I had one of my bad nights so I ended up sleeping in and got a pretty late start to the day. At least I got a decent amount of sleep! I did get all the regular chores done and did some Seminary lesson preparations and we had family night.

My lesson Tuesday morning wasn't one of my best, but I kind of knew going into it that it would be that way so I didn't stress about it, really. (And it wasn't bad...just not great.) I knew Wednesday's lesson would be better, and it was. I went to lunch with my friend Rebekah on Tuesday. We tried out a place called Frederick Coffee and Cafe. Obviously, we were there for the cafe part, not the coffee part! I had a chicken salad sandwich that was pretty good, and enjoyed getting caught up with Rebekah. 

The lesson on Tuesday was about the Gathering of Israel and the lesson on Wednesday was about the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Here is a picture of the board from our discussion on Wednesday:

The kids participated well and I felt like we had a meaningful discussion. I did my fourth VITA shift that day and it was super busy. We were totally swamped the whole time I was there and it was a little stressful, but not too bad. I completed four tax returns and did at least one review (maybe two...I can't remember now). Frank took Seth to YM and also picked him up, which I appreciated because by 7:30 I was super sleepy and I went to bed about 7:50 and didn't even wake up when Seth and Frank got back home. 

Yesterday I didn't do anything out of the ordinary...I got all the regular chores done (laundry, grocery shopping, vacuuming...) and I also prepared Monday's Seminary lesson. I still need to prepare my second lesson for next week but I'm not teaching my second lesson until Friday, so I have plenty of time. (We switched things up a bit because the Doctrinal Mastery reviews always come up in the schedule on Fridays and they are easier to prepare and usually involve fun games, so my team teacher thought I should have a chance to prepare a DM review once in a while.) I'm certainly not planning to put off preparing it until late next week...I'll probably prepare it tomorrow. We had a pretty decent rain storm last night--we even got some lightning and thunder! 

This morning I went to the temple. It's been closed for maintenance the last few weeks and just reopened on Tuesday. You may remember that I am helping a friend complete some temple work for her family and that she asked me to do the proxy endowments for a set of twins. (I did the initiatories for both of them in January.) I did the endowment for the first twin the last time I went so I did the endowment for the other twin sister today. It felt great to be back in the temple again but it was a bit challenging for me to stay awake. I'd say that overall I am sleeping much better the last month or so, but apparently I'm still not getting enough sleep! 

I have continued to do a lot of reading. I finished the book Everything Sad is Untrue and really enjoyed it. It took some getting used to at the beginning because the writing style is really different from most books but it was definitely worth persevering. It was really full of profound statements and things that made me think and understand things in a different way. I would definitely recommend it, but it is written for middle school age kids and be prepared for a few stories about poop! I promise it's not too bad and there are actually some good lessons to be learned, even from the poop stories. After I finished that book, I started reading a book called The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. I just got into it far enough to get really interested when I got an email from the library letting me know that I can't renew it because someone else has put it on hold and it is due on Sunday. I'm on page 109 of 438 so I have a lot of reading to do in the next couple of days if I'm going to return it on time! It's about a pair of sisters in occupied France during WWII. 

I've been toying with the idea of going to visit Amy (and Curtis and Ben) in Texas during spring break, but after a bit of discussion with her and Mom, she and I are both going to go to Utah instead and Seth is coming with me to Utah too. (I definitely want to go to Texas another time, though!) We just booked our flight last night and I am looking forward to seeing Amy plus all the Utah folks including Mom, Hans, Scott, Tanner, and Shellie's and Tim's families.

We got a really nice email from Seth's English teacher this week. Here's what she said: "Good afternoon, I just wanted to reach out to say what a pleasure it is to have Seth in class. He actively participates every day in a positive way that truly contributes to his classmates' understanding of the difficult materials. Thank you and have a great day!" English is not usually Seth's best subject, so it was really great to get this email. He does seem to be enjoying this class a lot more than his previous English classes. He has made positive comments at home about it. They have been reading Hamlet, and I even heard him say "Shakespeare was a genius!" It's nice to know that he is learning to appreciate great literature. 

And on that happy note, I will finish because I can't think of anything else to say. 

PS to My Childhood Home & Neighborhood, Part 4--Lancaster, California

When I wrote the post about our house in Lancaster, California back in 2012, I didn't have a lot of photos of the house. I had a number of photos that were taken at the time we lived in the house (March 1977 - December 1978) but they were often dark and blurry. Also, the photos were not taken with the intention of showing what the house looked like (understandably)--they were taken at events such as birthdays--so I only had photos taken in a few of the rooms and even then a number of features such as the stairs and "indoor balcony" were not in any of the photos and I had a hard time describing them. (Original post is here.)

Probably 4 or 5 years ago, when I was looking up something about the house on the internet (can't remember what I was looking up or why), I discovered a listing for the house which included several photos of the interior because it was for sale at that time. I was shocked to see how beat up and run down the house looked in these photos, but otherwise it looked a lot like the house I remembered and there were better views of many of the rooms so I saved copies of all of the photos to my computer, intending to create a follow up blog post about the house. Well, I never got around to it but that's okay because just this week I looked up the house again and I discovered that the house sold again about a year ago and the newer listing had new photos of the house. From the photos, it is obvious that at some point the house was purchased and renovated. It looks so much nicer now! Although there are a number of changes to the house, it is still quite recognizable as the house that we lived in. Whoever fixed it up did a good job, but they must have run out of funds after fixing the inside of the house because the backyard / pool still look pretty beat up. 

At any rate, I am happy to have a lot of photos to share here that will give you a much better idea of what the house was like. I've decided to do a "before and after" format. Here we go:

Here is the front of the house. It's been painted a lighter color which I like much better than the rusty red color that it used to be. There's a new garage door, too. I'm pretty sure there was a single front door (not double doors) when we lived in the house. The following three photos are from the more recent listing:

Looks like the tree was trimmed down a lot (and another tree removed) and the fence added in the front. They also took out some of the lawn and put in the lighter tile. I'm not sure why...personally, I think it looks weird next to the brick. I think it would have been better if they had put matching brick there, or removed the old brick and re-paved the whole area with the tile.

I feel like there was grass or gravel on this side of the driveway when we lived there, but I don't remember for sure. I just don't remember there being dirt there. 

Here's a photo from the old listing that shows a view of the stairs in the front room. You can also see part of the "balcony". I'm pretty sure the wrought iron railing on the stairs and the balcony were black when we lived in the house and there was definitely orange shag carpet covering the steps (and the living room floor), but otherwise it looks the same (the walls were all one color too...looks like someone was in the process of painting maybe). 

In this photo from the old listing, you can see that there was a window and sliding glass door on this wall of the living room, which is how I remember this room. You can see part of the balcony in this photo too:

Here are photos of the living room from the new listing. The balcony railing has been filled in with a wall, the sliding glass door has been replaced with a window, a new window was added next to the front door, and the fireplace has also been renovated. (I think the other window was also replaced with a different window...it looks smaller to me). Overall, I think the room looks really nice but I don't really like the fireplace. As long as they were renovating it, I think they could have made it look a lot nicer. The fireplace was actually larger when we lived in the house, and there was a mantel and decorative wood paneling above the mantel that went all the way up to the ceiling. (I probably wouldn't remember any of these details if I didn't have a few photos from the time we lived in the house where the fireplace can be seen in the background). I don't blame them for removing the paneling, but the new fireplace looks too small and just isn't very appealing, in my opinion:

This photo from the old listing shows the dining area of the kitchen. It looks a lot like I remember it, with large windows all around the walls and a sliding glass door to the backyard:

And here is the kitchen wall. The cabinets were not black and white when we lived there (they were probably dark brown, but I don't remember) and the countertops used to be white tile, but I think all the appliances and cabinets are in the same location (although the appliances are also different...we had a classic 1970s harvest gold dishwasher when we lived in the house!):

Here are photos of the kitchen from the recent listing. Obviously, there was a complete kitchen remodel with new cabinets, countertops, flooring, lighting, and appliances. But there are also a number of structural changes including adding a wall and moving the refrigerator to that wall, removing one of the windows on the wall with the sink, and extending the couter space on that wall. It also looks to me like the two windows that remain in the dining area were replaced with smaller windows that don't sit as close to the floor as the old windows. The sliding glass door has also been replaced with a newer one. Overall, it is much nicer. I think the renovation was well done and makes much better use of the space in this large room:

 

This is the downstairs hallway, which connects to the kitchen (this photo is from the older listing; there wasn't one in the new listing). On the right side of the hallway is the laundry room and a bedroom (it was Shellie's room when we lived there). On the left side is a bathroom and the master bedroom.

This is the downstairs hall bathroom before the house was renovated. Or at least...I think this is the downstairs bathroom. The bathrooms confused me a bit because the size and layout of this bathroom definitely look like the downstairs bathroom. In my memory, this was the only bathroom in the house with a tub...the other two bathrooms had showers. I know I definitely took baths in the downstairs bathroom, and I don't think I would have done that if there was a tub in the bathroom upstairs. However, in both the pre-renovation photos and the new photos, two of the bathrooms have a tub. A tub could have been added to the upstairs bathroom later, of course. What really makes me question which bathroom is which is that the other bathroom photo from before the renovation shows a tub with sliding frosted glass doors on it, and in my memory the downstairs bathroom tub had sliding frosted glass doors. However, the bathroom in that photo looks too small to be the downstairs bathroom. Of course I may be remembering wrong, but in my memory the downstairs bathroom was bigger than the upstairs one (and both the old and the new photos appear to back up my memory in this way...one bathroom looks a lot smaller than the other one). It's just that the tub with the sliding frosted glass doors is in the wrong bathroom...haha!! In the end, I decided to go with this photo being the downstairs bathroom because it is definitley bigger. It's possible that a tub with sliding frosted glass doors to match the downstairs tub could have replaced the shower in the upstairs bathroom at some point, but it

is highly unlikely that the downstairs bathroom got smaller and the upstairs one got bigger. As I said before, my memory could be completely wrong about the bathroom sizes, but I did check with Amy and she also remembers the downstairs bathroom being bigger and taking baths in that bathroom, not the upstairs one. So we'll go with this being the downstairs bathroom:

It looks a lot nicer now, doesn't it?:

This is the laundry room, which was across the hall from the bathroom. It's a nice big room...I would love to have a laundry room like this!:

Here's the laundry room after renovation:

This is the bedroom at the end of the hall, which was Shellie's room when we lived in the house:

This is the master bedroom, before renovation. The door to the master bathroom is in the left wall:

The master bedroom, post renovation:

Here's another photo of the master bedroom, from a different angle. The recent listing mentioned that the house had possible potential for a rental area because there was a bedroom with it's own bathroom and private entrance. Apparently this room was being used as a rental unit when this photo was taken, since there is a microwave, mini refrigerator, and other kitchen utensils on the cabinet in front of the window. The door in the wall leading to the outside is definitely a later addition...it wasn't there when we lived in the house (and clearly isn't there in the pre-renovation photo):

Here is the master bathroom. I don't remember the master bath at all from the time we lived in the house (other than that there was a master bath):

 

Now for the upstairs. This is the loft area that looked down onto the living room. We didn't call it the loft, we called it the "balcony room". We used this room as a family room...there was a television on the solid wall and we had a couch and some chairs facing the television that backed up to the railing (not right against the railing...I remember I could squeeze in between the back of the couch and the railing):

The loft after renovations:

In this photo, you can see that there is a bedroom right behind the loft. This is the room that Amy and I shared:

Here are photos of the room Amy and I shared. It really hasn't changed except for the carpet and wall color. I was short enough when we lived here that I had to climb on a stool or something else to look out the window!:

It looks like this room may have been used as the master bedroom and it is definitely a large bedroom. Look at all that floor space! I remember having plenty of room to spread out toys on the floor to play. We had twin beds that we put with the headboards against the wall with the window (each bed in a corner, with the window in between the two beds). 

I remember this walk-in closet too...we played in there sometimes.

Here is a photo of the upstairs hallway, taken approximately from the doorway of the bedroom that Amy and I shared. The door on the right was to a smaller bedroom that my older brothers used, the door on the left is to the upstairs bathroom, and the door at the end of the hall was to the bedroom that Tim and Ben shared:

Here is the smaller bedroom, across from the bathroom. This room was mostly Hans's room, but Erick shared this room with him when he was home. Erick was living at college (BYU) when we moved into the house and I think he only lived in this house with us for a couple of summers. Curtis was on his mission when we moved into the house and for almost the entire time that we lived here. He returned from his mission shortly before we moved to Utah and I think he only lived in the house for a week or less:

The door in the corner is to a closet. When we moved into the house, this closet connected to the closet in Tim & Ben's bedroom (it was sort of L shaped) so we could walk back and forth from room to room by walking through the closet. We little kids thought this was so cool! But it was not particularly practical to share a closet with two rooms, so my dad built some shelves to put in the middle of the closet which created a barrier between the two parts of the closet and basically turned it into two smaller closets instead of one big one. Here are photos of the room after renovations; it looks so much better:

Here is the upstairs bathroom (I think!), before and after renovations:

This is the last bedroom, which is the one that Tim & Ben shared:

After renovations:

Now we'll move on to the backyard / side yard. This first photo is the side yard, on the living room and kitchen side of the house. When we lived in the house, this yard was all cement with red brick trim and it looked pretty nice. There were a few openings where trees were planted...we called them "chum" trees because the fruit that grew on them looked like cherries but tasted like plums. (We later learned that they were Chinese plum trees). I was sad to see that the "chum" trees are gone. The cement and red brick trim are a lot worse for the wear, too. In the newer photo, you can see that some of the cement and brick trim remains but some of it is gone:

Finally, here are photos of the pool. This is the last pre-renovation photo. It does look exactly how I remember it except that there's no water in the pool:

Here are the more recent photos of the pool / backyard. The pool still doesn't have water...I don't know if it needs repairs or what...and you can also see more areas where the concrete is missing, and there are areas of dirt. None of those dirt areas were there when we lived in the house...the entire backyard was concrete with red brick trim. Hopefully someone will be able to fix up the backyard at some point. It was really quite nice when we lived there:

The planter in the corner had some trees, rose bushes, and other shrubbery when we lived in the house. I remember having to drag a hose over there to water everything. I like that they have cactus in the planters now, although the trees and rose bushes looked nice too.

It's nice to have these extra photos of the house which show so much more than the photos we took while we lived there. I keep hoping that at some point I'll be able to find photos online of some of the other houses we lived in, too. If I do, I will do follow up posts for those houses too.