Here we go again

Monday we met with Ray, our builder, to see what he could do with the fire damage on Main St.  We removed the plywood “band aid” and saw that the damage was not extensive.  It was confined within about 4 studs.  It looks like it started on the porch railing… just where a  can for cigarette butt might have stood.

Ray seems to think he can fix it for a reasonable amount and got started on it. 

I visited with the insurance adjustor this week and think we are moving closer to settlement on the Minnesota St. duplex in St. Louis.  The tenant abandoned it in a total mess, and so it will need to be cleaned before it can be relisted. After having the theft and the problems with one house in St. Louis, I decided to put the other duplex on the market too.  That one faired better.  We had an open house on Friday and got several offers.  So it’s now under contract. 

I was moving my IRA properties to a new custodial trust.  I thought the Minnesota house would be sold before the transfer took place… but it wasn’t.  Even though the first trust co. had signed the paperwork for the sale, they transferred it to the second co.  The problem?  The insurance $ will go to the first company and I don’t want to have to re-title it.  So I spent a good part of the week trying to get it back where it belonged.  Finally on Friday, the two trust representatives and I spoke on a conference call and figured out how to make it happen.

I did some visiting teaching and I worked on some articles and projects. It was kind of a quiet week because they predicted snow and ice.  It didn’t materialize on Wednesday night (Although they canceled youth activities) but by Thursday morning we had some wintry mix, and by the evening most of the trees had a nice coating of ice.

Friday was one of those dreadfully beautiful days.  Ice glistened on every tree.  Our willow was bent almost to the ground. I'm glad to say it's upright again today.

While it didn’t get very warm, the sun came out and helped melt some of the ice so the trees didn’t suffer too much.

 Here the sun is just rising over the shed.  And below is the view across our road.

 Ice on our almost blooming peach tree. Silly thing!  Doesn't it know it's still winter?  And water melted and refroze forming long drips on the rose branch.

 This wild plum tree just looks like a crystal tree.

 And here the sycamore branches show icicles draping from wide branches.

Saturday I had a heritage seed class.  It was very interesting to learn about how to plant seeds and transplant seedlings and harvest seeds.  There are seed exchanges around and they encouraged us to hang around “seedy” people.  At 1pm we had a wedding at the church.

Did I tell you our stake is doing a cookbook?  When I rode up to Stake Council with the RS president we talked about it.  So then the ward asked if I’d be responsible for collecting and typing the ward’s contributions.  Then the stake leader responsible called and asked if I’d do it all.  “All of it??”  They have a printer set up to print and bind, but I will collect the recipes from the other wards and organize them into categories and insure they are uniform (The wards should be doing that, too.) and put them on pages.   Then the leader will work on an index. And take it to the printers.

 Tom had bought a device that takes old 35 mm  photo slides and transfers them to digital prints. He has been doing a couple of trays of slides a week transferring them over. He’s gone through his year in Germany and is now on Sequoia vacations. As he puts them in he is labeling them.

I spent lots of time trying to organize my lessons for the next 5 weeks and deciding what was the most important thing to teach.  Then I had three people in class. It’s hard to divide up into group discussions with three people.  Sigh.  At least I got a list of everyone that’s supposed to be there.  I’ll try to contact them and see if we can have a better class next week.