Feels Like the End of Summer

It really isn’t the end of summer.  It’s only the end of July.  But the weather has cooled off. It’s been unusually rainy, and while muggy, mostly in the 80’s.  For July, that’s cool.

Then there’s end drawing to a close of Rebecca’s visit… and we will be back to being all alone. So I suppose when she leaves, that’s the end of summer for us.

The trees and plants are loving the rain. The cucumbers are producing their hearts out.  We took probably 40 cucumbers to church today—that we just picked Saturday evening!  All the garden is producing at this time is beans, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. Not a lot of tomatoes. The cantaloupe has fed some critters, but not us.  And we have a very nice basil plant.  Oh, I forgot the vining spinach that’s taking over the garden.

I finally got the go-ahead for a web site redesign.  I’ll work on rewriting the web pages, but they want input on placement and photos as well.  This is a fun job.  The current website will make anything I do look good.  I’m also making some inroads on the newsletter.

Joshua got a book from the library that had him glued to it until it was done. So I picked it up and got ensnared. The premise was a meteor hit the moon and causes all kinds of natural calamities on earth- tidal waves, volcanos, earthquakes and the ensuing breakdown of infrastructure and society. I picked it up and it was gripping.  As a friend said, “It makes you want to make sure you have your 10 years food supply. Book title: “This World We Live In” by Susan Beth Pfeiffer.

The church has a Pathways Program.  It allows young adults and older adults to return to college and get a degree with distance learning. Students don’t need to have graduated or even have a GED, take the ACT or anything.  They can just enroll. But they need to attend a group class that includes institute.  The first year they take a life-skills, study skills kind of class.  If they pass the class, they can continue with distance learning from BYU Idaho, go to the campus for further study or transfer to another college. It costs $65 a semester hour and that price will not increase as long as they are in the program.

It’s a great program for people under employed or whose lives got derailed and now they want to advance their life.  The difficulty for us is that the nearest place to go is a weekly meeting in Branson or Springfield.  But I thought if students could carpool it wouldn’t be so difficult. And the meeting/support groups are just for the first year.  So I wrote up information about the program and tried to get it into the hands of those I thought might be interested.

We had a couple who’ve been married for 20 or so years going to the temple to be sealed.  We thought we’d go and support them.  We chose to drive ourselves instead of going in the van. So we invited another two to ride with us. The couple had a carful going as well.  Then, Thursday at 9:30 the couple called.  Their two passengers had fallen out.  They no longer had enough gas money to get to the temple on their own. They could go with the van people, but they needed to be there about an hour before everyone else.  There was no way to let everyone know about the shift in time for the van.  So we called the two who we’d just invited that morning and shifted them over to the van and left that extra hour early ourselves to take the couple to the temple.

We thought we could do other temple work before their sealing.  However, the couple was also going to get some food storage from the distribution center… and it was supposed to be delivered to the temple for them.  But when they called… oops, it was not going to be delivered.  So Tom and I went to pick it up and returned to the temple just about the time we would have originally arrived.  It all worked out. It was just not as we had expected.

The sealing was lovely.  We followed it with a temple session that had a nicely updated film.  And we were able to drive back home with the original two we’d invited.

Saturday Rebecca wanted to go to Silver Dollar City one last time.  It was raining in the morning, but was supposed to clear up.  So we left a little later than planned.  We only had a few hours at SDC, and then we went to the Hughes Brothers' Show.  They have multiple generations in the show and the kids enjoyed seeing toddlers to teens on the stage as well as the adults.

Today is the last Sunday Rebecca and family will be sharing a bench with me at church.  I’ll be back to sitting all by my lonesome or with whomever has a spot. Still, it’s always great to go to church.