Sad Tuesday

Monday I finally got a hold of the new retreat center we wanted to hold the Family Reunion at and got the OK to go and visit on Wednesday.  On my calendar, it looks like I had a lot of things to do and didn't get them done... So I'm not sure what I did.  Rebecca had the herculean task of gathering up all her family items and getting them packed away.  She was extremely successful. I think only one thing got left behind.

Rebecca packed the car and then went to a chiro appointment.  Tom and I planned on leaving shortly after she did.  She had a goal to leave by noon.... but we thought, She's not going to make that.  So we lollygagged and did some other stuff.  By golly, she came home from the Chiropractor, loaded up the backpacks and kids... and took off!  Just about at noon!

It was sad to see them go and know it will be a year before we see them again.  But we had SUCH fun while they were here.  We did some sheet and towel washing Tuesday morning.  But shortly after Rebecca left, we took off to visit Jonathan and Kristy.

It was delightful that they were in the path of our trip to check out the new retreat center.  So we had a lovely evening with them. The next morning we left about 8 AM and drove to Perry, Kansas.  The caretaker of the Chihowa Retreat Center was just delightful!  She was so willing to show us around and explain things.  They didn't have any campers there, so we got to see everything that we wanted.  It looks to be a great place for family gatherings.  It was nice that they had the equipment for the volleyball, basketball, and baseball courts and fishing lines and canoes and paddle boats for the lake.

Afterwords, we drove into Lawrence, KS and stopped at the visitor's center.  We had a delightful lunch at a bakery and headed back to Jonathan and Kristy's. We got back in time for dinner and some visiting.  Tom helped Jonathan fix the garage door and cleaned out the two pounds of hair in the upstairs bathroom. And taught Isabelle how to do it in the future.

Kristy invited us to go to White Water with them on Thursday. We'd brought swimsuits, but not other things like over-shirts or water shoes.  But they accommodated us with the needed equipment and off we went.  It was a fun time.  I mostly hung out with Zachary in the little kids area and wave pool.  But I especially liked the family tube ride.

We left about noon and stopped at Aldi's on the way home for some groceries.  I just had time to unpack, shower and turn around for a 5pm dinner engagement. I'd invited my neighbor to go with me to a presentation about retirement.  Based on the flyer, I assumed it was a kind of insurance product, and it was.  It could be useful, but I think I have my retirement planning kind of in place. The presentation was at Gaston's Restaurant right on the White River so it was a pretty place to eat.

I got back home in time to help Tom with some of the bed making.  He did a great job of organizing the toy closet back to it's original condition and vacuuming and getting all the bedding washed and organized and put neatly away.  He is AWESOME!

Friday my goal was to dive into all the projects I'd delayed for three day.  I don't know that it happened.  I mostly caught up with emails, answered LinkedIn requests, and finished a website.  I did spend a few hours revising a teacher workbook for Seed Digging. Every time I read about it, it sounds so successful!  It's a way to get at the root of problems that cause emotional distress.

Saturday we weeded the garden and picked veggies. I was speaking Sunday so my first priority was to complete my talk.  We had invited people over for lunch Sunday as well.  They live out of town and their daughter was getting her Patriarchal Blessing here in Mountain Home.  So my second priority was to make a chicken salad for Sunday. That entailed going to Walmart to shop and get a rotisserie chicken to use. A friend introduced me to that short-cut and I'm not sure its faster, but it's tastier.

Friday evening, Tom went to a rehearsal dinner for a wedding and Saturday we drove over for the wedding itself. It was held on the property behind our house.  Well, a part of the 500 acres the bride's father owns.  It was a lovely wedding.  It was sprinkling/raining off and on up until the actual ceremony-- which was outdoors on a hill.  The rain let up in time for the wedding.  It was perfect, no sun in the eyes, cooler, and a radiant bride and groom.

Today/Sunday, I tried to get my missionary letter done before church.  I think my talk went well.  It was based on President Uchdorf's talk about the Savior finding the lost sheep and carrying it on his shoulders.  He spoke about how valuable we are to the Lord and how much he loves us.  He knows our weaknesses, sins, infirmities-- and still he felt we are valuable enough to atone for us.  He knows the sheep who are lost and he loves them enough to seek them out and bring them back.

The family who came to lunch have 7 children ages almost 16 to under two. They were very well behaved.  He is a teacher in Mansfield. We had a nice visit before they left for the patriarchal blessing.  They left 6 children behind.  Tom was home by then and did a great job entertaining them with the zip line-- until it started raining-- and then with mad checkers games.

Pioneer Day

The beastly hot weather has continued. It's a good week to stay inside. It was nice to have Rebecca and family back with us! The kids are fun to interact with... and Rebecca fixes delicious food!

Monday is always "dig in and work hard at all the stuff you didn't get done last week" day. I worked on my heating & cooling newsletter and did some following up.  Last week one of our less active sisters died.  She was not close to her family and asked a friend to be her executor. So it ended up that Tom was doing the funeral and I was giving the eulogy. I called the friend and gleaned knowledge from her. Then at the viewing on Monday evening, she had a step-daughter there (about the same age as the deceased) and she had a lot more information.  It was interesting to hear the other side of the family's divorce and estrangement causes.  I wrote the eulogy after gathering all that info.

We also connected with Chihowa retreat and may have found a better place for the family reunion. We hope to drive up there this week to take a look. You can check it out at Chihowa.org. I typed up info and sent it out to the sibs. Once we view the place, we'll try to send it to everyone else.

Tuesday was the funeral.  Tom and I got up early and weeded the garden and picked veggies. We have a great abundance of green beans and cucumbers. We've been using them, freezing the beans and giving the cukes away to friends and people at church.  That evening Rebecca, Tom and I went to see Central Intelligence. I'd rate it a B-. Too much slapstick and foul words for me, but an interesting premise and enough plot twists to keep you wondering until the end.

Wednesday I wrote the web pages for BotAlert-- a software that reveals automated robot tweets on Twitter. Did you know that about 40% of both candidate's "followers" are bots? Bots can spread dis-information, skew metrics, alter public opinion, Spam hate, and reduce the enjoyment of actually tweeting real friends. Some have been used to incite rebellion and change the course of elections. When people give so much weight to Social Proof, and that proof turns out to be manufactured, it give others more control than they should have. So this software detects them so they can be booted out.

Thursday I spoke with a hedge fund manager and asset manager at a small firm. He was looking for someone to help write his bi-weekly letter.  It was very interesting to talk to him. I hope it works out as I think I'd learn a lot. For some reason, this seemed like a good evening to serve Tom his favorite birthday meal-- Liver and Onions. Rebecca and family were having leftovers. I made a Chocolate cake, too.

Friday, when we would actually celebrate, Rebecca went off to Silver Dollar City. She was actually doing compassionate service. She was taking a sister to the airport... with an SDC stop on the way. The sister had an extra ticket she volunteered to give to Josh, so that added incentive. They made a pretty early day of it, and returned home in time to do cake and gifts for Tom's birthday.

I think our septic issue is finally over and finished at our Whiteville house!  Now the A/C is acting up. Oh, the joys of rental property. One ward member has been in the hospital with a bowel obstruction. He was working on a rental house, trying to get it ready to sell. 

Tom organized a work party and they went over on Friday to hang doors, paint, clean up trash and mow.  Tom went back again  two or three more times to try to get all the junk out from under the house-- walk out basement? Saturday morning he took Josh, Riley and Delaney with him to do some of the shoveling. Below is the trailer loaded with most of the stuff.

In the Evening Tom took some of the helpers out for ice cream.

Friday evening I helped Tom bake a blackberry pie and Rebecca made some pies as well for the Ward Pioneer day on Saturday. She also made a quilt top to quilt there. On Saturday morning I sliced some tomatoes from the garden and made cucumber salad. It was sweet, an older German lady said, "Oh that was wonderful salad. It reminded me of Germany."  I told her it was Nana's recipe and she was from Switzerland.

Rebecca and I set up two small quilts. One older sister wanted to learn to quilt. And several younger girls were interested in helping out-- including two of the grandchildren.

We also had the traditional tug of war between the bishopric and the primary children. The second run, Tom enlisted the aid of some young adults. Tom was thankful the traditional wading pool at the center line was gone as his feet stayed dry this time. It was a fun activity!

I came home and made spaghetti sauce from all the overripe tomatoes sitting on our counter. We turned it into baked zitti for dinner.

Today at church was good.  The choir sang a different but lovely version of "Come, Come, Ye Saints."  I got my temple recommend 1/2 renewed.  I need a second interview to complete it.  Tonight I have a phone meeting with my Relief Society Presidency.

This afternoon, Marian was in search of a prince... all she found was a frog.

Silver Dollar City- Temple-Youth Conference

Rebecca left us for the week.  For the few days before she departed, she’d been communicating with the siblings.  She’d planned to go to Silver Dollar City on Monday on her way to visit Jonathan and Kristy.  Did anyone want to come with her?  She got a kind of Meh response… and was thinking about skipping it.

This mattered to Tom and me because we thought we’d go to SDC with her.  Then we decided we’d go on to St. Louis and go to the temple. So by Saturday night, we’d decided there probably would be no SDC trip.  Then Deborah called… she was going… and it would be nice to have someone help with the kids.  Okay.  I guess we’re back on.  Then Kera said that Charlotte was better (she’d had pneumonia) and she was coming.

And on Monday, as we were heading out, Deborah let us know that Ian had the day off and he was coming, too!  So we had a fun, low-key day at SDC.  We went on kiddy rides.  We went to see the Harlem Globe Trotters.  Callie convinced me to go on a fireman’s ride where they shoot you up into the air and you kind of bungie fall back down—bouncing along the way.  But it wasn’t as scary as it sounds… well, it was scary.  You were seated on a machine around a square that thrust you up.  So you didn’t feel like you were dangling without support.  Anyhow, it was more fun than I thought it would be.

We left about 3 pm.  That was before the slight incident with Simon bashing his head on the stone wall and the first aid responders. Apparently it was more if a scrape.  But heads bleed a lot. He is fine now.

Tom and I drove up to St. Louis and got there about 8 pm.  We got up pretty early to go to the temple.  Marian, Isabelle, and Katie had done baptisms for this side of the Walder family on the last trip up.  Tom and I did about 18 initiatories and two endowments. We planned on doing one more endowment… but things were a little interesting at the temple that morning.  Apparently a motor burned up and shut the power down.  So we were on auxiliary power.  The lights flickered periodically.  The film ran with the lights on.  There was no air conditioning so the endowment room doors were open, but it still got a little warm.  Nevertheless, it was a great session. However, they were not going to run another session until the power came back on.  So we headed home.

It was a quiet week without any children or grandchildren here.  Fortunately there were enough shoes collected by the door and a few toys left out that we didn’t feel we’d been totally abandoned.

When we went to our family reunion at the Cottage Resort, the first night the noise in the Reunion Hall was overwhelming.  We thought, what if we have 100 or more people in here. It will be impossible.  We talked to the owners about using the other two rooms in the Reunion hall as well.  One is a for-sure yes.  The other…. Not sure. So Miranda talked to someone and her family went to a place near Joplin.  In checking that out, we found some other possibilities.  While Rebecca and Miranda were at Jonathan’s, they went to the George Washington Carver museum and then stopped by the Joplin retreat center.  FANTASTIC commercial kitchen.  Large meeting area… only chairs, no sofas or relaxing chairs.  Cabins with A/C but walk to bath.  Not a good trade off.

We found that by searching for “retreats” we get other options.  But do families want to be squished into one room… or put teens into a bunk room… in exchange for better play areas and a larger meeting place?  Or do people want more comfortable lodging and a ho-hum meeting place and kitchen.  Ah the dilemma of reunion planning.  I did find a monastery…. One person rooms anyone?

Our garden is starting to come on.  We are getting plenty of beans and cucumbers.  The tomato crop is a bit irregular.  Some cherry tomatoes, stunted roma tomatoes, and a few HUGE beefsteak tomatoes.  Our pepper crop is pretty good with the useless hot peppers but not so good with the bell peppers.  The zucchini and crookneck squash and winter squash and watermelon have HUGE leaves. If you judged by the leaves, we should be seeing a plethora of squash.  Right now, its a few every few days.  And the gray squash bugs have appeared. I’m surprised; perhaps the huge leaves keep the plants alive even with these buggers gnawing on them. So far, they are still alive.

I froze some beans, gave away some cucumbers, and Rebecca is planning meals with zucchini and tomatoes. She made a great roasted tomato soup.

I’ve been working on some publicity with some of the start-up companies. It will be interesting to see how it goes.  I also worked on a Relief Society Newsletter this week and finally ordered pictures from the family reunion to put on our wall.  We have a family display in the dining room so everyone who comes in sees our family.  We get lots of comments on it.  Rebecca will help us duplicate it with updates.

Friday Tom left early to go to a 4 stake Youth Conference.  Jonathan, Isabelle, and Joshua came with the Monett stake, Tom took the youth from our ward up.  Everyone seemed to have a great time. Josh seems sweet on a girl from the Monett Stake. One of our boys likes Isabelle.  I love these long distance romances!  Here's a photo of Josh and Isabelle at the Youth Conference.

We learned Friday that a ward member passed away.  She had not been to church in years, and Tom contacted the funeral home to let them know he was available to assist the family as needed.  A friend was the executor. No other family involved.  So I am to give the eulogy. Except I only knew her for a year or so about 12 years ago…  I called the friend and got some information. I guess we do the best with what we have.

Saturday I went to a wedding shower for a young woman in our ward. I also checked out a small house that has some good potential.  Saturday afternoon Rebecca returned home and later that night, Tom and Josh got back from youth conference.

Today was a good day at church. We had a great lesson in Sunday School about Alma 30-31 and how to recognize the lies and evil spread both then and today.  How an anti-Christ is really a counterfeit and tries to look very much like the real thing in order to deceive.

This weekend has also been a Worldwide Indexing Event.  I indexed some files on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Tom indexed today.  This is where you take photographed images of records and record them into fields so they can be searched by people looking for their family history.  I did some Kentucky marriage records and some Alabama draft records.  I was surprised that there was a “bride price” back then.  The husband-to-be posted a bond for the marriage—like $100!  That was a lot of money back in the 1880’s.

 Below are random photos.  The top is Marian with her cotton candy mustache at Golden Corral at the family reunion.

When we went to Andy and Kera's the kids enjoyed the large corn snake.

Singing in the Rain

We've had a good week.  It's been a bit quieter with just one family here…but we still had some "add-ons."

Aaron stayed behind to do some work with Tom.  He painted the floor of the shed that Tom and Isabelle replaced.  He mowed the lawn.  Josh went next door and did some yard work for the neighbor.
He may have helped Tom clean up the garage.  Tom thought it might be a 1-2 day job.  But we wisely tackled it one section at a time and even working parts of each day, there is still more to do.  He's done an amazing job sorting, cleaning, organizing and replacing.  It truly looks lovely... or as lovely as a garage can look.

 Tuesday I finally got my hair cut.  It's needed it since about the time of the reunion. But I was gone that week, too busy the next week, and she was on vacation the week after.  Actually, not taking a vacation. Her husband was in the hospital and not doing well. When I got my hair cut, he was home, but still doing very poorly. She was in need of a friend, so I'm glad we had a chance to talk.

Dan and Delaney left Saturday and drove to Tennessee to visit his sister and meet up with his parents. Delaney was also meeting a good friend of hers and his family.  Dan drove his parents back to Mountain Home and they arrived on Tuesday.  We enjoyed having Dan's parents over for dinner each night they were in town.  The kids went to the hotel pool and played there a few mornings.  One day they went to a cavern in Harrison. One evening after dinner, Steve White shared the history of his father who was born just before the turn of the century.  It was very interesting.

Friday the adults-- Tom and I included went to see Independence Day 2.  In spite of some negative review I'd heard and a slightly disjointed plot line, I liked it.  After the movie we collected the little kids and drove to my potter friend Marian's house.  We had some "frogs" for her Ikebana vases to deliver.  And the kids wanted to see the peacocks.  They got to see them and collect some feathers. They also got to pet the burro, the pony, and three of the seven cats.  I think everyone had a good time.

 One day one of my friends stopped by.  Her daughter works for a blackberry farm.  She gets all the overripe berries she picks-- gallons per day!  They brought us two fresh flats and two gallons of frozen berries.  Joy!!!!  We ate a ton of the fresh berries and then froze several gallons.  Rebecca also made us a delicious blackberry cobbler.  She made another one for Tom's Bishop's Youth Discussion this Sunday where a dozen teens quickly devoured it all!

 I had some samples to write this week.  One was an interesting project in creating a persona for a "bot" an online interactive interface that sounds like a person but is automated.  It was for a company that works with insurance companies.  I did a trial to see if we are a fit.  I hope so.  It would be fun to create that fictional character.

 Saturday Dan and his parent left.  They decided to visit Branson on their way to the airport.  Dan will fly back to Japan, the parents to Utah.  That morning Tom, Rebecca, kids and I went to the lake. It's the first time I've been to the lake this year.  The water was warm and easy to swim in. Everyone seemed to have a good time.

 Tomorrow Rebecca, her kids, and Aaron will leave.  We'll all go to Silver Dollar City and Kera and her family will join us there and depart with Aaron. Not sure how all the meeting up and exchanging suitcases will work... but I'm sure it will all work out.

Oh the Joy of Family!

June 19-July 3

Oh the Joys of Family!  We have continued to be surrounded by family- albeit on a smaller scale for the past two weeks.

After the family reunion Rebecca and Miranda and family came to visit. Miranda was to go on a pioneer trek and we were to watch her children later in the week. But the weather was so hot and several of the pioneer treks at that place earlier in the week ran into heat exhaustion and heat stroke. So they canceled the trek… and suddenly Miranda had no planning, no packing… nothing to do!  So she stayed with us and hopefully had a grand time.

Katie and Isabelle also came to join in the fun and work. Those two, plus Marian and sometimes Callie had such fun together. At night, when the little kids were going to bed… the big kids were out raiding the chicken coop. They took out the hens and petted them, carried them around and, ahem… even took them into the tree house, down the zip line and on the trampoline. We invited them to tame down the chicken festivities. So hopefully the zipline and trampoline are now out.

Katie and Isabelle helped Tom fix our metal shed in the back yard. I had some termite damage. We’d had the area treated so the termites were gone… but the damage lingered. They emptied all the stuff in the shed, took off some walls and removed most of the floor. They needed new joists and flooring. Then all the stuff needed to be put back inside before it rained. Even the week after the reunion was beastly hot- in the mid to high 90’s. So they worked early morning and late afternoon and took the mid-day off.

I did some work… although not a lot. Since I’m working to earn money to spend time with family, it seems to make sense not to work a lot while they are here. One of the projects I had worked on some in the past revolved around Brexit. I had studied the pros and cons. Staying meant security. Leaving allowed the British to regain their sovereignty. Right now 16 unelected leader of the EU make laws and tax and Britain must comply. What started as a simple trade group morphed into more and more control over members. I was pleased that Britain voted to leave—that they choose freedom over financial security.

It was interesting to see the stock markets TANK! As Everyone Said, “I told you so!  England will DIE if they leave the EU.”  Then, just a few days later, the markets recovered back to pre-Brexit levels. So, I guess England will not die after all. I figured they had more ingenuity and backbone than that. I was able to take some advantage of the stock market drop, but some good deals escaped me.

Friday night Marian, Delaney and Katie came with me to the firework display on the college campus. We got there about 8pm thinking the fireworks started at 9pm. But they didn’t start until 9:30. They lasted until close to 10 pm. Delaney was a bit concerned about how CLOSE they were. They covered the sky above us and looked like they were raining down on us. It was lovely! Watching fireworks like that is one of my favorite things.

The reason you didn’t get an update last week was that immediately after church, we all got into the available cars and drove to Andy and Kera’s house for Emma’s baptism. Actually, we drove directly to the church. It was a lovely event. She had about 25 family members there.

Ian drove down with his family. Deborah was to come in another car to take Miranda and family back to Springdale so Dan (who had a meeting there that night) could take her home to Oklahoma. But the baby had strep and Deborah was getting her medicine. We convinced her not to make the trip just to pick up Miranda. So early Monday, Miranda’s father-in-law drove to unite with Dan and head home. We hung around part of Monday and headed home. Tom had been somewhat under the weather. So he napped most of that morning. Rebecca and family stayed an additional day.

Rebecca came home on Tuesday—adding Aaron to the mix-- because Dan and Josh were flying in from Japan. They ended up with a series of delays and didn’t arrive until early, early Wednesday morning. In the meantime, Baby was better and Deborah came to visit with her gang.

I did get some writing work done. I wrote a document for Breathtec, a company that uses breath analysis in a high powered gas spectrometer to detect cancer, TB, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Very interesting technology. I reviewed an article and then went to lunch with an 82 year old writer friend. We mostly talked about the Gospel. His mom was Mormon, but he has no religion and does not think much of organized religion. Still, we had interesting conversation.

Friday Andy, Kera and family drove up for the weekend. We squashed 23 people into the house for the day and night. We decided to have a 4^th of July picnic that night with potato salad, coleslaw, watermelon, chips, hotdogs, and hamburgers. It was delicious. And the mess was mostly contained outside.

Tom has continued to trap some opossums and raccoons. The raccoons are so cute I have to remind myself they are serial killers. Thus far we have not lost any more chickens.

Saturday afternoon Deborah extracted herself and her clan from the house quite masterfully. I’ve only found one set of extra clothes here. They were in the washing machine when she left, along with sheets she’d kindly removed from the beds she and her children used.

Dan and Delaney left on Saturday as well to drive to Tennessee to see a cousin return from his mission and to connect with Dan’s parents. They will return with Dan to Mountain Home and visit with the rest of the family for a little bit before flying home.

We did some garden weeding this week, but probably not enough. We have onions, broccoli, cucumbers and zucchinis to eat. We should pull the carrots and beets too. Tomatoes and beans are soon to arrive.

This Sunday it was nice to take up a whole row of family and to see Aaron and Joshua passing the sacrament. The entire Mountain Home ward Relief Society was traveling, so they asked me to teach the lesson. I pulled thoughts from scriptures I’d been studying over the past week or so in Helaman.

Tomorrow Andy and Kera and family will leave and it will feel pretty quiet with just Rebecca and 4 children for a few days. We love her. Especially since she feeds us so well!