What have we done this week?

The week is over... and what do we have to show for it?

Sunday night on the way back from the seminary graduation, Tom took some beautiful pictures of the Henderson boat dock on Lake Norfork. The heavy rains have given the lake high water and a lot of debris, but this night it was smooth and lovely.

1. 211 Spring Park. We got a list of things that needed to be fixed. This entailed Tom crawling under the house to the far end and a lot of shouting (since we couldn't hear each other) to find a non-existent possible leak. He didn't find that one, but he found another far more obvious one the inspector had not mentioned.

Fortunately it was a faulty valve on the water heater and easily fixed. Tom fixed a few other problems and we forked out money for a replacement gas-log fireplace insert to solve the non-lighting problem.

2. Adam's tenant moved out. I use that term loosely. The tenants were gone, the stuff was not. Nine trash bags later, most of the stuff was gone, too. Tom asked our property manager to have the unit cleaned. He went back a few days later and it looked better, but the floors were still pretty sorry. Turns out the regular cleaning lady couldn't clean, so the property manager did...but didn't have a mop. He also had to glue the floor down in the kitchen where a seam was loosening. There's some rot around a window he's hiring someone to fix, and the house is good to rent.

3. We've been trying to keep ahead of the weeds in the garden and in the front flower beds. We finally evicted all the remains of the flowering quince we could find. When we went to fill in the hole, here were some roots with little green sprouts! Akk. I'll probably be pulling flowering quince from the fountain bed for years. I planted some bulbs there and decided that the lower profile makes the fountain stand out more. It looks good.

4. We had the missionaries over for dinner on Tuesday and went to the neighbor's house for dinner on Thursday. They just finished having their home custom built and it is gorgeous! Lovely large windows, elegant white crown molding, and a fresh spacious kitchen. They have a back sun room that gives them a view of the ridge and the deer who file through at sunset. Dinner was delicious and we had a nice conversation.

5. My writing has continued to be a bit slow. I had one phone call and he wants me to write some promotional material for a book I edited for him the end of last year. Then I spoke with another financial guy who is interested in my writing educational video scripts for investments. He does value analysis and shows hedge fund managers and financial advisors how to determine the true value of a company. We'll see if these fly.

6. We got an old lamp from Cousin Walt months ago. It needed some TLC.  Tom polished the brass and took off the green shade. He ordered new old-looking string-wrapped wire and rewired the lamp.  Bless his heart, it took some doing to get it all put back together.  But it looks lovely.

6. Miranda and Dan came to visit and brought some friends, Stephanie and Kenny and their three children. For the most part, the kids have played very well together. Kenny loves to fish so on Saturday he went fishing, even with the high water. Stephanie enjoys cooking and made some fantastic Stromboli. The stake president came to church on Sunday. I always make lunch for him and his executive secretary when they come. They typically have meetings afterwards and don't leave until about 3. So this way they have something to eat on their hour drive home. They will think I'm a fantastic cook since I gave them some slices of left-over Stromboli!

7. Tom and I went and did road clean-up on Saturday morning. They served breakfast after the road clean-up at the ward building. 

8. Friday Tom and I went to look for a new door for the downstairs. We bought one at Home Depot and they loaded it into the car. Saturday after we came back from the road clean-up, Dan helped Tom pull out the old door and install the new one. Although they had to take off more of the trim work then they first expected to, the door fit in and looks lovely. Tom painted the trim around it white and it brightens up the area. We wanted one with blinds inside so that we could have more privacy downstairs at night. We also wanted one that opened up so that you could just walk up the steps instead of having to close the door before you could do that.

We had some pretty strong thunder storms come through on Friday and Saturday nights. We got some hail, but nothing was damaged. However, it provided some nice watering for the plants we planted.

Everyone is out playing cards, so I'm going to join them.

A Bishop’s Week

This was a busy week to be a bishop. I only saw part of what when on. I know there were a bunch of people who wanted to see him. And someone who was about to have a car repossessed… but she didn’t want to come in earlier because she thought he might be mad at her. So she waited until the amount was huge and they were coming to repossess the car that day. I don’t know who it was or how it turned out, but I know the struggle about what was the best way to help was tough.

We had two people pass away this past Sunday. One was easy. The family was doing it at another church. The second one was more involved. The husband was a non-member. The son was a member but in Arizona. And communication was a bit slow. So there were phone messages back and forth as they tried to connect. The person who would normally do the program was not in town… but they didn’t get the full program until the day before the funeral. So that added some stress.

We went to the temple on Friday. That was more relaxing in some ways… if you don’t count the 4am wake-up and the 9pm return. The nice thing was that we were a small enough group to drive in the O’Brian’s van so the trip was much more comfortable. We were able to do 4 endowments, 3 initiatories and 14 sealings for family names. So it was a wonderfully productive day.

Saturday, however, was scheduled to be a doozie. There was a road clean-up scheduled at 7am with a breakfast to follow. Some lady was driving from Texas here and needed help cleaning out a storage shed hopefully at 9am. There was a funeral at 10 that Tom was officiating at, plus the burial, plus the lunch for family. Then then was a wedding Tom was to do at 2pm at a different church and then the reception following at our cultural hall for a Maple son— a longtime multigenerational ward family.

The good news was that storms were predicted and materialized, so the road clean-up and breakfast were postponed. The lady from Texas called and canceled because of the weather as well. We got about an inch of rain, but there was a short section down 9^th street that had several trees uprooted, a roof blown off, and a tree fall across a mobile. Let me tell you, there was not much left of the mobile. Fortunately it was empty.

So Saturday was reduced to a funeral and a wedding. 

Plus we heard back on a few repairs needed to our Spring Park house for the sale, so Tom went over there after the events to check them out. He planned to come home and mow. But after getting dressed for it, he just sat on the sofa for a few minutes and said, “I just want a little “me” time. Is that selfish?” Poor Boy. So he didn’t mow. He went and watched a movie. Then he made banana bread for BYD the next day.

Today, he got up early and made brownies, because, after all, the youth deserve more than ice cream and banana bread for their treat. He went off for 7:30 am meetings, conducted sacrament meeting, and I don’t know what other meetings, and then came home and had Bishops Youth Discussion (BYD) with 17 youth. It sounds like they had a good time. He must shoo them out the door at 3 so he can eat and leave before 4 for Seminary Graduation in West Plains (an hour away) at 5pm. And thus is the life of the Bishop.

And that doesn’t include fixing the steps at the midway duplex (2 days of work) bushhogging the pasture (about 7 hours of work plus ichy eyes and runny nose from hay fever,) digging out a bush and weeding the garden and…. I am blessed to have such a great man.

My week was somewhat more relaxed. With my book done, I’m theoretically going back an cleaning up stuff that got put to the side and looking for new work. I’ve been having fun with cryptocurrencies. They just keep going UP! I am astonished.

Monday night we had Empty Nesters at a home with a beautiful lawn and garden. She is the president of the Master Gardeners here in Mountain Home. It shows. We had tasty food and warm conversation. She’d invited all her neighbors and other gardening friends so we got to meet a bunch of new people.

Tuesday I helped Tom with the Midway steps and then went to a delightful Relief Society activity on being healthy. They talked about eating better, reducing stress and getting enough sleep. We ran out of time for exercising, but had time for a tasty fruit parfait.

Thursday I snagged a friend and went on the Art Odyssey tour. Many of the local artists opened their homes and studios to display their artwork. It was impressive and offered fantastic ideas. We stopped at a mosaic maker that really did amazing things and Jennifer got some great tips. We went to a ward member’s studio- watercolors- that I had been wanting to go and visit. We stopped at a pottery, a jewelry maker and several other artists. It was a fun afternoon.

Friday and Saturday were Temple, funeral and wedding with Tom.  After the funeral I stopped at Friend’s Market and bought a flat of locally grown strawberries. It was the end of the season and I was afraid I’d missed it altogether. I didn’t have the umph to do jam so I just froze most of them… except a few for this.

Today I took my hairdresser with me to church. We had perfect talks on the plan of salvation and why our church is different from others even as we believe in family and marriage and other common values of other churches.  Tonight while Tom goes for the seminary graduation, I’ll have a phone presidency meeting.

Free Time?

This week I pretty much finished all I can do on the book I’ve been writing. The people who are supposed to check it out have some huge compliance thing they need to work on until May 25^th. So I probably won’t get a lot of edits before then. It has almost opened up free time… almost. I did spend time writing bios. I will be co-author of the book, so that’s nice. No rights to it, but hey, authority status.

I had an interview on Friday about writing the biography of an icon in the direct marketing industry. He’s run an advertising agency in LA for 30 or 40 years. I think it would be an interesting project. They seemed to like me. So I’ll see how that pans out.

Tuesday we had the missionaries to dinner. Wednesday I worked in the garden and moved more mulch. They were predicting rain again and I wanted to get the garden settled before the rain. I had decided I wanted to try making sourdough bread. So I started some starter with just flour and water. It actually yeasted up, but did smell kind of sour. Was it the way it was supposed to smell… or did it have too much wild yeast and other stuff in it? Not sure.

We are up to nearly 100 sisters going on the Nauvoo trip in fall, so I needed to reserve another house. I hope it all comes together. Now it’s time to start organizing the food. No wait. First comes our reunion food, then the Nauvoo trip.

Thursday I got a massage. Nice. Friday we started the birthday celebrations early. We went out to dinner with friends and then on to the new Avengers of the Galaxy movie. It was pretty good.

Saturday Tom ran in the scout fund raiser 5k race. Before he went to race, he went out and brought me back an apple fritter donut for my “birthday cake” as requested. He came in third in the men’s division, behind two young kids. The 11 year old men’s winner thought he was just running a mile. I guess he missed the turnaround and ran the 5K. He said, “Mom, that was an awful long mile!”

That morning I started the sourdough bread. It is one of these long- day or more- kinds of recipes that is supposed to be healthy. It might have turned out better if I’d remembered to refrigerate the dough over night.

That afternoon we went to West Plains and helped with the flood cleanup. We had 15 people go and got a lot of work done. One man’s building had flooded up about 4’. They had just bought the place, but had stored things from the wife’s mother who had recently passed away. All soggy and needing to be thrown out. Old soggy carpet needed ripping out and inches of mud scraped from the floors. Here we are at the end of the first work place.  You really can't see all the mud we accumulated on ourselves.

We were too busy cleaning out the 4' high stack of stuff in this room to take a picture. Here it is nearly done.

Then we went to another place that needed all the paneling and drywall taken down to the studs. Dropped ceiling needed ripping out since the paneling went above that. And all the soggy insulation in the walls had to go. The kids had fun hacking into the paneling to pull it out. There was a dis-assembly line taking the panels from the drop ceiling and the insulation up there off the ceiling, out the front door and onto the pile.

After we got home and showered, we went out to eat at Letty’s Mexican Restaurant to celebrate my birthday. The scales are telling us we’ve been eating out too much. Tom and I were both speaking in Sacrament meeting on Mother’s Day. So we’d been preparing our talks all week. Tom also baked 2 batches of cookies to hand out for Mother’s Day. The YW president made a matching number so all the women were given two home made cookies.

I think Mother’s Day went well. Our talks were well received. The cookies were tasty. All the men in the ward sang Love at Home and I conducted and they sang well. My children have called so I feel loved.  I baked the bread and it wasn’t awful. I think the yeast was about spent, but I’m not going to call them bricks. There were nice air bubbles inside the bread and it tasted like sourdough but not overly strong.

House Offer

Monday we received an offer on the 211 Spring Street house we’d worked so hard on. I think it was on the market about 2 weeks. It was a full price offer, but they wanted us to pay closing costs. We adjusted the price a bit to pay a little less of the closing costs and went with the offer. It should close in June if all goes well. I’m not sure we’re ready to jump into another rehab. It’s amazing how much gets deducted from the profit when you take out realtor fees, closing costs, taxes, tithing and so on. Still, I think Tom will feel he was pretty well paid for all the work.

We have several houses in the neighborhood, including the house next door (past the pond). We were curious about them, so we had the realtor take us through them. All are older and need updating, but seem to be pretty solid houses. But they are beyond our price range and would not give us the profit margin we wanted.

I’ve been slogging through the revisions on the book. Probably not as diligently as I should be. However, Orit came back and said, ummm, the people who are supposed to be reviewing the book are sluggish and I can’t get them to work faster. So things will slow down. But I want to make sure you’re paid. So I may get paid before the book has been finalized. Which is nice. Because I can’t control how long it takes these guys to put in their two cents. It’s a bit annoying to have it hanging over my head… but if I have money in hand, I’ll feel much better about it.

We planted the garden on Tuesday. We had two areas of “mulch” that had been sitting there for years. One out by the corral and the other next to the garden. We’d toss grass clippings or other stuff into them and they always seemed to be not-very-broken down. But I decided to dig them out anyway and surprisingly, there was rich mulch on the bottom, underneath the still-not-decomposed grass clippings. And I decided that stuff on top would still act as a weed suppresser. So we mulched were we were going to plant seeds and seedlings and put grass clippings around where the vines would grow. We have more mulch to dig out. But on Wednesday and Thursday the rains came again.

I decided I would not do well in the northwest. I don’t like days of rain. I feel very unproductive in this gloomy weather. It’s great for reading a good book in front of a fireplace… but not so good for focusing on work.

Thursday Tom and I spend the afternoon driving around the area looking at all the water. It was drizzling but we could see swollen streams and rivers. We didn’t have a lot of flooding around us. We went to the dam and watched the spillways pouring out water. We drove along the riverfront road and saw a few high water marks, but most of the houses seemed to have escaped damage. By Thursday evening the sun came out and it was hard to tell it had rained so much. Except our pond is still full-to-overflowing.

 Dam Spillway.

 Lake level is just a tad high.

 Here you can see it's not much below the top of the dam.

 Misty, swollen Norfork River.

Friday morning we started our drive to Oklahoma and the Warrior Dash. Ariana went with us and we drove her car since it has 4 wheel drive. We thought it might be necessary for when they parked at the race. But the ground there was pretty dry. We stopped at Deborah’s for lunch and a short visit on the way out. We got to Tulsa in time to shop at Costco and then go see Camden play a soccer game. I haven’t seen Camden smile so much perhaps ever. He had such a good time! And he was a pretty good soccer player and quite coordinated. We went back to Miranda’s for dinner and then Kera came with all the kids at home but Matthew. It was fun to see them.

Saturday Tom, Dan, and Aaron went to the race with Miranda and Katie going along for moral support. (Tom will blog about that.) Kera and I stayed home with the rest of the kids and chatted and had a great time. The kids had a good time playing outside on the swings, on the trampoline, and on a rope they hung over the ball pit. They would swing out and drop (about 2 feet) into the ball pit. Somehow this was great fun. They also played in some dirt and I was a bit concerned they would end up dirtier than those running in the muddy race.

After the runners returned home, we lunched and then went out for the traditional Andy’s ice cream and headed home. We stopped again at Deborah’s for some chili dip and chips. Yum! And for hugs from the grandkids. It was nice having three drivers. We took turns resting. We got home about 7pm and got most everything laundered by bedtime.

Today was fast Sunday. We had a good testimony meeting. There was talk on the essential need for the grace of the Savior to help us. As hard as we try, we can’t be perfect. But we can trust in the Lord and his promises to help us. When kids go wayward, again, we love them and leave it to the Lord to do his miracles in their lives in his timeframe.

Today I feel amazingly blessed. We have so much. We live in a wonderful time and in a great country and place in the world. We are blessed with a loving family and with good health. It makes it easy to choose to be happy.

Warrior Dash!

Annual Warrior Dash Weekend!

This is Tom's 5th consecutive year to participate in the Warrior Dash 5 k mud run. Over the years various family members and friends have joined in on this annual event. This year Dan Mc and I were joined by first time runner, 14 year old Aaron, and third time participant young adult Ariana from Mountain home. Ariana, Sandy and I drove up early enough on Friday to enjoy lunch with Deborah and family before continuing onto Tulsa. We were able to stop by Costco just in time to enjoy the wonderful snacks we would never buy set up by the various vendors as we did our shopping. Then to Camden's soccer game and Miranda's for dinner. Kera and family (minus Andy and Matthew) arrived and we had an enjoyable evening together. With a reshuffle of bodies, there was room for all of us under their roof for the night.

We were up in time to enjoy delicious Costco muffins and home grown eggs before heading off to Inola for the race. We participated in the 9:15am heat, so were one of the first races to hit the route.  They modified some of the obstacles and added some new ones. This time the only real muddy one was at the end: the mud crawl under barbed wire so you had to get into the mud. They did have a 'shower' to rinse off under afterwords. This consisted of lots of nozzles at the end of hoses so you could spray off the mud; not 100% effective for getting all the mud and debris off, but clean enough to at least get home to a warm shower.

Here are some photos showing the participants and some of the obstacles in sequence. You can't miss Dan is his unique suit (thank you Rebecca!); Aaron was a dinosaur; Ariana Super Woman and I have the tux suit on.  The three other runners in the second and two of the final photos are friends of Dan.