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.