This & That

This Weekend

Twice a year, members of our church are addressed by its leadership during five meetings over a weekend in what we call our General Conference . The weekends are held in April and October and I always look so forward to them.  We are always given such wonderful counsel, advice and admonitions....things that remind us to be a little better and kinder, to serve each other.  The weekend always seems to come when I'm feeling a little depleted in those areas and makes me feel more centered.....brings me back to the basics again. 

I've a Whale of a Tale to Tell Ye, Lads

We had one of those really fun/hectic/fast/nerve-wracking days yesterday.  We took the kids out of school for half a day and headed down to Utah for DS #2's last BYU Men's Chorus  concert.  He'll be graduating this summer and has sung in the Chorus all the time he's been there.  Such a great group of young men that make such beautiful music.  Their motto?  Esse Quam Videri---to be rather than to seem.
Anyway, they had a formal concert of sacred music last night which was amazing, as it always is.  What was really fun, though, was in the afternoon, they did a collection of their fun songs just for the families that had come into town for the concert.  They ended with a set of Disney songs just for the kids and there was my string bean astro-physics major taking the part of Lumiere, asking us all to "sit back and relax as the dining room presents.....your dinner"....all done with his very best French accent.  That's my boy!
There was also an awesome barbershop arrangement of "Cruella Deville" and choreography to "Under the Sea".  They were having such a great time.  The visual you have to get, though, is 200 very exuberant college age, very Mormon  men channeling their inner pirate as they sang, "I've a whale of a tale to tell ye, lads, a whale of a tale or two.....of the flappin' fish and the girls I've loved....I swear by my tattoo".  Just hilarious because you know there's probably not a tattoo in the bunch.  What great music and such a great day.

Happy Birthday to The Man

I met this man during my senior year of high school.  I know there's a lot of joking about high school romances, but this one stuck.   We've been married almost 28 years now, have completed lots of schooling,  have raised 6 kids, had a cancer scare, a premie baby and still we keep going strong.  He's an amazing dad...here he is with one of my nieces, and he can hardly wait to become a grandpa this summer.
It's his birthday today and I wanted to let him know....that he's still the one.

I'm a Little Partial

But I think this is one of the cutest things I've ever seen. Big day at our house as DD got her braces on.

Projects

My DD loves to do little crafty projects.  She tends to flit from one thing to another, never really sticking with anything for a great length of time, and this month's obsession is these beaded bookmarks.  She learned how to do them at our church's Activity Day and she has made some for the grandmas for Mother's Day presents.  They start out as a straight piece of wire that she bends with smooth needle-nosed pliers and strings with beads and a charm.  The flowery wire part goes on the inside of the book and the beads rest against the spine of the book.  The fingernails make me laugh....so almost-12.

The Smells of Spring....

I've had a few this week in our continued warm weather.  This is what sits right outside the window of the room where I do my scrapping.   All week long, I've had the window open when I've been in there and the smell of hyacinth has come through my window.  Love that smell....it's truly a smell of spring here.  There are others I'm anxious for....I'm still waiting for the fresh-cut grass smell.  Even though the boys mowed this week, the grass isn't green yet, so there's no grass smell.  I'm also still waiting for the lilacs to bloom in the back yard.

It's Coming....

We have had about 2 weeks of fairly uninterrupted warmer weather.  As a result, things are starting to bud and bloom.  I figure it will snow in June and freeze all the fruit, but for now it looks like spring is determined to break through.  These are the leaf buds on an aspen tree in our yard.  Mean mom that I am, I made the boys mow this week when they were home and this morning we did a little digging out of the flower beds and some front walk sweeping.

What I Did On My Spring Break

Life is always an adventure for me, living with the outdoors men that I do.  We have some friends who live in the mountains of Wyoming and have been after us for years to come over during spring break and do some snowmobiling.   We finally managed to work out schedules and headed over Monday morning.  Now, I am a city girl born and bred and I was pushed WAY out of my comfort zone.  First off, there was the snowmobiling....in the wilderness.....with no other people  except us around for literally miles.  It is beautiful country in the mountains of Wyoming and we spent Tuesday exploring about 50 miles of trails and ice fishing on Green River Lake.  I've never been ice fishing before and the though of standing on frozen water after a week of warm temperatures had me thinking twice and even three times.   But when they drilled the holes in the ice to fish through, you could measure that the ice was about 18 inches thick.  As always, one of my biggest annoyances at being in the wilds is that there's nowhere to pee and this place is no exception, but that aside, it was a fun day. DD caught the first fish which gave her bragging rights and annoyed DS#4 to no end.  The fishing really died off after that so the women left the lake before the die-hard men.  I've always maintained that I'm a jinx to fishing.  It always seems that if I'm around, the fish beat a hasty retreat.  This time was no exception.  After we left, the men caught several more fish, even disgruntled DS#4 managed to reel one in.
The next morning before we had to leave, we went to the biggest, steepest sledding hill I've ever seen in my life. The kids thought it was great and proceeded to careen down several times.  Chicken that I am, I only went down once at the end of the excursion and I'm not sure my bladder control will ever be the same again.  I'm kicking my scrapbooking self that I didn't get a shot snowmobiling back to the house through the pines with just a few flakes of snow falling.  A fun couple of days over all.

Spring Break for us continues through the rest of the week and I'm planning on slave-driving my kids in the yard, mean mom that I am.

My Grandbaby

Let me introduce to you my grandbaby. Here is DS#1 and DIL and the kidlet that will be making his or her arrival sometime later this summer.

Erin Go Bragh

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 
So yesterday I said I was taking an online photography class.  I have been really looking forward to this, because I don't understand "camera-speak" and I've been hoping to learn how to take better pictures.  One of my biggest problems is that I have a hard time understanding how to manually adjust things.  I'm going to read my manual, though and really make the attempt with this class.  Anyway, one of the assignments this week was to try a garage photo shoot.  So this morning, I headed out to the fabric store and purchased to end pieces of both an off-white and black fabric.  I pulled my car out of the garage, rolled the folded up ping-pong table into its place and draped it with the white fabric first.   I quickly found out that my remnant pieces weren't long enough, as you'll see in the photo, but still I was surprised with how good the results were. I was also surprised that DD looked much warmer against the black background than the white and that the shadows on the right side of her face seemed much more pronounced against the white.  

Amy H, maybe you can tell me why that is and if there's some way to compensate for it....the garage door is to her right.  But in general, I am very pleased with how they turned out.....a great photography experiment.