A BUSY, BUSY MONTH OF JUNE

As soon as June began, we knew it would be a whirlwind of a month....and it was. Along with our regular monthly responsibilities ie: temple, yard and house work, visiting and home teaching, and church callings, we threw in planting annuals and a garden, buying a new car, speaking at a fireside, a graduation, a lunch and  two dinner dates, Father's day and a birthday for Paul. Let me explain.

Two of  12 pots around our yard

Right after memorial day, we always plant our garden as well as our annuals and this year was no exception.  It took us a half a day to get the garden in and, the very next day, we drove to Orem to buy annuals.  We bought them from our friend, Gail Roper, last year at his nursery and were very pleased with them so that is where we went this year, too. He had most of what we needed but his wave petunias were very leggy. He just gave them to us and discounted many other plants because it was at the end of his selling season. (Orem is about 3 weeks ahead of Heber in weather suitable for planting annuals.) On our way home from buying annuals, we stopped at a fruit stand where they had some beautiful pots already planted with annuals. We bought three for along our driveway. Of course, that afternoon and into the evening, we planted what we could, finishing up the following day. We love our yard when the annuals begin to bloom and add some much needed color. Paul spent the rest of the week weeding flower beds and mowing the lawn making the yard look beautiful, as always.

On June 3rd, we attended Taylor's graduation, the first of our grandchildren to be out of high school.  (This just begins a graduation every year for the next 8 years or so.) Taylor graduated with a class of 800 so the ceremony took a couple of hours. We got to talk with him for only a minute afterwards as his mom wanted him with her family who were all present. Because we were unable to find out any of his plans for the future, we invited him to meet us for lunch the following Thursday.  We were thrilled when he accepted our invitation.  We met him at a hot wing place in Draper. The food was OK but our visit with Taylor was great.  He is planning to go to Utah State or on a mission.  Right now he is working, almost full time, at Good Earth, a whole foods grocery store. We pray he keeps his head on straight.  We would love to see him serve a mission so he could set the example for his younger brothers.  We'll just have to wait and see.  

A wonderful grandson

Friday of that first week, we had the privilege of having dinner with Sasha Uskova, from Moscow. She left Russia to come live in the U.S. because of a special young man, Dave. She met Dave while she was in the U.S. going to college in Michigan. They started communicating a while ago and felt like they wanted to make their relationship more permanent. They had spent the two weeks prior to our visit in Oregon. His brother lives there and that is where they will settle after they get married, probably in August. Dave even got a job while he was there. They make a cute couple.  We are so excited for Sasha. She is one of those extraordinary people we were fortunate to meet. We ate at PF Chang's and then drove them to downtown Provo, where they would meet friends, for a street concert.

Such a happy couple

We have not been released from our single adult calling in the stake, yet, so we attended a service project for the single adults in Park City on that first Saturday. We set up tables and chairs and moved potted plants for a fund raising event sponsored by the National Ability Center. It is a place for handicap people to live and work, as well as to receive valuable life skills training. When enough single adults arrived, we quietly slipped out as there was not enough to do to keep us all busy. Beside, it was Paul's day to mow the lawn.


The next week, we attended a dinner at the Riverside Country Club in Provo, sponsored by Merril Lynch.  It was a buffet dinner followed by Ty Detmer as the guest speaker. It was more of a question and answer time as he is the new offensive coordinator for the BYU Cougar's football team this year.  It was interesting to understand more about the plans of this new coaching staff. Hopefully it will be a good year. They have a very tough schedule right off the bat but we're hoping for a few wins.




The fireside at which we spoke was the Cobblestone Empty Nester's group.  We used to attend that group when we were all together as one ward but have since left to attend a dinner group in our own ward.  The Remington's hosted this one and asked if we would come talk about our mission.  After dinner, we all moved into their movie area where we introduced our mission responsibilities and then played a DVD showing pictures of as much of our mission experiences as we could.  Everyone seemed to enjoy our presentation and it was fun for us to remember all those wonderful things that made our mission a highlight of our life. 

We, also, attended Paul's 55th class reunion. He graduated from Pleasant Grove high school in 1961. Since we now live in Utah, we attended this one. Paul enjoyed seeing his old classmates on this evening of dinner and visiting.  It was a little alarming when we found out that many more of his former classmates had passed on.  At the 50th, only 15 had died but in the past 5 year another 15 have passed away. It only pointed out to us that we are getting very old. A little sobering.

The whole group of Pleasant Grove alumni present for the evening

That then brings us to Father's day and Paul's birthday. Father's Day was filled with family, dinner with our Utah children and telephone calls from our Oregon children. Todd and Kailee and Aria as well as Jon and MIndi and 4 of Jon's boys came up for dinner.  We had ham which is always a big hit. 

For Paul's birthday, we went golfing in the morning, cleaned up our Honda in the afternoon, and went to dinner in the evening.  We also ordered a new car, hence cleaning up the old Honda to sell to Jon and MIndi.

Opening his birthday card at
Claim Jumpers where we went
to dinner for his birthday

A sweet gift to Paul from Kailee's sister.
Todd and Kailee bought him Twinkies
and two gift certificates to Subway - two of
Paul's favorite things

About the new car...we spent several days going to many car dealerships trying to decide on which car to buy.  I wanted an all wheel car, possibly an SUV, but Paul had his heart set on a Honda Accord, like the one we've driven for 10 years. In the end, Paul won out. There was something about every other car we drove that we didn't like ie: the interior of the Jeep Cherokee, lack of a back up camera on the BMW, only a 4 cylinder engine in the Honda CRV, and the placement of the cup holders in the Audi. We feel good about the Honda accord. Even though it isn't all wheel drive, it is a 6 cylinder so it has lots of get up and go. It's easier going with the familiar at our age. We did change colors to a deep red with white interior. At the last minute. we changed our minds to an upgraded model that we could drive right off the lot.The other model we were wanting had to be shipped in from Wyoming and would cost us $750 to ship it and take up to a week to get here. We love our new car with all it's fancy updated gadgets....at least we will when we learn how to use them all.

Our new car

An interesting, thing happened one Sunday evening.  Paul had spent the whole week getting the yard in pristine condition. It looked wonderful until late Sunday afternoon when a mammoth hail storm hit our area. It shredded leaves off the trees which, of course, landed in the bark and all over the lawn and driveway. Many of our annuals, especially in the berm area, were battered and had to be replaced.  We were just sick. We spent the better part of the next morning cleaning up the mess created by this fluke storm. This brought back memories of a hail storm devastating our yard the day before a wedding reception held in our back yard. Oh, the blessings from Mother Nature.

On a sad note - Paul was reading the obituaries, as he always does, and noticed a eulogy for Glen Mott.  He was Paul's mentor in Spokane when Glen was the high councilman in charge of stake activities and Paul was the activity chairman. He learned a lot from Glen who was an exacting task master. Glen's son was in the stake presidency when we left Spokane. We knew his wife and family quite well. The funeral was held at 11 a.m. on the same day we were taking Taylor out to lunch so that made it easy to attend.  We were glad we did as we got to visit with Greg and Marlene, Glen's son and daughter-in-law. They were thrilled we had made the effort to be there to honor their dad.


A fun picture we noticed in the church news this month.  It's of our young single's group in Moscow, Russia when Elder Ballard recently went to visit that area and put on a fireside for the YSA's.  What a treat that must have been.  We loved seeing so many familiar faces in the picture.


The end of the of the month was spent with Deon and Gary who flew in the last Monday of June to travel with us to Glacier National Park area. We stayed through the first of July so I'll include the events of that trip in July's blog.  

I must end with cuteness......Aria, of course

Aria in her 'demon' shorts -
an auto correct
from when I typed in 'denim' on a
Facebook post.

Aria with her curly hair from the
Florida humidity...so dang cute!!!