Another trip to the Phoenix area

No rest for me after driving to the Phoenix area yesterday.  My niece Carolyn needed a ride to one of the metro airports there this afternoon.  Due to church and work I couldn't take her in the afternoon, but told her I could take her hours early if she were willing to wait.  She was.

Here she is grabbing her things out of the car at the airport:

 

After dropping her off I headed back the 15 miles to the main freeway and as I was driving along I saw something on the other side of the freeway earthen berm and thought to myself, "That looks like an LDS temple."  But of course, I wasn't near the Mesa temple and the Mesa temple doesn't look anything like the thing I saw.  Oh.  Except there are TWO new LDS temples being built in the Phoenix area, including one in Gilbert, which I was passing.  You can't see it very well in this picture I snapped, but it is just above the berm in the middle of the picture.  Oh, and behind a light pole.  Next to Waldo.

 

This artist's conception picture miiiiight give you a better idea what it looks like.  The exterior seemed to be in place, so I assume they are working on the interior now.

 

A sort-of trip to the temple

Our ward has been sponsoring a trip to the LDS temple 2 hours away twice a year as long as we've been living here and we haven't missed one yet.  We provide our own transportation, but they provide babysitting near the temple, along with lunch after our temple session of worship.

In all this time Bill and I have never been asked to babysit, but today was finally our turn.  We were assigned to watch the children for the first half of the time the parents would be gone, then we would go to the temple and do some faster-than-normal things there due to the shortened time.

But!  There was a wreck on the way to the big city that didn't hold *us* up because we passed it only about 10 minutes after it happend and the freeway wasn't closed yet, but almost everyone else behind us got caught in the traffic jam as they rerouted traffic off the freeway and then back on.  And then the temple apparently was PACKED!  There were weddings!  There were guests!  There were photographers!  There were bridesmaids in their pretty, matching dresses!  There were more regular temple attendees than normal, even for an August Saturday because of some internal changes!  We decided to just stay at the babysitting place and skip the extreme hustle and bustle of the temple today!

Honestly, one reason I go to the temple is to feel the peace of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ.  I wanted to feel that today and I feared I wouldn't, or at least not to the extent I usually do.

So the picture is of the girls as we got ready to leave.  You can see how excited Elizabeth was to leave.  The girls really love this semi-annual activity and guess what?  Our ward juuuust changed it to a quarterly activity, so we'll be going at least four times a year from now on.  So happy about that!

Save money on cheese

Today I stopped by Costco because I needed some mozzarella cheese for our Friday night pizzas.  As usual, I bought the 5 lb bag of shredded.  I'm always vaguely uneasy about buying 5 pounds at a time because I'm pretty sure it's going to go bad before I can eat it all, but if I freeze the bag I have to remember to get it out of the freezer the night before I want to use it, or I have to make good use of an ice pick.

So I did something smarter:

 

As soon as I got home (no procrastinating!) I got out 9 new plastic bags and using the package as the 10th (for tonight's pizza), I divided the cheese into the bags, pushed the air out, and flattened them.  By flattening them, they will thaw faster when each pizza night comes, even if I forget to take the cheese out ahead of time.

I laid them out on a cookie sheet for quick and flat freezing and popped them into the chest freezer on the back porch.  No waste and fresh mozzarella every Friday night for a couple of months.

Random Kevin picture

Have you noticed I'm posting more Kevin pictures?  I haven't been taking my camera everywhere with me like I once did, and other times, like tonight when I wanted to take my camera with me to the food bank service project, I couldn't find it.  I'm pretty sure it had something to do with an eleven year old daughter.

So, compliments of my dear son, here is another picture and below it my comments.  No matter what.

Okay, this didn't turn out exactly as I hoped.  I went back to the disc and tried to turn the picture 90 degrees, but it wouldn't go.  Maybe this was a special panoramic picture?  While I was messing around with the first picture, I looked at the ones on either side of it.  Look at this terrific picture!  And to think I'm going to see that bay soon . . . .

Because I see a sitting backpack in the first picture, I'm going to say Kevin and his companion and perhaps some other missionaries or church members or other people they met in the area went for a pretty serious hike on their weekly day off.  What a payoff!

Madame Butterfly

Okay, don't laugh, but I've never known the story of Madame Butterfly.  One of my students and I were talking about Nagasaki, Japan this morning and this opera came up (it takes place in Nagasaki).

The first thing I did was go online to see what the story was about.  I read the synopsis first, and then the story was so interesting I read the blow-by-blow account on wikipedia.

Pinkerton was a jerk.  Butterfly was naive.  I don't really like tragedies because I always want a happy ending.  However, if I get a chance to see this opera, I will.

The source for the picture is the wikipedia article linked above.

Back to our schedule!

This summer was pretty free-form as far as schedules and plans went.  Now the girls are back in school our days have more structure.  Actually, that's a good thing.  I think some moms like the summer because they can sleep in later in the morning with the kids, but my job gets me up uber early year 'round, so summer is no advantage to me there.  Even though homework time can be a bit hair-raising around here, doesn't this look sweet?

Random Kevin picture

Whoo boy, I'm going to take a guess here.  How about the post office or consulate or wherever American guys living in Brazil have to go to get continued permission to "teach and preach and work as missionaries do"?

Sophia's first birthday?

Sophia was wondering what it was like on her first birthday when she got to eat her birthday cupcake with her fingers and make a real mess.  Don't you wish you could remember being picked up and carried around or pushed in a stroller?  She decided to find out about the cake, so she made a cake for the family and a small one for herself and frosted them.

Funny, huh?

A little change to the front of our house

Okay, here is a confession:  I'm not very daring.  I don't like to rock the boat or do the unexpected because I think the "normal" thing is usually what I typically like best.

I've been thinking about painting my front door.  I know, I know, not too daring, but I've been thinking about a surprising color for it.  Lime green.  Soft mustard.  Something like that.  So when I saw a commercial on TV saying Ace Hardware was giving away a free quart of paint today, I decided to just do it.
                                         
The "before" wasn't bad at all, but I just wanted something more interesting.  In the end I couldn't get either the lime green or mustard because they both used a yellow base which wasn't included in the giveaway, but got this instead:

I know.  Orange.  Isn't that cool and funky?  Oh, and a 4-5 coat paint (grrr . . .).  I'm not sure if that's due to the paint I'm using or that it's a light color going over a dark one or that my brush is not a super-smooth one.

Sophia's first day of school

No matter how you look at it, Sophia is an "upper classman" now. Her school is a K-5 school, so last year in 3rd grade it could have been argued that she was in the upper half of the school, but since most elementary schools are K-6, I really think 4th grade is the first upper grade.

All that aside . . . she wouldn't let us take her to the bus on the first day or even go along with her, so here she is ready to roll:

And she's off!

And I must say, I really thought this patio picture was cute too: