Our fourth teenager!

It sure is amazing that it has been 13 years since Joel was born.  Every day since then has been full of fun and adventure.  Joel makes every day a little brighter.  I love my Joel buddy.

Yardwork and running and a scholarship

I spent most of the week outside working in the back yard.  I have no idea how many dozens of gallons of Roundup I sprayed on the shrub beds and the trails.  I also weeded like crazy and planted and moved a few trees.  I was sad to see that one of my beautiful Vulcan Magnolia trees had died and did not produce a bunch of bright pink blossoms like its 2 brothers did.  Of course I had to find a replacement for that beautiful tree to fill the spot in the yard where the bright blossoms were sorely missed this year.  It looks like everything else survived our insane winter very well, though.  I also had to plant a couple of magnolia trees near our bridge. It just had to happen.  Maybe right now it doesn't look like much, but in 5 years, it is going to be amazing.

In springtime I love the blossoms.  The ones that make me super happy are first the forsythia in late February, telling me to not give up hope that spring is on its way.  Second, it is the magnolias with their huge cup-and-saucer blossoms and bright colors.  Last summer we planed 3 Butterflies magnolias behind our neighbor's house.  Butterflies has a super bright-yellow blossom.  And our neighbor just kicked stage 4 colon cancer's butt, so we planted those trees during his cancer battle to show off bright yellow LIVESTRONG blossoms every spring.  Those trees are just now starting to bloom, and it makes me happy.  The third type of blossom that makes me happy in spring is the dogwood.  Maybe this is my favorite.  Only 4 petals, but seriously it is such a beautiful flower.  I told Mark if we ever get married again it has to be while the dogwood trees are in bloom so I can have dogwood blossoms.  My wedding flowers were...hideous.  I didn't really care at the time.  I was just a kid.  I just cared about having real roses in my headpiece and didn't really stop to think that perhaps I should have matching flowers in my bouquet.   Whatever.  Really, my sleeves were so puffy that I am sure nobody even noticed my bouquet anyway.

I have finished my jobs for the week, and now the wheelbarrow, sprayer backpack and shovel are put away for the weekend, but there is still much weeding to be done.  And spraying.  And then bark dust.  The kids are so happy that we have a giant yard to work in.....

After running 10 miles last Saturday, I took this week as an easy week and had planned to run only 6 miles today.  I found out about a 10k that was going on this morning, and decided to register for it to test my 10k speed.  I was so happy to see when I got there that 2 of my sisters-in-law had also registered.  I ran the race with Ellen, but in the last 1/2 mile she pulled out an 8 minute-per-mile pace and beat me by a few seconds.  We placed 1st and 2nd in our age group, though!  Overall I ran a 57:42, which made me pretty happy considering everything my knees have been through in the past year.  Ogden 1/2 marathon is 5 weeks away, and then Seattle 1/2 is 10 weeks away. I am hoping that by the time Seattle rolls around I can run a 9:00 pace and come in under 2 hours.  Ogden I am just hoping to survive with a 10:00 pace.  I hope that my legs and knee continue to be pain-free, and hopefully I can keep getting my butt out the door to run every morning.

The big news this week is that Abram heard back from BYU about scholarships.  He will be at BYU in the fall, and was able to get a bed in the one brand-new dorm building he wanted.  If that wasn't great enough, we found out this week that BYU is paying Abram's tuition!!!  Hooray for Abram and his big brain.

Great Expectations

Sunday night was the premiere of the new PBS Masterpiece Theater version of Great Expectations.  It did not disappoint.  If you didn't catch it, you can watch the first installment by clicking the link above, and then make sure that you catch the conclusion this Sunday night on PBS.


I eagerly awaited this version of Dickens's great story.  I was at first surprised by the casting of Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham, because she is so young and I had always pictured Miss Havisham as an old woman.  I absolutely loved Gillian as Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, though, so I knew she would be perfect in another Dickens role of a woman tormented by her past.  I loved that Miss Havisham was younger-ish in this version.  It makes what she has allowed her life to become to be even more tragic, because she is still young enough to have a life full of joy and she has thrown that all away over a past disappointment.

All of the casting is perfect.  I cannot wait to see how the story plays out this weekend.  My sister texted me Sunday night that "grown-up Pip is a dreamboat."  I had to wait a whole day to find out that she was absolutely right, because I crashed early Sunday after our wild day in the car coming home from Utah.

After the basketball game was over last night, I grabbed the remote from Jacob and told him it was time to watch Great Expectations.  I expected the teenage boys to leave me alone.  But they stuck around, and they were captivated from the very first moment Magwitch came up out of the marshes.  They watched the entire episode, and didn't want me to tell them anything about how it is going to end next week.  Teenagers hooked on Dickens.  It makes a mom proud.

What happened in March

So March was a little bit crazy around here.... So crazy that I didn't even write one blog post.  I spent the month trying to get our tax information all finalized and to our accountant, cleaning and organizing the house, and working on the backyard in the few moments that it was NOT raining.  And then we left for 9 days in Salt Lake City for spring break, which always means lots of work getting things organized, clean and packed for 9 people.  To top that off, I re-strung all 47 strings on Aubrey's harp to prepare it for getting regulated.  That was an entire day's project all by itself.

We also had a bunch of days with morning snow in March, and when that happens, I am just all crazy watching the weather (not the TV weather, I mean my weather station and online satellite images) to try to figure out what is going to happen.  That distracts me from doing other things I should be doing.

Another great thing I got hooked on last month was online genealogy indexing with Familysearch.org.  I discovered I have a gift for reading really old cursive.  I have loved deciphering ship manifests of passengers landing in Boston during the 1800s.  I also did many, many pages of the England 1871 Census.  It really is a fun thing to read the documents and enter names and ages of people who lived so long ago.  My mind goes crazy thinking about all of the Irish who landed in Boston expecting a new and wonderful life, hoping that many of them actually did find that rather than the hate and scorn that so many Irish were greeted with.  I also love learning about all of the interesting careers that people in England had in the 1870s.  Things such as: cordwainer, carter, brass polisher, pen maker, candlemaker, etc. I love picturing these little villages where tradespeople of all kinds worked together trying to survive.  My sister got me hooked on indexing.  She sticks to the typed records because the handwritten ones make her crazy, but I LOVE reading the old cursive.  It's like a puzzle trying to figure out some of the names and places, but for some reason my brain can almost aways pick out what the writer intended to say.  Maybe it comes from being a student in the days before computers were around, or from being a teacher from the same era that makes it easy for my brain to read the cursive.  I tried my hand at some Venezuelan birth certificates from the 1800's as well.  It was fun to add the challenge of reading Spanish AND cursive at the same time.  But then I went back to the ship manifests.

To get to Utah, we drove 2 cars, with 4 drivers, so that was pretty great.  Lots of space and lots of help driving.  The way there we drove through a snow storm in the Blue Mountains, and that was pretty stressful because it was very dark and impossible to see where the road was curving.  But we made it to Ontario for the night.  I ran over the Snake River to Idaho in the morning, which was a fun thing to do, right?

In Salt Lake City we had fun with my family and also loved meeting up with some old friends.  The weather was so incredibly nice while we were there that the kids came home a bit sunburned.  We spent a day at BYU and went to a volleyball game, a day at the new Utah Museum of Natural History where Abram took this picture of me admiring their incredible weather station.  Also spent a day downtown at temple square and the new City Creek shopping center, went skating at the Olympic Oval, swimming at the community rec center, visited great grandparents, and just had a lot of fun.  The kids loved being with their cousins.  We did not make it bowling or to Hires for my Big H fix, and so next time we go those will be on the top of my list.

We drove home in one long day, which was a fun adventure.  I love the mountains of Salt Lake City, but every time I drive back home from being in Utah I am struck by the green beauty of the Gorge.  And the waterfalls were all very powerful on Sunday because Oregon had so much rain during the week we were gone.  It was a very beautiful drive.  When we got home and I walked into the house and saw the beautiful river out the back and the waterfall out the kitchen window I remembered that I really do live in the most beautiful place.