Nick Adamson came to visit this week. He works for Ameriprise in Dallas. We got to have dinner with him on Tuesday and Wednesday night and catch up a little.
On Wednesday night I was in charge of Scouts so we started the Space Exploration merit badge. We made spaghetti rockets. You take a bunch of dried spaghetti and you glue it to a model rocket engine. Then you add fins and decorations made of paper or cardboard. Nick and Elisa each made one too. It was a blast. You would never have guessed that I was never a Boy Scout. Mine was pretty pathetic. It made it halfway off the launch pad and then got stuck without ever getting airborne. Nick and Elisa both got some good distance out of theirs.
On Thursday night we had a campout for the Scouts. (They were off school on Friday). We did the car camping thing. We also launched the boys’ rockets off at the campout. It’s a fun activity. The boys also had fun playing with starting the fire and stuff. They were always a little afraid and waited for an adult to say it was OK before they tried anything. We also played murder in the dark until midnight.
There was a harvest festival on Saturday where they had prize pumpkins on display. The winner was 1,010 pounds. Daniel grows a big pumpkin himself so we thought it would be fun to go with him and Tara. He didn’t think his pumpkin would be able to compete though.
On Saturday evening I got really brave. I ripped up the linoleum in our master bathroom. Elisa and I extracted the toilet. We are going to cut away a big section of the floor that has water damage. I think I know how to get it all put together now. The damage was a lot more contained than we had thought. It doesn’t extend into the kitchen and barely extends into the guest bathroom. We are going to be able to do repairs without moving any plumbing in the guest bathroom, thankfully. The bad news is there are a billion bugs and spiders coming into the house, which Chad blames on the colder weather but which I know is really due to the hole in our floor.
Well, we have no idea what happened the first half of the week besides the normal. But I suppose the remainder of the week makes up for that.
I finally got the materials for my student development course I need to finish before I can start real classes again for my major. I did two of the nine lessons on Thursday and Friday. It feels good to get them done.
On Saturday we went to an exhibit called the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a billion million people there which made it a bit slow to go through the exhibit. It also made the exhibit seem more boring than it probably really was. We got to see the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, parts of them anyway. It was especially exciting to see the scrolls from the creation in genesis and the burning bush part of Moses where Jehovah says “I AM THAT I AM.†The number “2000 years†seems really big when you are talking about something that people wrote down. I thought it was hard to fathom. They pretty much all looked like pieces of beef jerky though. I had been reading up a lot on the Scrolls, especially last year. I think in the end I had more fun reading the transcriptions on the Internet than seeing the original manuscripts. They were really small and dark.
Our garden is starting to go to sleep for the winter. We are picking some of the last of our dahlias, moping over all the tomatoes we can’t possibly keep up with, and joyfully harvesting the few other surviving vegetables. We managed to keep three bell peppers alive, though they are a bit scrawny, and we pulled up a bunch of carrots last night. Lots of tiny ones and one big one.
There’s this thing up in Issaquah called Salmon Days. October is when the salmon come back to spawn and there is a big salmon hatchery in Issaquah. It’s like a mini-fair. Except it’s not so “mini.†There were tons of people there. You could tell that it was in Issaquah and not Seattle because there was only one booth with hemp products. Every fair in Seattle is required to have half of the booths devoted to hemp it looks like. Anyway, we got some fair food and a salmon bake. There were salmon swimming upstream through the middle of the fair area and you could go watch them jump. My mom used to take us there when we were all little. It was fun to finally get to go again. (It usually falls on conference weekend.)
On Monday Elisa and I bought tickets for our honeymoon. Finally. Woohoo! We’ve almost been married for six months. The tickets are for a trip over our first anniversary. We decided on going to Italy. We’ll spend a couple days in Rome, then a couple days in Florence, and then finish the week in Paris. I guess we don’t really know what we’re doing in any more detail yet. We talked about other itineraries further towards the Mediterranean but in the end it just seemed like in Western Europe we wouldn’t have to spend as much time traveling.
Elisa got the info she needed from BYU to start preparing for her school program. I have been pre-accepted. There is a 1 credit student development class I need to complete and then I’ll be free to finish my degree online. That should keep her from going stir-crazy this winter. I am thrilled to be able to take classes toward my degree again. It is starting to feel like I’ll actually complete it instead of just talk about it being done sometime. It will just be in general studies, but there are some interesting emphases to choose from. I’ll probably do psychology or family studies.
So, Elisa and I were thinking about something that I know sounds silly. We came up with a name for our house. I’ve always wanted to have a name for the house. For a few months it was once nicknamed “The Ranch†(because of the large backyard) or “The Casino†(because we were always playing poker in the middle of the night). Cheryl Smith wanted us to name it “Ché Parry.†That one’s not my favorite. Anyway, our latest choice is “Ameixas.†That’s the Portuguese word for plums, and we like it because there’s a ton of character in the plum tree in the middle of our yard. Plus I think it sounds cool. Does it sound as cool as I think? Maybe don’t answer that. I still like the idea of having a house with a name. Let me know if you think that’s a good idea. We looked “house naming†up online. It is a pretty big deal in England. They have house names rather than house numbers. One naming suggestion was to find something that was a unique feature of the place. We also like the idea of making it say something about us too. Some other words that sounded lively were “Campoverde,†“Ameixa Azul,†“L’Arbre Bleu,†“Par de Cerejeira,†“Ginjeira,†and “Âbundancia.â€
I got to go to Hilary Kruetz’s baby shower for Carter. It was originally planned to happen while we were at Lake Powell but was rescheduled. I was very excited about that! Hilary has been like a sister to me forever. Her and her husband Brian adopted Carter in June. Their story is so amazing and I am overjoyed for them! It was a lot of fun to celebrate their little family.
