This week Elisa and I went to the Evergreen State Fair. It’s a lot like the Idaho State Fair. Except they call them elephant ears up here, not tiger ears. Elisa’s family thought I was pretty funny for asking for a tiger ear. We rode the swing ride. Yeah, right after we had all that heavy greasy fair food. The food was excellent. I had been craving real strawberry shortcake since our wedding. Theirs passed the test and I can finally rest easy knowing that everything is right in the world.

I ripped up the corner of our bathroom floor yesterday. There’s some water damage that was showing through the linoleum. It turns out that all the wafer board subflooring is spoiled—it has rotted into dirt. Some of the 2x4s are bad too. We’ll have to rebuild part of both of the floors of our two adjoining bathrooms. Luckily, we also get to get rid of the ugly blue stuff on the walls in the shower. I went under the house while Elisa had the shower water running, and a stream of water was just running down through the cracks in the caulking and it collected on the wood underneath the tub. And it landed on me while I was there. So it’s pretty clear where the water is coming from. (That’s the good news since locating a leak can be difficult.) We don’t yet have a plan for fixing it. Oh, yeah, in the process of looking under the tub through a panel in our bed room, Chad stood up right under and into some shelves in the wall. It ripped them clear out and everything came tumbling down. He fixes the house well. I didn’t like the shelves anyway. 🙂 That’s a little home maintenance technique I like to call, “One step forward, two steps back.”

Our tomato plant has kept burgeoning out into the entire plot while the rest of the vegetables die. This week it finally broke through the bamboo supports around it. It toppled over and now is sort of a tomato puddle. We’re going to have a billion ripe tomatoes anyday.

I had four deacons show up for class today! They are all active. One is new because he just had a birthday. I had him in primary with me. One is probably going to be moving into the ward with his mom. We also rescheduled scouts for Tuesday. I can keep playing soccer with my old team on Wednesday! I really didn’t want to have to quit.

Here’s your interesting factoid of the week. Elisa was wondering what the singular form of the word “cattle” was. Also, in our reading of the Old Testament it said that the Hebrews had “beeves” but we didn’t know what that meant. Well, I know you can’t stand the suspense, but we found out the answers to both questions! An article on Wikipedia all about cattle explained it. The word “cow” only refers to females, and “bull” only refers to males. So lots of cows and bulls together are “cattle.” But there is not really any word at all for a singular “cattle.” It said that technically the word is “ox.” Nobody uses that word anymore because ox makes people think of a different animal (“musk ox”). Some people want to use the word “catron.” Then when we are teaching kids about what noise each animal makes we can just shorten that and tell them that a cat goes “moo.” Not confusing at all. But the better part is that there is a singular for beef cows or “beeves” (which answered our bible question). The singular is beef. What sound does a beef make?