Another Weekend Trip to Petersboro

Erika and I had an interesting experience with regard to a wedding. Paul brought home a week or so ago an invitation to the wedding reception of the daughter of David Frischknecht, a man that he worked with when we lived in Frankfurt. She was just a little girl then and now she is all grown up and getting married. I put the invitation on the counter, thinking it would be fun to go. Paul wasn't able to go, but I began planning on attending because Nancy Frischknecht and I had been friends in Frankfurt and she had actually watched Erika when I made a quick trip back to the US to solve some driver’s license problems. Erika noticed the invitation on the counter and it turns out that she knew the bride who also teaches at South Jordan Middle School. They hadn't realized that they had both been children together in the same ward in Frankfurt even though they knew each other. So Erika ended up going to the reception with me and we surprised the bride with an old friend of her parents (me) and a co-worker (Erika) being related to each other. It was fun to be a part of that surprised moment. It was also fun to Nancy and David again. They live up near Layton in a place called Fruit Heights—and I haven’t seen them hardly at all since we have been back from Europe. This past week was super busy for Paul, being made up of five days of 12-14 hour work days. There was a group of international managers in for training and he - as the main shepherd of the group-- had to keep the show on the road - but as usual he did a pretty good job of it and drew some attention for a job well done. He was hosting an evening dinner on the night of the reception that Erika and I went to—so that is why he wasn't available to attend with us. Saturday Paul and I went to the brand new Brigham City Temple on the way to Petersboro where Paul did some spraying for weeds and gophers and then picked up a load of hay. It is truly a beautiful building. The finish work both inside and out is the arguably the nicest I have ever seen anywhere. We had intended to attend an endowment session, but they are still so new that you need an appointment to attend an endowment session. We didn't know that and just showed up. They made space for us in a sealing session so we were able to go into the building, but we didn't see the endowment rooms or the celestial room. It was exceptionally beautiful, the moldings and trim work is just sooo lovely. The exterior is sort of the same shape as the Salt Lake Temple, but it is sort of a softer gentler version. There is a fruit blossom motif used in both the interior and the exterior. I am looking forward to going there again to attend a session. We got final word this week that Peter passed his ethics test in addition to the bar and has his JD diploma. We are very proud and happy about that. He is working for Orem City Prosecutors Office right now but is applying for other jobs, too.

News of the Week

Another week has passed in our lives. It has been a wet week—lots of rain every day. The brown places in the lawn have lots of happy blades pushing up again. The week began with us as a big family group. Philip and Camille with Jonathan and Andrew spent the night with us on Monday and Tuesday we took them to the airport. That was a sad moment. We have loved having them with us at our house and also near and coming to dinner frequently. And we just adored the grandchildren. We are already looking forward to having them come and be with us in January and February. We will get them for about three weeks and the DeGoyler's will get them for about the same. They will be near in the not too distant future. And that it is a happy thought. I am already starting to think about Christmas presents and changing the arrangements in the basement to make it work better for them. They are always on my mind. This past weekend we were supposed to go on a Back Country Horseman activity. It was an overnight camping and riding event. We were all going to Settlement Canyon near Tooele where we were pitching tents and some people in their living quarters in their horse trailers. They were going to have a campfire in the evening and members were invited to come prepared to share cowboy poetry or songs—bring their instruments and such. It was going to be a nice time. I was going to go with Paul for the evening events and camp with him and then come home in the morning and he was going to go for the ride which was the next day. I was going to go in a separate car so I could leave without any trouble. But the event was cancelled due to inclement weather. And it was inclement. It rained like crazy on Friday and then cleared a little in the morning on Saturday—but was raining on Saturday afternoon. As it turned out—even if the weather hadn't been so bad, Paul and I wouldn't have gone anyway. I had the flu on Thursday and Friday and Paul wasn't feeling that great either—though not sick in the same way as me. I came home from work on Thursday, feeling poorly, took a hot bath and went to bed and slept all evening and all night. I felt somewhat better in the morning and went to work, but still wasn't in top form on Friday. Friday evening, because I felt like going to bed, but not like sleeping, I needed an “escape book” to read as I was convalescing and I settled on Edenbrooke—a book that I bought at Deseret Book for Grandma Kern’s birthday more than a year ago and which Erika had borrowed from a friend to read when she was at Lake Powell last summer. It was still here at the house so I read it and I knew it wasn't going to be something that would be difficult or have anything too unpleasant in it and that it would have a happy ending. I also knew that I would be able to finish it over the weekend. And so I started it on Friday night and finished it on Sunday. It was a fun, pleasant read and compared to a lot of the heavier things I have been reading lately, it was a bright breezy book. Just right for getting over a sickness. Grandma had read and enjoyed it and had encouraged me to read it, so I now I have scratched that off my list. On Saturday Paul suggested that we take a drive to Petersboro and see how the rain had affected our pasture there and if all of his grass seed had sprouted in the extra moisture. He offered me a movie in Logan as well, but we decided to go to the Logan Temple instead. I had seen the new temple film at the Jordan River Temple a couple of weeks ago when I went to the temple with an old friend, but Paul hadn't seen the new film yet. And it had been a very long time since we had visited the Logan Temple. I tried to think back and the last time that I remembered going was when Jimmy Kern married his first wife—we attended a session with the Demar and Doris Kern family on that occasion. Anyway it was a long time ago. Every temple has its own interesting features and look and things that make it memorable and unique. Paul and I were happy to have the experience of another temple—even if both of us had been there before, it seemed kind of like new because it had been so long. We never attended a session there before the renovations so it would have looked the same way it looks now back then, but neither of us remembered anything about it from 30 or so years earlier so it was as if seeing it for the first time. The next time that we go up to see the property we will go to a session in the Brigham City Temple. We haven’t been in that temple yet. And I have saved the best news for last. Peter called us on Sunday evening to announce that the results from the Bar Exam had been posted and that he passed. We are so happy for him and proud of him. This was wonderful news. Of course, it was a great relief for Peter, too. All the studying that he did this summer, the many hours he spent reading paid off for him. He is now a member of the Utah Bar. There will be a swearing in ceremony in October and we will be happy for that occasion, too. So our congratulations go out to him and to Kortney for the efforts getting him to this point.

We are winding down on our time with Philip and Camille. They leave Tuesday evening for Paris—one night there and then off to Djibouti. I have loved having Jonathan and Andrew near and we have them to dinner frequently. They are moving to our house today and we will have them tonight and then off they go. I have had toys in the family room all summer and I will have to put them away for the season and that seems so sad. Jonathan is three which is just my favorite age. He talks with us and is so imaginative and entertaining—he and Paul have done some special things together and they have a wonderful relationship. They have been coming to our ward all summer and it has been so fun to have a big row of family again. K.C. has returned from his Far East Trip. He was in China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. He had a great time. He’s back into the swing of things in Cambridge starting classes again. He enjoyed his experience with Friendemic—his internship this summer, but I think he is glad to be back in Boston, too. I am now working at the new Corner Canyon High School. Sometimes it feels a little like a dream to be here. I was at Brighton for a long, long time and I look around and wonder what happened to me. There have been good and bad things about this move, but I feel good about it and the positives out weight the negatives. I now have a 25 minute commute and I have been tackling some long books on CD that seemed too daunting before. I am listening currently to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , which is on every list, but which I had never read. It was pretty shocking in the 50’s, but it is quite interesting to me. It is 27 CD’s and runs for about 35 hours. But I will finish it in a month just by having it in the car. While her introduction states that it was all fiction—reviewers and critics and even the jacket of the CD’s claim it as a thinly veiled biography of Frank Lloyd Wright and his rise to prominence. I’m finding all the discussion of architecture engaging. I just finished a Kate Morton book—The Forgotten Garden—it was a book club book, and Janssen just reviewed it on her blog—not too heavy but leant itself to an involved discussion. We had a dinner at Grannie and Granddad’s last night. It was very nice. The family contingent here is decreasing. We has a good crowd with Philip and Camille and their two, Peter and Kortney and Eleanor, Erika and Jono, Paul and I –a big Kern group—and Stephen and Steve with Grannie and Granddad. Robin and Jeff gone, Merrick and Philip gone, Emily and Otto gone. The composition has changed over time.

Paul and I were up at the cabin over Labor Day. It was a very pleasant to be in Island Park. I had a very relaxing weekend. We left at about 4:30 on Friday afternoon from Salt Lake and it was after 10:00 when we arrived on Aspen Ridge. Paul had a horse ride in the Teton Wilderness area planned with Blake on Saturday and I was really happy to have a calm day with no great plans ahead of me. We did have an early morning on Saturday to get Paul off, meeting Blake at 8:00 a.m. My only agenda item for the weekend was the handwork on a T-shirt quilt that I was working on. I went on a walk in the morning and I had brought a book on CD that I started to listen to. My day went relaxingly and I made some progress on my book—I am listening to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead which is 27 CD’s so I was happy to get through seven of them on Saturday and on my quilt. The weather was lovely on Saturday. My walk was bright and warm, but it is really dry. There was a fire going near TwoTop and so there was a smoky haze throughout. We were planning on leaving the remaining two horses in Island Park for a couple more weeks, but the pond is getting lower and Paul worried that they might run out of water before we could get back. (We will be in SLC for the next two weekends because Philip and Camille and their little family will be leaving next week and the weekend of the 7-8th is their last weekend here. And the next weekend is a Back Country Horseman Event in Settlement Canyon near Tooele which we will be attending.) So anyway—we decided to take the horses home with us. Paul had a long day’s ride, (he thought they had covered more than 25 miles—and there was also 1 ½ hour travel time on both ends) but got home about 7:30p.m. I had brought some old James Bond movies starring Sean Connery and we watched the first one of the twenty odd James Bond cannon. The first in the series was Dr. No. Ursula Andres was the Bond girl. We had to admit that the pacing of movies made in the 60’s is very different than what is expected now. It seemed a little on the slow and dull side—but we sat through it anyway. On Sunday evening we watched Goldfinger and we liked that better. We are not the least bit committed to watching the entire collection, but it was fun to watch a couple of old movies and see the perceptions that prevailed in the time that they were filmed. I brought four with me, but we only managed the two and frankly I think that was enough. Paul and I had been joking about old James Bond movies and so it was another nice diversion from the normal. Paul and I both enjoyed sleeping in on Sunday morning. We didn't set an alarm and just stayed in bed and kept dozing off until well after 9:00 on Sunday morning. We both get up very early on work days and so it was very indulgent to sleep in so late. The temperature in the cabin was the perfect mix of fresh and cool and yet not chilly. Paul and I both slept so well, I came home feeling really refreshed. Also it was so nice that we didn't have to rush home on Sunday, but had another day to enjoy—the blessing of a long weekend. We took down the teepee while we were there. It is stowed away in the boxes. We were a little bit sad to discover that we had disrupted the storage area of one or more industrious squirrels. Between the teepee wall and the liner there were probably more than one hundred pinecones. I wondered what the poor squirrel (s) thought when they came back to their safe haven to discover that the secure hiding place that they had discovered was completely gone and their pile of pinecones was totally exposed. Paul comforted me by saying that they would just search and find a new secure hiding place. And they still have a few weeks of good weather before the cold weather comes. We had a few rain showers on Sunday afternoon and a few more on Monday, but it wasn't enough to really clear the air of the smoke from the fire. I walked on Monday morning and it didn't even smell like rain, but by the time we were packing up the car, it was sprinkling again. But it stopped by the time we left. We’re back in SLC now. Both back at work. Everything is settling in for the fall. Philip and Camille will leave on the 10th. We will miss them very much. It has been fun to have them a part of our regular lives. Peter starts working for Orem City on September 9th, next week. He is looking forward to that. K.C. is back from his trip to the far east and is back at school at MIT. Erika is in full swing with school again. And so our lives move forward as usual.