Paul's recovery, Children Reports, Conference weekend at the Cabin

Seems like forever since I have written. Here it is the end of another week. We have been busy—both Paul and me. Things going on at work, things going on at school, things going on at home. Enough to keep us going. Paul is recovering a little bit every day. He is going to a physical therapist that is making him work hard. The day or two after the session he is pretty sore, but he sees the improvement from each session. He is also going to the City Creek Gym every day but Sunday and swimming and working out and so he is seeing that sometime in the future he will be normal again. He still has periods of discomfort (pain), but he is actually sleeping the whole night in our bed again. And has actually slept through the night a couple of times. Pain and other discomforts to wake him up from time to time, but we can see that he is getting better. And that makes us very hopeful. Philip called a few days ago with his ipad and we had some facetime with him and the grandchildren and Camille. He called mostly to show us that Andrew is really up and walking now. He isn't just taking some of those first tentative steps but is waling like a champ, moving around like he owns the place. We had a nice chat with Philip and Camille. They are getting ready for the move to Ukraine. They leave their home in Washington D.C. on the 22nd of this month—then there is a week of meetings and travel before they actually arrive in Kiev. Philip has to shadow an immigration officer at the International Terminal in New York for two days. Then they will fly to Frankfurt, Germany and overnight there, then continue on to Kiev. They are ready to go—Philip has been studying for the last eight months, language and policy, and now it is time to put it all into action. We told them from the time that we knew about the assignment to Ukraine that we would be coming to visit them and Paul has been looking at flight information for the last three months. Sunday we took the plunge and booked and bought airline tickets for the two of us to go and visit them. We will be going in June next year. We will leave on the 15th of June and come home on the 23rd of June. That is just after I get done with work for the 2014-2015 school year. So we will have the whole year practically to look forward to the trip. I took the precaution of buying insurance for the trip—who knows what could happen in all that time—but we are really excited and happy about the prospect. We will be seeing K.C. again this week. He is flying in on Sunday. Friendemic, the company he is working for right now is having a company retreat next week and he is flying in for that and to work with the other employees that are concerned with information technology, which is the area where he works. He will be staying with us but will get a rental car so that he can come and go on his own. It is fun to have him come and visit because he is a magnet that encourages our children to gather at our house. We will see the whole group at least once while he is here. I suppose that I should organize some kind of family dinner, which I haven’t done yet. This week on Tuesday, I had a gathering of one of my book clubs. I didn't care much for the book—Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walters. I didn't really think much of it while I was reading it. (Many dysfunctional people in ridiculous situations.) But it has been positively reviewed and has won some very prestigious awards. It is total fiction, but it is set in Italy and concerns events that happened during the filming of the movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. (That is where they fell in love and their romance figures into the story.) The hostess, Lisa Whiteley has a sister who is a movie critic and a movie aficionado and a collector, and she came to the meeting and did a very interesting presentation on Elizabeth Taylor. She had books, and dolls and movie posters and signatures. She collects signatures and has about 250 celebrity signatures in her collection. That was the most interesting part of the book club evening. I found out lots of interesting tidbits about Taylor/Burton. One of the books was about Elizabeth Taylor's massive jewelry collection. It seems that whenever Elizabeth and Richard had a fight that part of the make-up was a piece of jewelry—so sometime Elizabeth Taylor would pick fights when she wanted a particular piece of jewelry. Hmmm. It is a lovely group of women and I enjoy very much our time together. Paul and I spend last weekend (Conference Weekend). We can’t watch conference, but we can listen. We listened to all four sessions and Paul went to Mack’s Inn to the priesthood session. We actually listened to the closing session in the truck on the way home. We went to Island Park for the weekend for another reason besides conference, to take down the fences, bring the horses home and winterize the cabin. It was such a lovely weekend there. It was bright and cool, the trees losing their leaves and turning colors. There was this quiet sense of the end of summer. The horses were happy to see us, and were happy to hop into the trailer when it came time to go home. We loaded them into the trailer on Sunday between sessions and then took the fences down. When we had finished and all the fences were lying down and the poles standing straight and unconnected, it looked so much like the change in season. We do feel blessed that the option of leaving the horses there was available when Paul was so indisposed, and that they ended up being good at self-care. Peter came on Monday and Wednesday last week and helped Paul get hay and get it placed in the pasture in Midvale—so now we are ready and prepared for winter. Paul has decided to try and get ready to do the Buffalo Round-Up on Antelope Island and so we are going to do a short ride in Dimple Dale on Saturday—and see how that goes. We are moving into the “healed” place—sooner or later. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Erika had a series of tests a couple of weeks ago—she had been combating continuing stomach problems—runs in the Kern Family. She was diagnosed with Celiac disease and so now she is gluten-free, too. It isn't happy news, but at least she knows that it is possible to live a comfortable and normal life with celiac, as she has witnessed it first hand in our situation with Paul. And I won’t have to do anything different when she comes to our house for dinner since Paul and I eat pretty much gluten-free anyway. Erika and Jono and their group of friends are having a Murder Mystery Party next week—it is set in 8th Century China—so I am thinking about Chinese and Asian food for the party and looking forward to that.