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.

Corner Canyon High School

Last post was in 2010 -- Life continues, but here is a new post. I began working at Brighton High School in the fall of 1998. I began in October or early November and I was a part time aide to a blind teacher named Lucy Jensen. I read papers and written home work assignments out loud to her, took attendance, went through her mail, corrected assignments and proctored tests. At the end of that year she retired and I lost that job. However, I signed up to be a substitute teacher and began substituting in September. In October I began a long term substitute position for Connie Christensen, the AP English teacher at Brighton. That was a wonderful, demanding job and was such great fun and hard work. I thought after that experience that I would like to teach high school and looked into what it would take to certify as an English teacher. But it proved impractical. When I finished the long term, sub job, I began working in the main office at Brighton, still part time and stayed there until the end of the year. That job ended as well, but in the fall I was hired by Terry Price, the CTE (Career and Technical Education) Coordinator at Brighton and I worked at that job for 13 years. In the spring of 2012, the secretary position at Brighton High School opened up. I had been toying with the idea of working full time and this opportunity seemed ideally suited to me. I knew the people, I was familiar with the operation of the Counseling Center, it was at the school I knew and loved and it was full time work. I applied and got the job. I began working in this new capacity at the end of July in 2012. I thought that I knew what was going on, but discovered that it was different and challenging in ways that my CTE job had not been. However, generally speaking I enjoyed what I was doing and the people that I was working with. There was one disappointing development. When the dust settled on the hire, I discovered that the position was a demotion and a pay cut. I called the district and was told that they were grandfathering out the secretary position. It had been a Lane 2, but new hires would be assigned Lane 1. I was kind of bitter about this—but it was fait accompli. I ended up making about the same amount full time as I had been making at ¾ time at my previous job, maybe slightly more. But I was getting benefits and there was a small retirement starting to accrue—so I just pressed on. Allyson Hanks had been the head counselor at Brighton High School for as many years as I had been there. She left the year that I started as secretary to be on the development team for the new Corner Canyon High School. In the spring she came to me and encouraged me to apply as the secretary to the counseling center at that high school. At first I dismissed it out of hand—I was two miles away from Brighton, I liked the individual counselors I was working with, I had been a Brighton for years and years, it was my boundary school, my children had attended there, I knew the faculty and staff and it would be a lateral move. I couldn’t get excited about it. Then Allyson came to me and said that they were listing the Counseling Center Secretary job as a Lane 4 and that I should apply. That would be a significant difference in pay for the same job and it was an offer that I couldn’t resist. I wrote a request to transfer to my principal, Charisse Hilton. I explained that I had taken a pay cut and a demotion to work as the Counseling Center secretary and with an offer for a Lane 4, I felt it was an opportunity that I should investigate. She emailed me back and said that she had signed my request for transfer, but that all secretarial jobs at different schools were at the same Lane and pay scale so there would not be competition for employees between schools. She assured me that the job at Corner Canyon would not be a Lane 4, but a Lane 1 as it was a Brighton. I forwarded that email to Allyson. It turned out that Charisse was partly right. Eventually the Corner Canyons job was listed at a Lane 2—this was a surprise for me because in truth, my job at Brighton has been posted at the wrong land. I should have been a Lane 2 all year, but no one at Brighton was minding the store. They had known that I took a pay cut and a demotion, but no one had gone to bat from me and my own efforts had been fruitless. Allyson did go to the HR advisor over this area and they took a look at my hire sheets and discovered that in fact I was being underpaid and at the wrong lane. I got emails on that day from Charisse and from the secretary at HR advising me that I had been paid at the wrong level and that I was being promoted and they were going to give me the difference in pay for the seven months that I had been working below my pay grade. Interestingly, it was not my counseling staff or my local principal that advocated for me. It was Allyson, my friend, former colleague, and potentially future employer who went to them and said Kathie is a Lane 1—why? It was Allyson who took and interest and a concern for my situation. I was very grateful. It was for this reason that I began to seriously entertain the idea of joining the Corner Canyon High School Counseling staff and the secretary. I knew that it was going to be a lateral move, but I was encouraged by Allyson, by Sally Matsen and Dina Kohler (counselors at Brighton)—by staff and faculty at Brighton who were also leaving to go to Corner Canyon and so I continued to further my application. I submitted the paper work and then signed up for an interview time. At the interview, the vibe given off by the interview team—Mary Bailey, Brian McGill, Allyson Hanks, Wayne Dittmore and Kathy Hilton, was so warm and inviting and I felt so good about the prospect of working for them that I couldn’t resist accepting the offer which was extended to me about 1½ hours after the interview was complete.

As the year ended, I had a few regrets about leaving Brighton, but as I have assumed the spot at Corner Canyon High School in the beautiful and spacious Counseling Center here, I have had no regrets about the change. And I listen to book-on-CD as I drive to work—so the extra drive time about fifteen minutes more than the six minutes it used to take, is quite pleasant.

On Wednesday morning at about 8:30 a.m. Camille delivered a 9 lb. 13 oz boy by C-section. We went to visit them at about 1 o'clock to see our first grandbaby. They have named him Jonathan Paul Kern. And, of course, we think that he is the best baby in the world. Here are some photos of the new baby, his family (with his parents, Philip and Camille) and the proud grandparents, including me, who hopes to be called Grannie in the great Lauper tradition. (My mother's mother was my Grannie and my mother has been Grannie to our four children.)

READING ALOUD

The Reading Mother
I had a Mother who read to me
Sagas of pirates who scoured the sea,
Cutlasses clenched in their yellowed teeth,
“Blackbirds” stowed in the hold beneath.

I had a Mother who read me lays
Of ancient and gallant and golden days;
Stories of Marmion and Ivanhoe,
Which every boy has a right to know.

I had a Mother who read me tales
Of Gelert the hound of the hills of Wales,
True to his trust till his tragic death,
Faithfulness blent with his final breath.

I had a Mother who read me the things
That wholesome life to the boy heart brings --
Stories that stir with an upward touch,
Oh, that each Mother of boys were such!

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Chests of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I, you can never be --
For I had a Mother who read to me.

~ Strickland Gillilan

For Mother’s Day this year Erika gave me a piece of framed art which included the final stanza of The Reading Mother by Strickland Gillilan. Gillilan who lived from 1869-1954 expressed in that poem the value of reading aloud. I enjoyed that blessing in my childhood, and passed it on to my children, I hope. Now it is interesting to read what the New York Times has to say about the fine art of reading out loud.



THE NEW YORK TIMES
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 16, 2009

Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past. Consider audio books. An enormous number of Americans read by listening these days — listening aloud, I call it. The technology for doing so is diverse and widespread, and so are the places people listen to audio books. But from the perspective of a reader in, say, the early 19th century, about the time of Jane Austen, there is something peculiar about it, even lonely.

In those days, literate families and friends read aloud to each other as a matter of habit. Books were still relatively scarce and expensive, and the routine electronic diversions we take for granted were, of course, nonexistent. If you had grown up listening to adults reading to each other regularly, the thought of all of those solitary 21st-century individuals hearkening to earbuds and car radios would seem isolating. It would also seem as though they were being trained only to listen to books and not to read aloud from them.

It’s part of a pattern. Instead of making music at home, we listen to recordings of professional musicians. When people talk about the books they’ve heard, they’re often talking about the quality of the readers, who are usually professional. The way we listen to books has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient.

But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

No one understood this better than Jane Austen. One of the late turning points in “Mansfield Park” comes when Henry Crawford picks up a volume of Shakespeare, “which had the air of being very recently closed,” and begins to read aloud to the young Bertrams and their cousin, Fanny Price. Fanny discovers in Crawford’s reading “a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.” And yet his ability to do every part “with equal beauty” is a clear sign to us, if not entirely to Fanny, of his superficiality.

I read aloud to my writing students, and when students read aloud to me I notice something odd. They are smart and literate, and most of them had parents who read to them as children. But when students read aloud at first, I notice that they are trying to read the meaning of the words. If the work is their own, they are usually trying to read the intention of the writer.

It’s as though they’re reading what the words represent rather than the words themselves. What gets lost is the inner voice of the prose, the life of the language. This is reflected in their writing, too, at first.

In one realm — poetry — reading aloud has never really died out. Take Robert Pinsky’s new book, “Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud.” But I suspect there is no going back. You can easily make the argument that reading silently is an economic artifact, a sign of a new prosperity beginning in the early 19th century and a new cheapness in books. The same argument applies to listening to books on your iPhone. But what I would suggest is that our idea of reading is incomplete, impoverished, unless we are also taking the time to read aloud.

Horse Ride, Birthday, Enrichment and Visitors

Two weeks have passed since I wrote, so I need to do a little catch up on what has been happening in our household and in my life.

In my work capacities, it has been a very busy time. This time of year is when the Career Center staff must qualify students who anticipate taking Concurrent Enrollment classes next year. Students who want to take Math 1010, and/or 1050 and/or 1060 and those who want to take English 1010 from Salt Lake Community College must take a College Placement Test (CPT). In order to take the CPT they must be a registered student at Salt Lake Community College. So my colleagues and I have been calling students to the Career Center and giving them instructions on how to register on line and we (actually only I have been doing this part) have been creating a spread sheet with all the pertinent information on it so that we can call students who have Math or English this trimester out of class, and which class, and create assignments for those who will come and test one of three days after school. It has been a long and labored process, and now that I have distributed the assignments to the teachers who will excuse their students out of class to come and test, more students have come in with their completed registrations and so my lists are now inaccurate, hmmm. Testing is what I will be doing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this coming week: Testing students each period during the day, and after school – an untimed test that may keep me at school until 5:00 p.m. And then I will have to organize the lists so that we will know how many sections of each of the classes we will need to build for next year. Enough of that.

Fortunately my life is made up of other things besides CPT Testing, thank goodness. On March 28, and now that seems like a long time ago, I went with Paul on a day ride with the Back Country Horsemen. We met at mile marker 10 out in the West Desert beyond Cedar Fort, and rode for about 2½ hours to an abandoned cabin in the foothills above the desert floor. We could see part of the Tooele Army Depot or (something like that) from the foothills. In comparison with the ride Paul went on last month, it was much better, there were no “terribly inexperienced” and no “misbehaving” horses and so there were no unplanned rodeos. I am probably the most inexperienced rider among the group, but Indy is the perfect horse for me, he is smart and experienced and accommodating to an “inexperienced” rider like me. When we got to the cabin everyone dismounts and has lunch and visits and then we ride back to the trailers. We got back at about three o’clock and then had to drive back to SLC and drop off the horses and then return home. It is really a full day. We left at about 7:30 in the morning.

Sunday March 29th was Paul’s birthday. Since no children are living at 8786 Oak Valley with us at the moment, there was no one but me to wish Paul a Happy Birthday!, but we had a nice breakfast and went to church. Paul got calls from his siblings and mother and we had a festive occasion at Grannie and Granddad’s on Sunday evening. Mom had organized the regular “birthday” dinner for those celebrating March birthdays, and in addition to the Salt Lake, Utah County contingent, Ben Dailey (recent from his mission) was coming from Rexburg to join the group and reconnect with “Gates” relatives. Because he was coming, Erika joined him. Peter came from Provo, (Philip and Camille were to join us as well, but Philip fell ill on Sunday and they didn’t make it.)So Paul had a nice group of family members to wish him a Happy Birthday. I made birthday cakes to take to the dinner, and Mom served an Italian Dinner with Lasagna, green salad and garlic bread. It was such a large group this time—Grannie and Granddad, Stephen and Steve, Paul and I, Peter and Erika, Emily, Laura, Jon, Gabrielle, and Ben, Merrick, Philip and Landen, and Ted Bushman—that we were divided between two tables. Those born before 1980 were in the kitchen at the kitchen table and those born after 1980 were in the dining room. The “older adults” had a nice visit in the kitchen, while the “young adults” seemed to be enjoying themselves in the dining room. After dinner we all came in the living room where we sang “Happy Birthday”, played by Granddad in F# major complete with glissandos, twice to commemorate both Paul’s and Steve’s birthdays, followed by some gift opening. After some visiting some of the family members departed and Erika, Ben and Peter were left. After some more visiting they left. Erika and Ben had driven nearly four hours to be at dinner for about 2¼ hours and then left to drive home nearly another four hours. It was lovely to have them as part of the events. We gave Erika instructions to call us when she arrived in Rexburg, which she did sometime around 1:00 a.m.

On Tuesday, March 31, I was one of the participants in our Enrichment Evening and annual Relief Society Birthday Party. The Enrichment Leader had organized a “Relief Society Around the World” event. Sisters who had experience with the Relief Society Organization in countries other than the United States were invited to give a five minute presentation about one or more of their experiences. They were also asked to provide a centerpiece on a table for the evening. This meeting was to include dinner and so the organizers had set up eight round tables, each one assigned to one of the participants. Some of the sisters were like me and had lived abroad as adults, others had served missions in foreign countries, and others had ties of one kind or another. The countries represented were: Germany, Belgium/France (that was me), Holland, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Chile, The Philippians, and Micronesia. I told two anecdotes about my experiences in Belgium. The first was about my first homemaking meeting in Belgium, where I learned about spoons. In Europe generally, there are two sizes of spoons, huge and tiny. There are “coffee” spoons, short handled and tiny bowled, designed to stir hot drinks, but not to eat with and “tablespoons” usually bigger than our American soupspoons. I told about how the first meeting, where they were serving macaroni and cheese, I sat my two boys, ages six and three at a table where they were expected to eat with what I thought of as serving spoons. It was a cultural difference, to be sure, and the sisters produced some coffee spoons for the children, but I sat in amazement as I watched refined European sisters eating with huge spoons. Since then I have purchased my own set of silverware from Europe and we have coffee spoons and tablespoons and when friends of my children eat with us, they always comment on what big spoons we have. The other story I told was about the celebration our Liege Ward held in commemoration of the 150 years of Relief Society in 1992. The sister who was president of our Relief Society at the time wanted a deluxe cake decorated in blue and gold for the occasion. She purchased food coloring from England and asked me to come early to help her decorate the cake. I knew that blue food coloring was going to make an obnoxious color dark or light, but she insisted on dark and the bilious blue that was produced was hardly appetizing, but decorating I did, and at the end of the luncheon there were piles of blue frosting on each plate. Some things just don’t work in other cultures. Blue frosting was apparently one of them.

This week produced the delight of having Liza in town from Monday night to Friday morning, and so I got to have a little slice of time with her. We met for lunch on Wednesday and then I went over to Grannie and Granddad’s on Thursday night to visit as well. We had lunch at Paradise Bakery and a nice chat that seemed too short, and so off I went on Thursday evening. Paul and I had planned to go to the cabin for the weekend, and after I arrived at Grannie and Granddad’s house, Paul called from our house saying that there was a huge puddle of something on the floor of the garage where the car had been and that he was coming to get me when I was ready to come home and we were going to take the car directly to the dealership. So I visited with Liza and Grannie and Granddad for a while, we talked about the upcoming Family Reunion among other things and about AP English, and then Paul came and off we went.

With the difficulties with the car and the unsettled weather, we decided to stay home for Conference weekend, and we have watched the sessions in the comfort of our home. Paul went down to Provo on Saturday night, picked up Philip in Eagle Mountain and then met up with Peter at the Marriott Center. He had a nice visit with the boys and I stayed at home and finished up the ironing. We will be going up to the cabin next weekend, probably leaving on Thursday afternoon and coming home on Saturday. We will be bringing Erika home with us. She finishes up school on the 9th and the 10th is her last day of work. She wants to be back home on Saturday evening so that she can see Peter in Humor-U down in Provo. It will be a busy weekend.