Friday, October 31, 2008

Halloween Greetings

Hey everyone, Happy Halloween.  Lisa is in Disneyland, Di in NY with Stephen visiting her and Danny and Maretta in Philly celebrating the big baseball championship today.  Everyone else is in Salt Lake (I think).  Dad and I are going golfing this afternoon because he has the afternoon off.  We are looking forward to seeing the grandkids in their costumes tonight and maybe I can figure out how to post some pictures on this and will show you what they look like.  Bye for now.  Mom

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Who Misses Bama???


Who misses Bama???  I sure do.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

I can draw...who knew?



I was bored today while Danny chose to focus on his books instead of me (the nerve), so I decided to do something I've never done before...sketch. I took my headphones, blanket, drawing paper, pictures to draw, and bug spray out to our infested backyard and began. Two hours later I ended up with these. I thought they were pretty good (the originals look better than they do on here). Who knew I could draw? The first one is the boy I used to nanny, the second is the most adorable boy in my preschool class.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

We're getting a temple!!!

AHHHH!!! We are so excited for our temple!! We watched conference over the internet yesterday. Last conference we had a lot of problems watching it over the internet. Either we would get the wrong session or the broadcast would freeze, etc. Yesterday morning we were late getting conference started because we were talking Grant and Susan. We got it going about 10 min after it started but weren't sure if we had gotten the right session or not. We could tell that he was about to announce temples so we listened to see if we had gotten an old session or the current one. When he announce Philadelphia, Pennsylvania I started screaming and I think I hurt Danny when I grabbed his arm in excitement!

We couldn't be happier right now. I've always lived within 15 minutes of a temple and it has been so hard that almost as soon as I received my endowments we moved to a place where our temple is 3 hours away (or if we chose we could drive to the manhattan temple which is 2 1/2 hours away and pay $65 in tolls, parking, and gas). I'm embarrassed to say that we've only made the trip once. It's hard to take an entire Saturday off for the temple when your husband is ALWAYS studying.

They've already posted on our stake website the address for our new temple, and it's only 10-15 minutes away from us!! The church already owns the land. It's on the outskirts of center city. They were planning on building us a new chapel there for our ward to use, but now they are going to make it a temple/chapel like the one in Manhattan. I'm assuming since our ward was going to meet there before that our ward will still meet there when it's complete. That will bring a whole new meaning to going to church if it's attached to a temple! What a neat experience for us, hopefully. I'm hoping since we already have the land, and it's going to be a small temple that they will finish it quickly. We only have 2 1/2 more years here. I've always wished that I could work and serve in the temple during this time. I don't have kids and Danny is always busy, and this will probably be my only chance for years and years since mothers can't work at the temple while they have children living at home. My prayers have been answered and hopefully we'll be able to have lots of time to enjoy it. The Lord is so good to us!

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Sunday, September 28, 2008

This is a letter I wrote for Maretta's family newsletter

This is my third attempt at starting this letter and after realizing that if I updated everyone about what has going on since the last time I wrote I would be here all night. Instead I will just focus on the past week. Last Sunday we had our third visitors since we have lived in Philly. Maretta’s uncle Sid and cousin Remington spent the night at our house so that Sid could visit a specialist at the U of Penn hospital about his recent loss of smell. We very much enjoyed their company and were glad to put them up for the night as they put us up for the night a couple of months ago in New Jersey. It is great to have family so close by. Maretta prepared a wonderful meal and we all sat around talking for hours afterwards about a million different topics. It was interesting to hear Sid talk about his job working for the oil companies and his reasons why gas prices are so high and that big oil companies are not as evil as people would have you believe (except Citgo). Remington was excited about his mission call to Sacramento and still adjusting to wearing garments. We hope to have more visitors soon.

Monday and Tuesday was the day of my first test of the school year. Supposedly this block is the most difficult of the year and I can see why. They gave us an enormous amount to cover in the six weeks and it’s hard to prepare for the first test because you never know what they’re going to focus on. To celebrate, Maretta and I went out to Olive Garden for dinner and feasted on the never-ending pasta.

Wednesday was back to business as usual with a new case to study. They don’t mess around in med school I’ve realized. Our tests are always on a Monday because heaven forbid they gave us a weekend of nothing to study. Anyway, as a reward for finishing the exam I decided I would regrip my golf clubs. They still had the same grips on them as when I got them for graduating high school. I went to Dick’s sporting goods and purchased some grips, tape and solvent. I watched a few demonstrations of how to do it on youtube and felt like it should be an easy task. In fact, some of you reading this may have even done it before and can attest to the simplicity of it. I removed the old grips and cleaned off the shaft. I wrapped the double-sided tape around the shaft and removed the backing from the tape. Now the tricky part is to soak the tape and the inside of the new grip with a solvent. Mineral spirits work, but the guy at Dick’s convinced me to get the store brand. I sprayed it on and attempted to slide the grip over. I got the grip on about a half an inch and tried to slide it on like the dude on youtube so effortlessly demonstrated. I couldn’t budge it though. I pushed and pushed, but the grip was too flimsy and would collapse and the tape was too sticky. Even after I cut the tip to give it a bigger caliber it still wouldn’t glide. I had to give up before I drove myself crazy from frustration. I don’t claim to be a handy man, but I knew I should have been able to put these grips on and I could tell Maretta lost a lot of respect for me.

Friday, I took my clubs back to Dick’s and the guy that helped me felt bad that he had convinced me to get the tape and solvent from their store. He remembered that someone had complained to him before about the solvent or tape and regripped my clubs for free. He let me go to the back and watch him do it. Five minutes later my clubs were ready to go and I now had a good excuse for Maretta to gain back her respect.

Earlier on Friday we had another group meeting to discuss our case about a patient with liver disease. In honor of completing our first test and maybe since we were studying the effects of alcohol on the liver, our group decided to have a little group party. I made pretzels from a recipe that a lady in Jann’s neighborhood gave to Maretta and others brought hummus, beer, and donuts. Everyone enjoyed a bottle of beer (rootbeer for me) and we finished our discussions on the liver. The pretzels were a big hit and in fact Maretta is thinking about making them every Saturday and selling them in our neighborhood for some extra cash. She needs some money to pay off her latest purchase, a keyboard. She’s been diligently practicing ever since she got it yesterday. She can already play ode to joy and Fur Elise. Speaking of Maretta, today she was told she was being “promoted” from young women’s advisor to first counselor in the young women’s presidency. She’s excited to whip our young women in to shape and increase the attendance from 2 active girls. Maretta is also enjoying her job as a preschool teacher and we just found out that one of her student’s dad is a classmate of mine. So now we’re becoming better friends so that Maretta will give his daughter an A. Ok. I have to end this letter. We love and miss you all.

Danny and Maretta