What a great weekend! It was so nice to hear that R&R have a contract on their house and that Ryan got home early from his trip. Then it was great to know that Joel is having some success as ward mission leader and gave a talk in church yesterday. Jim will be heading to Tucson this weekend to buy a gently used car, which I hope will be some fun in their busy and stressful life. It's fun to hear about Savannah playing t-ball and Seth playing football and Andrew playing trucks, even though he prefers his trucks to talking to me on the phone :). And Julie and Jim seems to be surviving little Logan's insomnia and getting through school. Last week Laurie called to let me know her angelic week ended on a scary Friday the 13th, when one of her charges got lost visiting another classroom. (Ask her for the details.) Then it's always inspiring to hear of Melissa and Jared and their training program plus having friends to dinner every Sunday. What hospitality! And the posts of baby development are always awe-inspiring.
My most pressing concern right now is preparing a Christmas program for the Young Men/Young Women to perform at 3 rest homes and the church Christmas party. As always, Dad has a wealth of creative ideas - he should be doing it, not me! But it's been fun to get the Christmas spirit early by reading through lots of plays, cantatas, stories, carols and their history, and poems. One story Dad found in the newspaper this week exemplified the Christmas spirit better than anything. Did you read of the Navy SEAL who threw himself on a grenade, saving the lives of 3-4 of his comrades? He was 25 years old. "Greater love hath no man than this..." Being in SD means you get to hear about many military exploits and the amazing heroism of these brave men and women.
I've been planning to join the Blue Star Mothers group in Escondido. A Blue Star Mom is one with a child in any branch of the military. The group supports the troops by organizing postcard/letter drives, care package drives, support for the families, etc. These groups have been around since WWI. There is also the Gold Star Mothers group if your child has been killed in action. During times of war, houses would have a small banner hanging in the front window with blue and/or gold stars representing the number of family members serving/having served in the armed forces. Speaking of World War I, have you read of the most unusual event in military history - the story of the 1914 informal truce between the German and British soldiers on Christmas Eve, when the soldiers laid down their arms and came out to exchange gifts, sing, play soccer? Read about it at snopes.com or just google it! It is amazing!

Cousins Camp was wonderful! Stay tuned for posts on the activities!

San Diego temple - you may have already seen this photo I took as I was leaving one night. But it was fun to add it to the blog and see that it worked! Yea!

Record high temperature in Escondido last Saturday: 112 degrees! The a/c has been out of order on two different days at work, as there are many places are struggling with the heat. Is this just an Al Gore publicity stunt for his movie?! Even at the mall on Saturday it was hot and sweaty, not cool at all. At work, I had a Snicker's bar in my desk that I cut into 5 pieces for a little treat every day. Well, with all the heat over the weekend, my Snicker's melted into a big goopy thing and the chocolate took on that dusty color of chocolate that's gotten too hot. But it's ok b/c it still tastes pretty good :)
I hope when you read the Ritter Troop blog that you check on Zachary's progress. 5 months in NICU! It makes you count your blessings, for sure, and stops you from whining about any little thing in your own life when you see what he and his parents are going through.
Anyway, the pool is pretty warm even with no heater. "Wish you were here!"

Hey! With many thanks to Jared O. for getting me going, I'm back on the blog. What an eventful month June was. With Howard in the hospital, as you know, and Lizzy arriving two weeks early but with too many big projects at work to be able to take some vacation to see her, it was a somewhat stressful month.
The trip to Salt Lake City for Michael and Jenn's wedding was great. Jenn manages a tanning salon and is the youngest of five children; Michael is pursuing his computer hardware job in SLC. He looked very happy in the temple and on the dance floor at the reception! The reception was casual with the groomsmen and bridesmaids wearing khaki pants/skirts and blue/hot pink polo shirts. Jenn and Michael were in the traditional gown and tux, but the reception was held in a big barn-like reception center. It was well attended and lots of fun! I even got to dance with both my sons (and Joel taught me the TRUE cha-cha) and Grandma got to dance with all the grandsons except Michael. What was he thinking, forgetting his grandma?!
One big highlight was dinner at the Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant with enough tasty cheese and chocolate to make everyone happy. I'm so glad we could also see the 1842 second edition of the Book of Mormon that Bill Brooke has. It's insured for a cool $1 million. See Ryan's or Mel's great photos if you can.

The Kyoto Prize dinner was last week and, as usual, it was quite a nice time. We've attended this the last 3 years. Long evening but great food and entertainment, including an 11!-yr old girl who played Chopin’s Fantasy in C# Minor. She’s already debuted with the Shanghai Symphony and other notable groups. And she had a delightful personality, too! A group with those big Oriental drums played, also, and we had a singer and dancing couple. Fun!

I missed talking to Ryan before he left on this trip because I got too engrossed in a medical show on hypothermic cardiac arrest, where drs cool your blood so low that your heart stops, so they can repair, for example, brain aneurysms. You are clinically dead for 15-20 minutes, then they warm your blood and your heart usually starts beating spontaneously (or they shock it). One of the young women who underwent this procedure had a near-death experience where she "popped out" of her body and could tell the doctor, later, what was going on elsewhere in the room; then she saw a light which grew brighter and brighter and her grandmother came to her and told her that she would be going back, which she soon did. Pretty interesting! The doctor said that with the brain that cold and metabolic activity so slow, he couldn't imagine that the brain could generate those images. Pretty amazing, huh!

I'm alone for a few days while Dad is in Los Angeles at a conference, which means I can play the piano as much as I want and play hookey from my other household tasks. We're going to visit Ryan and Rebecca the end of May, Memorial Day weekend, and taking Mom with us. I hope she'll fly out a few days before and stay a few days after.
At work we're celebrating the release of a new enhanced credit report and are blowing up balloons Wed, Thur, and Fri, putting them in bouquets and distributing them around the company. There's a crew of 6 of us doing this, so each morning we fill 300 balloons with helium. It's a fun project and a real change from sitting in a cubicle. Afterwards, we're treated to juice and bagels or muffins or croissants.
One of the new things I'm learning about at work is how to use XML (extensible markup language)files in SAS. XML is related to HTML, which you all know and love. I read XML For Dummies as a start. It's really hard to keep up on technology! Grandma says she's giving up and is not getting an iPod even though she knows it's cool.

Big night last night - I bought a scanner! Now Dad and I can scan in all the slides and photos, put them on CDs and add them to the current family history. Will Dad really be able to get rid of the slides after we scan them? Will we keep the slide projector? Oh, the questions posed by modern technology! What do you think we should do?

Unexpected guests!
Every day when I come home from work, the first thing I do is check the pool. After a couple of bad experiences where little animals fell in and drowned, my mind became subject to the fear that there might be a dead body in the pool. So you can imagine how amazing it was to part the curtains, half-expecting the worst, and find that Mr. and Mrs. Mallard Duck had flown in for a short stay in our luxurious spa and pool. At the time I saw them, they were resting on the spa edge where the water flows into the pool. Make Way for Ducklings is being re-enacted right here! No doubt it's nesting time, but with no fish or peanut-tossing passengers in boats, our pool wasn't very alluring. They flew off in a few minutes, leaving behind, on the pool bottom, evidence that they had swum around for a while. (The pool vacuum took care of it in short order.) What beautiful ducks they are!
Then this morning on the way to work on the 15, Dad saw, in Lake Hodges trees, a huge flock of cranes, numbering in the hundreds he thought. Also, some pelicans were interspersed. It made such an impression on him that he immediately and enthusiastically phoned to tell me about it.
Question: what do I do with the photos I've taken with my cell phone camera? Do I email them to myself?? I'm out of memory and can't take more pictures until I figure this out.

This weekend went way too fast. Friday night was a great night at the temple while poor Dad worked on the tax documents. Saturday, watching conference was wonderful and inspiring; then Dad took the tax stuff to work to fax to Austin (Don Flaten). Whew! What a relief to get that transferred to someone with the mind for it. So Dad didn't see the afternoon session, but for those who did, you may remember David F. Evans speaking. He's the husband of Dad's cousin - Aunt Edith's daughter. (It's just a coincidence that she married someone with her mother's maiden name. They're the ones who returned this year from serving as mission president in Japan. Also, our former bishop from Pasadena days, Keith Hilbig, was called to serve in the First Quorum of the Seventy. That was exciting to see.
Tonight we watched a Christopher Lowell show I'd taped and we got more enthused about finishing the house decorating. Dad's a natural artist.
Also, this weekend I'm monitoring a job at work whereby I'm processing credit reports for Long Beach Mortgage Company, a part of WAMU, or Washington Mutual, - all 230,210 for 2005 b/c they want to see the FICO scores. I get 35 per minute so it's going to take a good 4.5 - 5 days before I can even start pulling them into SAS for analysis. My boss at work is Peng Leong, who's from Australia but born and raised mostly in Malaysia. He's a real athlete and loves cricket and golf. Most of the other guys I work with are excellent cricket players: Prabakaran, Vinod, Ranga, Bhupadi, Sam Raj, Srinivas, Amit. Well, if you get the idea that we are run by foreigners, you're pretty accurate. They are all smart guys and very, very nice. But Peng's boss is John and he loves country music and playing basketball, so it's all good.
Jared volunteered to help me do some other things on the blog, but so far I'm pretty limited.
Next week we're performing our Easter cantata; I wish you all could hear it, it's so nice.

At last, I may have figured out how to post something. Last night I got home from San Francisco, after attending the SAS conference in the Moscone West Convention Center. What a great time! But I'll have to wait until later to write the details because work is pressing right now. Being away for a few days causes a build-up of actionable items!

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