Sunday in Alaska

Boyd let me take his photo in front of the church, as Bishop of the Rabbit Creek Ward. The spire of the Anchorage temple is behind. Boyd and Mary Ann live about a mile from the church and temple, so it takes only 5 minutes to get there.

Eric, Elissa, and Aaron wait in the hall outside the bishop's office.

Busy in the kitchen after church:


...while John...

...and Eric take a nap.

Amber demonstrates the hoped-for reaction of trick or treaters to her Halloween decorations in the doorway of their home.

Dinner! Yummy Alaskan salmon.

Here I am among the bears:

and John and I pose with the musk oxen, who have the deepest, plushest, softest fur imaginable.

One last picture with wildlife at the airport, and we were off for the night to Utah.

We got first class seats on our flight back, hooray! I can't sleep sitting up, however, so I worked on my werewolf notes and read Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Full Catastrophe Living." John slept some which was good since he has to teach today. I had my photos ready so I decided to upload them before I go to bed.

We couldn't decide what we liked the best--looking at the lot and the potential new house, listening to the family discuss their options, looking at sports photos by Eric and Boyd and art projects by Amber and Mary Ann, watching the girls play soccer and basketball, eating out Mexican and sushi (not at the same restaurant), eating Alaskan salmon caught by the family, hearing Boyd conduct sacrament meeting. Thanks to Rob for his flight benefits, and especially thanks to Boyd, Mary Ann, Eric, Aaron, Elissa, and Amber for having us in their home, talking with us, and entertaining us so well. I hope we make it back before another five years pass.

Anchorage! Day One

We are having a true Boyd & Mary Ann experience here (with Rob's Delta flight benefits picking up the cost of airfare). We arrived at 30 minutes after midnight, slept, and were up for Amber's YMCA basketball game at a local elementary school.

As you can see, it's a pretty intense spectator sport. The guy on the left of Aaron is in their ward, and is a Bennion, son of another John. Small (Mormon) world!

Here is why all the family's vehicles are out in the driveway, and why they are enthusiastically planning this...

...project, in the foothills above the city. They have put a bid in on a 4.39 acre property with a foundation, well, and graded drive already done. What a project! If I had several million dollars and an army of gardeners and landscapers, I'd go for it for sure. As it is, I told Mary Ann I would probably be showing up on their doorstop to help.

Here's Boyd and the magnificent view. My camera doesn't do justice to it. On a clear day you can see Denali on the right:


Here's the part of the foundation for the swimming pool and the exercise room:

Here's the view toward Cook Inlet:

Here's the view toward Anchorage (and Denali, 5 hours away by car, in this photo hidden in the clouds):

Eric, Mary Ann, Aaron, and Boyd inspect the property (John watches unenviously, having only this year finished landscaping our garden). Boyd's idea is to keep the grounds as wild as possible. There are forests, wetlands, hills, grassland, a stream--it's amazingly lovely. Mary Ann is thinking of keeping the original foundation and the three-story plan, and having a Bed & Breakfast.

On our way to Elissa's indoor soccer game, we stopped at Boyd's second PT location:

Boyd with some of his equipment:

Here are a couple of photos of Elissa's game. Part of the focus problem was because it was indoors and dim, but mostly it was because Elissa was always in motion. Hard to get a shot of her being still.


Aaron, Eric, and Amber support their sis:

We stayed up visiting and talking about architecture until late at night. The busy mom works late:

Tomorrow will be fun as we go to church (where Boyd is bishop) at a building on the same grounds as the Anchorage Temple. I'll have more pix then.

Chris' Fall Choir Concert

I made it to Chris' THS Acappella Choir concert on Thursday after work. He of course didn't tell me about it until late the night before, so we couldn't invite Grandma and Grandpa, and John was still feverish with his sinus infection, so he didn't go. I guess choral singing is not his favorite type of music, but I certainly enjoy hearing them perform.

Here are a couple of short clips for your listening pleasure. Well, the sound doesn't come through too well on my camera's microphone, but you get the idea.

News of the (whoops! past two) Week(s)

We were all set last weekend to spend a night at the sand dunes in west Juab County, but reports of freezing nights scared us off, despite John pish-poshing our pampered city-ness. So instead we met up in SLC for the afternoon before Chris' All-State Choir concert at the tabernacle. Rob, Betsy, Ethan, and Amy came with us to Temple Square and surrounds to look at the flowers and the new construction at City Creek. In the end the flowers were a bit scanty, having just been pulled up for the spring bulbs to be set (I presume), but the visit was still fun.

We spent some time in the two visitors' centers. When Betsy asked Ethan who this person was, he shouted, "JeeJee!"

John was very civilized and appropriate...

..until the urge for a nap overwhelmed him...

...below, in the most public spot in Salt Lake. "Would you lie down on the steps of St. Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican?" I said to him. "Or on the floor of the Taj Mahal? This is just the same." He is shameless.

It was fun to spend time with the kids.

I think maybe my pretty new blue and teal scarf was not quite as cool as I thought it was. No, the scarf is OK, it was the rest of me. Sigh.

Betsy, Ethan, and Snoopy. Snoopy has his own sign. Ethan talks and talks, orally and with his hands (ASL). Maybe we'll learn sign as he does.

Ethan and Auntie Amy:

Rob at one of the new fountains next to Deseret Book at the new City Creek development. While there we saw John's new book (one of a collection of essays on Fathers).

Betsy, Amy, Rob, and Ethan skipped out on the concert, but that was OK because we got to sit by Liz and Alan
and Tana and J.Lynn. In fact we ate dinner before the concert at the nearby JBs with Tana, J.Lynn, and Shane, who was also singing.

They wouldn't let us take photos during the concert, so this one was taken beforehand, and about a third of the choir is missing. J.Lynn took pictures and video during the afternoon practice session, however. Here is a video of part of one of their songs. Pretty impressive!

J.Lynn took this photo of Chris. Liz and Alan's Frost is bottom right.

We did our writing group the next day at Charlotte England's cabin. I took my camera but forgot to take photos. We have been participating in the writing group for twenty years now.

This week was my first chance to swim since surgery (since a long while before that, actually. A side effect of endometrial cancer is that you're not so comfortable swimming). Anyway, it was great! I don't know why the pool is so underused in the evening, but there have only been four or five other people in the pool whenever we've gone. I think it has helped get me off my metabolic plateau. I've now lost 41 lbs. Even though my blood sugar is still above normal, it's much better than it was right after surgery. We'll see how it progresses. My blood pressure is usually between 110-125/70-80. I went to visit mom and dad at the farm on Friday and all we talked about was medical stuff. I am now officially Old.

Several of us, including Sergene, went to see RED on Saturday. Extremely silly. I've still got a crush on Bruce Willis though. Then John, Sergene, and I went to see The Magic Flute at BYU. Here for your listening pleasure, is the Queen of the Night.

Into October

John, Sergene, and I went for a picnic at Nunn's Park today between conference sessions. Thanks to Mary Ann J. for the picnic basket--isn't it cute?

The reds are not as red as usual, probably because of the lack of rain this month. We're supposed to get rain starting tonight and continuing all week, however.

Yesterday the three of us drove the Alpine Loop, starting in American Fork Canyon, and ended up having sandwiches at Sundance. I forget how breathtaking that drive is (I also forgot my camera).

Friday John and I took off for Detroit, leaving home at 4:50 a.m., in hopes of catching a connecting flight to either Manchester NH or Burlington VT so we could go visit Janet and her husband John P. Unfortunately, by the time we didn't make our standby flight to Manchester, we also realized that we wouldn't be making any other flights, including flights through Atlanta or NYC, flights to Boston and drive 3 and 1/2 hours, or any leg of any flight home on Sunday. So we waited around for the perfectly open flight back to SLC that evening. While in the airport John worked on his computer in peace, I walked from one end of the (interminable) terminal to the other end and back for my exercise, we had a nice Mexican lunch and a nice sandwich dinner, and we each got to watch our separate movie in the relatively roomy bulkhead seats on the way back, so it wasn't a total loss. In fact it was at least mildly fun.

But we decided that our best use of Rob's free flight perk (or is it perq, for perquisite? I never know how to spell it) is to decide when we have flexible time and then look around to see which direct flights to whatever city are open on the day we want to leave and on the day we want to come back--and by open, I mean at least 30 unsold seats. That leaves a lot of options but requires us to be a little more flexible and spontaneous than we're used to. Then if we don't make any of the flights, we just go out to lunch in Salt Lake and drive home. Easy!

The other nice thing in our lives right now is refinancing into the new extremely low mortgage interest rates. Just when I was starting to panic at my inability to save $1K per month for my share of the family budget when we're in England next year, we looked into refinancing our mortgages, and discovered that we can move from 5.5% on our main mortgage and from 8% on our second mortgage to a combined rate of 3.37% and drop our monthly expenses by about $1K! Whew! And if we pay a couple hundred of that directly into the principal every month, we'll be debt-free even faster! I don't know why we didn't think of it before, except we're both financially sub-literate. The only trouble is we have four separate and mutually exclusive ideas for that extra money every month. Or maybe I mean overlapping. Four separate places to spend the same money, anyway. So we'll probably still go bumbling cluelessly along as usual, but with a little more financial flexibility.

I'm still doing well with my fitness and diabetic eating program, although it's harder to not eat more carbs since John has started making bread. I know, isn't that great! He's already taken over the drying and bottling of produce from the garden (I'll have to take a picture of our fruit room), but now he's taking up baking! He made his first batch--five loaves--of whole wheat bread today, and it's delicious. And he cleans the house at least as thoroughly as I do and does his own laundry. Soon the only homemaking advantage I have will be that I can (and do) make a better bed. I don't mind.

Tomorrow we're having his birthday party by eating out at a Korean restaurant and coming home for angel food cake with 7 Minute Frosting. Yeah, yuck, but he loves it.

The West Desert

John and I have been planning a three-day, two-night trip west through the desert into Nevada by pickup to do research for our respective writing projects (mine is a novel about fundamentalist Mormon werewolves with a commune in eastern Juab County, and his is a 19th Century polygamist murder mystery), but alas, we shredded a tire on the gravel road between Lookout Pass and Simpson Springs and didn't feel confident enough of our spare to continue west.

It was a beautiful night, full moon, only a little cool. We decided to go on the five miles or so to Simpson Springs to camp and then come back home the next morning.

John, competent as always, changed the tire and we went on our way. You can't tell in the pix, but the moon was like a spotlight and the desert was magical.

Here he starts supper--corn on the cob, fresh peaches and tomatoes, hot chocolate, cheesy potato soup. He cut up a can of spam into the soup, a true desert-rat touch. Yum!

We slept on our cots under the juniper tree.


John told me stories about cattle drives between Greenjacket and Riverbed from when he was a kid. They would often camp at Simpson Springs, which had a pony express station and a glass-bottomed pond for swimming (glass-bottomed with broken beer bottles, and filled in now).

Here's John and Table Mountain:

We went for a short walk back up to the foothills. Here's a higher view of Table Mountain:

Yes! I was there!

Pretty rocks for the waterfall garden:

Driving out this morning, we saw 25-30 antelope:


John at Lookout:

From Lookout you can see Mt. Nebo in the farthest distance. The three peaks are always recognizable, north, south, east, or west, even by air as you're flying home:

Near Vernon we saw a golden eagle on a power line. What a beauty.

At home again, we're bottling tomato juice and peaches, so the day is not wasted. We'll make the longer trip later.