These Difficult Wonderful times

 Christmas is over and the year is nearly done! Yea! Well, mostly.  I'm in a minority here and I acknowledge my blessedness, but there have been lots of good parts of this year too, and also, I'm a little superstitious.  If we keep moaning about how hard this year has been, aren't we asking for another shoe to drop?  I actually feel that our culture has gotten so accustomed to comfort and ease, as a whole, that we are inclined to have tantrums when faced with real difficulty.  I keep harking back to the Great Depression, the World wars, the 1918 influenza epidemic, even the turmoil of the 1960's that I personally remember.  I really don't think most of us are suffering as badly as many people were then.  Again, I have it very easy. I know this.  Here, I'll show you.  

Those roses indicate another year with my amazing husband.  That's 41 years!  Makes me seem old. Oh wait, I am! But we're so very blessed to still have each other.  Our ward has many older people who have lost a spouse so I count this blessing daily.

There were shortages for a short while at the start of the stay at home order.  With our food storage, we lacked for nothing.  A neighbor who has a large family ran out of toiled paper...inexplicably one of the first and most acute shortages, so I gave her some of ours.  I was surprised to find it more difficult than expected to share.  I still had plenty for six months, plus I know I could have figured alternatives if necessary, but I still had to push myself to share my extra.  Then a sweet senior sister gave us some of hers to share.  Again, so blessed by her generous example.

My Darling sister invited my 90 year old Mom to visit her in Colorado.  Mom was thrilled to go see her and her new house and get out of our Az heat so I flew up with her and visited for a couple of days.  I'm blessed to have such good family. Again we were blessed that none of us got ill from our travel and increased exposure.

She cooked us an amazing dinner!

The view from her deck!

We had a fun visit, saw her town, and then a month later she flew home with Mom and visited us.  

I put a plant in my new planter! I like that it looks like hair.

For Alicia's birthday, her husband invited her sisters to surprise her with a short visit.   It was wonderful, such fun to hug and visit with them. 

Scott fixed a gourmet dinner of steak and lobster.

The sisters made the cake!  It looks like one from a magazine and was delicious!

  

The summer was long and hot but we sure have gorgeous sunsets.  This is a detail of the smoke stack at the temple which has been under renovation the last couple of years.  Rod had joked that they were going to put an angel Moroni on it and so was planning on painting it with the angel.  He had me photograph it and found a surprising amount of detail in the tower.  

Since we didn't get to have our trip to Yellowstone this year, we planned a Quarantine family photo, a collage of pictures with matching masks.  We searched for fabric, even on line and didn't find any we liked so we found marked down pajama sets and used the fabric from them to make masks.  Then we sent the masks to each family and got photos back.  We have such good kids.

Aren't they great!

Lately, Rod has been working on reorganizing his den/studio.  It's looking great!

Those glasses are precious.  Our youngest step grandson got some money to spend on a souvenir at a gift shop.  When he saw these, he insisted he wanted to use his $ to buy them for Poppop.  We were so touched.  

Rod has gotten back into making journals, for missionaries.  This is one he just gave to it's new owner. 

Rod took our nephew hiking.  Kaleb is my youngest sister's son...he's the age of our grandkids.  He enjoys hiking, often going with missionaries so Kaleb felt all grown up.  It's a big achievement for him.

Collin is another hiking partner and friend. He's a former Mesa missionary we've adopted.

I've got pumpkins in the garden!

Rod's Aunt Mona died during this pandemic.  I think the hardest part for her family was not being allowed to be with her as she struggled and died.  Rod was asked to speak at the funeral and we hope we were able to help comfort Tony a little.

The ceramics studio had on line classes, which I took and enjoyed, but I sure miss the wheel and am anxious to get back to those classes. Here are some planters I made for Alicia.  Her house is almost a forest lately.

I made some more oil lamps too.

We went over to Alicia's to help move a new sofa for her on Sunday a week before Thanksgiving.  She mentioned that Ellie was sick but we weren't too worried.  Then Alicia got sick too, got tested and they were both positive for covid.  The Tue after we both started to feel a little bit sick, so went the Fri before Thanksgiving and got tested.  Our symptoms were mild, low fever, cough, achy and tired with a notable headache but we decided that it was too risky to travel if we were sick, so we canceled our trip to Seattle.  We were quite bummed.  It's tradition!!! But it turned out to be a good thing because we were positive for THE VIRUS. I felt like it was anticlimactic.  At least we are now immune....maybe.  We had our own little Thanksgiving dinner.  It was interesting to realize that it's the first time we've ever had Thanksgiving with just the two of us.  We were almost completely over most of it but couldn't really taste much....kind of a sad thing at Thanksgiving.  On the other hand we were not gasping for air in the hospital.  How can we complain.

We had my usual birthday dinner at Golden Corral.  Only 2 families came.  Donnie is very protective of Mom.  It was still fun.  We have a wonderful Family!

We finished off the year with gingerbread houses.  These kids can pretty much do it themselves now.

Alicia had a dinner and talent show at her house the 23rd,  Keith had dinner at his house Christmas eve, and Todd an ice skating party and waffle supper at his house on Johnmass day.   

The spouses of course made such activities possible.  Thank you to all for making our Christmas wonderful. 

 Every year has trials and sorrows.  Every year has triumphs and joys. Mixed in is a large dose of mundane and hard work.  I chose to focus on our overwhelming blessings.  The Gift of our Savior is the greatest treasure of all, for it is a gift that lasts beyond this life and makes our joy triumph over any sorrows. Thank You!

2020 What?

Yes, I know.  The year is half over and this is my first post, but you see there have been problems.  It started out with my new laptop computer which we got for Christmas.  It seems technology keeps progressing...and I don't.  I had trouble loading my photos onto this computer.  I finally got the ones on my camera's current sd card to load,  then I kept trying to get the older ones to load.  Not working well.  I've got about half of them to work.  It was proposed that the sd cards are aging.... but my camera won't use the fancy new ones that sweet Geneva sent for mother's day so I suspect the age of the camera is the real problem....or maybe the age of the person trying to use it???  Then in April came the pandemic. It's strange to think that in Jan and Feb we hadn't heard anything about it and expected a 'normal' year.  So now we are in the midst of "these trying times" trying to find the "new normal" and learning new ways to connect in spite of "social distancing".  (I'm getting very tired of hearing those phrases!) Outside of missing my ceramics classes and not getting to take the trips we had planned, we have not suffered at all.  We  had plenty of toilet paper stored (it was the first thing to run short), plenty of food and no real difficulties finding anything we wanted if we kept looking.  Rod has frankly enjoyed not having our regular church meetings, and there is a real sweetness to our 'home Sacrament meetings'.  We miss visiting kids and going to the temple.  It kills me not to hug people. Don't tell but I have rebelled and given a few hugs under special circumstances.  Our kids have been able to 'work from home' so that helps greatly too.  Our 2nd son got a new job in Jan which could have been problematic, but his company decided to have employees take 1 week furloughs once a month for a while instead of firing people.  This ended up a blessing as he was able to work full time on the remodeling of their 'new' home  during those weeks.  .We did go over and help for a week.  I have been called as a counselor in the Relief Society during this time.  I expect it will be more work once we are back to having meetings, but so far, its not too hard. (I'm probably not doing it right)  We are having more difficulty getting our exercising done with the gym closed.  Yup, we're gaining weight.  I carry a bandanna in my purse for the stores that require face masks.  I have postulated that our glaring sun, high heat, and very low humidity will do more to prevent contagion than most of the other measures being tried.  My pride will get me in trouble, I'm sure.

While the weather was cool, we went on small hikes and bicycle rides.  I very much enjoyed those.  We miss the pool now that it's getting hot.  Here come the photos.

The Superstitions are still beautiful

The flowers were just starting to bloom.

Why does 'the view' never photograph well?

I was fascinated by the colors in the grasses as the wind shifted them...like silk.

Keeping our social distance was easy there.

 Birthdays still come and go.

It's nice having Todd closer so visits are easier.

I made some birthday cakes for Alicia's kids.

I did get some things back from ceramics before they shut down.  I like to give stuff I've made as gifts but I'm getting low now.   Sooo Sad!