Travel and Family

The blessings and burdens of being a Relief Society president Along with my commitment to write regularly on my blog, I’ve also made another goal this year and that’s to visit with at least 52 of the sisters in my ward by the year’s end. Like the blog, it may not be exactly one a week – I hope it’s actually more on most weeks, but that way, with vacations and illnesses, I still want to say at the end of the year, that I’ve visited 52 sisters in their homes this year. I’ve keep a list of the sisters either I’ve visited either alone, with the entire presidency or at least one other member of the presidency. So far this year, among those that we’ve visited are a woman with 3 young special needs children whose husband has been unemployed for at least a year. Another sister, a convert, just recently started coming back to church after several moves and life found her in inactivity. She’s raising a grandchild as her own, has cervical cancer, and works nights as a janitor. Another sister was ...

Ontario Reign Hockey One of the last times I went ice skating, I broke my tailbone (yea, falling again) and couldn't run -- or slouch -- for a year. So, I'm not so free form on the ice any longer. I did try outside ice skating at the Riverside Festival of Lights a couple of years ago and stayed upright the entire session. But watching other people who know how to combine skating, hitting a puck with sticks and, best of all, fighting -- all while on slippery ice -- now that's worth the price of admission! But, one of the nice things about my new job is that we place ads with the Citizen's Bank Arena and with The Reign so our company gets tickets every once in a while for the employees to use. Last week on Wednesday night, after a long day at work, it was a fun mid-week break to kick the old routine and go on up to the arena and watch a fun hockey game with John, Hayley and Ryan. Our seats were on the third row just a bit off the center of the ice. The Reign beat the tea...

April, Sarah and I signed up for the Fontana Half Marathon in June. So, with that, we have to train and train and train. Sarah and Heidi trained and ran the St. George Marathon back in 2003 before either of them began their families. I've run several 5Ks before and 3.2 miles is about the farthest I've ever run up until last week. I found a half marathon training plan on-line which we're making a decent attempt at following. Until Saturday, all the runs on the plan have been within our comfort zones of 4 miles or under. This was the first week we plotted out and ran a route over 5 miles. Heidi, April and I met at Heidi's house out in Perris on Saturday and began our big circle route . Once we reached a certain point, you just have to finish....that's why I like big circles better than "out and back" routes. The five miles took us an hour because I'm still pretty slow at the run and I still need to build in walking breaks now and again -- e...

On Sunday, after dinner, we decided to have an "Unbirthday" Party. Some of the grandkids have been watching and reading Alice in Wonderland and, since we have no birthdays between Carter's in December and William's in March (and we happened to have a large cake left over from Ward Conference), we decided this would be a fun idea. We started by singing "Happy Unbirthday" but it sounded pretty bad. I've never even seen the Disney version of the cartoon so didn't even know how it was supposed to sound -- but, really, that wouldn't have mattered anyway. (If you've heard me sing, you know what I'm talkin' about.) The fun part is that every kid around the table got to blow out candles. (I buy them in bulk at Smart & Final. They come in 500 packs there so you can birthday or unbirthday party all you want!) Asher asked to have his picture taken and then did this pose up all by himself and then smiled when he saw the results. (He must kno...