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Here's a very funny conversation I "witnessed" between Glo and John who were waiting to fly to Utah together (I was part of the group message).  John was ... ahem .... busy at the moment, and the plane was boarding.  Glo was a bit stressed, to say the least.  She figured the best way to tell him to hurry up was to text him, because we all know that John is never without his phone. Between the auto correct and Glo's incompetence in spelling, this was quite hilarious. Add caption

When I asked John to sing that song for me (so I could get the lyrics), John sang it more like "Hart Breaka, Dream Maka.  So, Bell Ringa.... A couple of months ago, I was approached by my visiting teacher, asking if I wanted to join a local bell choir, sponsored by the local Catholic church.  Absolutely! Seriously, Tuesday evenings are the highlight of my weekday schedule.  I love going to bell ringing rehearsals!  I have the cutest stand partner (I'd be surprised if she was more than 100 pounds)--maybe that's why she rings the smallest bells, although I don't know what my excuse is....  This choir has been growing for almost 30 years now through generous donations of members of the church--it's amazing to see the number of bells they have purchased over the years. The people are so friendly, and the music is just beautiful.  I'm in the beginning choir (or the newb choir, as Mark would say), mostly because I don't have a clue about the technique ...

Over a year ago, my friend, Claudia, made an off-hand comment about why my kids like me so much:  I am the fun parent.  She meant this is in a good cop/bad cop kind of way.  When I asked her about her comment, she said that John was the not-as-fun parent (aka mean parent), and I am the fun parent. Believe me, I have never seen myself that way, being the one who has made the kids run 3 miles a day, or practice for hours each day, or pushed them to finish their Eagle projects, or threatened them with jobs in fast food if they didn't score well on the SAT. Anyway, something I know about Claudia is that she sees things clearly.  Like, I wish I could always get her opinion about the happenings in my life, because she's a correct and honest sounding board.  Her thoughts about my children's musical lives have been invaluable, being a seasoned musician herself, and I know that I can go to her when I need advice. But the fun parent?  Surely this couldn't be. ...

Mark has officially been on his mission now for six months.  Two and a half months in the MTC, and three and a half months in Russia.  To some, it may feel as if he just left, but I seem to feel everyday that he is gone :-( It has been hard, reading the disappointment in Mark's emails each week.  He works from sun-up to sun-down with no success.  Actually, that idiom doesn't really work in Russia considering they only have a few hours of daylight each day :-)  Let's just say that he works from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day.  He was made a trainer for the last transfer, and he was sent to a small city where there had been no success before.  Because the former missionaries had no investigators, Mark and his new trainee had the task of finding an investigator.  ANY investigator.  In the United States, new investigators usually come from member referrals, or from knocking on doors.  Because there are very few members in Russia, and because t...

I like analogies, because they help me understand things.  Sometimes when I can't understand a situation in my regular, old, everyday life, and my brain can't process what is happening, I try and think of an analogy, and crazily enough, it helps me see reality a bit clearer. Imagine you are an explorer around the time of Columbus, give or take one hundred years.  You are sailing on the open seas, wondering if the earth is round.  Along the way, you run into unexplored land masses, and on those land masses or islands are different kinds of people.  People who don't look like you, don't speak like you, and don't act like you.  I suspect that the initial reaction by the explorers was one of fear and suspicion of these new people.  Even if you settled down and stayed awhile, there would always be tension because you come from two totally different cultures. From the opposite point of view, imagine that you are one of the inhabitants of those islands, and yo...

It's inevitable when I first meet anyone--they ask why we lived in Germany for six years.  I give them the standard answer that my husband was in the military.  However, I rarely get to share the reason of  why we chose to move to Germany. John was in his fourth and final year of an OB/Gyn residency in Dayton, Ohio.  We knew that as soon as he graduated, we were headed into full-time service in the military.  The military allowed us to make a list of places we thought we would like to move, although there's no guarantee that a serviceman will actually be sent to any one of those places. Honestly, I hadn't given it any thought.  College, medical school and residency had been all-consuming in our lives.  We had been in survival mode for so many years, trying to pay the bills and take care of the kids with too little money and even less time. John already knew the places where it was possible to work as an OB/Gyn.  He had done some time down a...

When I was a child, I knew there was one thing I never wanted to be when I grew up:  OLD. My grandmother (whom I never saw as elderly) would take us to visit old people (or that's what I called them at the time).  It was a regular activity for us, and I am grateful to her now for showing me the importance of doing this. Ruby Diamond c.1905 There was a woman in Tallahassee named Ruby Diamond (yes, that was her actual name), and she was older than the hills.  She also, as they say, had more money than God.  In fact, there is the Ruby Diamond Auditorium, and the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall on the campus of Florida State University--they were named for her because of her continued support of Florida State as an alumna  of the university itself.  I didn't know it at the time, but she graduated from FSU in 1905 (as a woman), and went on to receive her Master's from FSU.  My girls can't appreciate it now, but this was an amazing feat for a woman then....

Okay, so as much as I didn't enjoy the Mormon culture in Utah, there were definitely some "winner" moments, spent with people I love: Claudia :  Sunday morning, I woke up Ethan far earlier than he thought he would need to wake up (seeing as he stayed out until 1 a.m. the night before) to attend "Music and the Spoken Word" in the Tabernacle at Temple Square.  I hadn't planned on going until I received an email the night before from my friend, Claudia Koide.  She moved to Utah Valley this past summer, and now plays for the "Orchestra at Temple Square".  She informed me that the concert in the morning would be a requiem for the children killed in Newtown, Connecticut last month.  In fact, the conductor of the orchestra, Ryan Murphy, grew up in Newtown and actually attended Sandy Hook elementary.  Claudia told me it was a concert, not to be missed. So, we drove up to Salt Lake City, found parking and headed in.  As with any performance, words ...

With my trip to Utah this past week, I had several thoughts on the term "inversion".  When I told Glo the title of this blog post, she kept asking me exactly what "inversion" meant.  I will define it as best I can (not being a dictionary, or a scientist): ~Inversion, simply put, means to turn something upside down. You might wonder why I was thinking about this infrequently used word, and I will answer that for you by describing the weather in "Happy Valley". Normally, in Utah (or in any other location for that matter), a higher altitude results in colder air.  It's warmer on the ground, and gets increasingly cooler higher up.  Naturally, air rises from the ground (because it's warm).  Because of something funky going on (obviously meteorology is not my strong suit), there ended up being an inversion throughout the valley. What this meant was that it was bitterly cold on the ground, and significantly warmer in the air (up near the mount...

In case you've been hiding under a rock for the past 20+ years, I have something to tell you:  I don't like BYU.  Or at least that's what I thought until today. I am here in Provo, dropping off Ethan at school.  He decided at the end of his mission that he wanted to attend school here (versus American University in Washington DC).  While I completely support him in his decision, it didn't make me happy at all. When I was here at BYU, I was miserable.  Probably more miserable than I am living in Pennsylvania, but that's another post for another day.  I was shocked by the prevalence of a Mormon culture, and I felt completely out of place when I discovered that I didn't fit into that culture.  It was hard for me to make friends.  Too, it was an incredibly hard time for John and me.  We were newly married, and we both brought mountains of emotional baggage into our marriage.  We didn't know how to handle any of it, and we really struggle...

I love road trips.  Like, there's nothing like a road trip to make me happy.  I grew up taking road trips with my grandparents Caruthers.  They would pick me up in Lubbock at the end of every school year, and we would spend three days driving across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, finally arriving in Tallahassee, Florida.  My grandmother always packed a cooler full of food--ham sandwiches, grapes, and cans of Dr. Pepper.  I would take up residence in the back seat of whatever behemoth car they owned at the time--I know the "Caprice Classic" was a favorite for years, but I think there was a Chevy Impala at some point.  For a six-year old, it was like having my own room!  We would talk about anything and everything, and we would laugh a lot.  My granddad stuck to the speed limit of 55 mph, but my grandmother laughed in his face when she got behind the wheel and took the car up to 65 mph.  My grandparents taught me a lot on those tr...