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While I know there are some famous authors who could do it, for me, there is no possible way to accurately represent the experience I had last night.  All I can think is that if there was a real life representation of the movie The Blair Witch Project, I lived it. We had a house showing scheduled for this weekend--the exact weekend that John and I were flying to Altoona so that he could pull call.  I spent about eight hours making arrangements for Gretchen (Glo's best friend from Interlochen, and who is currently studying French horn at Michigan) to get the animals out of the house during the showing.  Gretchen has watched our animals before, and she's a dream dog-watcher, but making sure the house is ready to show while getting rid of any and all animal paraphernalia?  It's a very large task. Usually I just ask Gretchen to watch the animals, she shows up after we leave, and she leaves before we show up again, and I put money in her Venmo account.  Meanwhile...

As I sit here at my computer on a Sunday afternoon, having taught the Mia Maids today, and waiting to leave for New Beginnings, I can hardly believe that a week has come and gone.  Wasn't it just last Sunday? With John not working now (hasn't seen a patient, been in clinic, or stepped foot in a hospital since November 15), we've had some time on our hands.  For the first month, John was busy collecting information and documents for the lawyer.  Then Christmas came and everybody was home.  But now?  We are having to make our own fun...or in the case of the church, people will make it for us. There is a bishop's storehouse in Farmington Hills (a suburb of Detroit).  Last November, I spent a morning there with Amber, stocking shelves.  As it turns out, one of the senior missionaries broke his ankle and is out of commission for eight weeks, and with our stake being the "agent" stake for the storehouse, the stake needed a replacement for him and his wif...

Querida Glo, Comó estás?  Comó está el CCM?  Espero que todo esté bien! We miss you and hope you are having a great time! You look like you are doing well in your picture on the bus, the cool kid at the back of the bus!  How is your companion?  How is the food?  How is the air in la Ciudad de México?  Have you had an air quality attack?  I hope not! We are doing ok.  We have been serving a lot!  We are working in the bishops storehouse tues and thurs and in the temple  on Thursday night so we are pretty busy with service.  I kind of like the storehouse.  Mommy and I are pretty fast so we usually end up getting the jobs done quickly and then we just kind of sit around and wait for something to happen, like a person to come in the storehouse to shop for their food.  My favorite time at the storehouse is what I call MEAT ATTACK.  We get a team of 7 people and all the frozen meat products the storehouse provi...

Johannah. Holy smokes.  What a difference from before her mission to after her mission.  She is a confident, funny, friendly, social animal now....versus being an insecure, funny, not-so-friendly, hide-in-her-room-and-watch-Netflix college student before.  I mean, it takes a special kind of person to sign up to be a Resident Assistant at BYU, and she has taken the job and run with it.  In fact, she's now the popular girl in her dorm, with all the residents wanting to hang out with her and be her friend.  And no wonder--she makes them Sunday pancakes...and invites the partnering male dorm floor residents ;-)  It's like the person that she was always meant to be has finally arrived and is taking the world by storm. Over Thanksgiving, I had four tickets to a Michigan hockey game.  John and I figured it would be fun for the kids to go, thinking Ethan and Rebecca, and Mark and Allison.  But I remembered that Hannie loves hockey games too, so I tri...

Well, here I sit, at 1:12am, thinking. I’m afraid that the biggest reason I have never been able to sleep like certain siblings of mine is due to my inability to turn off my brain at convenient times. I can sit in bed for hours, thinking, all the while, frustrated at myself because I CAN'T SLEEP! In this case, I took a rather long nap today, so it could just be that I’m not tired. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of finding one’s self. It seems funny that we should ever need to find ourselves, because we certainly can’t go missing (folks round here don’t normally joke ‘bout Jesus). It is very possible, however, to lose one’s self amidst trials and suffering. We spend our entire lives becoming someone, only to find out that there is more that we didn’t know. If I looked at myself ten, five, or even two years ago, I would find myself to be considerably different than I am now. I find that we find ourselves best when we realize that we had lost who we were before. ...

Delta flight 557.  Departing Detroit at 8:32 a.m., arriving Mexico City at 12:32 p.m.  John is flying to Pittsburgh today, so he got to go through security with her and walk her to her gate, while I stayed at the front of security, crying my eyes out. She's ready.  She's so ready.  She's wanted to do this for as long as I can remember.  And between her patriarchal blessing, and her setting apart, and her father's blessing from John last night, she will have a life-changing experience.  She will learn Spanish.  She will change the lives of people who are waiting for her to teach them. I will never forget when Gloria came out of her patriarchal blessing.  The patriarch turned to us and said that he couldn't remember any specifics of what he had said in the blessing, but he had the strongest feeling that Heavenly Father was pleased with the choices Glo had made so far in her life.  That she was on the right path. As much as I don't want he...