Scorching the World

I didn’t do much. It was nice. I did some pour painting. I’m trying to make some pictures that are red, white, and blue, but the red keeps turning pink and muddy. I keep painting over the same pictures trying to get it better. But it was fun trying. Now I need to buy more paint. This wasn't one of the red ones - it was one that I did a while back that didn't turn out right so I tried to fix it. I like it now.   This is the one that won't stay red. The red always turns another color. I don't know why.    This was just some leftover paint. and that's what it looks like. I finally got to watch Where’d You Go Bernadette. It was good! Somebody told me to watch it but I hadn’t found it yet. Our renter was supposed to teach the scripture class tonight, but since her mother died Sunday night, she left for Utah today and I volunteered to teach the class. So I spent a lot of time studying and preparing. It was fun. I like preparing lessons and teaching them, even if there...

Today is the birthday of my 5 th child. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have him for a son. I’m so grateful for him! He is amazing! Last week Clean Queen was extremely busy. I had constant requests for big jobs and had to turn away most of them. This week I have a few open appointments and I didn’t get one single request for cleaning all day. What is up with that? I decided to put some of my excel documents on google sheets so I have them even if my computer gets lost or dies. I just sort of felt suddenly urgent about that, so I spent most of the day setting up one of them in sheets. It took a long time but I love playing with spreadsheets. At 7pm we had FHE with our group of friends from Woodward Park ward and I gave the same lesson that I had given our kids yesterday, on General Conference – preparing for it, getting the most out of it, and following up with study after it. I guess it is one of my favorite topics because one of them reminded me that I gave a follow-up lesson...

We both slept so good last night; it was very pleasant to wake up and feel rested and great. Tom had Ward Council at 8am, so we both got dressed and ready early. While he was in his meeting, I studied the lesson and listened to another Come Follow Me resource video on You Tube called Unshaken. It was really good with lots of insights, but it was really long – possibly 4 to 6 hours total. Still, it was good. After Tom came out for our Ward devotional on Zoom, I remembered I had wanted to make bread so we would could use it for the Sacrament instead of using a tortilla like we did last week. So I started some and hadn’t finished yet when the devotional started. It was nice to be able to finish while listening. You can’t do that when you worship in a chapel! So the devotional was really good with good talks. They even had one guy who came home from his mission a few months ago, who is currently attending BYU speak! He just got on Zoom with us and spoke like as if he were here! You can...

Looking at cars is not my favorite thing in the world. Tanya got Tom thinking about it, and it is pretty much the only thing Tom talks about. That’s not true, but it sure seems like it sometimes. I tease him that I would much rather talk about glitter! Because he HATES glitter. He thinks it is the worse thing in the world and will lead to world destruction. Now he has started calling the cars glitter, like “Oh, look at that read glitter over there! Do you like that kind?” That’s how he tries to get me interested in looking at the cars. So there are a few car dealerships near us, so we went fairly early to go check them out, just to see what they had. There were some interesting cars, but nothing worth buying. Then we went home and looked online some more and checked cars that Tanya had sent to Tom’s phone. There were enough in Fresno that we decided to just go to the dealerships instead of talking to sales guys on the phone. I think we went to 3 or 4 dealerships and nobody had wh...

A s soon as I woke up Tom started spoiling me. I hadn’t slept well last night after so Tom let me sleep in. So nice. Then he made me a special breakfast and we took it easy. I actually had a LOT of Clean Queen work. I can’t take off, even for my birthday; I just have to work around whatever we are doing so I carried my phone everywhere and dealt with stuff wherever I was at the time. He had one minor job that he wanted to get finished in the studio – he needed to grout the tile backsplash that we put in yesterday. It didn’t take him long and it looks wonderful! We went to lunch at Logan’s Roadhouse and had some wonderful ribs. We really splurged on calories and just enjoyed the food. Then we went to a place called Nothing Bundt Cakes and bought my birthday cake. They have little mini cakes that are just the right size for Tom and I and it was delicious! We picked up another cake and some ice cream on the way home so we could have a party with the Knudsens. It is amazing how fas...

I’m old, but not too old to get excited about my birthday. There aren’t any presents I need, I don’t really eat cake, and I don’t enjoy being sung to, but I still get excited just because it is my special day. Tomorrow. I believe in celebrating all week. The goal for today was to tile the backsplash above the kitchen counter in the studio. Tom and I had stuff we had to take care of before we could start, but by late morning we had it all set up and ready. It took a long time. We had to go around two different electrical outlets that made it way more complicated, and did our best to do the brick pattern. But we only did three rows (my idea. Tom just wanted to do two rows) but it turned out pretty darn good if you don’t look too closely. Clean up and putting everything away took as long as the setup did. Cleaning up the tile, wiping everything off, putting away all the tools, etc, and cleaning and folding up the tile saw isn’t quick. After we got it all cleaned up, we went out ther...

Before bedtime last night, when I was in the bathroom, I could hear some banging in the ceiling. I thought Tom was doing something, so I went out to see what he was doing. He was sitting on the couch watching tv, so I had him go with me into the bedroom to hear the noises. It was a lot of banging, like someone was moving boards in the attic. He said there was no way for anything that big to get into the attic, so he got the flashlight and went out to see if he could see what was out there. It was scary to me. He wandered around with the flashlight for a while, but never saw anything and whatever it was ran away because we never heard any more noises. We had really hoped to get the kitchen cabinets in the studio actually installed yesterday, but everything took too long. So today we did it. It took a lot of wedging, and force-fitting because nothing is level or plumb in the garage, but we managed. Hooray! The biggest problem was that when Tom set the counter outside for a little whi...

  I woke up about 2:30am for no reason so I got up and did some computer stuff. Tom joined me about half hour later. We went back to bed about 5am, but I don’t think I ever really slept after that. It is so silly to be old. The goal for today was to get the kitchen cabinets in the studio attached to the walls and to each other, then install the counter. I thought it would be no big deal and we would be able to also put in the tile backsplash. Tom thought it would take all day to just install them. Turned out he was right. After spending more time that we planned on our actual jobs, we spent all the remaining time on the cabinets, trying to figure them out exactly, and didn’t actually get anything screwed in. One wall is so uneven that we need a filler board on the counter so we decided it would be best if that board was painted and sealed like the counter, so we went to buy the boards, then I pour-painted them. Tomorrow I can pour the epoxy on them, then in 3 days we can instal...

Tom’s phone started dinging at 3:30am, notifying of a new text. I finally got up to see what it was so it would stop dinging. It was from Sarah again. She decided she was ready to come to Fresno and asked Tom to go pick her up. She has no concept that we might be sound asleep or that he is 2 ½ hours away. She has a want that that’s all she thinks of. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. I think I was finally dozing off about 6:30am when the sun was up and it was time to get up. I am not a very pleasant person when I haven’t had enough sleep. We had the Sunday Devotional with the ward and then Sunday School. Anne sent a text that she was going back to bed and that she would be available again about 1pm, so I didn’t worry about setting up our zoom chat until then. About 12:30, Anne and Carma started texting that they were wondering why I hadn’t started the chat yet. I said, I’m waiting until 1pm. Then Anne reminded me that she was talking about 1pm her time, not my time. Silly m...

  The days are so much alike that it is hard to feel like Saturday is very different from weekdays. I guess that’s what retirement is all about – every day is the weekend. It has turned cool enough, because of the weeks of heavy smoke blocking the sun, that I really think our swimming season is over. So today I packed up the pool toys. Well, I packed up most of them. I need to figure out a way to pack the pool noodles so they stay clean and don’t get weathered through the winter. It sure was a short swimming season this year. The smoke ended the swim season, but we also missed a lot of swim days because we were under a deadline to get the studio done. Knudsens didn’t come over hardly at all to swim because they now have friends who have much bigger and more impressive swimming pools and what teen would rather swim with their grandma than their friends? But Tom and I did totally enjoy the part of the summer that we did swim! It is still the perfect thing for hot summer days. Tom...

Today was Chile’s Independence Day. They really celebrate big there. Good memories. Tom was home all day today and we worked in the studio and yard. I had set up another appointment with Xfinity for them to solve my issue with having cable in the studio. A guy came who has come here before for other installations and is quite knowledgeable. He put in a cable box that basically does what I really didn’t want, but he convinced me to give it a try and see how it works before going back to something else. Tom installed a full-length mirror in the studio. That should be nice to have. We changed the doors on the refrigerator so they open from the right instead of from the left. It seemed much harder than it should have been, but we got it done and it works. Happy days! The parts for our broken lawnmower finally came in so Tom went to pick them up plus a truckload of good soil. He fixed the mower and mowed our very over-grown back yard. It looks so much better! By the time he got home...

Today Tom had to go to Sacramento for work so he took Laelle’s birthday gift and made a big circle from Sacramento to Alameda to give it to her. She seemed to like it so I hope all the kids will have fun with the flying monkeys. It’s sad I couldn’t go, but I don’t dare leave home while I’m working and I also had errands to run and other things I needed to take care of. Maybe someday Tom and I will both retire. He left by about 8am. I worked on Ryan’s ebook most of the day. About 10am I left to go back to Xfinity to switch out the cable box they had given us for the studio. This was the 4 th time we’ve tried a different type of box to try to get it so the studio has separate service from ours, included on our account. Then I picked up some groceries and other necessities. When I got home, I tried to set up the new cable box, but it didn’t do what they said it would. I was on the phone with them for nearly 40 minutes while they tried to see if they could figure out a way to give us ...

It has been so nice that he is getting paid even though he spends so little time actually working. I’ve become quite spoiled having him around most of the time! But today he had to go to Porterville. It’s south of here, and in that area there are a lot of orchards where they grow wonderful fruit. Some of them have a stand out front where fruit is sitting in baskets. There are bags, and you can fill up a bag of whatever you want for $6. Then you put your $6 in a jar. There isn’t anybody there attending the fruit or the money. So he came home with a bag of peaches and nectarines. So good! I spent the day putting epoxy on the counters for the studio. It was pretty time-consuming because I had to keep going back every 20 minutes to scrape the places where it dripped. I tried to avoid stepping any place where it had dripped, but every time I went in the room (it’s in our guest room instead of outside to avoid all the ash in the air), I would get stickiness on my feet. I kept putting d...

Today was all scheduled around two appointments. At 8am we had arranged for a guy from the cable company to come and fix the DVR box in the studio. It wouldn’t record, pause, rewind, or anything that these new, fancy, modern cable boxes do. When the guy came, after he spent a long   time on the phone with his help desk, he said the box we had couldn’t do any of that and if Janna wanted that, she would have to get her own account and her own cable box. Janna wasn’t sure she wanted to do that, so we had to discuss it for a while. A 15 minute appointment turned out to be nearly an hour. The next appointment was supposed to be at 10am with our pest control company. Janna had complained that she has a lot of bugs coming in the studio, so we had them come for an extra treatment inside and out. When he still hadn’t come by 11:30am, Tom called and they said the appointment was in the afternoon. I reminded them it was for 10am, so the guy left immediately and got here at noon. They said...

Mel Lewis is in charge of teaching the lesson for our Zoom Family Home Evening tonight and yesterday he asked me to put together a little Kahoot quiz based on 3 Nephi 1-8. I only came up with 10 questions and the last 3 were silly, but I got it ready last night and this morning. I had quite a bit of Clean Queen things to do this morning. I kept getting requests for appointments, through email and phone texts. It kept me pretty busy. People who have canceled their appointments since March are beginning to come back and want us to begin cleaning again. I just hope that the girls who want to work will begin to come back, also. We have a very hard time finding more than 4 to work, and that’s a problem. Lilian has had to join the team again, which makes me really happy because everything flows much smoother if she is there in person. Around noon Tom went back to Fresno Ag to get more Floetrol. They only had one bottle left, but fortunately, it was enough to finish. The last two boards...

This was the day I’ve looked forward to for months! I really wanted to do a paint pour on the kitchen counter in the studio and Tom agreed to let me try it. It has taken a long time to get to the point where we are ready for the counter – now that the cabinets are in place and painted, we were ready to get it done. There was a lot Tom needed to do first. He needed to get the wood, and get it cut to the right size. He had the two major cuts done at Lowe’s, so they were perfect cuts. Then the last two cuts he did at a friend’s house, Mark Laffere, where he had a very nice table saw that would make perfectly straight cuts. So nice when people have the right equipment! Then he set up tables in the guest room for the counters to be worked on, then cut and attached the front trim on each one, then did a line of putty on that seam. Then they were ready for me. He wanted me to paint the green moisture barrier on them before painting them, to just be sure they didn’t absorb too much moist...

Tom and I were working in the studio (after doing our own work for a couple of hours) and I got an idea. It would involve a lot more work, so I hated to mention it, but I couldn’t see why it wouldn’t work, so I called Tom into the studio and said, “I have an awful idea and I need you to talk me out of it.” He said, “I hate it already.” My idea was to switch the fridge a cabinet on the other wall. It didn’t look like it would fit under the shelf we put up yesterday, but it did. It didn’t look like the cabinet would fit where the fridge was, but it did. And doing it solved a couple of problems we had before, like getting a cabinet/counter on the right side of the sink so water would be splashing down the side of the fridge. We made the switch and it looked so much better and was much more functional, that Tom was really happy about it. It meant he now has to raise the outlet that was behind the fridge about three feet, and the dimensions for the counters was different but that was ok...

  This morning we woke up to more smoke in the air. Even inside the house smelled like smoke. I really hope and pray we get some rain soon, especially where the fires are! Tom and I both had a little work to do in the morning and I worked on Ryan’s mini-book while Tom worked on the yard a little.  We got SO MUCH done today! I painted the cabinets while Tom painted the closet door, the bathroom door (both sides) and the entry door (both sides). Then he counter-sunk the nails in the door frames and caulked around the and then painted them. When I finished the prime coat and then the paint coat, they were beautiful, but not as shiny as I wanted them, so I painted them with some Verathane. Now they are beautiful! After Tom finished all he was doing, we installed the door and drawer pulls on the cabinets. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been because the screws that came with the pulls were too short for the thickness of the drawers. Tom had four longer screws that worked an...

 I   had another morning of Clean Queen emergency when a client had a son with a fever and needed to cancel her appointment for today. I tried to move a few clients from their appointments on Thursday or Friday and finally got one who could let us come today. Whew! That’s always a little scary! Tom also had a bit of work to do in the morning, but finally after lunch we were both free to work in the studio. He focused on getting baseboards in the bathroom. I focused on totally re-arranging the room, which definitely slowed and interrupted his plans. But it looks so much better now. I had planned the furniture placement with the finished garage in mind, which it won’t be until after we get our garage/car port built. So until then, it wasn’t working. The chair where she sits to watch tv is way too far from the tv, and there wasn’t room for a desk and she just bought a computer. So I figured a better arrangement, but to do it we had to remove all furniture except in the k...

Having a total day off and traveling on Monday made it feel like a Friday or Saturday. Then it felt like we were starting the week today, so I’ve had to keep reminding myself that today is Tuesday, not Monday. Very confusing when you’re old. I had a whole lot of Clean Queen this morning. One of today’s clients had a son with a fever and they were taking him to get tested, so she had to cancel. So  immediately  I needed to find an appointment to replace her. I tried clients from tomorrow and Thursday and finally got one who was happy to have her house cleaned today with only a couple of hours’ notice. Whew!  That messed up some of the rest of the week, so I spent a lot of time trying to fix the week. I send messages the wait to see who answers first, then cancel all the other messages. I made rice krispie treats yesterday so I spent some time in the morning boxing it up, wrapping it for mailing, and getting the names and addresses on the boxes. I was almost ready to go...

A three-day weekend really isn’t very much time. We arrived Friday afternoon, had 2 whole days here, now we had to go back home already. When Tom went to put some of our stuff in the car, he found that there was ash on the car from the nearby fires. So sad. Trina had a few projects she needed help with, so we got on those before Tom and I left. The first was to put together a bunk set she someone gave her. It has a bottom double bed, a single bunk, and a trundle underneath. She had bought screws to put it together, so we did the bottom frame, but she didn’t have enough screws to put the top one. We slid the trundle under and it looked pretty good. All of it has been blocking the hall for a long time, so she was happy to get it into a room. She can finish putting it together later, then she still has to get mattresses for the 3 beds. But that one was major! Then she and I cleaned up Dexter and Trevor’s room a little and put together a drawer that was falling apart. She was happy to ...

Everyone came out in Sunday clothes as they got up this morning. It was so nice to see! It took until 9:30am for everyone to show up, and we had our first ward Devotional (Sacrament meeting without the Sacrament service). We joined Zoom online for it and it was really nice – a very short testimony meeting. The Bishop made some comments at the end. He told that many members in the ward are having a really hard time right now. Some have serious health problems, some unemployment, some are even losing their houses, all part of the effects of the pandemic and quarantine. It’s really bad for a lot of people. I feel so blessed that our lives are continuing without hardly any changes – just some minor inconveniences. It was a good reminder that we need to reach out to others to help where we can. After the Devotional, we joined my ward Sunday School. It was a pretty good discussion and then the time ran out before the teacher ended her lesson. It was suddenly just shut down. Kind of funny. ...