Scorching the World

Tom and I both woke up around 5am again. I sure would have preferred to sleep a little longer. My head was aching, and I just needed more sleep, but it felt good to lie in bed another hour. Tom left for work at 6:30, and by 7am, Tami and Randy were awake and up. Tami had a personal training client at 7:30, so she had to be ready. She does some of her work in person but most of it over zoom. So convenient! Randy went immediately to the kitchen and start working. We didn’t have breakfast until Tami finished with her client. I have to say again how nice it is to have her here in our home. I love seeing her smiling and happy! My heart is filled with joy and love for my precious daughter who has been through so much. Randy got a lot done, and after Tom got home, they worked on the kitchen the rest of the day until time to leave for Tanya’s. Everything takes a very long time because everything the need to do has something else that needs done first. Nothing fits perfectly, so it has ...

Tom made breakfast this morning of fried spuds, scrambled eggs with green beans and asparagus frm the garden. Then he also made fresh orange juice, and had bowls of cherries, blackberries, and blueberries, all from the garden! What a wonderful and beautiful breakfast! Tanya still had so much to do to get her house ready for company coming and having celebrations for Cannon’s graduation. Clearly, she was ambitious in her planning and now is really having to work hard to get it all done in time. Cai comes tomorrow and I’m pretty sure she will be working up to the last minute. The biggest project is laying the stick on tiles. Her living room is huge with lots of furniture to move, but with helpers, she was able to finish it today. At the same time she had Tom and Randy fixing the fireplace we hung yesterday. She didn’t like how to looked, so they lowered it, then painted it along with other things in that area that were partially painted. It looks so much better. She didn’t have any m...

Tom and I keep going to bed around 11-11:30 then Tom wakes up around 4-4:30 and I wake up around 5. Then of course we are beyond sleepy and need a nap in the afternoon. It is so silly to be old. You can do a lot of things before Church when you get up at 5am! This seems to be the new normal. Church was good with good speakers and a good Relief Society lesson. Our RS lesson was on Elder Gong’s conference talk of ministering. The teacher started out asking how many lessons over the years have we had on ministering. My answer was “hundreds”. And it’s true, but I told her later, we need this lesson frequently and repeatedly! It is a hard thing to make a priority and yet is one of the most important things we do in this life. Tom and I got a quick snack and a quick lunch before I had to leave for my meeting at 3pm – it was the Stake Missionary Committee Meeting. I do enjoy being in that meeting with the stake mission leader, the stake president, the mission president, and the sisters ...

Tom was waiting to hear back from a couple of people who were interested in our countertop, and one of them was supposed to come with a crew around noon. So in the meantime, we each worked on our own things. Finally around 11 Tom decided we could leave and if the one lady was ready to come over, we would just go back home. Tom called her later and she said her helpers got called into work, so they couldn’t pick it up today after all. So we went to Lowe’s to look at things and price them out, then we went to Home Depot to compare. Home Depot had a better selection and some things were slightly cheaper. But they only had one of the smaller cabinets we needed. However, they said their store in Clovis had 7 of them. Tom decided not to buy any of the cabinets and just get all of them at the Clovis store. That whole thing took a long time. When we finally got to the Clovis store, they had that other cabinet but were missing the bridge cabinet where the vent hood goes. So we bought all th...

Tom left for work, and I did my stuff – Clean Queen, computer stuff, practicing the piano, painting a little, and trying to crochet a little. I’m having trouble with the latter. I decided to try to crochet hats, but they keep turning out like frisbees. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I almost completely unraveled the last one and tried again, but it just doesn’t turn out right. I might give up on that until I can do it with Trina watching. I had an appointment to get my nails done. I have a love/hate relationship with the girl who does them. She does a good job, but never shapes them how I want, so I have taught her to not file my nails – just put the coating on them so they don’t snag and let me do the rest. Today she finished in 10 minutes instead of an hour. That makes me really happy! I was in and out quickly. The funny thing was that Tom was working and he happened to be passing by at the same time I was arriving at the nail place, so we arranged to meet up. I don’t know wh...

While Tom and I have been so focused on getting everything ready to fix up our kitchen, Tanya has been trying to get her house ready for next week when Cannon graduates from high school and Cai comes from Idaho for it!   She is really trying to get new flooring down. She has spent weeks/months ripping out the current flooring, smoothing the cement, and has begun laying the stick-on tiles. We agreed to go help her today because Thursday is the day we don’t have to go anywhere else. So we were at her house by 9am, after getting Clean Queen sort of set for the day, and Tom watering his plants outside. She had Tom start taking out the wood nail strips that hold down the carpet in Kaden’s room. She already had taken out the carpet, but those darn nail strips are hard to remove. He spent several hours on that. First I shampooed Cannon’s carpet. The dogs have left samples in there, so it smelled pretty bad. I went over it 3 times and the water still came out dirty, but it smelled bett...

Around 8am, a big white truck drove up in front of our house. They delivered our new cooktop and oven! So exciting! We didn’t have time to open the boxes to inspect them, but we’re so excited they are here and ready to install! We needed to find and order a countertop. One installer who came to give us an estimate works specifically with 2 suppliers, and he gave us their names so we could go choose something. We decided to go do that before the temple, so we left an hour early. At the first place, we didn’t find anything we loved, but there was one we took the numbers on, It isn’t’ as beautiful as the porcelain piece we saw in the first store we went to, but it will look so much better than our current counter that it will work great. Then we just had time to run to the other one. They were both way south in Fresno. It was really stressful trying to look as fast as possible and find something we liked while trying to still get to the temple on time. We saw two that we liked at th...

Tom left for work early. I did the regular stuff while he was gone – Clean Queen, breakfast, cleaning, practicing, etc., until time to chat with my sisters. This was the highlight of the day, just talking about whatever comes up. If we were paying long-distance fees, we would skip most of the stuff, so it is fun to be able to see each other and just chat and laugh. We talked so long Carma was late for her doctor appointment. We had a guy coming to measure our counters to give us a bid for installation, then we went to a couple of places that sell quartz to try to find something we like and get an estimate on that. The trick is every stone store has its own installers, and the installer who came only works with certain stores. All of them can install in less than 2 weeks, where Home Depot is cheaper but will take up to 3 months. We will need to go look at more stone tomorrow. Tom borrowed a tool from Tanya to remove our tile, but I couldn’t get it to work. Later Tanya came over on h...

Tom got a message last night that our boss, Scott, just found out that we had a deep clean scheduled for tomorrow. Porterville stake was sending people for the deep clean. Whenever there is this type of deep clean, it’s hard to tell which people came for the deep clean and which are our local people who came for our regular Monday cleaning. This time Scott said we could have as many of the Porterville people as we wanted until we finished. So for the first time since we started nearly a year ago, we got every job done today. It was fun because people came from Madera 3 rd ward – people we were so happy to see and haven’t seen for many, many years. They are so good. Anyway, the temple was like a beehive of activity. There must have been 30 people cleaning all over – moving chairs and other furniture, cleaning chandeliers and other light fixtures, vacuuming ceilings and cleaning everything all over the place. When it was getting close to 10am, Tom let me leave (we went in separate...

Tom had a special 7am stake Priesthood meeting this morning. I told him that if he found out it was the 2 nd coming, to be sure to tell me. He got home just in time for us to leave for Church. I wanted to be super early because I was playing today. Sacrament meeting was really good with some great talks, especially by Brother Balough from the high council. Sunday School was good too, with lots of discussion. This teacher really knows how to generate discussion. Tom had invited a new friend for dinner. This is how my husband works – this lady, Sherrie something, applied to rent our studio apartment, then decided it wouldn’t work for her because she needed to be in Clovis. Instead of saying ok, thanks for your inquiry, he said, “Oh, let me see if I can help you find something to rent, and contacted Tanya. Sherrie found a room to rent, but Tom stayed in contact with her. His conversations with people are always casual with way more information than the average person would share,...

Tom always has things he wants to do. Always. Every day. Today first he went to the church to see if they needed any help cleaning. He was glad he went because there were only 2 other men there. Don’t know where their families were, but the 3 men did everything. Then there was a neighborhood meeting on keeping our homes safe. He enjoyed that. I didn’t want to go because I really didn’t want to know about all the crime in our neighborhood. I prefer to think we are safe here. I sleep better that way. Then there was a neighborhood cleanup where people could take household and yard waste to dump it. I decided to go with him for that one. He had to get David, our neighbor, help put the garbage bin in the back of the truck. I couldn’t lift it no matter how hard I tried. Then they loaded his garbage bin in the truck and Tom and I went to the place about quarter mile away. Sadly, even though it wasn’t supposed to close for 2 more hours, so many people had already dumped so much that they c...

We got a call from Tami asking if she and Randy could come stay here for “about a week”. She is moving and there is a gap between when she has to leave her current place and when she can move into the new place. That is way beyond exciting for us! I would love to have Tami here, for as long as she can stay! We’ve been talking a lot about redoing our kitchen and trying to assess how expensive it would be so we can save up for it. It has been in the realm of ‘pipe-dream’ until now. Randy is a finish carpenter and said he could do the work! That’s so exciting! Suddenly the pipe dream is turning into a reality. So we spent much of the day discussing the kitchen options. They range from around way too much money to almost being able to afford it, especially if we have a live-in carpenter. They would be here starting Memorial weekend, which will mess with our plans to go see Trina, so we have to work that out. Anyway, Tom left for work early and I did Clean Queen. All was quiet. For a ...

We like Thursdays because it is the only day of the week (except a few Saturdays) where we don’t have anything on the calendar. No place we have to go. Nothing we HAVE to do. So nice. For some reason both of us woke up super early. I was awake before 3:30am, but stayed still in bed until Tom woke up around 4, then we went ahead and got up. I had new ideas about the kitchen remodel we want to do, and wanted Tom's opinion on things, so i got out my computer and we searched things for a while. By the time we finished that, we were super awake. We stayed busy and awake until about 7am when we both felt really sleepy but it was too late to go back to bed. I had to get on Clean Queen so Tom stayed up with me.  So Tom worked in the yard off and on to not get too overheated, and I did Clean Queen. I did it first thing in the morning most of the afternoon, and into the evening. We did manage a wonderful nap. I sleep so soundly when we nap - I think I sleep better during a short nap than I...

Tom went to clean up our friend, Rosie Smith’s front yard, then the back yard where Christian lives. He managed to get back in time to shower and be ready to go to the temple at 12:15. I did Clean Queen and practiced the piano. We were shocked that NOBODY showed up to help clean in the temple today. This is the first week of Fresno West Stake, so I’m sure some message got dropped somewhere. We were very blessed that Kim, a lady who is also a service missionary in the temple, came just in case we needed her. She is amazing; she always seems to be wherever service is needed. I want to be more like here. She is also always willing to do anything we ask and doesn’t worry about favorite jobs or what’s too hard. On the days she doesn’t help us, she does miscellaneous jobs for Scott, our boss. We were SO glad she was there. We did the bare minimum and had to force ourselves to leave some things not done, but I needed to get home to do CQ and I really wanted to stop at Lowe’s on the ...

Tom left for work early, but it doesn’t seem as early now that it is light more than an hour before he leaves! We are both wide awake well before 6am. I thought I would be really sore and in pain from working hard at Tanya's house yesterday, but I felt rather invigorated, like my body appreciated some exercise! While Tom was gone, I got caught up on computer stuff, finished laundry, mopped the floors, practiced, and felt very accomplished. But the best part was chatting with my sisters! There isn’t anything earthshaking that we discuss, but it is sure fun to see each other’s faces and talk about whatever is on our minds. Tom and I are dreaming of remodeling our kitchen. It’s only a dream, but it sure is fun to talk about. I dream of cutting the fireplace back so it does not take half of the wall, but I guess that really isn’t an option. Still, I dream. We spent a LOT of time discussing that stuff. Talking doesn’t cost us anything and sure is fun!

  We finally got to go back to the temple today after a 2 week break. I missed going, and yet the days just filled up with other stuff that seemed important at the time. It was nice to be back. There were some new carpets but mostly inside the things that were done weren’t so noticeable. The most noticeable thing that was done was he exterior front steps. Previously they had been painted grey, but that paint kept chipping off and looked really bad. This new paint job included a non-slip surface on the steps and very shiny paint on the entry. The cute thing was that our “temple can” who is named TC actually left a paw print. The people who did the coating asked the supervisor, Scott, if he wanted them to redo it to cover it up, but he decided to leave it because TC has become pretty famous and everyone loves that there is a temple cat in Fresno. He is the official greeter and sprawls out whenever anyone walks by. Cute! For the next 4 months we are working with West Stake to do the...