Scorching the World

  I had a headache in the night, so I took some Tylenol and slept a little longer after Tom left for work. When I finally got up, I got a shower and wrote on my blog before getting on zoom with Anne. We had great conversations, catching up on each other’s lives and discussing things that are important to us.   I love that we can share our lives in person. Tom got home from work before Anne and I were done. He has shorter days on Tuesdays than on Fridays. I mostly spent the day working on my temperature blanket. This is the 3 rd version of it and I try to use the same yarn from taking the other versions apart, so there is a lot of piecing and weaving in the ends, but it is going together pretty fast. I’ll be caught up soon. In the evening we watched Jeopardy, NCIS and Come Follow me with Lynne Hilton Wilson. She’s so good.  

  We both slept really well last night, so getting up was most pleasant. I had a dentist appointment at 9 to fill a cavity under a crown. That means they have to remove the crown, fill the cavity, put on a temporary crown, and in 2 weeks I’ll go back to get the new crown. I used to think that when I got old and every tooth had fillings or crowns, I’d be done with the dentist. But fillings get old and break down, gums recede, and cavities eat away the tooth under the crown, which I think is pretty rude. It’s a good thing I really like my dentist. Tom did yard work while I was gone. After I got back, he came in from the yard to make some phone calls for his other work. I got a call from one of the sisters where we had shared cookies yesterday. She had told us when we dropped off the cookies that she had been sick but thought she was getting better. This morning she called to say she felt worse and asked if Tom could come give her a blessing. We asked if it could wait until people...

Tom wanted a haircut before his shower, so we got him trimmed up nice first thing in the morning. We still had time to do some computer stuff after getting dressed, before going to church at 9:30. Sacrament meeting was really good. The bishopric had taken the young men white water rafting during the week, so they had 4 of the older ones bear their testimonies of the trip and lessons they had learned from their experiences, then the Bishop summed it all   up. I’m glad they didn’t have one of my sons with them, but it sounded like a great experience that they won’t forget, and they won’t forget what lessons they learned from it. After Sacrament meeting, they announced that 1 young man and 1 young woman had received their mission calls, and announced where they were going. So cool! They said by end of summer we will have 7 of our youth on missions! We have a small youth group, so that is amazing! Relief Society was good, too. Ashley Ortega taught from President Eyring’s talk and h...

  I had signed up to help clean the church building this morning. Tom always goes without signing up, but I am not that faithful and unselfish, so I sign up once ever now and then. We went a little early so Tom could blow off leaves all around the building while we waited for someone to unlock it. But when we got there Hal Smeltzer was already there cleaning, so we went in and started. He said the building was unlocked when he got there so he had already done a couple of the jobs before we arrived. The person in charge wasn’t there yet arrived about 20 minutes later. I cleaned the chapel while Tom blew off the sidewalks outside and then we left for Oakland. That put us a little ahead of schedule, which was wonderful. I was worried about possible weather or traffic that could make us late for the noon session. We didn’t hit any bad weather even though thunderstorms had been predicted. We got to the temple with enough time to walk around outside a bit and take pictures. It was ...

I woke up about 3 and spent a couple of hours trying to go back to sleep, so I was very sound asleep when Tom’s alarm went off at 5:55am. I slept almost another hour after he left – highly unusual. I got a shower, did morning routine of computer, scriptures, and practicing before it was time for Tanya to come over to go to Yoga with me. But she never showed, so I finally texted her and said I was leaving without her. She texted much later that she had worked a 12 hour shift and slept through yoga this week. A good friend in Madera died and his funeral was today. It started at 11am, but Tom couldn’t get home that fast. As soon Tom got home and changed clothes, we left for Gonzalo’s funeral. Sadly, we missed the whole thing in spite of the fact that we were only about 40 minutes late. So we headed over to the cemetery. He and his family are dear friends from the Spanish ward in Madera. We knew them when their kids were little and now they are all grown up. They wanted Tom to spea...

  We rarely have eight things to do in one day, but somehow everything for this week tried to pile into one day. Because we had so many things back to back to back, we asked Caeli if maybe it would be better if she came over tomorrow instead of today, which she agreed to do. We also try to minimize our trips to Fresno, but things just weren’t booked closely enough together to do that without just sitting around Fresno waiting for the next appointment. 1. “First” thing in the morning we went to work out. I love having that first. My arms were a little sore from working out yesterday, so I tried to vary the workout enough to work on other muscles, endurance, and heart rate. 2. We came straight home so we could change clothes. We had about an hour before I needed to leave to go to dentist Tom’s truck was in the shop and he called to see when it would be ready. By the time he got ahold of the guy fixing it, we had to leave right then so I could  3. take Tom down to south F...

  We did go work out first thing, then when we got back we did computer stuff, studied scriptures, and studied Portuguese. That was the busy part of the day. Pretty much the rest of the day Tom worked either on Synergy or in the yard. I “worked” on my temperature blanket. I hope I like it after taking it all apart and starting over. So far I’ve done about 8 weeks on the new one. It does go much faster when 1 row is a week instead of a day. In the evening we watched Jeopardy, then did another Portuguese study. It’s harder than I prefer to do, but Tom is loving it so much it makes it worthwhile.

  Tom was told to go to work a little later today because there were fewer deliveries to do. He figured that also meant he would finish earlier. He had an appointment to take his truck to a repair place as soon as he got off work, so that meant I would need to go to Fresno to give him a ride home. Anne and I chat at 8:30 am, so I was expecting Tom to call any minute to go pick him up. But Anne and I got a really good, long chat and he didn’t ever interrupt us. His work gave him some errands to run after his route, so he wasn’t ready to be picked up until after 11:30am. So Anne and I had a good chat. It was fun to talk, and I’m always grateful that this kind of technology so we can see each other and talk about anything we want – all for free! I spent the day just doing fun things. I worked on the remake of my temperature blanket and other such silly things that are just fun. Tom wanted to look for his high school album in the house because he hasn’t been able to find it a...

I woke up about 5am but Tom slept until 6:30. I got up, dressed, and sat quietly playing computer games on my tablet until he woke up. We haven't been to the gym for about 2 weeks, so we decided it HAD to come first. I like to write on my blog and do scripture study first, but when we do that, we never want to stop the momentum to go to the gym. The workout felt good. It isn't good to miss a week or two. I don't know how we will keep up the exercises while on vacation in June. I need to find some good links to online exercising we can do. After we got home, I worked on my blog, then scriptures. Tom worked on his computer, in the yard, then was going to do some Synergy but decided to postpone until tomorrow. He was supposed to help people work on our friend’s yard again, so he went there at 3, but nobody else showed up, so he came back home. I’ve been wanting to talk to my friend Renee for several days, so we agreed to chat this morning. As soon as both of us were re...

  I wanted to go early to practice and warm up on the organ, but the choir was going to rehearse at 9am. We were afraid if we went any earlier, the building might not even be unlocked yet, so Tom confirmed with someone that the Bishop would be there by 8:30 and we left in time for that. There were 4 cars at the church waiting before someone came with a key at 8:45, and it was not the Bishop. No problem, I got about 15 minutes to figure out what settings to use before choir started to practice. As the choir director went through the program, telling us how it would go, one of the things she mentioned was an “intermediate” hymn, that was not on my list of hymns for today! I began to panic! I went to that hymn and tried to play it and knew I would need much more than a few minutes of run-through. I talked to Nora, who was in charge and begged her to take that one hymn off the program. She talked to the Bishop, and they agreed. It was a good thing, not only for me, but also because t...

  By the Saturday before I play the organ in church, I’m getting pretty nervous. I need to figure out how to play hymns without ever making mistakes. That’s what I need. I did practice more than usual today and tried to really get the hymns down. Tom and I both slept through the night, which is amazing for old people like us. Tom went to help clean the church and picked a bunch of lemons to take to share. I cleaned the house, mopping and such, and worked on my morning things while he was gone. We want to have “travel pillows” for whenever we go someplace other than hotels, where we use our air mattress, our own blankets, and our own pillows. Taking our bed pillows is too bulky in the trunk and I don’t like them to get dirty as we shuffle them around in the travel. So I found cute fabric and sewed the outsides, but searched and searched for the huge bag of stuffing I have. I finally got Tom to help me search, but we couldn’t find it. I never wanted it thrown away or donated, s...

  Tom went to work, as usual on a Friday. I got things done and worked on a baby blanket for Cai’s baby until Tanya got here and we went to Yoga. I loved the yoga workout this time. There are a lot of things I can’t do very well, but the effort feels so good. After yoga, I left to go run errands and Tanya stayed to “take a nap”. It turned out that she watched tv the whole time and never went to sleep. I took the cookies I made yesterday to the temple for all the construction guys there. I hope I took enough – there were guys everywhere and everyone so busy. I didn’t get to go inside, which I had really hoped, but that’s ok. Then I went to a bank to close an account, then I texted my friend, Sandy, to see if I could come to visit but she didn’t answer quickly enough so I went to Walmart. She texted while I was getting groceries and said she would love a visit, so when I finished shopping I went over there. She lives really close to Walmart. Sandy had been a good friend since...

We both were wide awake at 5am again and decided to get reservations made for hotels in Europe for our trip in June. We were amazed that prices have gone up a lot since we last looked at them about a month ago. We spent 1 ½ hours before Tom gave up and suggested calling a travel agent. But I persevered until about 10:30. I got all the hotels set up for the whole trip! I sure hope they turn out to be good places and central to where we want to be. Now we’re really getting excited! Then I finally did my blog and other things. Tom made me a yummy omelet to thank me for all the effort. Part of the reason Tom stopped trying to help me was that he needed to get all of the yard waste from Ruthann’s out of his truck. He went around to neighbor’s houses where they have dumpsters to see if they were empty enough to fit some and managed to get rid of all of it. That was a great relief!   The dumpsters in the neighborhood are dumped on Thursday afternoons, so he needed to get the stuff i...

  Tom and I were both awake before 5am, so we got up and practiced Portuguese. I swear this is a hard language! There are things that just don’t make sense and Babbel doesn’t explain quite enough in my opinion. Anyway, after that, we listened to a conference talk in Portuguese while reading it in Spanish, then worked on our own computer things for a little while. Ravenna has been on a “family trip” for a couple of weeks. She decided for her birthday present to herself, she would go see Cai’s baby and other people important to her. So from Cai’s she went to Mike and Becky, then down to Arizona to see her other grandparents and her best friend, then to Trina’s for one night, then our house was the last stop on her way home. She got here about 11:30 and stayed a couple of hours. Christian didn’t ever answer or acknowledge my invitation to come while she’s here but arrived before Ravenna! We made Tom’s famous burritos with fresh squeezed orange juice and fresh grapefruits. We showe...

On Tuesdays and Fridays we start our day at 6am when Tom leaves for work. I just did computer stuff and picked up a bit until Anne was ready to chat at 8:30. We had a good visit but we still miss Carma so much. Tom was gone quite a while so I worked on my little projects. I FINISHED the baby blanket for Cai’s baby. I’m not thrilled with it, but I think she might like it. I’m glad to have it done and ready to wrap. I also worked on another doll, just for fun. It’s a hand sewn pattern I found. It’s hard for me to do good hand stitching, but it’s pretty fun, too.    After Tom got home from work and errands, he did a bunch of computer stuff. He’s trying to help our nephew, Mary’s son who lives in Mexico get citizenship, but there are lots of complications. He needs his mother’s birth certificate, but she has a different name on her birth certificate, her marriage certificate and her death certificate. So Tom has been trying to get all those to match so that Guy can get his cit...

  We are getting good at doing scripture study first thing, then Babbel in Portuguese. We are committed to keeping our priorities prioritized. I also wrote on my blog and balanced the checkbook first thing in the morning. After Tom headed out to work on the yard, I worked on cleaning the oven. I have never spilled anything or had anything happen in the oven to get it dirty, yet the bottom and sides were very dirty. That’s when I learned that this oven in the studio does not have a self-cleaning feature. I didn’t have any oven cleaner, so I did it the old-fashioned way – spray to soften, then scrub. I think it only took about an hour and looks much better now. I guess I’ll clean it more often from now on. The next thing on my to-do list was mending. I had bought 2 new blouses that hung way too low, so I shortened them both, then altered another blouse I got at a thrift store a long time ago that I love, but it had things about it that didn’t look good when I wore it. I hope it...

  We woke up so early that we had lots of time before going to Church. It was a relaxing morning. We found out this morning that it was Fast Sunday, so eating breakfast wasn’t part of the morning. Church was good. Testimony meeting had some good testimonies and the Relief Society lesson was good. After the 2 nd hour, I got to lead the choir rehearsal because Nora Guillen was out of town. I volunteered and sort of bullied her into letting me do it. I loved the rehearsal. I love leading music and love the songs we’re singing. So beautiful. Sad that next week when we sing them, Nora will be back and they probably won’t remember what I said, but it was still super fun to do. Tom said I was definitely in my happy place. My back was fine, mostly through the meetings and choir practice, but when we got home, it felt good to rest it while Tom made some delicious stir-fry. Then we got a little nap. There was a baptism at 5 and I was giving the talk on the Holy Ghost. The talk on ...

  Today was fun! As soon as Tom left to go help clean the church building, I vacuumed the carpet in our room, then I shampooed it. It was so dirty! I was inspired to do this today because with the back pain I’ve had this week, I tried to do yoga on the floor, and realized the carpet smelled of dog. Really bad. Plus it was getting pretty dirty. It was a beautiful day outside, so I was able to open both windows and both doors and turn on the fan. I did one pass on the carpet with carpet shampoo, then 2 passes with clear water to get the soap out. The water came out significantly less filthy on the last pass. And it smelled much better. Plus with all the doors and windows open, the room filled with the aroma of orange and lemon blossoms and jasmine. It was so wonderful! As soon as I finished that, I made a batch of brownies. I planned to take half to the baptism today, half to the baptism tomorrow, and hoped to have a few leftover for the renters. I cut the pan of brownies up ...

My back continues to give me problems if I stand for more than a couple of minutes. So I sat whenever I could, which was most of the day. I managed to clean the kitchen, mop the floor and do a load of laundry in-between sitting. While sitting I worked mostly on the baby quilt I’m doing. I think it’s going to need a few more weeks to finish. Tanya wasn’t able to come to yoga today because of a car shortage, so I went alone. I debated a lot about whether I could do yoga with the pain in my back and decided the movement would feel good, and went without Tanya. When I got there, I found out it had been canceled. It wasn’t a big deal to me that I got all dressed and out of the house before 9am, but I was really glad Tanya hadn’t driven all the way from Clovis to go with me. While I crochet, I watched a lot of tv. Most of it was not memorable, but I did find a pretty cute Hallmark movie called Just One Kiss that I quite enjoyed. Tom was gone most of the day. He went to work, then did...

  We are excited as we prepare for Easter. We’re trying to make it a bigger deal this year but don’t have specific ideas of how to do that. One thing we will do is go to an open house that Tanya’s stake his holding that celebrates Easter. Can’t wait to see what that is like. The pain in my back ribs has been bad enough that was careful not to aggravate it all day. I only stood up when I had to and even then only for short spurts. However, I managed to get the rest of the winter stuff packed and moved to the garage. That felt really great! Also, the renter in Christian’s house who is moving out soon, hopefully, gave me 2 large bags of clothes and bedding to donate. There were 3 chenille bedspreads that she thought were worth a lot of money, so I decided to try to sell them for her. I listed them on Facebook and immediately got a call from a lady who lives really close, so we agreed to meet today at 1pm halfway in-between our houses. She liked 2 of them and was really excited t...

  I have had a pain in my left ribs since Sunday. Luckily I slept well because it doesn’t hurt when I’m lying or sitting down. The rest of the day I just rested whenever it hurt to bad to continue standing. Our morning routine now includes studying the scriptures together then studying Portuguese. I have to say, compared to Spanish, it’s really hard! We are using Babel and I’m not enjoying it much. There was a community meeting with our assemblyman that Tom went to in the morning. He likes being involved in those things, but I prefer not to, especially if there is controversy. He was gone a couple of hours and brought me home a donut from the meeting. One of my goals for today was to organize the shelves better where all my craft and painting stuff is, and the other things on those shelves in the garage. I never could get to the boxes I wanted. Tom stayed with me and helped me because he's so nice. We only spent a couple of hours on it, but we got a lot done. Now there are ...

I love this time of year when the orange blossoms and the Jasmine are in bloom! It smells so, so, wonderful! Tom and I woke up a few times before his alarm went off, but we managed to go back to sleep, so it was a good thing he set an alarm. Actually, now he usually sets one alarm on Alexa and one on Siri, just to be sure. They go off at exactly the same time, thanks to the universe. I got busy first thing after he left. I wanted to switch out my winter clothes for summer clothes, so yesterday I brought in my box of summer clothes and this morning I pulled all the winter clothes out of the closet and set them in the box summer clothes storage box. I either have way more winter clothes or they are just much bulkier, because they didn’t all fit into the same box. I’ll have to figure out a solution for that. But I washed and dried the summer clothes so they smell fresh and to get the wrinkles out. It’s almost like Christmas to have a whole new wardrobe of some favorite things to wear....

We set new goals to reflect our current schedule. We decided to go to the gym first thing in the mornings on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and on Tuesdays and Fridays, to meet at the gym when Tom finishes work. So the goal for this morning was to go to the gym “first thing”. But I like to have scripture study first thing, write on my blog and read Anne’s blog at the same time, then play through the next assigned hymns at least once as soon as I get up. We didn’t get up very early this morning, so by the time I finished my morning routine and then we went to the gym “first thing” it was 10am. That’s ok, though, we got a good workout and that’s what matters. We picked up a few things at the grocery store on the way home. I needed to balance the checkbook, crochet on my projects, and several other things today so I didn’t ever get to other projects. Tom worked outside and got more big projects done. He really takes care of the yard and enjoys it, but it is a full-time job for hi...