Scorching the World

  We are determined to finish preparing Tanya’s rental so she can get it rented soon. She had to work today so we were going to met at her house at 11am. That gave me a whole lot of morning to get stuff done. Tom woke up before 5am and got up and was on his computer when I woke up at 5.  My first order of business was to get the house cleaned. I enlisted Tom to vacuum while I swept and mopped. Then I cleaned the bathrooms. It’s been an embarrassingly long time since we did that.  So we spent 2 hours cleaning and were finished by 7am. Mornings are gold for getting a lot of things done.    It’s so nice to have a clean house! Then I worked on the computer for a very long time, then practiced the piano. What a fun life I live! After we finished and were on the computers, I got a text from Ginger Duran. She’s the stake music chairman. She asked me if I would lead a choir for stake conference on August 23, in Spanish. But instead of just having a choir from the ...

  I agreed to meet Tanya at the rental at 6:30am again. The two of us can get good stuff done while nobody else is there and it is still cool outside. Yesterday we turned off the electricity and replaced the rest of the outlets and light switches, so now that job is done. But when we turned the power back on, half of the house didn’t have electricity. I went out and switched every breaker off and on, then Tanya switched the main back on because I wasn’t strong enough, and then everything worked. Hooray! We feel so good when we can figure things out by ourselves. Anyway, back to today. It is hard to get out of the house by 6am! I had to remember to take her the pie I made from Todd’s peaches, and a bunch of pints of Pluot jam from Todd’s tree. She was super happy to get those things. We got a whole lot of little things done while we were alone in the house. We touched up the black spray on the front security screen door where there was still purple showing through. It took two o...

  I woke up at 4am, thinking about having to play organ again this coming Sunday. I wouldn’t mind playing 2 Sundays in a row or playing every Sunday, but one of the hymns for this coming Sunday is too hard for me.  Later I arranged for another organist to play this Sunday. What a load off my mind! I eventually got up at almost 5am to get started on my day.  I was on the computer for quite a while and even practiced on the piano on the quietest setting possible, then got dressed and ready to go. Tanya and I planned to meet at her rental at 6:30am. Tom had to do some Synergy work, then went to play pickleball, then joined us at the rental at 11am. Tanya and I got a lot done. When we stopped for a break after 4 hours, I made a list of everything that still needs done in each room. It’s quite a list, but none of the things will take a very long time. I think we’ll be done by the end of next week. Hopefully. So we worked from 6:30 until I left about 2pm. I was so tir...

This is me when playing the organ in Sacrament meeting Since I was playing in Sacrament meeting today, I wanted to be there as early as possible. I can practice at home, but the organ at the church has a much more sensitive touch, so it’s important to get used to that before I play in front of people. So we got to the church at 8:30am only to find nobody was there. It said on Tom’s calendar that the Bishop had meetings with the youth, but apparently, they were canceled? So we sat in the parking lot and I filed my fingernails shorter while we waited for someone to show up. Within about 15 minutes, 2 men from the Spanish ward came and let us in. I practiced and practiced. Janeen always comes at 9:30 to go over the hymns with the organist, which is helpful to me to set a tempo and see how she will handle pick-up notes and such. That’s pretty helpful to me, but more time working things out together would help even more because there were a couple of things she did that threw me off. Trut...

  One of the sister clubs we organized for the summer is a travel club where whoever wants to can join together to do an activity. Today the organizer, Hollie Arrequin, put together an outing at Shaver Lake. Tom and I have never been there even though it is only an hour away and people we know go there all the time. Janeen Durrant wanted a ride because nobody else in her family wanted to or was available to go, so we offered for her to ride with us. I always have a lot to talk about with Janeen, so that was fun. Janeen had arranged to meet at our house at 8am and of course, Tom had a lot of things he wanted to get done before we left. He was washing our renter’s car when I told him he had to stop and put his stuff away so he was ready to go. We had packed some peanut butter sandwiches and vegetables for lunch. Hollie had arranged to get to the lake early to reserve a table, but when we got there, we couldn’t find her. We tried texting her but it seemed she didn’t have service...

     Tom and I woke up about 20 minutes before he needed to get up for work. That gave him time to do a little watering outside before leaving. Our sprinklers need some attention but it is always too hot outside for me to want to go look at them. I did my morning routine then worked on my skirt. I finally finished it and hung it in the closet to wear Sunday. I’m still not sure I like it or if I will take it all apart again and do something else with it. Anne asked if we could zoom for a little while to begin to choose our classes for Education Week. We have 3 more weeks before I go to Utah for that, so there’s plenty of time to look at them and change our minds. It is very overwhelming to me to look at the schedule because there are lots of classes I would like to go to that are all at the same time, but in different parts of campus. There are certain speakers that I could just sit and listen to all day and never change classes. Looking at the schedule, it seems I could...

  We like Thursdays. They have become our new weekend, like a free day with no obligations. We slept in until 5 this morning. I did my morning routine, spending much more time practicing the organ. I’m still not comfortable with the hymns for Sunday because I haven’t practiced as much as normally because of our traveling weekends. It makes a big difference when I miss several days in a row for a couple of weeks in a row. Most of the day I worked on my skirt. I’m putting ruffles of chiffon over a polyester skirt I already had and it is much more difficult than it should have been. There was no way to account for or predict how much the skirt would stretch or how hard it is to cut straight lines in the chiffon. I finished it, but some layers were way crooked. The skirt is also pretty heavy, so the elastic waist is too loose. I think it will be really pretty when I finish it, but Tom called it “different”. For sure it is testing my patience. Tom worked on Synergy most of the d...

  I woke up about 2;30 when I realized Tom wasn’t in bed with me. I laid there for a long time trying to go back to sleep, until I was awake enough to open my eyes, then I joined him in the office. I got a whole lot done on the computer and about 9am, he was ready for a nap, but I was still wide awake. He took a nap while I sewed. Then about 10:30 I was super tired, so I took a little nap until our neighbor texted. She asked if she could come over for a few minutes. We quickly straightened up the house before she came. We had a nice little visit with her. She is such a nice person; we have wonderful neighbors. Tom decided not to play pickleball this morning. The place he usually plays wasn’t available so they invited everyone to join a group in a  different  building , but he opted out and stayed home. Yesterday his boss from the sausage delivery asked him to take their truck to dmv for a certification, but he missed the message, so he volunteered to go do it today....

  We were able to sleep in again this morning and woke up at 6:30 AM. We’re really becoming lazy. Lol. Breakfast wasn’t until 8 AM so we spent the morning packing and relaxing. We managed to watch an episode of the Waltons before going down to breakfast. They don’t have much of a breakfast. There’s one brand of cold cereal, whole wheat bread that you can toast, some kind of sausage McMuffin, and a couple of flavors of yogurt. I had the yogurt Tom had the McMuffin. We went back up and finished packing and left the hotel by 8:30 AM. I had wanted to leave at 8am because I like being early and having time to sit and wait just in case there is heavy traffic or any kind of emergency, but Tom believes in being on-time. It stressed me out, but everything worked out fine in the end. I always stress for nothing. The Paine Field airport in Everett is very small. I’m not sure if we saw the whole thing but the terminal we were at only had two gates, so it was easy to go through securi...

  I like that they always stand in order - Kari, Keisha, and Kami We slept in this morning until nearly 6:30 AM. What a luxury! We were ready for breakfast at 7:30 and went downstairs only to find that the office doesn’t even open until 8 AM. There isn’t anything in our room that says what time breakfast is, but they told Tom last night that they have a complimentary breakfast. When we did have breakfast, it wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was free, so we don’t complain. The closest ward to our hotel was only three minutes away by car so we decided to walk. But what we didn’t know beforehand was that it was mostly uphill so we were a bit winded when we got to the church. But it was nice weather, and we sure needed the exercise. It was a beautiful stake center. A man greeted us by the door and said his name was Tyler Nebeker. I said, “oh, you’re the Bishop.” I had looked up the location online and it gave me his name so I recognized it right away. Tom talked to some ...

  I woke up about 5 minutes before Tom’s alarm went off. We both slept great in our own bed. It’s wonderful to visit family and see wonderful places, but home is always the best. Tanya told me she didn't need me this week and I could have the whole week off! What a bonus! After Tom left for work, I did 2 loads of laundry and got caught up on my blog. Today is the day the gardeners come, so I hung one load outside, but I used a portable clothesline to hang our underwear in the house. I got to chat with Anne at 8:30 which was super fun. We have so much to catch up on and plan. I love being able to chat with her! I practiced the piano, but ran into a snag. Erilynne had asked me to play in her place the first week of August, but she was scheduled to play a hymn that is way too hard for me. So I decided to create a simplified version and spent most of the day working on that. Honestly, it’s fun to write music, so I enjoyed doing it a lot. After Tom got home, we had breakfast, then...

  I woke up at 4:30 but stayed in bed until 4:45, then got up to take a shower. Tom got up shortly after that. We finished our packing, adding our last-minute items like charging cables, pajamas, and makeup, then took off for the airport. There is not enough parking at the airport! It’s a very small airport and it looks like there’s lots of parking, but we had to drive around quite a while before we could find any place to stick our car. We finally found one and figured out how to pay for parking because it's gone digital since last time we were there. Then we hurried into the airport. I had already printed out our boarding passes so we went straight to TSA check and got in line. There were only two people ahead of us in line so it didn’t take long to go through and as soon as we got to the place where you put your suitcases, Tanya was there. She helped us load our things into the bins and told us what lines to get into. She told Tom to take off his belt because he would ha...

  Tom was supposed to go to work today and had asked for the day off so we could head up to Washington. Kari Dokka’s (our niece) daughter was getting married. But Tom was looking more closely at the paperwork last night and realized our flight was tomorrow, not today. He called his work and said he could go in to work after all, but was told they were closed today. The 2nd option for this morning was that he could go to pickleball, which was exciting because he doesn’t usually get to play with the Friday group. But he decided to skip it one more time and help me at Tanya’s rental. The whole thing about my confusion with our flight was just so strange and felt like the Twilight Zone. I was sure our flight was this morning. We were both fully packed and ready to go, I don’t know how I didn’t know that I had booked our flight for Saturday, not Friday. The 80 year old brain is seriously defective! Anyway, we got a lot of stuff done with this bonus day at home, then we headed over a...