Monday, June 29, 2009

My FHE #5

Whew! Grant and Ruth must have gone to bed, haven't posted a FHE Flashback, so I'll put mine on a day late. Yesterday was loaded and I didn't get to it. My VT partner has been unavailable (gone, it turns out, and forgot to let me know), so I put it off as long as I could trying to connect. It's a busy workweek, so I made the rounds yesterday.

Here are several “dressing up” poses of Jewel. The white fake fur coat complete with a muff a neighbor made and loaned to Jewel while it fit her, and we “crimped” her hair. Her dad brought this bouncy ball home from the DI and it provided hours of pleasure. She got really good at maximum height, up and down the hall! The dog got lots of exercise, as well. Jewel would tease our little dogs relentlessly, then run off, and they would chase her, often scoring a bite in her behind or legs. I chose to not interfere, figuring it would cure her, but it never did.







Here’s a cute picture of sleep having overtaken Jewel and Grant. No doubt the movie was a Western and on the boring side. (J/K, but I did used to tease that sex in movies was bad but apparently killing people was just fine.) This is the kids dressed up for the baptism festivities involving Jewel turning eight, Grant almost 12. It was the one and only time Jewel had short hair as a preteen. We didn’t have hair salon trips in our budget, and it was very traumatizing for me to cut off her lovely, long hair! (What she requested for her birthday. She actually liked it [then]. For which I was most grateful.)


These are two Halloween’s in a row, and the last time Grant went out trick-or-treating. He and his friends made masks at school and wore them. (Grant’s in the middle.) For years thereafter it was part of the decorations - I’d hang it on the porch light. Still have it. (The mask, not the porch light. J) I can’t remember who both friends are. One was Brent Francom I think, and the other was probably Tyler Humble or Justin Burgon.




Jewel’s room was redecorated only once in the 15 years she called it hers, and after the bed we added new carpet, window treatment and picture frames, hunter green and burgundy. The bed was a Christmas surprise, and you can see how pleased she was. Grant had bunkbeds which Jewel inherited. We gave them to some neighbors who were kind enough to come get them on Christmas eve after the kids went to sleep. I cooked up some reason for them to sleep downstairs. The next two pictures are a 1992 trip to the coast, and the cutie Jewel was enjoying with Janeil is Emily.




This last picture is one of several bikes Grant bought with the money he earned delivering newspapers for years and years. He had another one that was pretty fancy, a silver “trick” bike, and the last day of school the neighbors had a movie celebration and he left it on their lawn. Some questionable teenage male visitors of the family next door helped themselves to it and we assumed it was gone for good. One day, late that same summer, I got a frantic phone call at work from Grant, he’s in the kitchen upstairs and I can hear the pounding on the downstairs door! Those boys came back for a visit to that same house, Grant spotted his bike and just grabbed it and brought it home, inside the house. Luckily one of the neighborhood dads was home and noticed the commotion, and came to his protection until I could get the police there. The boys, in their arrogance, insisted that the bike was theirs, but Grant ID’d a hidden flaw which was good enough for the police to allow him to keep it (even though he didn’t know the serial number), and shewed the bad guys away. This bike he sold; the silver one he gave away to a boy who didn’t have a bike.

Next installment - last Sunday in July.

Sunday, June 21, 2009


Happy Father's Day to
Grant and Johnny!

These are two of my favorite pictures of my Dad.

The cow milking one is out in what was called the "north pasture" in Manila. I'd go with him for the chore but there was this white cow that didn't like me (or enjoyed knowing I was afraid of it), and I'd keep my distance.

The other is from his honeymoon with Norma, and the back of the picture says "Vasilios Aloizos [name], Dodekanisou Neapoli Piraeus Greece," and it appears the picture was taken by a tour guide. Neapoli is near Thessaloniki. Piraeus is the southernmost town of mainland Greece, near Athens, built upon the site of the ancient city Boiai (King Boias was a descendant of Hercules). Patmos is one of the islands in the Prefecture of Dodekanisou. I wish I had Norma's journal. I copied one that covered before and after, but she must have kept it separately. Looking at the church tours, however, I'm betting theirs was similar - Athens, Corinth, then Cairo to see the pyramids, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, Patmos, Ephesus, Piraeus.

From one of the poems he liked to quote:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time.
Footprints that perhaps another
Sailing o'er life's lonesome main,
Some forlorn shipwrecked brother
Seeing, may take heart again.
Let us then be up and doing
With a heart for any fate,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

(Last stanza of the Psalm of Life by Longfellow.)

And this from a song he used to sing (we played it at his funeral):

To love someone more dearly every day,
To help a wandering child to find his way,
To ponder o'er a noble thought and pray,
And smile when evening falls, and smile when evening falls,
This is my task.

To follow truth as blind men long for light,
To do my best from dawn of day till night,
To keep heart fit for His holy sight,
And answer when He Calls, and answer when He Calls,
This is my task.

And then my Savior by and by to meet
When faith hath made her task on earth complete,
And lay my homage at the Master's feet
Within the jasper walls, within the jasper walls,
This crowns my task.

Aha! I figured out how to get My Task to "play"! No, I didn't accomplish it with any Mac built-ins, though no doubt I could - right Carl? I bought a CoolPix Nikon for the trip to Houston - no more flipping problems on my pictures with backwards words!

Couldn't find the song in the various lists, tried uploading it to get a URL assigned (did, but blogger wouldn't accept it), so then I made my Dad's LP record as a video. So there's nothing much to see, but if you want to hear it, turn off my playlist (If you haven't already) and click on the video! Hopefully I haven't unwittingly broken any rules, seems to me since I own the LP I can invite whomever to listen to it with me.... I'll have to reread Bednar on the matter! So on the extremely off chance anyone wants to lift it, I say no, you can't. J And yes, next time I'll stabilize the frame. (And move the clock!)

Saturday, June 13, 2009

What a great quote, at the moment in my sidebar, soon to disappear:

Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does no good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise. – Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)



A few gratitudes to note:

I'm grateful for a tight house. Haven't had the heat on in ages though it's currently 57 and has been in the 50's nightly with rain four days in a row now. My flora is taking it on the powdery-mildew chin, however, so these week-old pictures are I'm sure as good as it's going to get this season.





And here's a couple just now, both from the same bush, after the latest downpour, amazingly beautiful considering that row of bushes go back to the sixties and also survived the fire (right next to the totally incinerated garage):







My knee is doing better these days, for some reason, for which I am grateful. Probably from wearing my Zcoil shoes every day in Houston and every day of our recent Utah School Nutrition Association Conference.






And lastly, I get to be the sacrament meeting chorister tomorrow!

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