Papa, with flowers

Seeing as how they owned a flower shop for ten years, it isn't that surprising that my parents were asked to do floral arrangements to sit at the front of the chapel during our most recent Stake Conference. Mom was feeling sort of migrane-y when the day arrived to actually put the arrangements together, so she asked Dad to do them-- and he happily obliged. He enjoys flower arranging.

Very promptly (less than a week) after the conference, a note arrived from our new stake president, thanking Mom for doing the flowers. The following Sunday, someone else thanked her again. We keep meaning to tell them who it really was, but we're all a bit forgetful, so it hasn't happened yet.

Hooray for technology!

Ivy started it, but I've finally followed her example: I read aloud to the neeflings over the phone-- either books checked out of the library or ones from our own collections. I know it sounds silly that I hadn't thought of this solution before, but I have to say that it is much less exhausting to read someone else's story aloud than to be making up your own all the time. (Also, beyond that, there's this sort of happiness that comes from making a kid happy, and this is one of the most easily accessible ways for me to get to that.)

The story I'm reading at any given time may be truly age-appropriate for only one kid (sometimes two), but frequently several of them will listen in, via speakerphone. I hadn't realized quite how popular this was until the other day when I called to read to Sroon, and his younger brother Quarto shouted, "SPEAK-er-phoooooone!" with the last part getting more faint as he ran off to the bedroom to tell the others what was about to commence.

Assateague

I am trying to catch up with myself. I suppose that this means that I should post more.

Assateague is a barrier island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, just a few miles south of the ever-crowded-and-commercial Ocean City. We visited just before school let out, and it was very, very lovely (and sparse enough to be fun).

Yes, it's true that it's just a beach; but it is also true that this was my first true view of the Atlantic Ocean, and it was QUITE exciting to me.

All three of my pictures are from rather late in the day. I guess that this could be explained by the fact that we didn't get out the door until ten or so, and didn't get there until after noon, and didn't actually get to the beach until around five. That is, indeed, Papa; neither he nor Mom went swimming that day, but I had a nice dip in the Atlantic, and did a bit of shell collecting to boot. Papa just collected pictures with his camera (there were dolphins! If only one of us had had a telephoto lens and a tripod...) and Mom collected the sun's rays and chapters from the book she was reading.

While we were driving, Mom mentioned that they usually go to a beach in Delaware. I said that it was fine with me if we went to Delaware; I just wanted to go to the ocean. But she kept driving towards Assateague. Finally, she explained that she wanted to see the horses on Assateague. Ah-hah! And we saw some, literally as we were driving away. I got two shots (Mom asked me to); I chose to post the one I thought was more interesting.


One Friday morning a couple of months ago, my mother knocked on my bedroom door and said, "How would you like to go to Assateague today?" I promptly agreed. We had planned-- sort-of planned-- to go to Assateague a month before that but were waylaid by medical problems on Mom's part. I have to say that this experience is the only time in my entire life that I remember my mother spontaneously deciding to take a trip. (No vacation with Mom would be a vacation with Mom without her spontaneously deciding to change plans mid-stream; but actually deciding to go and then leaving the same morning is unheard-of, in my experience with her.)

Forgetting isn't everything

Stuff I've managed to forget/misplace, which affected me today:

• my regular ring of keys
• the spare car key
• the other spare car key
• the time of C and B's wedding
• the key to my (usual, permanent) locker at the temple
• because of the above, my name tag which identifies me as a worker at the temple
• that it is a good idea to wear, ahem, *appropriately-colored undergarments when one is attending the temple
• the time that prayer meeting for my shift starts
• my little hand-sewing project which I thought I had packed just in case I ended up waiting around for a while, for a ride

Stuff I've managed to do anyway:

• Talk my astonishingly patient mother into both dropping me off and picking me up
• Borrow needed items of clothing 
• Get a temporary name tag, and 
• Just get a locker in the regular locker room instead of the worker room
• Be on time to the aforementioned wedding (I was two hours early; whew!)
• Help out the swamped, morning shift of the temple staff, because I happened to have an hour to kill, because I was two hours early to a wedding being held there
• Let my shift supervisor know that I'd be missing the prayer meeting because of said wedding (I was there early! so I left a note)
• Be practically on time to start working on my shift
• Be a patron at the temple; I skipped being a patron early in the day because they needed me as a worker, but at the end of my own shift it was very, very quiet, so (with permission) I left my post and went up to another very, very quiet office where they were most happy to have me as a patron in the hour before my mother was able to pick me up
• Find the second spare car key! Now if only my memory would show up as well...

*Just in case you didn't know: one walks into the temple in "street clothes," which means Sunday Best. Once inside, one enters a locker room (with individual booths for privacy when changing) and switches to "temple whites," which, as the name indicates, are all white. Since white doesn't tend to be terribly opaque, if one happens to be forgetful about what color of under-layers one has worn, it WILL show through.

Note to Self: Remember Eisenhower's Advice

This is from a letter written to Lucius Clay, who at the time (1947) was the military governor for Germany. He tried to resign his post (officially) at least eleven times; unofficially, the count was even higher. Eisenhower had been his good friend for a long time, and in this letter, he was trying to talk him out of one of the threatened resignations. I found it quoted in The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour, by Andrei Cherny.
 
"...please remember that now abide Faith, Hope, and Charity, these three, and greater than any is a sense of humor."

Turtles, Ducks and a Heron

From that one day a couple of months ago when I was so trigger-happy with my camera. But it was really cool-looking!

There were more turtles out than I have ever seen at the same time, before or since, and it seemed like they were all sunning themselves.

These were sitting on the tubing which is somehow connected to the dredging of the lake-- a LOT of turtles were on the tubing that day.

The ducks and the turtles didn't seem to mind each other much.

And this is as close as I could get to the heron I saw.  I was afraid you wouldn't be able to see it at all, but this picture came out OK.

Blogessence

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. For one, I had dreams of Becoming A Writer, and I figured that if I had a(n at least nominally) public forum in which I expected myself to express ideas in a comprehensible format on a regular basis, then I would be forced to work on my writing on an equally regular basis. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of writer I wanted to be, so the first blog descriptor lines that I used (“whatever I feel like writing at the time”) made perfect sense.

And yet, there was a further sense of purpose, even from the beginning. My first posting was about the death of one of my uncles, and how I mourned not just his passing but the passing of my chance to become closer to a man who had taken it upon himself to connect me more firmly to an extended family which—reflecting the attitudes of my own parents—wasn’t quite sure what to do with its first old maid in a generation. I wanted to express, even though in most senses it was too late, my appreciation for his making me feel even a little more at home with my family. As I continued to write, I found myself gravitating to subjects which help me figure out how to make myself feel at home even in the unexpected--you may laugh, and I actually don't mind, but it's still true-- as I say, the unexpected circumstance of being a grownup who needs a home, but who has neither of the most usual prerequisites in my home culture: a husband or a house of my own.

I come from quite the line of wanderers; I feel a keen wanderlust myself; and yet I feel equally a keen pang of longing for a true sense of home, which in some ways I have assuaged by blogging about what I think a Proper Home could and/or should be like. And realizing that I was doing this is partly what led me to my current blog descriptor, which (to finally answer N’s question) comes from the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, and is one of my favorite scriptures ever.

[And I would love to blog about being an Incredibly Mormon (not to mention More Than Faintly Victorian) person and living in a larger society which "gets" me, in some ways, better than my Mormon subculture does, but that will have to wait.  This posting that you're reading right now, since I promised it in the last posting, caused a long-ish, unplanned pause in my blogging, which I do not wish to repeat.]