MAY AND JUNE 2019

We have had such a lovely summer so far and a lot of that is because of interactions with great friends like you!
Jessica Scott joined us at TULIP FESTIVAL one morning...we love that some of you live close enough to join us on outings!

We are settling into the new house so nicely!  Got the APM ROOM pretty much set and the mission quilt on display there!  Come check it out!

Front room showcases a print of the ROME ITALY TEMPLE reflected in the glass of the Visitor Center Cristus statue.  Very cool!

Went to run a 5K with my daughters elementary school team and saw our own Juan Castanos there checking people in!  That made my day!

And got to attend the sealing of Aryssa and David in the Provo City Center Temple!  It was so beautiful!

We held a little Mission Reunion BBQ at the pavilion near our home and had such a fun time battling the winds and the chill! 
Prescott and Alisa Jackson
Ethan and Kassi Bruegger with Lana.

It was great to visit and so fun to catch up with all who came!

Christina Polander, Melissa Chord, Sarah Jensen.

And to meet some new mission babies!!
Chad and Melissa Alvey with baby Morgan.

Levi Egan

We just LOVE seeing these cute families grow!

Nick and Courtney Egan with Levi.

Amy and Joseph Barley

Daniel Shurtleff with President T and the donuts!

Have to show off our cute new granddaughter...hey all you ginger RM's, we may have another to add to our family.  Our son, Austin is our redhead and may finally have his look-alike!

We have had so much fun getting our yard put in with the new house. 
Cute little firepit area is ready for you to come have SMORES with us...

And got the pergola built this weekend so we can eat outside or watch movies underneath on the projection screen!
Set up a time to come visit!

MARCH and APRIL 2019

March and April are sort of a blur...
we were finishing up our new home and putting our old home on the market.


The old home sold within a week and this put the pressure on getting the new home ready for us to actually move into before closing on the old house.

Things fell into place perfectly, well for the most part, and it all has worked out so far.
We are living in our new home now, have not closed on it yet, but mostly settled in.

We had some great run-ins with RMs during these two months.
We were at a friend's reception when we thought we saw Kyle Denny...or someone who looked just like him, but I thought he was still in Missouri.  Nope, he was here in real life!
So good to see him!

Then Michelle Summerhays Watts arranged to meet up with us when she was in town visiting and also helped orchestrate meeting up with Kellie Carrigan and Kaitlyn Tolley with her husband.
They are all just so great!!

We met at Kneaders in SLC for dinner and it was just so much fun!

Scott and I got away for a long weekend to Bryce National Park and had a wonderful time hiking in snow...

...and not so much snow!  Beautiful place!

OK...this makes us SO HAPPY!  Remember Molesi Vaoga?  Well, our dear friends the Janulis from by the Mission Home are actually sponsoring him and his wife to live in the US and get work Visas.  They live with them in Peoria now.
This is Molesi with Dana Janulis.

Got a call from Jesi Burton while she was in town working on job stuff and master's degree stuff and we went to lunch.

She was one of the first to get to see the Mission Quilt in it's new home in the APM room of our new home.
She is doing AMAZING!  Hope it works out for her to come here to school!

OK, this is a little story about judging.  See this moving crew we hired?  Look a little rough around the edges, right?  Well, we really enjoyed having them move our big stuff to the new house and they were so nice and friendly.  At the end, one of them (the one in the gray shirt across from me) starts telling us about "my Church" and some of the things he is doing with them.  Pretty soon he is telling us about being baptized 2 months ago, about being ordained to be a Priest and going to do baptisms for the dead in the temple.  Yup.  You CANNOT judge a book by it's cover.  Made our day!

We had another visitor to the house.  CarlosCecena was back in town and arranged to meet up at the house for dinner with us.  What a great young man!  He is working hard in Mexico making dental lab work like crowns etc and also practicing to be a dentist.
We love how he keeps in touch each time he visits.

Katrina Woo married her sweetheart in Bountiful in April and we got to be there for that special day!

This makes us so happy seeing HER so happy!

Our baby Braden graduated from BYU this month.  We are also so happy for him!

We hosted our first APM DINNER GROUP in the new house this month and it was SO FUN!



Here the group are checking out the quilt in the APM Room.

Overflow table for dinner...

Dining room group.





Front and center is the Egan Family.  Courtney and Nick; Levi is crawling around somewhere.
L to R Jennie Taylor, Aryssa Hutchinson and David McBride, Melissa Chord, Aubree Fluckiger, Taylors, Paul Wilson, Zach Jensen and Crystal Turner.
We had the best walk down MEMORY LANE ever!!

WE WILL PLAN OUR SUMMER BBQ SOON AND LET YOU ALL KNOW!  WE LOVE  YOU!!

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  We have had a very busy 2019 so far!

We started off with a visit from our daughter Jenna and 2 of her kids and that was a blast for us!  Klay was so excited to ride with Grandpa to work on a TRAIN!

And we got to take them to places like DINOSAUR MUSEUMS.  If any of you want to go to any Thanksgiving Point museums, just let us know...we have a membership that allows us to take guests free :)

We spent a lot of time at IKEA!
Yup, it has become like a Friday night DATE NIGHT tradition!
We did 2 IKEA kitchens in our new home so we are constantly shopping for something to go along with those.







We had a wonderful APM DINNER GROUP in February with some of our RMs in the area...a good mix of older and younger ones!
Catie & John (Swallow) Paulsen, friend Andrew with Melissa Chord, Lance Cabral, Jason & Erica Hutchinson with Logan, Kendra & Klaus Griessman, and Kasey & Joe Cannon. 

We are getting some MISSION GRANDKIDS showing up at these dinners which is a blast!



Speaking of a blast, we are still loving our service in our local YSA!  We had this crazy group over for sort of an IRON CHEF cookoff...and of course, OUR TEAM WON!

February took us BACK TO ARIZONA for the President Nelson devotional there.

Does this stadium look familiar to any of you??

Here is what it looked like BEFORE all the devotional stuff...

And here is what it looked like DURING all the devotional stuff!

 The entire floor area was seating for YOUTH!
It was a wonderful experience to be with so many great Saints in this place that we love so much!

We got in 2 days of hikes while we were there.

First, we went to MORMON TRAIL down on South Mountain.






We were there with Rex from Church News as a videographer so we got to see him film with a DRONE.








And then, we got to be in our very FIRST DRONIE!!!

We drove over to Gilbert to get some drone shots of the temple there...spectacular!

Then we met up with the Janulis and some other News Guys for dinner at our favorite dive, CHINO BANDIDOS!

Here they are saying hello to the PANDA BUDDHA

The next morning we went over to Thunderbird to hike...yes, you see us wearing jackets.  It was February and SO COLD most of the time we were in AZ!

This hike takes up near the Phoenix Temple with some great views.

Then we drove over and got some drone shots there...

We noticed as we drove in that there was a large bird up near the angel Moroni...

So, I was able to zoom in to get a shot of this scraggly RED TAILED HAWK that was up there a long time!






OK, one of our very favorite things in AZ are the people we served with.  We always have a dinner with our great Office Missionaries who are the dearest people in the world!
Lyons (serving a Member Leader Mission still), Kings serving at the temple, Elcocks serving at the temple, Williams (serving as JUST SERVE Missionaries), Kiggins serving at the Temple, Rodgers also serving at the temple, the Janulis serving as Pathways Missionaries and Cherry's (Diane was home with a bum knee)  OH HOW WE LOVE THESE PEOPLE!!

OK, these shots are just for fun...I got to go behind the scenes at the stadium and met up with some former ward members who had decorated both bathrooms down there for President and Sister Nelson.  They were SO AMAZING!

And, I talked with the designers of the flowers for the podiums who used the native flowers inluding my favorite, Bougainvillia, the burgandy one.

Saturday night we arranged to meet up with some local RM's at another favorite place to eat...WALDO'S TACOS!!


Here are KaraLee (Glenn) and Aaron Darrow with their 3 little boys.  Keith and Preston have a new baby brother who was like 2 weeks old!  Brave KaraLee!!

And, it made our night to see Hollie (Moody) Pitts with her little girl and baby boy.

Here I am with some of our GIRLS!!  Add Maureen (Keelin) Hirsch to the mix!

Kathy Turville showed up along with the Elcocks...

And, Alex Whipple surprised us by showing up from Mesa!  He is good friends with the Waldo Family from his service in the area.

Holly and her cute family.  I got some good baby time!!

A shot with KaraLee.

And with Maureen and Chris.
We are getting to know these spouses of our RMs when we visit and we love and admire them too!

We were delighted that Talon and Paxton Campbell with their adorable little girl, showed up later on...he had a test in Tucson that day for his work; we were so grateful they could make it!

We have special memories of the Waldo family ourselves.  This son served a short mission with us in our area before he headed out to serve his fulltime mission!

And here are his folks and little brother who love and serve the ward as he is Bishop Waldo now!

Their new location for the Taco Truck on Grand.

We always love our time visiting the Janulis family...including their grandkids who sort of grew up with us in the mission...we knew these two when they were tiny and even one as a baby and they are now so old!

We were delighted to get an invitation to go to the temple with Caleb Brown the other night.  Made our night really.

And, as we went into the session, who should stand up to go with us but Prescott and Alissa Jackson!!  We loved being in the session and in the Celestial Room with them afterwards!!

 As a matter of fact, we loved being with them so much that we invited them to join us in another DINNER GROUP the next Sunday!  We had a wonderful group of Dan & Cassie Farnsworth with their little baby girl, Sage.  Corinne Coleman, Caleb Brown, Prescott and Alissa Jackson and us.

I have said this before...we are absolutely placed in callings that surround us with people we are supposed to meet.  This is the case with dear friends from our time at the MTC.
We got together with the Dunns and Warners from our time last year at the MTC together. 
Dunns treated us to a wonderful evening at the UTAH JAZZ game, which BTW was probably the most exciting game this season against the Bucks.  Yes, we won.

Courtside seats were super fun.

And, as great as all the trimmings of the game and such, it was the PEOPLE that made it all wonderful!

We were blessed to find another RM at the game, RICHARD TRIPP who happens to work for Vivent as well and was in the loge with us!
Made our night!
















Then when we went in to Stake Conference today, who should we see but LANCE CABRAL!  He was in the right place and we were so happy to see him there!
We love you all!

Quick house updates...our new home is coming along nicely.

Upstairs kitchen here you can see we were getting in doors and drawers, yup, we built those from those IKEA trips.

Weather finally got nice enough for our painter to paint the front of the house this month!

We got going on the downstairs kitchen.











And our home of 33 years in now on the market...a bittersweet time for us!

We love you...we will invite you to a MOVING PARTY one of these days and then an OPEN HOUSE when we get settled in the new place!