Weekend

I am in love with our little corner of the earth and it was also not without its highs and lows.

Wednesday, Adam and I finished getting everything loaded and after a few last minute stops, headed to the land of the setting sun.  We unloaded in the ice crusted snow.  Adam pulled up onto the lawn (poor lawn, we'll treat you better someday) and he handed me things over the porch railing.  It was a good system, except our mattress in a box, that weighed about 10,000 pounds, wasn't going to work.  We went calling on the neighbors to borrow a dolly from my dad and Marianne and Robert and some of their family was visiting so Robert and Nikki came to help.  They made short work of not only bringing the heavy stuff inside but also they helped build our platform bed.

You can't beat the neighbors around here.

We had dinner at my parents' house and Ammon's family was there for that.  Emma and Mark arrived, having come after work and Adam and Mark drove back to our house together and Emma and I drove together.  Emma marveled at all the stars.  She said breathlessly, "I can see the Milky Way."

It is magical.

While I was putting away the additional stuff the kids brought me (most importantly the butter and pesto that were integral to my Thanksgiving contributions but I had forgotten--my extensive list let me down!).  Emma sat in our sparse living room and played her guitar and sang and I felt like I was pretty much in paradise.  

Thursday was when our reversal of fortunes came.

I made pie and pesto dip and hummed along in my lovely, if Spartan, little kitchen with the pretty views out the (very dirty) windows.  Marianne and Robert and a bunch of their people stopped by on their walk.  Everything was going swimmingly and then neither toilet would flush.

I called my dad to borrow a plunger and told him the news and he said, "That's not good."  I was hoping he would say that there was a magic button hidden in a closet that I could push to fix everything, but I guess there isn't.

My uncle Drew has a bigger house there, next to the smaller house his family lived in when we were growing up.  He told my dad he had some furniture there he wanted to get rid of and we were welcome to it.  It seemed like an easy short term fix to our no furniture problem.  My dad and Ammon met us there.

No ones uses the little house and it is not what you would call vermin proof.  Mark pointed to the mouse droppings and I said, "Oh, those aren't mouse droppings." Rats.  Literally.

The couches were in really good shape (besides the rats) and I wanted them.  Adam didn't.  He gamely helped load them in the back of my dad's truck.  We put them on the front porch and I started taking off the removable cushion covers to see just what the story was.  My dad nobly pulled a mouse skeleton out of a crevice and tossed it away so I didn't have to.

I wondered if those couches were going to spell the end of our marriage, but we rallied.  I was dealing with them and the men went to ponder the septic situation.  The couch cushions were in really good shape and the rodents hadn't done too much damage.  After my dad and Ammon left, Adam and I vacuumed the couches and flipped them over and they are very solidly constructed.  I think we'll try to get them reupholstered and they won't be just a short term fix.

The marriage will be saved.

Adam was in touch with Andrew, our contractor, and then spoke with a plumber/septic person?  I don't know his official title.  He agreed to come the next day to try to reconcile our troubles.

We called a family council.  

Adam and Emma were fine staying overnight in a place where there were not working toilets.

I was not.

Mark wanted to go back to Utah because his friend had sent a distress signal and he wanted to answer it.

We went to Thanksgiving dinner at Marianne's and left our problems behind.  It was a great affair.  Marianne knows how to throw a party; she always has.  I think there were 32 people if I counted correctly.  We had plenty of food and plenty of laughter and conviviality.  

My dad offered to come with his excavator the next day and dig up our septic tank.  Because he, you know, just happens to have an excavator like you do.  He said they'd build a fire to thaw the ground.  So we canceled with our other guy.

Adam, who is every bit the hero my dad is in my life, just in different ways, got us a hotel room in Elko.

After dinner we made these button Christmas trees which united two things I love, buttons and spending time with the ladies.

After our craft, we played a rousing game of Nauvoo bingo.  Clarissa and Timeon's adorable foreign exchange student from Germany (who knows five languages--she's amazing) enthusiastically played too and I wonder if she will go home thinking that Nauvoo bingo is a part of American Thanksgiving.  My mom created the game after their mission.  The spaces are photos they took in Nauvoo.  Enoch is the traditional caller of the game, but had the audacity to move to Portland.  Ammon filled in and Marianne and Olivia and I were sitting closest to him and several times we lost track of our boards because we were either chatting or laughing at what Ammon was saying.  It was a crying gasping situation at times.  Let's just say Ammon missed his calling as a bingo caller.  

Maybe it isn't too late, he's young yet.

The best part of Nauvoo bingo, besides the brother cracking wise while calling, is the prizes.  My mom has bins of prizes.  They were all laid out on the long countertop in Marianne and Robert's new sunroom and everybody got 1) a prize when they got bingo, 2) a prize when they got blackout and 3) another prize because my mom said they could.  They are legitimately good prizes and more than one person hid the Bath and Body Works lotion or hand soap they wanted before the game started.

The last thing was the talent show.  Robert juggled oranges (a fan favorite) and I sang with our kids, but otherwise it was just the grandkids performing.  They are some talented kids, but I thought Omar stole the show by solving a rubiks cube his brother Ammon had helpfully messed up for him in 53 seconds.  How is that even possible?!?

Braeden texted this peaceful scene of their Thanksgiving dinner:

Mark responded with this:

I think this happened during our button Christmas trees.  My favorite part of the picture is Ruben placidly on his phone while his brothers are getting pummeled at his elbow.

Mark went back to Utah, Adam and I went to Elko, and Emma borrowed a car from the Johnsons and slept in our house.  Brave girl.

Friday morning, I roped Adam into pondering all the Black Friday deals and then he took a shower and I called my dad.  My dad, brothers, Robert, Morgan and Olivia's boys had built the fire at 7:00 AM!  Adam felt bad he hadn't been there to help.  We headed to Starr Valley and Emma and I visited my mom and my dad and Ammon and Adam worked.  

We looked at her old high school yearbooks and she tried to remember the name of the musical she starred in when she was in high school.  When my sisters were in high school musicals and when my children were in high school musicals, my mom never mentioned she had been in one.  "Why didn't you ever tell us?" I asked.  She just shrugged.

We made spaghetti for lunch and then they went back to work outside and Emma and I inventoried stuff at our house.  I want to know what I have and what I need to bring when we visit.  I took this picture out the bedroom window:

Ammon is hard to see, but he's down in the hole.

I stopped by to thank Ammon and I said, "Say Ammon, how did you spend your Thanksgiving vacation?"  

He grinned and leaned on his shovel and said,  "Stay in school, kids."

Emma napped and I feathered my nest a little, organizing things until I had to use the bathroom and went back over to my parents' house.

Katie and Melanee and their kids were back from Black Friday shopping in town so we saw some of their spoils and then Adam called and said we needed to go to town for ten feet of 4 inch PVC pipe.  My dad said he also wanted me to get some starter fluid and I felt the returning panic of when I was in high school and my dad would send me to that store for something and I would get the wrong thing.  That store intimidates me.  Adam was getting the pipe cut and getting the stuff he needed and I wandered completely aimlessly not even knowing which part of the nonsensical store to look.  A worker took compassion on me and asked if I needed help.  I located the stuff for my dad, Adam tied the pipe on the top of the car (luckily he is better at knots than I am) and we were on our way.  It was dark by the time we got back and they used our car and my dad's (pull into the orchard?  no problem for the Subarus) to illuminate the way and they fixed it!  There were roots grown into the line.  (I won't hold it against the crabapple tree though.  I've always loved it since I was a little girl and would swing on the tire swing on the Big Treehouse tree and try to touch the crabapple tree with my feet.)

We had dinner at Marianne's, a reprise of Thanksgiving leftovers which was wonderful.  We went back to our snug little house which was also wonderful.

Saturday morning I got up before everyone else and I found my spot.

I will eventually get a more comfy chair.

I enjoyed the fire and the view.

The folding chairs are strategically placed to flatten the rug but they also are very lightweight so I don't think they flatten it much.

You can't see it in the picture but there was softly falling snow outside that then turned to more enthusiastic falling snow.

Emma and I went to Olivia's for her annual holiday brunch.  It is always a highlight.  Olivia also knows how to throw a party.

Here's a picture of my mom and her girls:

Melanee, Olivia, my mom, Marianne, me and Katie--why am I standing out in front of everyone?

Then here's a picture of our girls:

Back row: Clarissa, Carolina, Desi, Liberty, Shuyan (the foreign exchange student), Olivia, Destin (she lives with Marianne and Robert), Emma.  Front row:  Charlotte, Ruby (holding Liliana's picture), Azure, and Lucette.

Olivia had us each write a limerick about the person to our right.  What it comes down to is that none of us are going to quit our day jobs to become limerick writers, but we still enjoyed them.  We told about a rose, a thorn and a bud from the year and some of us cried. (I don't know if I've ever been to the brunch and not cried.)

We played After the Manner of the Adverb and Smurf, which is what my family calls Pluck the Chicken.

It was a good time.

Saturday night Adam and Emma and I worked on a puzzle and then went to Marianne's for some capitalism playing.  I'm not very good at it, to the chagrin of Robert who is super competitive and would cringe at my choices (he also looks at everyones' hands).  It was a fun time.  I love being a couple minutes away from my family.

Sunday morning we battened down all the hatches in our house and went to church.  We left after sacrament meeting and came back to Utah.

I feel rejuvenated and grateful.  I loved our Thanksgiving break, even with the reversal of fortunes, and I feel blessed in my association with my parents and siblings. 

And now it's the Christmas season!  Hurray!