garden, scouting, accidents on our corner, and my missionaries

Garden report--we didn't garden in our regular spot as it was overrun by salt grass. Glen has been poisoning and burning the salt grass. We hope next year the situation will be better. What we did was plant some tomato, eggplant, lettuce, and bell pepper plants that I started from seed at the end of our back yard next to the fence. They were eaten by what we figure were rabbits. Glen then replanted and it was late in the season. In the end, we have a few tomato plants (regular, roma, and cherry), one zucchini, and one yellow crookneck squash growing.

As of today, we have only harvested 2 zucchini, 1 crookneck, 2 small tomatoes, and about a pint of cherry tomatoes. We have not gone without homegrown goods, however, thanks to Uncle Jim and to David and Jackie. We've enjoyed tomatoes, zucchini, cantaloupe, and crookneck from their gardens.

I hope next year goes better.

this year's garden

we hope our regular spot will be useable again next year

There was a Scouting Court of Honor this week. Alex received 4 merit badges, bringing his number of badges earned to 5 (first aid being his other one). This time around he earned his Emergency Preparedness, Environmental Science, Leather Work, and Wilderness Survival.

For the Wilderness Survival, one of the requirements was to sleep out of doors and not in your tent. The night Alex slept out there was a big rain storm. Other boys were sleeping out, too. The scoutmaster ran around at 2 am trying to help the boys who were getting rained on. He found Alex dry and still sleeping because he had chosen a good spot for his bag--under a table which was under a good tarp. The other boys were under a tarp that was kind of holey, so the rain was dripping through.

Of course, I forgot my camera so I don't have him in his uniform, but here he is with his new badges that he earned at scout camp.

We used to have accidents on the corner in front of our house half-way often. Then the corner was redesigned many years ago, and we haven't had any trouble for quite a while. In a period of 11 days, we've now had 3 accidents.

The first was on Tuesday the 3rd, probably in the late morning. I was in Reno that day with Hannah (who was getting her braces off). I don't think the driver was injured.

Then I heard a funny noise at 5:20 am on Saturday morning the 14th--I thought something had happened over at the dairy barn (mini-explosion in a piece of equipment is what my sleepy mind pictured), but a guy had "missed" the corner and plowed through the arrow signs that showed that the road curved. His car wound up in the little ditch. He wasn't injured and supposedly alcohol was involved.

That same evening around 10:30 a woman coming from the opposite direction "missed" the corner, wound up in the same little ditch, and alcohol was also a factor. Luckily, she wasn't injured either. On Monday, NDOT came out to fix the mangled signs from Saturday morning.

That's the end of our driveway

We've been getting short letters from our 2 missionaries lately, but they seem to be doing well.

Ryan is mentioning teaching real investigators for the first time. It was transfer week this past week, and for the first time he isn't moving to a new area. He's been in Louisiana 4 months now and is already in his 3rd area, so we didn't think he'd be transferred, but you never know. It looks like he is happy and gets along well with his companion, Elder Deaver.

Oh, yeah. Ryan is teaching himself Braille. He bought himself a Braille Book of Mormon for $3.30. This is what he said:  "Yeah, I'm going to read Braille. I already knew the alphabet, but during this last week I've learned most of the symbols they have for certain combinations of letters and the punctuation. I'm also getting a lot better at being able to read it with my fingers. It was hard to do that at first. It takes me about 15 min to read a verse." Amazing.

James Taylor had a concert last weekend with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square. Turns out, Eric was able to go. This is what he said:

"I got to go [in the] standby line to [see] the James Taylor performance on the 7th. He did "Carolina in My Mind" and "Fire and Rain" and initially I was kind of disappointed he didn't do "Sweet Baby James," but sure enough he did it last second as an "impromptu" encore, just not in the program.

So, yeah, I'm surrounded by greatness here, all the time. It's great."

Part of the greatness he's referring to deals with the fact that Comic-Con was recently held in Salt Lake and a lot of famous people were running around. I don't think he saw any of them personally, but he was thrilled by all the big names (Adam West, Burt Ward, "William Shatner, Lou Ferrigno, David Prowse, Kevin Sorbo... Peter Mayhew... A whole bunch of big names, is the point. And the giant head of Chuck Norris.").

There was also a special event at the Church History Museum where a "bunch of professional artists just did their thing, in front of you, and you could go around and watch them and ask questions. Mostly painters, but there was a paper cutter and a few carpenters, and potter/novelist Ben Behunin was down on the main level. Probably my favorite there was Emily C McPhie; the C stands for Christensen like James, her father." Eric and I love the artwork of James C. Christensen. To see what he does, go to his site: http://www.jameschristensenart.com/

So, Eric seems happy. I wonder how his assignment is going, though...

I start a long-term sub job on Tuesday. It'll be for 3-6 weeks for a resource (= special ed) math teacher at the high school. She does all inclusion classes, so I have co-teachers. It should be a good job as her co-teachers are all wonderful and I love math.

Happy Fall!