Before and After, In the Lovely Garden

So the past couple of years we have been working on a garden in a church/community plot donated by a member of our church. We weren't as faithful as getting there this year but we were sure blessed at what we got despite the fact that we didn't go as often as we should. First you see a picture of a Hawk we saw on the road to the garden one evening. Next we have some pictures of some of the things from our garden. I will call these BEFORE pictures.

All three pictures are from different days of picking. I didn't take pictures every time I picked either. The eggplants came in a variety of sizes. We had some nice big ones and a couple of cute little ones.

OK, no before picture of the watermelon, we had three I think that we managed to pick at the right time and eat, the others either got picked too early or were left for too long.

Tomatillos 1st in the bag (mixed with a few cherry tomatoes of course), 2nd in the sink then 3rd husked and washed.

 

Now it is time for the AFTER pictures :) 

 (sorry I have no pics of what happened to the tomatillos, but don't worry, it was all delicious.)

 

Homemade pizza with fresh vegetables has become one of our favorite! And this stuffed eggplant was delicious!

So if you are going to have eggplant you have to have ratatouille, it was sooo good and I made french bread to go with it.

 

Don't get grossed out by the name but this is tomato pie. I think I would describe it as a pizza pie with a white sauce and mozzarella cheese. It was sooo Good! We made it at least three times this summer.

Our Next Adventure

While I know I don't have a lot of followers, I know the two I have have been waiting. So here we go with Idaho and Utah.

Honestly it was a whirlwind of a trip. We both have family out there so of course we both had sets of people we wanted to go see. We started with some of my family, then some of his, then some of mine then some of his...

Here are a few pictures of some of our time there.

 Met my newest nephew.

 Nap time.

 Went bowling.

 Sister time.

  We went to the Bountiful temple, another for the list. :) (I stole this picture from the church website)

We also visited Temple Square, I wonder if my parents would take this picture for their wall...I am probably being presumptuous though.

 This night we also volunteered at a soup kitchen with his sister's family, sorry no pictures. :(

We spent Christmas there. We had stayed with his parent's for a couple of nights but went to his sister's on Christmas Eve to be there Christmas morning. It was really nice.

So everything is really out of order because the first pictures with my sisters came after Christmas as did visiting Bountiful temple. There were some nice walks and playing wally ball and various activies in between the pictures too. We went to my brother's and his brother's. It was just a nice trip meeting new people, spending time with family...

The day before we were to come home we took a cold walk out to this park. We didn't actually walk in the park because of the snow, but rather we walked around it.

Somewhere in there we stopped for a bit so he could ask me a certain question...I said yes! We took some pictures (isn't he great for thinking of bringing a camera for this occasion!) then, since it was actually quite cold, we took a little drive up the hillside and found a spot to talk a bit and to make some phone calls. The next few hours were followed by texts and phone calls to tell people the big news.

 This was his grandmother's ring, I love it and I am honored to wear it! I am also glad it was cold enough to shrink my hand enough that it would fit. :)

So here I am, ready to embark in my next set of distractions while preparing for the transition to my new life.

Looking Forward to the Next...

Okay, be forewarned that there is a lot of explanation going into the fun part of this post, and it is a bit personal, but here it is anyway.

I am really blessed to have found a good job for the past 11 years. I have had the joy of working with teenagers in a high school and developing my skills for teaching Spanish. Now when I say joy of working with teenagers I mean that to the extent that I like teenagers, and generally speaking I get along quite well with them. I could sit around all day and just talk to them, unfortunately my job wasn't just hanging out with them, it was teaching them, which meant trying to get them to focus and learn something that they didn't usually feel like learning.  When it comes to teenagers they just aren't as fun when you have to get them to do things they don't want to do. That having been said I really struggled with my job and spent much time pondering possible changes to my career. Unfortunately no matter how much soul searching and prayer I put into it I would always come full circle to rediscovering that I was where I needed to be for the time I was in. 

Year ten was the absolute worst for me! I had one class in particular that made me want to walk out of my job everyday. I tried everything with them, from phone calls to personal pleas, to individual goal setting with each student to having the assistant principal sit in on classes...you name it I probably tried it; fasting and praying included. I don't know what made me sign another contract but I did have one single moment where I knew I must do it for another year. I signed the contract then at the end of the school year I took off to Utah to get away and, like I said in my other post, regroup.

So, here I found myself re-determined to move forward and to teach for at least another year. Fortunately the next year had a little bit of hope to it because as I said before I was dating this guy, as I also mentioned before, that I really liked. My challenge now was to get through the year with the hope that I would finally find something new to make this "one more year" my last. 

For the next several months I found myself looking forward to the next big thing, the next date, the next trip, the next holiday... so here are some of the highlights that I looked forward to that year.

NAUVOO
So my...hmmm...what do I call him?...I will just say boyfriend :) suggested we take a little day trip for Labor Day. We talked about a few places and settled on going to Nauvoo. Here is a pic to prove it.

(Just in case I have readers who aren't familiar with Nauvoo here is a site with a little info.)

LOUISIANA
So he use to live in a tiny community and went to church with a very small congregation that was made up of people mostly older than he was. One evening he told me he had word of one of them passing away and another that was near death and that he wanted to go visit soon. I knew I would miss him and asked when he planned on going, he said soon, within the next few weeks, then he followed up with extending an invite to me to go with him. I was pretty excited. We made arrangements to stay with his old branch president (like a bishop but for a smaller congregation). They had appropriate accommodations for us in their home that was in the middle of nowhere. Some of the highlights of the trip included:

-the scenic drive where I learned more of the depth of knowledge he had for farming. (on a side note, all my sisters married Idaho boys, and yet I ended up with the farmer - hmm -go figure)

-a beautiful sunset! (pictures never do them justice)

-and of course riding a small tractor

Things I don't have pictures of: 
-the delicious catfish we had at a random stop
-the walk by the river, it was just a stop and stretch stop
-the ride in and old army truck 
-the roadside picnic we had on the way home 
-the meeting of people he use to know and seeing his love and care for them (only emphasized what a great guy I was dating)

So I guess he also enjoyed that trip because on the way home he suggested that we take another trip to Utah for Christmas...to make that wait time a little more bearable I also looked forward to my Birthday in October and to Thanksgiving, but I don't have any pictures of them.

UTAH/IDAHO
to be continued...

Great Dates

As promised I am back to do some updating.

So last summer, as I posted, I spent a lot of time in Utah. It was a great summer and I had a lot of time to collect my emotions and figure out what my next step in life was. Things weren't really going my way and I really need to reflect on what I needed to do to make them go my way. The big lesson I learned is that you can't really make it go your way, you just have to choose which way you are going. My final decision was to just move forward.

So I returned to St. Louis with new determination to just keep moving forward as I have always tried to do. Then I started to see this really great guy. I confess I was nervous about it for many reasons but also excited because deep inside I really liked him and had liked him for a long time. So needless to say the next several months were very nice as we dated and got to know one another better.

Here are some of the great dates we had.

 
Baseball: The River City Rescales is a minor league baseball team near St. Louis. This was particularly enjoyable because it is small and up close. You can really see the players and their skill. Know how the ball is being pitched and how the batter is swinging. He surprised me with our own personal tailgate after the game. We sat at the truck and enjoyed watermelon he had grown in his garden. Made for a great ending of a fun date.  





Jefferson Expansion Memorial Museum: So under the St. Louis arch is a museum that walks you through the western expansion, you can see a buffalo and a teepee and read stories about different Native Americans and about Lewis and Clark and such. We went here and got our fill of history then took advantage of the evening to go walk around outside, near the river and under the arch.





 Creve Coeur Lake: We went and rented a double kayak and spent a good amount of time going around the lake. Here I learned about egrets and watched in amazement as they tucked their necks back and went from floating on the lake to sitting high in the trees where they looked like some strange kind of tp-ing job.





 Tennis: We would go play tennis every once in awhile. During these times I learned how patient he is because, before meeting him, I had never played tennis and I was awful. (I still am, but I really try hard to do better.) Anyway he was great at working with me and showing me how to do things without acting all knowing or being critical or anything. He is good at praise and acknowledging small accomplishments and hard work. And he gave me a new racquet for my birthday!


Obviously I was falling for him and from the look of things it seemed that he just might be falling for me too.

Temples

I am realizing that I already posted many of my highlights from my Utah trip, see the following if you need catching up:

Zion's
Butterfield
Dog Lake
Jenny Lake

Another activity I really enjoyed was attending some new temples. If you don't know about temples click here and search temples.

There are 141 Operating (1 Under Renovation), 13 Under Construction, 16 Announced. Of these I have been to I think 27. Four of those I added in my visit to Utah last year. Oquirrh Mountain,
 Draper,
Manti,
and St. George Utah.

They were all really neat and have special meaning and history to me. The first, Oquirrh Mountain, was kind of my temple while living in Utah this past summer, I attended several times.

The second, Draper, I went to with my nieces. I went to add another to my list but I had a very special experience there that helped me let go of one of my biggest concerns in life at the time and that allowed me to move one from something I had been struggling with for a very long time. I don't know why it was there and at that time, I didn't go with any particular prayer or thought in mind but I felt two distinct phrases, 8 words, that let me know my Heavenly Father knew exactly where I was and what I had pressing on me and let me know exactly how to deal with it. It was a great blessing.

Manti and St. George I did while on my way to Zion's National Park. I loved the history behind them and the feeling I felt when I was there. After attending the St. George temple I got a hotel room (first time ever doing that alone!) then took the next day to do the hike at Zion's that I already blogged about last year. That night I stayed with an old roommate in Kanab then began a very long road trip to Nauvoo Illinois. I did not attend the temple there but I have before, it is beautiful and has great history also, but I did get to see a few brothers and a sister and we went to the Nauvoo Pagent with them. 

Finally after that I headed back home where I began a new journey that would change my life forever. So there I will leave you hanging. One preview is I got to add another temple to my list less than a year later...more to come...

A Year of Highlights: From July to July

So I realize I am way out of date when it comes to updating my blog. I also realize I have had a lot to share in the past year. I am going to try to do a few highlights maybe adding a few from my Utah summer and my transition back to Missouri and my new life. All good stuff! Can’t wait to share!

Happy Holidays

In October of 2011 President Eyring gave a talk about bearing witness. In the talk he shared an experience where he was to speak at a graduation at a university. As the date grew near he received a call from the woman who had asked him to speak, she had become concerned because she had learned that Elder Eyring’s responsibility as an apostle was to bear witness of Jesus Christ, she informed him he could not do that in his speech. As the time grew nearer he was more and more troubled over the situation then he says “In a miracle like the Red Sea parting, I found a news article. That university had been honored for doing what the Church has learned to do in our humanitarian efforts across the world. And so in my talk I described what we and they had done to lift people in great need. I said that I knew that Jesus Christ was the source of the blessings that had come into the lives of those we and they had served.”

I know there have been many arguments over the phrase Happy Holidays; I confess I love to hear “merry Christmas” but last year as I thought about the general feelings at this time of the year. I love the whole build up, even starting with Halloween then Thanksgiving and all the excitement as people put up lights, make family plans, get excited about shopping…I just love the whole feel of it. There really is a spirit of Christmas that is in everyone. So as I pondered this last year I decided that the excitement everyone feels, whether believers in Christmas or some other holiday that generates excitement and love is because of the light of Christ that is in everyone, even if they don’t know it.

So if you say Happy Holiday or Season’s Greetings or anything other than Merry Christmas to me I will be glad in my heart because to me that means the light of Christ is in you whether you say you celebrate Christmas or not.