Beautiful April!

Everywhere you look, it is so beautiful!  I love the violets growing in between my rock path in the back yard.  

  The St. Louis temple grounds are just stunning.  

 I ordered some fancy iris all the way from Holland and I planted them Thursday morning.  Lizzy and I went in on the order to get a discount.  I hope two years from now to have an entire blog post dedicated to pictures of my iris! 

It was a nice week all around.  I picked up my pottery projects.  

  I went to the Family History Center and learned how to scan slides with Jean Pry’s film scanner.  Her device will not work with Windows 10 and thankfully, the FHC computers are still loaded with Windows 7 which is what we needed.  I actually brought home a surplus computer from there (on loan) to finish, here in the comfort of my own home, the massive slide scanning project ahead of me.  Plus, it saves me 40 minutes of travel time to the FHC and back.

I went visiting teaching on Friday to the family who can’t ever seem to throw anything away.  I guess you would categorize them as “hoarders”, I don’t know.  They are also “collectors” – picking things up from trash set at the side of the road.  Well, ahem, actually, I do that, too.  I have no shame.  But, at our visit on Friday, their collecting turned out to benefit me.  They had acquired some discarded wooden Adirondack rockers but realized they were too low to the ground and asked if I wanted them.  You bet! 

 

  They need a bit of cleaning and a couple of new screws but I love them.

Friday night Steve and I and Steven and Tamara had a nice evening in Jefferson City.  First we ate BBQ at Lutz’s – as delicious as Lonnie Ray’s but sadly a bit more pricey.  

 

Then we attended a fabulous concert put on by Brigham Young University – Idaho’s chamber orchestra in the capitol rotunda.  

  This group was on a two-week tour throughout the Midwest and our stake sponsored Friday’s performance.  I was a bit worried about the “live” acoustics of the rotunda but I needn’t have – it was just perfect.  Wow – it was just amazing. 

Steve and I made a quick trip to the temple yesterday morning but had to forgo a visit with the Southerlands to return to Columbia to attend Walter Shoupe’s memorial early in the afternoon.  We got to see the entire Archuletta family at the gathering (A.J. and Alex were good friends with Brandon) including A.J.’s little 3-year-old girl, Ava.  Would you believe Albert is 70 years old?!?  He told us the nicest thing – he wished we were still their neighbors out on Route Z.  It was nice to see the slide and video presentation of Walter and Norma’s life and some of the memory presentations were touching.  It is too bad he smoked his whole life because that is what got him in the end.  He and Norma should have had many more years together.  He was only two years older than Steve.

Movie report:  Steve, Elise, and I watched Field of Dreams Monday night.  I watched two documentaries:  One was In Search of Beethoven which was marvelous.  It was filled with performances of his incredible music as well as fascinating insights into his life, personality.  For example, while not active in any particular denomination, he had a deep love of God.  He was also a people person which made his deafness all the more miserable.  In addition to longing for “normal” association with friends, he yearned to find a wife but many of the women he fell in love with were in a higher class and thus, out of reach.   The other documentary was Unmistaken Child about the search for a reincarnated high Lama (not the Dali Lama) in a village in Tibet among 1 ½ year old boys (born around the time the former Lama died).  Fascinating.