A busy week in June

This has been a FULL week!  It started off on Monday with a visit from Steven and Tamara.  They drove to Phoenix from San Diego that morning and we met for lunch in Tempe at a Costa Vida restaurant. (our mission president is CEO of most of these restaurants - although I don't think he owns the Tempe one).  My sister, Juli, also drove down from Payson to join us and we had a lovely afternoon eating and chatting.  We actually moved the party over to Mesa at Amy and Cory's place because the restaurant got uncomfortable (chairs, AC too high, etc).   We parted ways around 5:00 as Steven and Tamara went to her sister's house in Chandler.


Tuesday morning, just Steven met us at the mission office and we spent the day together.  (Tamara had activities planned with her two sisters that live here).  We had lunch at Dara Thai, a really nice and reasonably priced restaurant in Anthem and my brother, Jim, joined us.  Then, we took Steven to.....yes, you guessed it.....Cave Creek and the Rare Earth Gallery in their brand new remodeled facilities.

We enjoyed delicious ice cream at the City Creamery just down the street.

And then we went back to Anthem to visit until Steven had to leave to return his rental car and board an airplane.  Tamara is staying here an extra week.

On Wednesday, it was back regular business at the mission office where we welcomed twelve new missionaries to the Arizona Phoenix Mission.

Thursday, we enlisted the help of two of our "seasoned" sister missionaries, Berry and Brown, to help us pick up three more brand new Toyota Tacoma trucks.  They were pretty excited to be part of this adventure.  We had Sister Poulson drive us to the dealership and then we each drove a truck back (Steve, me, the sisters)  That is me, Sister Berry, and Sister Katie Brown below

On Saturday, Steve and I attended a Gluten-Free Fair in Glendale.  We wandered from booth to booth tasting and collecting free samples and coupons.  We easily recouped the $24 dollars I spent for our tickets.  

One booth required us to have our picture taken in order to get our box of spaghetti -

 American Gothic, gluten-free style

Progress is finally being made in the seminary classroom.  Workers have arrived at 6:00 am all week to frame and install sheet rock.  

We inadvertently discovered that not all Wal-Marts are equal here in the valley.  We had to return to the mission office Wednesday evening and decided to just do our grocery shopping down there and, lo and behold, eggs, milk and produce are significantly cheaper at the Glendale Wal-Mart!  I guess the Anthem one can raise their prices because they don't have much competition up in the far north.  So, we are changing our shopping routine accordingly....

We watched again the movie "42" on Friday night.  It was good a second time.