The ECLIPSE!

Friday day, April 5th, both Sarah and her dogs and Kirsti, Ryan, Alice and Ivan all left Utah for their two day drive to Missouri. (Zeek was boarded)  They didn't have snow but they battled wind gusts all the way to mid-Missouri. 

Friday evening, Elise arrived at our place. 

Saturday was General Conference and we were able to watch both sessions. You can see that Elise and Steve also fought the nap-monster.

I battled that monster with sewing projects. One was to make covers for the recliner whose vinyl is cracking on the arms and head cushion and previous "repairs" were not very successful.

 Elise drove to Ballwin Saturday evening to participate in a Trivia Night with Emily, Joe and Noah while Steve and I awaited the arrivals of Sarah, who got here around 6:30 and Kirsti and family who came around 7:30.  Kirsti and Ryan took the guest room, of course, and we put Alice up on a twin air mattress in the TV room and Ivan on a crib mattress on the floor of the library. Elise slept on the living room couch and Sarah stayed the night with her dogs in her car in the back yard! A FULL house, for sure.

Elise, Steve and I left at 6:00 am Sunday morning for Greenwood so we could make the Sunday morning General Conference session (which started at 12:00, eastern daylight time). The Merrills got to Julina's by 3:00. The Southerlands arrived at about 6:00 and Steven drove to our place and he and Sarah drove together, coming a little after Emily and family. Joe's niece, Maddie, and her boyfriend, Tony brought up the rear. They and the Southerlands pitched tents in Juli and Alex's huge yard for the night - battled a bit of light rain for a couple of hours but stayed dry. Steven brought a cot and set up in the computer room. Elise slept in Juli's office twin bed. Sarah slept in her car again with the dogs and Steve and I took the guest room - sharing the bathroom and shower, of course.  We had a family dinner Sunday night - sloppy joes, chips, coleslaw, potato salad, cookies and a gluten-free carrot cake. 

Monday morning, we fixed a huge breakfast

The eclipse was not until the afternoon so we had time to watch the Simpson's monorail episode that features an eclipse and for a family photo at a nearby church. Emily's professional photos are pending but here we are gathering.

Then, it was time for the big event!  We went out as the moon was beginning to cover the sun and it took over an hour for totality. While we waited, we enjoyed each other's company. Emily and Elise and then Emily and Steven favored us with a karaoke rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart. We also listened to Thus Sprach Zarathustra, Jupiter from The Planets, excerpts from the Interstellar soundtrack while we waited for the eclipse.  When it happened, it lasted for four minutes and it was just amazing. We could even see a solar flare! It was my first experience with a total eclipse and the only other time I remember an eclipse at all was when I was a girl and we had to view a partial one with the pinhole on a piece of paper since eclipse glasses were not a thing back then.  Joe and Ryan both brought telescopes. Maddie brought a huge telephoto lens. 

Maddie and Tony

It was fun for the cousins to play with each other and we even had a Stratton sighting!

I tried to take pictures of the actual eclipse but they look like the sun is still not covered. The little speck of light below and right of the sun is Venus. We had perfect skies for the event.

Below is a photo of the strange shadow effects caused by the eclipse...

Below are photos of Sarah's set-up with the dogs...Isn't that a cute dog tent?

We had heard warnings that traffic would be bad getting to and from totality areas but we had absolutely no heavy traffic either way on I-70. We all left for St. Louis at around 5:00 Sunday evening and made it back with no problems.  Hooray!

Alice, Larkin and Ivan building a "fire"...'pssst, don't tell them that they are doing in the neighbor's yard

 

April Fooled

Monday, April first, really pulled a good one on us.  We had temperatures in the mid-80's requiring us to turn on the air conditioner. I did the whole switch-the-summer-for-the-winter clothes bit, hauling things up and down the stairs to the different closets.  And then it got cold again....VERY cold.  Enough to turn the heater back on and worry about frost warnings. Sigh....

I uploaded the photos for this blog back on Sunday but it is now Friday morning and I am finally sitting down to write about them. I will not blog this coming Sunday because we (Steve, Elise and I) are leaving at the crack of dawn to drive to Indiana to watch the eclipse on Monday with most of the family. Sarah and Kirsti both arrive (separately) tomorrow (Saturday). Steven will drive over to St. Louis on Sunday and he and Sarah will head to Indy sometime that day. The Merrills and Southerlands  will also drive to Julina's that day. Sadly, poor Beckie has to stay back for work obligations or we would have the whole family together! I have already asked Emily if she can photo-shop Beckie in to the group picture 😄

But, back to last week.....it started with my ministering sisters, Naomi LaFond and Marla Buttars and their children coming over Monday morning to help rake leaves....of which we had a ton! (thanks, huge oak tree on the neighbor's property) Elise was still visiting and she got jumped in and helped, too. Aside from temporarily losing a boot while stomping in the bag of leaves, I think everyone had a good time.  Quentin Buttars, below, is only three but surprisingly an effective worker. He was quite good at wielding that snow shovel! Jaxson, the oldest brother, did a super job of hauling the tubs full of leaves back to the alley yard waste dumpster.  Middle brother, Troy, was most enamored with all the tools we had in our garage and kept trying to use them to get the leaves (think assorted brooms, long handled weeder....he was, however, the one who thought of the snow shovels). Little Fiona LaFond was just cute and her little brother slept the whole time in his baby carrier.

Beckie celebrated a birthday on Thursday and Steve and I drove over to deliver her gifts and card and, to our surprise, Kyle and Micah (and Luna and Armond) were visiting! They will be moving to Little Rock, Arkansas for Kyle's new (and much better paying ) job!  It will put them very close to Kyle's parents in Hot Springs but much farther from Beckie.

Saturday morning, Steve and I helped a woman in the ward with her move. Looking at the photo below, you will notice that most of the helpers were senior citizens!!!  Happily, we did have three younger guys come and help, too, but they didn't make the photo. (except Kaleb standing next to Emily)

Easter Sunday we all gathered at our place to celebrate Beckie's birthday as well as glorious Easter. Sam Carpintero also joined us. Here we are after our delicious dinner of ham, potatoes supreme, glazed carrots, fresh fruit salad and strawberry shortcake.

                                                                                                                                                           

Steve and I watched the 2021 Ghostbusters on Friday night - the little girl was just wonderful - and RED on Saturday night. I played my cello for part of our ward's Maundy Thursday's evening observation (we just gather and quietly ponder and pray for an hour.) I was able to sand and re-do a spot on our front door threshold that had chipped paint.  OH, and Steve and I did our taxes and we are actually getting some money back this year!  Shock!  We are thinking to apply it towards hiring someone to sand and re-stain our backyard deck.  

This week, so far, has been fairly routine although I have attended three Kindness Begins With Me / Welcome Center meetings!  Tuesday morning was a brunch gathering at Roosters, a restaurant downtown. Wednesday evening was at the church and last night was on Zoom. I need to close and transcribe all the minutes I took. 

 

Spring Break!

I had a list a mile long of things I wanted to accomplish during spring break.  Not surprisingly, I only checked off a fraction of the items. But, I still feel satisfied at what I DID get done. I finished the sugar egg project. So many little sugar eggs.....I gave one to each of my Primary children and I will give one to each of the three sisters I minister to.  I am planning to give the large panorama egg to Alice and Ivan.

I tackled my scrapbook project - all of 2023 and Christmas of 2023 - and got all the artifacts into the binders and ordered the appropriate photos. I do think 2024 might be my last year to actually past things in a scrapbook since all the photos are in my Lamb-e-umptum books that I print every year. I might just save the programs of concerts I am actually involved in and that's it. Because, I doubt any of my children will be keen on saving the scrapbooks after I have passed....

I took down St. Patrick's Day decorations and put up Easter stuff on Monday.

I had hoped to get a lot of yard work done but it was just too cold to want to go out and do anything.  I did go to Lowes and purchase 36 cinderblocks for a second raised vegetable bed and, over three days, I hauled them in the Element back home - twelve at a time. The folks at Lowes were so helpful in loading them in the car and Steve helped me get them out and placed in the back yard. I am also grateful that Lowes is very close to home.

I still had my music students to teach during the and civic orchestra rehearsal to attend Tuesday night. While there, I learned of a free performance of Vivaldi Four Seasons at a church in Clayton on Wednesday night so I decided to attend.  I have played the music (a somewhat simpler arrangement) with Prairie Strings but I had never heard it performed live by a professional ensemble.  The soloist is the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra and he was accompanied by musicians from the St Louis Symphony. It was top notch!  Here I am with Jayne and Nancy, two fellow cellists in the civic orchestra.

I met with my friend, Karen Bazdresch, Wednesday morning and we tried our hands at felting. We each bought kits and she made a penguin and I a little white bird for our first attempts. I don't have a photo but I am excited about the possibilities of this craft - particularly for bird Christmas ornaments.

Steve and I watched both Ghostbusters I and II this week (he had not seen either one!) and we watched the 1994 Three Musketeers with Elise last night. Steve hadn't seen it, either, even though we had it on VHS and the kids and I watched it several times.  With the re-watch, I was more aware of the sexual undertones, even for a Disney film, and I checked out the plot for the novel on Wikipedia and it looks like it was greatly toned down for the movie! So, I probably won't be reading the book anytime soon.

The big focus this week has been getting ready for the Lamb of God performance this evening. Our dress rehearsal yesterday morning was kind of a train wreck so I hope we do MUCH better tonight. This is the reason Elise is visiting this weekend, so she can attend the performance and see me play string bass and hear Emily sing the part of Mary Magdalene.

I need to eat dinner and get ready to leave so I will close with more spring flower photos from our front yard.

 

All good things

I meant to post these three photos earlier last week but life just took over...They are my front yard flowers I mentioned in last week's post...

I enjoyed my first free Monday morning in two months (yay for Ramadan) prepping sugar Easter eggs to make with the grandkids on Friday evening.  

Wednesday morning, I played "hookie" from my strings classes (I rescheduled them for early May) and Steve and I joined Emily at Crestview Middle School to listen to Lucy perform in her orchestra. It was fun to hear her group play so well. Lucy is not actually seen in the photo below but she is located somewhere by the conductor's left arm....(a fun fact is that I went to MU with her teacher, Michael Blackwood)

After the performance, Steve and I joined Emily on a visit to the Shaw Nature Preserve to admire the thousands of daffodils.

There is a children's play area at Shaw and I thought the tree creatures shown below were kind of charming (and maybe a bit creepy)

Wednesday evening we invited soon-to-be-leaving senior missionary couple, the Houles, over for dinner.  Steve grilled pork steaks and, being from Utah, they had never eaten a pork steaks. I also made a gluten-free coconut cream pie to enjoy then and again on Thursday, which was pi day.

Thursday morning, Steve and I took Fred Olver and Sam Carpintero with us to our bank to have our updated wills notarized.  Weather that day was fairly unsettled - I had to deal with a tornado warning at my morning strings class - and, by afternoon, there were tornado watches all over the St. Louis area.  We had a teensy bit of marble-sized hail and a lot of rain but nothing else. And, all the weather news pre-empted Jeopardy, Tournament of Champions, darn it! 

Friday after we attended the temple, we went to Southerlands for dinner and piano lessons and to make sugar eggs.

This past weekend was pretty wall-to-wall with working in the temple baptistry Saturday morning, a Lamb of God rehearsal on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, a ward youth fund raising dinner Saturday evening, and a Relief Society devotional Sunday evening. One happy occurrence out of all those events was lots of yummy gluten-free desserts. There was the coconut cream pie on Wednesday, Steve made mint brownies to take to the Southerlands on Friday and I made Italian cream cake to be auctioned off at the Saturday fundraiser.  I am happy to have leftovers of everything. And, we had delicious corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's day lunch. 

This coming week is my spring break and it will end with the Lamb of God performance. All good things to look forward to following a week of all good things....