David came to visit 7-10 March. Seems like his ‘keepers’ had other stuff to
do so they paid his way round trip to come and visit us. In essence, we became his babysitters and our
wage was paid by way of the round trip ticket.
How do you like them apples? He
was supposed to come on the 2.15pm bus but apparently Jim put him off at the
Greyhound very early and so David found himself on the 1.15pm bus instead. We took him to the Chinese Restaurant to eat
dinner but it was not too good tonight.
They did not have the temperature up sufficiently high to keep the food
at a safe temperature. David helped
himself to the Mongollian Barbecue and he was in hog heaven as a result. Saw a lady there with a smashingly wonderful
coat and remarked to her how wonderful I thought it was, and she gave me her
business card. Apparently she runs a
boutique downtown and would really like to have me go visit. Well, the boutiques here in Prescott think
they are in Scottsdale with their prices so I doubt if I will go visit her
shop.
On Friday 8th March, the weather turned
nasty. Bill had to work all day in
Prescott Valley, so I took David shopping.
He had on a pair of ‘finished forever’ jeans and wanted me to sew them
together but the fabric was too far gone so I opted to take him to Good Will to
shop – these are only work pants and he just crawls around in the dirt fixing
water systems so they do not have to be top flight pants for that. Well, I left him to shop and he came to me
with two pair of fairly nice looking jeans.
I thought we were ready to go out to other places to shop and he got
away from me. He does that. I spent time looking for him and was going to
the front of the store to have him paged, when I saw him standing there with
two HUGE bags of stuff. I did not think
that the two pair of pants should have taken that much space as to fill two
large bags, but when I asked him what he had purchased, he said, Well, there
are the pants and then they had some video’s that I have not seen before and I
just had to buy them. I did not ask what
else he purchased – I did not want to know.
He said he wanted to go to Wal Mart and we went there and he
withdrew $20 from his debit card and handed it to me to hold for him. He wanted to purchase some vitamins from
Safeway that he thought he needed. He
takes so much stuff now that I wonder which are at cross purposes in his body. While we were at Safeway, he insisted on
going to the Red Box and getting a video.
We have a pile of video’s here and I could see no reason to rent another
one. He rented Puss in Boots – a recent
make over of the famous tale. After
dinner, David, Bill and I sat and watched the video – it was quite
entertaining. Outside it was snowing
quite heavily. When we woke up on
Saturday morning, the world was absolutely stunning with white powdery snow on
everything.
Bob Logan passed away this past Monday, and so the funeral
was Saturday 9th March. Bill was
asked to help play the prelude for the service as well as the postlude. The service was ok – not a spiritual uplift
of the sort we have come to expect. There
was no talk of his spirituality but rather of the misfortunes of his life as
well as the heights to which his electronic acumen had arrived. We had helped with the meal that followed on
and so we stayed to help clean up afterwards.
We came home to rest a while and then after dinner, we went to Prescott
Valley Stake to attend their Saturday evening session of Stake Conference. I was there to meet the visiting church
authority, Elder Walker. His sister is
married to an elder who was in Japan the same time I was. Elder Walker had asked that I go to Prescott
Valley Stake to meet him. He told a
story of a man he had met who was a war hero.
Apparently the airman was with his crew above Germany somewhere when
their plane was hit and was on fire. The
crew could still fly the plane but there arose a discussion as to what should
be done. The airman was the only member
of the church on the plane and the only one who knew how to pray (according to
the crew). So they asked him to pray and ask what they should do. He noted in his journal that he heard a voice
tell him to get the plane back to England.
The airman thought this strange, because there was a fire on the
plane. The crew decided that someone had
to go outside the plane and use a fire extinguisher. As I sat there I was trying to imagine this
taking place but apparently they tied a rope to him and he inched out onto the
wing with two fire extinguishers, one of which did not work. In any case, he managed to extinguish most of
the fire and the plane did make it back to England. For his bravery , King George presented him
with a medal for bravery. The point of
the story is that God does hear and answer prayers and that we should keep a
journal entry for each and every incident that supports our faith and belief.
On Sunday, we took David to church. This is the only time he goes to church – when
he comes home to visit us. We really
wish that he would go to church in his own congregation in the Phoenix
Valley. At church, Thomas Jarman was
asked to bear his testimony. He and his family
were here for the Logan Funeral. Thomas
is going out as a missionary just after he graduates from high school. They recently moved to Texas for his father’s
work. His mother Wendie arranged for a
number of us to go to lunch on Monday, just to catch up on all that has
happened since they moved. She told us
that her sons would be coming back to Prescott to attend the Prescott High
School Prom. Seems a long way for two
boys to come to attend a prom since they moved to Texas one would think that
they would not be back for Prom here. But
then Thomas is a Senior and I guess it is a really really big deal. I remember what we went through when Sara
went to Prom at Dobson High.
On Tuesday 12, Bill worked in Prescott Valley Safeway Store
and I went to Zumba at the YMCA. The lunch
bunch had a luncheon at JB’s restaurant.
Our friend Betty Anne is very ill and refuses to believe that she is
ill. She looked like death warmed over
and she could not follow the conversation either. She is usually the life of the party. A day or so later she was back in the Hospital
for the second time in two weeks.
On Wednesday 13 March, I went to Kokopelli Eye institute to
see Dr. Ham. He examined my eye and said
that I needed to have some scar tissue removed by laser surgery and that we
could do it next week. Well next week I
will be in Utah……………so I guess it will be in April. At 1pm I went to beading with the weaving
group and I was able to see pretty well.
ON Thursday 14 March, I went to breakfast with Juli and
Andrea and then went to Zumba at the Y.
This week is spring break for the schools and so our regular teacher was
not there. She had arranged for a
substitute and instead of one, we had 4 of them. One very tall black man, two very stout white
ladies and one super skinny white lady; They were doing hip hop stuff and I do
not do hip hop. I was there for Zumba,
so I left after 20 minutes. In the late
afternoon we left for Flagstaff and we stayed in a motel overnight. Bill had an all day work shift at Safeway on
Friday.
We had trouble finding the Safeway store – we are not familiar
with Flagstaff. But we found it and I
was so shaken up that I decided that I was not going to drive the car. So I set out on foot to find the down town
area. I walked and walked and saw
wonderful things – particularly the San Fancisco Peaks up close. I think it was about 3 or 4 miles to down
town but I took my time and looked at wonderful stuff on the way. I wandered into an antique store – now that
was a walk down memory lane. I found the
bead shop but it has turned mostly into a metaphysical store with all kinds of
strange items for sale. I bought some
beads and walked back the way I came but found that the bus was coming so I
hopped on the bus and it drove me back to the outskirts Safeway Store. We drove home that night after 8pm.
Saturday 16th March was cold because we had some
snow the night before. I drove out to
Emmanuel Pines church Camp to see the quilters from Mesa who come out each year at the same time
to quilt. The Crystal church of
California was also there – they come each year for their women’s retreat. I was glad to see my quilting friends
again. This is the same weekend as the
AQG quilt show in Phoenix.
Sunday 17th was St. Patricks Day and Jacob (6yr
old) came up to me and gave me a big hug for St. Patricks day. His little brother did not want to be left
out so he came over too and gave me a big hug.
Monday 18th March was quilt guild day. We had been working to try to staff the board
for the new year and I was head of the nominating committee. When I stood up to ask for volunteers I was
met with a stony silence. NO one wants
to serve and I think that is sad.
However, I told them that I was not going to sit down until we got two
volunteers….and we did. So it was a
successful day.
Tuesday 19th March, we started on our journey to go to Salt Lake City for the Rootstech Conference
at the Salt Palace Convention center. On
the way there we stopped at Monument Valley in Southern Utah close to the
Arizona border. It is a desolate place
with massive monoliths rising from the valley floor. We saw a dust devil meander across the
valley. In Australia we called them
Whirly Winds. We drove on to Montecello,
Utah to stay for the night. At the motel
in Montecello, we asked for directions to get to the Natural Bridge National
Park and were directed to take a certain road.
In front of us was a massive precipice that rose right out of the valley
floor. I could not see any way around
this and the road kept going towards the precipice. Then we saw a sign that said “switchbacks
ahead” and we became acutely aware that we were about to take the ride of a
life time. The road began at the bottom
of the precipice and then the switchbacks began up the face of this sheer
wall. I was terrified. There were no guide rails on the sheer cliff
side and there was barely enough room for one car let alone two. We met a truck hauling a massive load of hay
coming towards us and I thought that we were finished. Both vehicles inched towards each other and
eventually passed….us going up and him coming down. I do not ever want to go on this road again…..I
think I aged 20 years. Eventually we
reached the natural Bridge National Park – arrived there in time to see the
attendant leave for the day. However, he
told us we could go on through the park and we did. Our next stop was to be at Arches National
Park. One fragile arch is the symbol
that Utah uses on its automobile license plates. We got to drive around in this park and it
was spectacular. We left there and made
our way to Salt Lake City. We found the
Salt Palace and we registered for Rootstech – translated that means we received
a shoulder bag filled with goodies (read that advertisements from the vendors)
and a tag that we hung around our necks.
Having registered, we wandered over to the new spectacular
City Creek Mall and had dinner. We then
went over to the LDS Hospital to see Ana and Tracy Hansen. Tracy has leukemia and has been in the
hospital now for 130 days. His most
recent biopsy shows that he does not have cancer any more, but he has been to
this point before. They are going to do
another bone marrow transplant in the near future and the hope is that he will
be completely free of Cancer.
It had begun snowing and so we left the hospital and went
off to the motel out near the airport.
We found it – after much difficulty – and fell into bed. We are exhausted.
We got up early on Thursday morning and found about 3 inches
of snow on the ground and decorating our car.
We got in and drove off for the Salt Palace and took a wrong turn so we
missed most of the opening remarks and keynote speaker. There were 7,500 attendees at this Rootstech
conference. We attended many classes on
all kinds of Genealogy connected subjects for 3 days. It was both hectic and frantic as we left one
class to go to another etc.etc. I was
amazed to observe the number of people who had laptops, I-pads, I-phones, cell
phones, readers and just about any and every electronic device available. I also wondered how many miles of cables and
electric wires, plus Wi-Fi points there were throughout the building. The whole building was one big electronic
field. I wondered about the people who
have pacemakers – how did they fare?
Our last class ended at 4pm on Saturday and so we went to
our car and drove to Cedar City to stay the night. Cedar city is where Sara went to
College. The next day we attended church
in Cedar City and then we drove to St. George for lunch. I drove from there through Las Vegas and then
on to Hoover Dam. In years past it took
no less than an hour to navigate the road across the dam, but now they have
this engineering marvel of a bridge that spans the Colorado River down from the
Dam breastwork and we are driving in the sky.
It took forever for us to get onto the road to the Dam at Boulder city,
Nevada, and then at Kingman, Arizona, it took forever to get through it as well
– both places were really congested with traffic. Finally we got back to Prescott around 8pm Sunday Night and we were grateful
to go to bed in our own bed.
Today, I went to do shopping for food and I am very glad to
see that the temperature is around 65degrees – a lot better than the 20 – 30 degrees
of Salt Lake City.
No comments:
Post a Comment