A Roommate Trek to Europe

“A life that is not documented is a life that within a generation or two will largely be lost to memory. What a tragedy this can be in the history of a family. Knowledge of our ancestors shapes us and instills within us values that give direction and meaning to our lives.”  Dennis Neuenschwander 

I just read an article talking about the essential role of grandparents and  about how children who know their family's stories feel a deeper sense of connection to the world and to their family.  Reading that made me grateful for the treasure trove that this blog is for family stories.   I'm not perfect at it, but 19 years of stories is pretty amazing!    That is why, after a whirlwind of a few months, I'm here to get this blog caught up again!    

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I decided that the easiest way to "get back to it" is to start where I left off chronologically, so I'm blogging about the trip Adam took with his roommates to Prague and Budapest.   He, Ty, and Zach found sub-$500 round trip tickets and paid for and planned the trip completely by themselves.   They spent a few days in each city, went to church in Budapest, where they also ran into a sister missionary from our stake in Virginia!    

I do not know the details of the following photos--like which city each is in--but they were all taken late April 2026.   Enjoy the random assortment.... 

A Few Things that Have Been Making Me Happy

Life has felt extra stressful lately.   In between the normal busyness of life, Glen is in process of transitioning to a new job (again!), things are heating up with the extended family drama I'm helping with, we are trying to spend more time with my elderly aunt who is in the crosshairs of the family drama, I had TWO unexpected trips out of town (one to OKC for my Nana's funeral and one to Dallas to help Heather with her injury), we are worried about my Mom and are trying to get a referral to get her tested for some things (a process that is proving to be much harder than it should be), and we still spend 3-5 days down in Provo most weeks for our callings.   

All this means I've had very little free time to relax or to pursue my hobbies, but, don't fret, life is not all business!   Here are a few things that have been making me happy lately: 

1.  Time with old friends.   I recently got lunch with some of my dear friends from Virginia, most of whom have moved to Utah in the last few years.  We also watched Bella M. as Juliet in BYU's production of Romeo and Juliet and Logan N. performing in BYU's Young Ambassador's show.  It is incredibly meaningful for me to be able to spend time with people who know my kids, my story, and love me anyway.    It's a feeling that is very fleeting since moving to Utah, so I embrace it whenever I can!   

2.  It was our ward's turn to help with preparing and serving dinner at stake institute for 300-500 people, and it was so fun to be able to gather and serve together in that way!  

3.  Speaking of service, I love Christy and Alicia, two of the women I serve with at church...

4.  Entertaining isn't necessarily my forte, but I do love having our ward members to our home once a month.   It usually ends up right about 30 people and it's fun to give them a home-cooked meal and to find a good excuse to send some postcards afterwards.   

5.  I also love our ward temple nights.  There's something special about gathering together in the temple and I wish our home ward did this occasionally too.   

6.  I also love finding photos like this in our camera roll.    Adam recently ran a race with his friends...

 7.  And Emma had her own Branch Temple night in Boston...

Here they are gathering to watch the worldwide RS broadcast...

8.  I loved logging onto Facebook and finding this adorable picture of our missionary who comes home about THREE MONTHS!!!!!     

Speaking of our missionary, I totally look forward to our family phone calls every p-day.  The ability to be able to communicate weekly was the best rule change the church has ever made!  

9.  Adam and his roommates came up to our house for Glen to smoke them some steak!  I completely neglected to take pictures of them, but here's a glimpse of our delicious lunch that day! 

10.  These cuties are coming to visit soon and I can hardly wait!!! 

So, that's a glimpse of some happy stuff, though  I also need to be better about taking pictures.   Some happy things not pictured were book group at our house.  The discussion of "The Billion Dollar Spy"  was excellent, the turn-out decent (around 10 people), and all in all a great night.   We've also been lucky enough to spend a little more time with a special  friend of Adam's that I definitely need to take more pictures of. 

Will life continue to be stressful for a while?   Absolutely.   But I'm trying hard to look for the rays of light in the midst of it all!   

Have a beautiful day! 

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All in One Weird Week

Life has been a little weird lately and I'm tired.    

No, I didn't say I'm weird,  though some would argue that that's also a true statement.   I'm referring to the fact that in amidst our normal busy life stuff, there has been a whole lot of really weird stuff making life even busier than usual and maxing out my mental bandwidth!     This blogpost shows a glimpse at one single week.  

Let's take a look at the somewhat normal stuff first.   

 It started off with dinner for the masses.  Yes, somehow hosting dinner for big groups has become a normal thing in our lives.   Glen smoked brisket and we had a ton of food:  

We had a decent turnout of people (about 30 all together)...

We love having our ward members in our home and feeding them home-cooked food...

And the food was definitely a hit, though I made too much corn and too many lemon bars...

I did a postcard challenge with some of them (everyone in this picture) and that was fun.  What is a postcard challenge, you ask?   It's when I challenge them to give me a word/theme and I go through my stash and send it to them in the mail.  It's a really fun way to share my postcards with them and to challenge myself to dig into the depths of my postcard stash.  Some words that challenged me this round were rutabaga, carrots, and garnishment.   

We have an awesome ward!   

It's been a very warm and dry winter overall, but we've had a little more rain lately.   One of the days we went on a wet walk...

This is what I looked like after...

I found these  cute photos taken by Emma in the camera roll that made me smile...

I hosted book group one night, then went to see Bella M. perform in Romeo and Juliet in the BYU ballet the next night, then went to a Valentine's dinner with a bunch of Kristina's friends that have relocated to Utah.   I do have to say that talking about books, seeing old friends at the ballet, and hanging out with new friends was all good for my psyche with all the other weird stuff going on.   I made these heart-shaped O-Henry bars for the Valentines dinner, then served the rest at our family dinner the next night.  

 

The sister of one of our ward members came to town for the long weekend.  After talking with her, we learned that she had just returned from serving in Ellie's mission.  What did I do?   I started blubbering and crying, because she'd seen our missionary more recently than me, which made me extra excited for June.  I am not a big crier, but I've been missing our missionary extra ever since she went past the year mark in December!  

Here's a glimpse at the Sunday dinner that week...we had burger bowls, which were extremely delicious and enjoyed by all at our full table!   This is where we enjoyed the rest of the heart shaped O-Henry bars.  

So that's mostly all the normal stuff. 

Let's get on to the weird stuff (definitely no pictures of this craziness).

1.  I have somehow become the assistant for helping an elderly relative evict an adverse tenant who has overstayed his welcome.   It's been a LONG, exhausting process which involves talking to attorneys, calling the suicide hotline multiple times, and trying to protect my relative from being taken advantage of.  We are going to great lengths to try to do this in a way that's a win-win for everyone, but it's hard when one of the parties is not a reasonable person.   I am ready for this process to be over.  

2. I left a negative review for a place on Google and the owner PICKED A FIGHT with me!    It was actually pretty bad and we ended up deleting our review, because we are chickens and they totally called us out by name.  We did absolutely nothing wrong, but they said a lot of inflammatory, gaslighting, threatening things (something we noticed they do with all of their negative reviews).  I still get very angry about it every time I think about it, and I really wanted to leave it up, because we did nothing wrong, but Glen was concerned because his name got dragged into the whole thing.  Seriously evil.   Please let me know if you ever want to go to a therapist office in Provo and I would love to tell you which one to run the other way from.  The way they attack any critique on them whatsoever tells you all you need to know about the way they do business and does not reflect well on a business that has to do with mental health.  We deal with a lot of  therapist offices with Glen's calling and every single interaction we had with them was an exercise in extreme frustration.   The owner of this office is clearly not mentally well himself, because mentally well people do not treat other people {even those that disagree with the way they do things} the way that he does.     I  started listening to "Let it Go" on repeat and did some hard exercises trying to burn off some negative energy and get my brain to a more positive place. 🙄

 <deep breath>  

And lest you think that's all of the weird stuff...it's not. That's just all that happened in that one week. I'll blog more about the rest of it later, but the weirdness definitely did not subside after that week was over. Some things to look forward to in  upcoming blogposts: an out of town funeral, a serious injury on the way home from said funeral, an apocalyptic snowstorm for some of my kids, an unexpected trip, and a sacrament talk ...plus more eviction drama.   yay.



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