Adventures on the organ

Our furnace broke this week. That was unfortunate. But then it turned out to be covered by our one-year home warranty! Big sigh of relief instead of a $2500 bill. Chloe used our fireplace to keep warm one morning when it was just a tad nippy! 

 

Aaron went to BizTown this week for a field trip. It’s a super fun place they get to go as fifth graders and Aaron got to play the role of CEO of the lending club. He rocked it! 

My niece Loressa had her bridal shower yesterday. It was fun! I got volunteered for the toilet paper wedding dress, lol.

Sometimes I forget how much my sister and I look like each other. So fun. 

I was not good at getting a cookie from my forehead to my mouth. I was excellent at unwrapping a starburst in my mouth, putting a puzzle together one-handed, and knowing the most about my niece, along with my sister and one of her friends. Good times. 

Bill and I went to see Wicked last night. Bucket list checked off! I’ve always wanted to see the show, but could never manage to fly out to NYC and see it. The off broadway version was still excellent! 

I subbed on the organ today and during the sacrament hymn I accidentally hit one of the preset buttons as I was playing, and nearly all the stops turned off. 😳 I had to scramble to push the crescendo pedal on the bottom to auto add more stops, plus the volume and at the same time find my lost place. That was a party! My brain exploded a little bit. New high for random organ experiences. 🤣 Both me and my two sisters play the organ and the piano and all of us have music callings at church at the moment. Which strikes me as being really unusual these days. I never really thought about that, but it’s pretty awesome. We’ve all played for long enough that we have an amazing hoard of accompanying disasters both on the organ and the piano. Oh, and on the violin for one of my sisters who also plays that instrument. 

We swapped horror stories and I did my best not to laugh too hard in sacrament meeting. Thankfully the rest of the songs went just fine. I never really play the organ perfectly. It’s so touchy with the sound. But I do just fine and that works. 

One more Book of Mormon challenge. This has been a fun experience for Spencer and Genevieve. 

Updated landscaping

Since we moved in at the end of last summer, we hadn’t fully seen what all our landscaping looked like in the spring. We’ve been trimming up bushes, fixing drip lines, cleaning out morning glory that was choking some bushes, putting down new mulch, weeding. We took out the rocks down the side of the fence in the backyard and switched it to mulch. Spencer and i tore out a ton of plants we didn’t like next to the house. We haven’t added new plants there yet, but they’ll come as we figure out what we want there. I didn’t even know what plants were in the yard last fall when I trimmed most of them for the winter. It’s been a lot of work, but when I finished the mulch in the front yard yesterday and stepped back to take a picture, oh it all felt very worth it! I love a beautiful yard and I’m really pleased with how mine is doing. The black mulch makes it all pop so nicely. 

And these peonies! 😍 The drip line wasn’t set up along this fence line, so the poor plants were a tad sad last August. I plan to buy a few more to fill in the spaces where they didn’t make it. We’ve been waiting for them to bloom for weeks to see what color they would be and I’m so thrilled with the red! 

It’s so rewarding to create a beautiful yard. ❤️❤️❤️
  

Zion Ragnar Trail Relay

I ran the Zion Ragnar Trail Relay this weekend. My South Jordan Run Club was able to put together two full teams of eight runners, so what it felt like me and 15 of my favorite friends went down and camped and ran together. It was hot and cold and a bit rainy at times and so much energy and support and good food and fun. We had an entire table full of snacks we all brought. I drank more electrolytes than I probably ever have. I ran a super technical four miles, another four miles that had a too steep to run mile two, and a 7.5 miles in the middle of the night. It was gorgeous and hard and satisfying. I’d do it again! 

I got a sweet Ragnar truckers hat. 

The campsite. 

Matching tattoos. 

Beautiful sunset over the shower building. 

Bright and sunny on the yellow loop. 

At the top of the yellow loop, well probably on one of the zillion false summits, of mile two. 

This was the chute I finished each of the three legs in. 

The tree with the clouds to frame it? Gorgeous. 

A shot one of my teammates got in her night run. I didn’t take any photos that led, and this one is breathtaking. It was surreal running in the pitch black with a very small scattering of runners over the course of that loop. 

Bill’s f3 group put a team together. This was them coming in at the finish. It was pretty inspiring. We did the same thing with my two teams and it felt so good. 

The team logo. We have a running joke about how we try to recruit people to come run with random strangers in the park after dark. 😆

And we finished. 

Huzzah! 

Two weeks

I had a great day yesterday. Ran the Salt Lake Half Marathon, got some work done in my yard, cut my finger…oh wait, that last one wasn’t good. Haha! I was working on my drip system and the pruning shears slipped and gouged into my thumb. It bled so much, it was insane. It was still bleeding an hour later when I went to the instant care to get it stitched up. Three stitches later, I’m set. But geez, it hurts. I cut in so deep. It’s probably 1/2-3/4” long. My yard looks like a crime scene where it happened. Blood just sheeted all over my hand into the grass and I go to run inside to the sink and realize it’s bleeding way too much for that. So I actually called Genevieve on my phone to come bring me a paper towel so I could get to the sink to wash it and see the damage, and also rinse the blood drips off the sidewalk. 😬 I couldn’t see the cut because it was bleeding too much. I was hoping I could just butterfly bandage it together but absolutely not. There was no way. Bill wasn’t home, so I had to call him to come back. While I didn’t get lightheaded, I was concerned I would, plus there’s just something to be said for letting someone actually help you instead of doing it all alone. 

Prior to that party, I got lots of good work done in my yard! 🤪 Trimmed these bushes. They were way overgrown, with no shape. 

Took a few shots of this gorgeous thing. I’m beyond thrilled with how the lasagna planting had gone. 

Ran a beautiful half marathon with all these friends. 

I’ve run this race significantly faster the last two years, but I’m beyond grateful to be out chugging away still. My health was just absolutely rocked the last nine months and while I’ve finally gotten the right medicine to heal from one thing that was misdiagnosed for seven months first, it did a number on my health and stamina. Then I had a breast cancer scare. And I’m in the depths of perimenopause, trying to figure out solutions for all that host of symptoms. Oh, and I am nursing a running injury in my leg that unfortunately was triggered during physical therapy for a lower back problem. It’s been a lot and I’m thrilled that I can still get out there and take on a half marathon. It’s a big ask and I love the feeling of accomplishment, even if this year’s was slower. 

Beautiful , warm day in Salt Lake at the finish line!

Back to those beautiful flowers, this is a double daffodil. 

A hyacinth that just barely peeks out. It might be a tad deep in the soil. So far it’s the only one. I don’t remember how many I planted, but there’s still lots of time for more to show up. 

This is a double tulip. 

Bill took a kayak down to the lake one morning this week and paddled a loop. So cool!

Spencer did another Book of Mormon challenge. 

We had everyone over for Waster last Sunday. 

Karen brought us some cat toys, which Remi loves. 

Some great shots of us with portrait mode. 

Family Easter egg hunt! The cousins were here too, but I just picked shots of my people. 

 My niece, who happens to live like two miles from my house, is getting married this summer and her mom and sister and her showed up at my house to say hi. Love them! They’re from California, so I don’t see them much. They were in town for wedding planning. The move to Daybreak last year put us really close to a couple nieces, which is fun. Nice since we moved further from my mom, grandma, and sister. I’m super close to my brothers partner too, which is fun since I see them a lot more as a result. 

Genevieve and Chloe and I went to a Daybreak Easter festival around the lake. It was so much fun. 

We got food afterwards at Harmons. They have super cheap kid boxes, which is dangerous information to have just discovered! 😁 It was a ton of food. 

We are going to paint our interior doors black or charcoal, and all our lights and faucets and handles are black and gold. So I leaned in and got this color for a cat door. 😍