Happy Birthday, Bruce!

Mathematically speaking, just last night Bruce was prime, and next year he will be square. (Can you guess his age, from the mathematical clues?)

But today is his birthday!

 And he is my very favorite person ever!

So...

Happy Birthday to My Very Favorite Person Ever!

I love you, Bruce North!

Mission Call!

I already posted this on facebook, but I have to write about it here because BRANDON GOT HIS MISSION CALL!

We got all the work of dental and physical exams, and paperwork, and photos, and interviews done by the middle of July or so, and he turned in his papers, and then we waited.

This was the first photo Brandon submitted with his mission papers. I wondered if we should use this picture because, although he had the best expression here, his eyes were squinted. But the family all voted for this one. Well they should know by now that Mom is always right. ;-) In the end we were asked to take and submit a new picture where we could see his eyes. 

After ...I want to say three weeks... On Thursday, August 15 Brandon got the big envelope from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the mail. This was it!

Bruce and I asked him if he wanted to wait until later in the day when Michael, Jason and Lindsey, and possibly my mom, could all get on Skype or face-time and watch him open it. But he didn't want to wait. (I didn't either, really.) We did at least get Lindsey on Bruce's phone, and Ryan used our camera to take a video of Brandon opening his mission call.

Brandon waits patiently while we all guess where he will go.

We made him wait while we went around the room and made some guesses. "Somewhere foreign" was ruled out as a cheating guess. (I thought they said, "somewhere foreign like Florida," which made me laugh.) There was an Asia, a Canada—speaking Mandarin, two Taiwans, and I chose Australia. (Bruce thought I said, "Austria," which I also thought would be cool.) Really,we all thought there was a possibility that he'd go somewhere Chinese-speaking because he had studied Chinese for two years in high school.

Brandon pulls out his trusty pocket-knife, opens the envelope and reads...

..."you are assigned to labor in the Hungary, Budapest mission."
!!!

We all laughed, it was so unexpected and exciting! (Although really every mission call is a surprise.) It was noted that Hungary is closer to Austria than to Taiwan. ;-)

Brandon continued reading aloud, "You will prepare to preach the gospel in the Hungarian language."

"I'm gonna be speaking Hungarian."

Well, how exciting is all that?

Later Brandon called his grandparents and Michael in Salt Lake, and Jason in Ephraim, to tell them the good news. And I took him out for ice-cream. And then it hit me: Hungary is far away!

Five thousand, six hundred, sixty-one, and eight-tenths miles away, to be exact. Wow.
But that's OK. I know it will all turn out good, so I'm still pretty excited. :-)

And now we prepare: Buy clothes and shoes and whatever else they tell us to get for him. Brandon will be entering the MTC (Missionary Training Center) on December 14.

(This is the picture that actually got turned in with his papers.)

So we are all excited here. Congratulations to Brandon!

My Dad

"What happens when, too early, we lose a parent, that party on whom we rely for only...everything?"

My dad passed away last Friday, September 2, 2016. It has been a long time since I've relied on him for everything. Dad was eighty-eight years old; some might say that I didn't lose him too early. But I will tell you that no matter how old your parents are or how much time you've had with them, it is always too early to lose them.

Dad had Alzheimer's. I've never written about this, and when I have talked about it I've only mentioned the funny things he said or did because otherwise it is just too sad to think about. I saw him go from realizing that he couldn't remember things (he'd tell my kids, "I know that I know who you are, but I can't remember your names."), to only recognizing my mom and his own kids, to not really remembering any of us. Except for Mom; he always knew that she was his sweetheart.

So I saw him progress—if "progress" could possibly be the right word for this—in his disease until he wasn't like the dad I knew at all.

Despite this, it is painful to lose him altogether.

This is my dad. The man who carried my baby picture in his wallet for...forever, as far as I know. He would come home from work and grab my feet and tickle them, or whisker my neck with his chin. He would "tuckle" me in at night (tickle and tuck me in). He carried me on his shoulders when we went on outings (although that was pretty scary—I only realized later that I have a fear of heights). He built my dollhouse; he drove me to dance lessons night after night after night for years. He paid for the dance lessons (and tons of costumes) too, while we're on that thought. He played word-games with me, making up words or sentences from people's license-plates, or changing the letters of words around.

 (One time he really puzzled me by asking me to get his "pie-tin" when he was getting ready for a meeting. He wanted his tie-pin.) He took me out driving when I was just learning how (and I know how scary it can be to take a brand-new teenage driver out!). He walked me down the aisle when I got married. My Dad.

Right now my heart is broken. I have just lost my father; my life will never be the same again.

"New" Digs

A couple of months ago Bruce got a bee in his bonnet (besides the acting bee, I mean...  This was a completely different bee!). He thought we should rearrange our bedroom. Well, our room is on the second floor of the house; it has a sloped ceiling and one gable. Our bed sits in the gable part of the room, which is just big enough to hold a queen-size bed. The rest of our stuff  is just fitted in however we could do it––and I thought we managed it pretty cleverly, too, considering how little standing-up space there is. I was pretty sure we could not rearrange our furniture.

This is what our room has looked like for the past year.

But Bruce said, what if we put our bed into the small nook under the eave–where my (Loralee's) dresser is now? Well, that sounded kind of claustrophobic! Nevertheless, I put it to simmer on a back-burner in my mind and finally it cooked enough that I decided to try it out. We figured if we hated sleeping under there, we would just move everything back to where it was. ('Cause doesn't that sound like a lot of fun?)

So after a perfunctory pre-cleaning, Bruce moved my dresser in front of the closet (left of the computer), and we pulled all the stuff we had stored behind both our dressers and piled it on and around that same space. We thought our bed might be too tall to go under the eave if we left the box-spring under the mattress (forget about the bed-frames!). So we tried to store the box-spring under the west eave. But it was too long.

The look on his face says it all...
Bruce loves rearranging the room!
(But it was his idea.)

On second thought, maybe the best place for the box-spring really would be under the mattress.

Here's how the room turned out:

(You may notice the mirror got replaced with a picture.)

This looks promising...  (and there's the mirror!)

nice...

And this looks cozy!
But the question remains, what will it be like to sleep in there?

And the answer is...
It is just fine to sleep under there. Lovely, in fact.
(Although it is really hard to make the bed.)

And guess what? We like it. A lot.

And this is what Bruce was after in the first place—
some floor-space (and some head-space, too), and a place to sit down. :-)

It feels so spacious! Room to stand, room to walk around, room to change our clothes, a place to sit... Fabulous!

Long Overdue

This is old news now—two weeks old! But I have to post pictures anyway.

I have been wanting to do something new with my hair for ages, but since my cousin switched from hair-stylist to dental-assistant I can hardly get anyone to touch it. I want to go to a salon and say, "Make it different," or, "Make it shorter," or, "Make it look really cute," and then have them do something cool. They want to know exactly what I want to do with it—what style, how much to cut off, layered or not, etc, etc, etc. How unreasonable! They are the professionals; not me! Not only that, but they invariably say what great, curly hair I have, and I should leave it long. >sigh< What they don't seem to get is that I have never been unhappy with a new hairstyle or color, and I have every reason to believe that my hair will grow back—just as curly as ever, and quickly, too––even if I did hate what they did to it (which is not likely). 

This is the most recent picture of me before the blessed event
(of cutting my hair).

Anyway, the last haircut I got, I just asked to have it layered to take some weight off the bottom of it. The girl might have cut off half an inch. I told her to cut more, and got more of the same. I finally gave up, paid her and left, vowing to myself to not get my hair done again until I could find someone brave enough to actually play with it.

And I finally did find someone! Patti, of Beehive Waxing and Hair (in Vernal), was the hair and makeup lady for Camelot. She told Bruce how to do his hair and beard for the show, and I had a feeling she might be just the person I was looking for. And she was! First she cut my hair shorter all over, and as she was finishing she said that it would be super cute to trim the back up into a little bit of an A-line—maybe I'd like to try that next time. So I said, "Let's do it!" She said, "Sure?" Yep. So she did. And she was super excited to do it, and really happy with the result. 

Here is what happens when I tell Bruce to take pictures of my new haircut from every angle . . .

Yes, when he starts taking my picture, I start to get a little silly:

I am almost as hot as Bruce's truck. ;-)

Anyway, I am super happy with my new look.

A new hairstyle works wonders for the soul!