News From Hungary!

I haven't written much lately, but here is something worth reading. I got a great email from Brandon this morning. This time he actually told us  a lot about what he's been doing. Yay! So I will copy his letter here, and add some *notes of my own at the end.

This is the most recent picture we've gotten of Brandon,
on his last transfer day. (Jan. 2018)
I don't know who the two sister missionaries are. 
*1.

Here's what Brandon had to say today:


So going in order backwards the things that have happened this last week are: *2. 

Sunday I was asked to play the piano...In Priesthood not Sacrament meeting thank goodness. I also was invited over to a members house for dinner and that was super nice. The member's family name is Belovics. Super cool people, and their home teachers were there too, so we got to participate in that lesson with them. On top of that we looked up a man whom we were able to teach about the restoration at the time we weren't able to set up a return appointment. But this time when we looked him up we were able to plan that return appointment and now he counts as an investigator. His name is Dávid, and I am hoping that all will go well with him.

Saturday we met with another of our new investigators and it was a super cool lesson but it was also really hard. His name is Mohamed, and he is Muslim. His native language is Arabic and so it is hard to communicate clearly with him. But we got him and Arabic Book of Mormon and he was super grateful for that. So hopefully now he is going to read it. He said that he would but right now he is reading a lot of other things and working a lot so it might be a while before he really starts reading it. Mohamed told us that he accepts all of the prophets and only believes that Christ was a prophet and not actually the son of God. It was clear to see how dear to him his religion is, and I suspect that out here in Hungary where he is perhaps the only one, at least in Veszprém, who practices the muslim religion, that he would want to try all the harder to hold onto what he now believes and accepts as truth. 

President and Sister Szabadkai

Friday we had interviews with President Szabadkai. It was good, I often find that I have nothing to tell him. I write about all important details of the week and send that to him weekly so...I dunno.

Thursday, nothing amazing happened. We had district meeting and were able to watch the First Presidency address which was cool. And after that we taught an English class.

Wednesday we went to visit Érzsi Néni who is a member that lives in a tiny town outside of Veszprém. We accidentally got off at the wrong bus stop and had to walk what felt like a milk and a half. And then she fed us a small lunch, we gave a brief lesson, but it was more a lesson to give her someone to talk to because she lives all alone and about thirty minutes away from Veszprém. She after the lesson made it known to us that the "lunch" she gave us was more of an appetizer, and honestly she never did say that the sandwiches that she gave us were lunch. So she then gave us a ton of spaghetti which was good but it was too much food. Then we missed our bus so we just had to make phone calls for an hour and a half because the whole town had been tracted just a couple days before.

Tuesday this was our most boring day. I can't think of anything that happened on Tuesday.

Elder Gilson (Brandon's current companion)
and Elder Norris (one of his former companions—
it looks like Gilson and Norris were also companions at one time.)

Monday was P-day. It was pretty good. Elder Gilson and I decided to go running every Monday morning. It hurts a lot. But I actually enjoy it. It is satisfying to do something hard and a little bit painful so long as it helps you improve and do better.

On the topic of my shoes, they are beginning to wear thin through the bottom. I am actually on the second pair of shoes that I brought on my mission. The first wore out the beginning of last summer. The ones that I am wearing are doing pretty well, but the stopped being 100% waterproof. So sometimes my feet get a little bit wet but it isn't often. *3.

I love Veszprém. It is actually really pretty out here even though it is winter and everything is dead. The people are the nicest that I have ever met in Hungary and I have a super cool companion and District. Funny thing, I am in the same district as Sister Eddy, she went to Snow College and she and Jason know each other. I love my companion, he fills in the holes to the way I serve my mission and really just makes me better. Also he has been on his mission shorter than I have been but he knows more Hungarian words than I do, are at leaste more different ones than I do, so I will hopefully learn from him how to speak better. I did get all of the music you sent to me, thank you so much! I am really happy to get to hear my choir music again. It is also pretty good for some background noise while I am studying. *4. *5.

I have served in Tatabánya, Érd, Kispest, and Now I am in Veszprém. I liked all of these areas but my favorite was Érd. But perhaps Veszprém will change that. I don't know why but since serving in Veszprém I have gained a greater appreciation for pickles, this is good though because people keep feeding us pickles. I don't know what to say about my previous areas but the only one that I really didn't like was Kispest, but now looking back I would happily go there again. It was a super cool area. *6.

That is all for now. I might write more later though.

Love you all!
Brandon.

Veszprém
(this is from a Google search; Brandon did not take this picture. )

*Mom's notes on all of this:

1. Apparently when they do transfers, all the missionaries go to the mission office before they move. Some wonderful person took pictures of all the missionaries who showed up that day and posted them on the secret Hungary Mission facebook group.  I was a happy mom that day!
(Brandon's camera got stolen right around Christmas time, so I'd seen fewer pictures than even before.)

2. Brandon started right in on telling us about his week; no salutation. :-) (Sometimes I do that too.)

3. Last week I had a nightmare that I had to take Jason to the doctor because his feet were hurting him. As we were walking out the door I saw that his right foot was terribly deformed (in a way that, actually, he would have had to been born with, but you know how dreams are). I found out the reason his foot looked so awful was because his shoes had gotten so worn out on his mission that all the walking ruined his foot. So I asked Brandon how his shoes were holding up.

4. I think Brandon has really liked all of his companions, but the one he has told us the most about is Elder Gilson. I'm glad they are doing so well together.

5. I asked Brandon if the SD card that I tried to put good mission-appropriate music on (including the music he performed with the school choir last year) actually had any music on it. I forgot to check it before I mailed it off to him.

6. I would have thought that the area he liked the least was his first area, Tatabánya. I thought he was the most homesick while he was there, and he was also accused of driving a person to suicide while he was there. (The missionaries were the last people known to speak to this man before he killed himself. There was a big investigation and everything, and they had an emergency transfer as soon as the questioning was all done.)

So that's the news from Hungary today. It makes my heart happy to hear such a newsy, cheerful letter from Brandon. Y

Sickening.

I could cry. At least if I weren't feeling almost in shock I could cry.

In May of 2014, after four years of college life; learning to drape and/or draft a pattern, sew it, do a fitting and re-sew it if necessary—all in one week or less; learning to tailor a coat, construct a bra, build a corset, design and make formal-wear; learning to illustrate fashion figures; re-learning how much I hate algebra; re-learning how much I like to write... It was a big four years...

one of my illustrations

Anyway, in May of 2014 I finished four years of college and earned two degrees from the Fashion Institute of Salt Lake; one in design, and one in technical apparel. My final, final project, the culmination of an entire school-year's work, was to participate in the Fashion Institute's fashion show. I designed, drafted patterns for, went to L.A. to purchase fabrics for, and sewed like a maniac for months, to create a ten-piece line of formal dresses, suitable for wearing to the symphony or the opera. I called my line Pianoforte.

my models receiving last-minute instructions

Fast-forward to today. As I was trying to find places to stash things in our new house, I unpacked the Pianoforte dresses. So, instead of doing the work I'd planned for today, I had Lindsey try them all on and model them for us. I have to say, they are quite stunning (I like them much better now than I did immediately after all the hours and all-nighters I spent making them—and I liked them pretty well even then).

But one dress was missing. In fact the dress that, in my mind, is the icon of my Pianoforte line is missing. I remember it was separate from the other dresses; it needed a small repair, and so I'd had it wrapped in a blue sheet in my bedroom, waiting until I could get to it—it had been stored with some rolls of fabric that were wrapped in that pellon-type half-paper-half-fabric that furniture sometimes is wrapped in for delivery. I remember the fabrics and the gown were among the very first things brought into our new house; they were put on my bedroom floor long before my bedroom furniture showed up. I remember unwrapping the fabrics later with Jessica so I could put them away. I remember telling her that the pellon-type fabric could and should be thrown away. I remember finding a place to stash my rolls of fabric, and Jessica throwing the pellon away.

And now, four weeks later, I finally remembered my dress and I can't find it. I've been over every inch of this house a zillion times over the last four weeks, trying to arrange and put things away, and I haven't seen it anywhere. I have a horrible, wrenching feeling that my baby was thrown out with the bath water. Did my beautiful gown get tossed out with the awful pellon? Has it been buried in the landfill for the last three weeks?

The dress.
Is it gone forever?
If it is, I will have to re-make it.

It makes me sick—almost literally—just to think of it, but I'm 90% sure, and 99% afraid that that is exactly what happened. My only pathetic hope is that somehow it got put into the garage with all the other stuff that's waiting to be gone through. But it is a tiny hope; I know that if it was in the house I wouldn't have put it into the dirty garage.

I could just die.

Aunt Beulah's Road-kill Overcoat

Living in Vernal—especially the last couple of days—has really been bringing out the fashion designer in me. Or maybe it's just bringing out the redneck in me.

Monday, day-before-yesterday, I went for a long, long drive. I had to take Jason back to Snow College after the Thanksgiving holiday—which was lovely, by the way (Thanksgiving was lovely; the drive was a little tedious). The trip to Ephraim is a three-and-a-half-hour drive through the desert, canyons, and general wilderness of Utah. In fact, to get almost anywhere from Vernal, you have to take a three-hour drive through the desert, canyons, and general wilderness of Utah. And whenever you take this excursion you are sure to see a lot of road kill. This used to really gross me out; now it only bothers me a lot if it's a skunk, or a scrambled deer. Or if it's a gory mess in the middle of the road where I am forced to look at it; that can be a little disturbing. Ew.

But lately—well, at least on Monday—maybe due to extreme tiredness, I kept seeing these dead critters—not the squished-to-a-pulp ones, but the ones lying on their backs with their feet up looking like cartoon animals playing dead... 

Anyway, I kept seeing these dead animals on the side of the road (mostly raccoons) and I would think, "I wonder if their fur is soft..." or, "I wonder what you could make of that fur..." or, "Too bad I can't just pick them up and take them to someone to skin and prepare the fur so I could use it for..." (Like I'd actually want to pick a dead animal up off of the road—and then drive home with it in my car! Eew!) At one point I even saw a dead pheasant and thought that the feathers would look great on a purse or something.

So, yeah. Weird. But maybe you should watch out for my new Fall 2018 "Road-Kill" line, just in case...

Wish List 2017

Normally (to Kim's dismay) I post my Christmas Wish List fifty days before Christmas—so you have time to buy me everything I could ever want.

This year I've not really thought about a wish list at all. I got my biggest wish, which was to buy a house, and it's kept me very busy the entire two weeks we've owned it. However, tradition is tradition.

So here is my 

2017 Wish List:

A new hand-blender (and accessories). I use my almost-eighteen-year-old machine almost every day; it is pretty worn out.
(this one from Best Buy)





Anything you can use in the kitchen: dish towels, dish rags and hot-pads (especially with red in them), drinking glasses, cooking/serving utensils...

Bath Towels.

A food scale. Yes, I really do use these, but the display on mine met with a terrible death recently.
(this one from Amazon)


Well, just about anything you would give as a house-warming (or a "house shower"—we give wedding and baby showers, why not new house showers?)
...any house-warming-type (especially kitchen) gift would be fantastic.

And now, I have a room to paint!

The Deed is Done...

or

The Great and Dreadful Day has Arrived!

Last Monday, November 6, at 10:00 a.m., Bruce and I drove over to Farm and  Home Title Company and I watched Bruce sign paper after paper after paper...

...For our new house!!!!!

It's been a long time coming, and it's been pretty traumatic trying to get here. We looked at quite a few houses here in Vernal before we settled on this one.

And when we first saw this one, I wasn't inclined to like it or want it. For one thing, we were hoping for a large back yard, and this one has a pretty small back yard. (Although it is completely landscaped and has a sprinkler system, which is a huge bonus.) Then we walked in the front door and saw that the front entry is laid with goldie, silvery, gray-ish stone. I thought, "Ugly." I looked down the stairs to my left and saw this fireplace...

...which looks worse in person, and I thought, "Well, that stone will have to go, too."

My kids directed my attention upward to the cottage-cheese with silver-glitter ceilings. I don't like them much more than the kids do. It didn't bode well.

Then I walked into the front living room. I looked around.

It felt like home.

As Bruce and I looked through the rest of the house and talked about the possibilities I grew more and more interested, and more and more excited. This was our house!

So we put in a bid for it on September 13, and then we waited. The bid was accepted! We were already pre-approved for a loan, so we were in business. We hoped we could close on September 28, Bruce's birthday. But Shauna (our realtor) told us that wasn't possible; we could be OK with that. Then we thought we could close the second week of October. Nope. The following week. Nope. The week after that? No. Before Halloween? No.

The loan process was a Huge, Hairy, Harrowing Ordeal. We had turned in everything that they asked for, and we were waiting. And waiting. For over a week. Then we got an email from Shauna saying that the loan company needed fifteen items of paperwork or they would drop us, and we'd have to start over, and we'd lose the house. That was a bad day. (It turns out that someone had hand-written Bruce's email address, and someone else read it wrong, so he never got all the emails they sent him asking for all these things.) But we did manage to get them everything they wanted before closing time that same day.

Then it was something else, and something else, and something else. For a month. So it was pretty frustrating.  Also we had some substantial equity from the sale of our house in West Valley; we intended to put half of it as a down-payment on the house, and use the other half for some remodeling and renovations (like the kitchen appliances that have almost the same birthday as the house—1977.) In the end, to make our numbers look good enough to qualify for the loan we paid about 65% of our equity to student loans, and the rest went to down-payment and closing costs. No remodeling would be happening. Or not much, anyway. (The day we found out we'd have to pay off that much of our student loans all at once was a bad day too. But after a day or two of adjusting my thinking I decided it would be no bad thing to not have that monster breathing down our necks any more.)

And then, in the midst of all of this headache, our van began its death-rattle. Something inside the motor is broken, and will cost more than the van is worth to repair. So we found another van. A newer van. (1998 instead of 1997). A van we could afford to pay cash for.

It is pretty much the same van, only a darker blue.
And a cargo door on the side, instead of the hinged doors that I like. :-/

Although the process was very stressful, the people we worked with were great. Shauna Harding, our realtor, was willing to put up a fight for us when needed; if you want to buy a house in Vernal, go see her. And Cary, at Academy Mortgage, the frequent bearer of bad tidings (none of which were his fault), was very kind, very personable, and easy to work with. HUD, who was selling the house, on the other hand was... a government agency. The final insult from HUD was that they wouldn't give us the keys; they would take them and destroy them and we had to put new door-handles/locks on everything. Which we intended to do anyway; we just didn't expect to have to do it on the very same day we "got our house keys."

So, here are more pics of the house:

the kitchen—looking in from the dining area
To the left of the ancient ovens is, yes...

...a bathroom. In the kitchen! 
I am used to people coming into my house and saying,
"Ooohh! What's that smell?" I do not want anyone to come
into my kitchen and say, "Ewww! What's that smell?!"
This tiny bathroom has to go! Fortunately that is a remodel
that will cost almost nothing but time.

the dining area
The door on the left goes to the two-car garage,
the living room is straight in front of you, and
the kitchen is to your right.

the main bathroom (upstairs)
This bathroom is 15 feet long. The photo kind of fools you because that door on the right looks like the entry door; it is actually the door to a closet inside the bathroom. There's another big closet (in the bathroom) to your left, and the bathtub is beyond that (in front of the toilet). All of the bathrooms in this house are just a little weird (with the kitchen-bathroom taking top prize).

one of the upstairs bedrooms
This fantastic room has one wall covered with peel-and-stick cork tiles, checkerboarded with gold-veined, smoked mirrors. Underneath that is this fantastic wallpaper that has 60's-style line drawings of boys playing football, baseball, etc. I actually kind of love the wallpaper for its very vintage/retro look. But I don't love it enough to keep it. I have spent most of this week taking all that stuff (including the dresser, which is attached—probably a great selling-feature, back in the day) ...I spent a lot of this week taking this stuff off of that wall. Another inexpensive remodel.

our favorite room—the family room
This room is an addition on the back of the house. If you go back up to the dining-room picture and imagine turning around 180°,
then you will be looking into this room. It is really as big as it looks—21 by 26 feet.

On Monday, closing day, we got our very first piece of mail at our new address—a gift from Academy Mortgage: a tiny bamboo cutting-board, with North etched/burned into it. It's really cute, but I'll have to post the picture later. Too much house-cleaning and house-fix-upping to do.

When we get moved in—or mostly moved in—I'll post more pics.

For now, congratulate us! We have to make large payments to a bank for the next many, many years! Dreadful!

No,no, no...just kidding!
Congratulate us! We are homeowners! And it is GREAT!!