This post is dedicated to my mom for allowing it to even exist. Thanks mom, for a wonderful 33rd birthday spent with you in the Big Apple! (Picture taken in the Chicago airport during our unexpectedly long layover.) We slept through a doozy of a storm which shut down the subway system entirely, jam packed…
Day 4 was mostly spent driving to and in Lake Tahoe for my husband’s family reunion. We ate our last fancy meal and packed up to check out. We loaded ourselves in the car and were off to Tahoe. We drove for a while. I mention this because I read Harry Potter and the Deathly…
We started Day 3 just like all of the others: with a scrumptious breakfast of whatever the heck we wanted to eat. I think Embassy Suites has taken my heart through their amazing omelets. We headed out to the BART station where we caught a bus to visit the Legion of Honor art museum. It’s…
We spent most of our second day in San Francisco with my friend Hilary from Pulling Curls and her husband. Our husbands played in a brass quintet in college! After eating our omelets and leisurely getting ourselves showered and ready, we took the CalTrain down to Santa Clara where Hilary picked us up and took…
In July of 2007, my husband and I drove to San Francisco for a little getaway with just the two of us. At the time, our children were 6, 4, and not quite a year old. On the first day of our vacation we used the San Francisco CityPass to take a cruise around San…
Eternity has always been a concept that is a bit difficult for me to comprehend. I pretty much am okay with the part about there being no ending. Seems everything has to go on forever in one way or another. But I do find the “no beginning” part a little disconcerting. When I was a…
Every year at Christmas time, as I am trying to “balance the budget,” I begin to reflect on the many blessings we have received in the past year. It never fails that I can see that the windows of heaven have truly been pouring down upon us due to our commitment to paying tithing. In…
My oldest daughter had an eye appointment last week and it turns out she really needed glasses. Her eyes are almost as bad as her dad’s already, and well…she has blind me for a mother. She wasn’t so excited about the prospect of getting glasses until she saw the box of children’s frames that she…
I have a lot of great stories in my life “history” that have to do with the blessings that come from paying tithing. Seriously, it’s been true for me that when I pay it money literally shows up from nowhere. And it’s happening again, although this time is less obvious than many of the other…
More than ten years ago, when I was 19 years old, I saw a flyer hanging in the HFAC (Harris Fine Arts Center…my home on BYU campus). It was announcing auditions for a “music mission” in Nauvoo…participants needed to be proficient in singing, acting and dancing. As a vocal performance major, I had the singing…
Today in Church we talked about self-reliance and food storage and emergency preparedness. It was really good for me, because for the last several months, and especially after Katrina, I have been wanting to do better at having my family be prepared. So last Sunday I ordered some food from the Cannery…used my scrap budget….
A couple days after Katrina hit, we had a pretty big Monsoon here. (Actually, it didn’t seem overly large to me, but it made national news, and in the wake of Katrina it had to be big news to make national news…maybe everyone was just going a little crazy over weather stories…who knows?) Anyway, when…