Changing Seasons, Job Hunts and Baking Club

Hola!

Fall is in the air! Temps are dropping just a little, and it's "crisp" outside. I think our leaves should be changing pretty soon. (The header photo is from a couple of years ago. Right now we don't have many changed leaves.)

**By The Way I labeled the Kara picture, which I took. All the others are Internet stock photos :)

CALENDAR.

Just sitting here thinking, about the past week and the week to come. We review the calendar on Sundays, and I think this coming week, we have something every night?!?! 2 soccer games this week, so those are 2 of the nights. I don't complain about those; I love watching Kara play soccer, and I know our time is limited on how many more games she'll have.

Kara throwing in the ball

TUTORING. I started back at the Elementary Schools, tutoring ELL kids 2 days a week. We have a couple of students this year, who just came to the U.S. the week before school started, and the kids spoke NO English. That must be pretty overwhelming! So we drill TONS of vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary, so they can have some words to draw from, to communicate at all. They are such cute kids. I work with kindergarten through 3rd grade. My 2 days are Tuesdays and Fridays this year.

FIRST TESTS. David and Teresa have been to their classes now, for a few weeks. The first round of tests will start or have already happened!  Good luck guys!

JOB HUNTING. Frank continues the job search...he's been connecting with people who he used to work with, mostly on Linkdin. He has various websites where openings are posted. He finds companies of interest, and can usually apply online. Sometimes he can find a former colleague who has some kind of "connection" with the company, which is all the better. They might be able to contact someone in the company who they know, to look for his resume. Sometimes it gets him an interview.



He's been actively searching for 2 months now. (He's been unemployed, technically, for 3 months, but that first month -- July -- was a lot of vacationing and not much job hunting. It was such an awesome month! Ha.) He has applied to 31 companies. He looked up his own records from the LAST real job hunt we did, leaving California to come here, in 2008. He said he applied for 68 jobs in that search.  It's a long process. For instance, 2 of the companies he interviewed with last week, said the next step in their process won't even happen for another 3 weeks or so. It's a lot of wait time, so you have to get in more applications during that time, and try to get some more interviews arranged.


HIGH SCHOOL CLUBS. Kara is involved in multiple "clubs" this year. She's the Junior Class President, on the Student Council, Baking Club Treasurer (they bake goodies for sales, to earn money for charities), and a member of S.A.D.D. (Students Against Destructive Decisions).

Frank and I went to Back to School Night, and got the general spiel from the teachers on what their classes will be like this year. She's got some tough but interesting classes! Her physics teacher graduated from Wayland High School...just 2 years ahead of David, for Pete's sake! Ha. We even found him in one of David's old yearbooks. He looks super young, and this is his first year of teaching. Should be interesting :) :) :)

I believe it's time for bed now! Have a fabulous week!

Love, Kari

First Soccer Game Kara

Hi!

Just a quick soccer update -- Kara's first game was last Tuesday. They lost, but I thought I'd post a few pics of Kara anyway.

My zoom lens gets in pretty close, even though it feels like a HUGE field. They play on the turf football field, and we sit in the (hard) bleachers.

Thankfully we bought our orange-and-black WAYLAND seat cushions, back when Teresa was in volleyball, for just such occasions...they give a tiny bit more cushion while you are sitting there.

The other thing to be thankful for, is warm temperatures. It's so much nicer watching a soccer game when the temps are in the 70's and 60's, and I know our days are numbered there. We'll take as many "nice day" games as we can get!

Here are some pics I got, with Kara in them. She is #3.

RWBY and Hatching Time

Hello!

Just wanted to share a few pics from the past week. (**You can click on any of these photos and they'll be BIGGER.)

COMIC CON. I'll start with David's cool costume he made. Yes, that he made! Ha. Last month he mentioned needing to go to the fabric store, and he wanted to transform one of his old missionary white shirts, into this costume.

"For what?" I ask.
"Comic Con, in Salt Lake." (As if I'm familiar with something called Comic Con. Ha!)

SLC Comic Con; David has his scythe

Actually, last year, he and some friends went to something like it in Boston. It's kind of a big, regional event that cities have, that celebrates movies or book series, and now they also do shows that are just on the Internet. People dress up like their favorite characters, and some people go all out crazy with these costumes.

They may invite the celebrities who star in the shows, and have panel discussions. It's kind of geeky when you consider the mind-boggling volumes of trivia that some of these people know (think Star Trek, Dr. Who...there are fan websites, video games and fan-written books based on these characters and their worlds.)

David went as Qrow (pronounced "crow") Cosplay, from the show "RWBY" (pronounced "Ruby.")  RWBY is "an American 3D Original Net Animation," which means it came out originally only on the Internet.

So. There's your background. David pulled out the sewing machine and actually made his costume! Started with a white shirt, added the black pieces for collar/cuffs/pockets, then the gray on the front. Cut a cape and Voila! :) :)

Not "over-the-top," like he said SOME of the costumes were, but it was pretty impressive. Here are pics of the animated character, and David. And I'll pull a photo from facebook of the 4-some who went on Saturday.

NATURE HIGHLIGHT.
OK -- now for the Nature Highlight from Saturday, here on our street, just 3 houses down. I was taking my morning walk, and saw some movement on the ground by the neighbor's mailbox. OH COOL, it's a BABY TURTLE! So I run home 3 houses, grab the camera, and tell Frank: come see a cool piece of nature, guess what I found!

walking (suprisingly fast) across the street

compared to a basketball

checking out Frank's finger when he
 put it down there for size comparison

I got back there and he was gone. We look around. Oh, there he is! Then Frank sees another one. And another one. We count 6. "Look," says Frank. "One is poking his head out of this hole." What??

It turns out, it was a nest, and we caught it at the very few minutes when the turtles had just hatched and were coming out of the nest!

We watched for 20 minutes, and Frank counted TWENTY-ONE baby turtles come out of the nest hole and walk across the street to the conservation land/kind of swampy marsh over there.

Here are some pics, because of course I took a ridiculous number of pictures.

Fun facts: Snapping Turtles look prehistoric, because, well, they kind of are. They have not needed to evolve or change at all, over the last hundreds of thousands of years, because they are already "perfect." Of course the eggs might be eaten by racoons or skunks or other animals, and birds might also eat these little baby turtles. But by the time they grow up into adolescents and adults, snapping turtles have very few, if any predators! Their spine grows into their rock-hard shell, and besides that they are known to be aggressive. Animals leave them alone. They are home free.

Have a great week!
Kari

Philadelphia quick trip

Hello!

Just a quick update, that we got to go to Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. They have completed the Temple there for our church, and anyone can take a tour through it.

It's so beautiful! The tour guides told us they had 2 architects working on it. And that those 2 architects looked at 1000+ pictures of historical sites all around Philadelphia, to incorporated as much as they could of those landmarks and colonial buildings, into the architecture and interior of the temple. It's very cool.

They also put a garden on top of the visitor's center next door, so you can walk upstairs and be on the roof. Then you see a cool view of the city buildings all around you. It's a really neat setting.

We stopped at the U.S. Mint that afternoon, just before going to our session time for the temple open house tour. Haven't been to that mint...it seems like we may have gone to the Denver Mint when we lived in Colorado? I can't remember now. Maybe I went there when I was a kid, but didn't take my OWN kids. That might be it.

There is also a cool boardwalk over the River that runs through the downtown area. We took a walk later that evening.

We stayed overnight, then got up and spent a couple of hours at Valley Forge.

Here are Kara and Teresa outside some of the huts they've recreated, that George Washington and his men lived in for the winter months they lived at Valley Forge.

Now we are back! And actually, last week we sent off David and Teresa, back to BYU for their fall semester! :( :( :( :( Where did the summer go?  We got up bright and early last Tuesday for them to catch a 6:15 flight. We of course had to stop for the traditional Dunkin Donuts.

David and Teresa started school this past Monday.

Not to be outdone, Kara started HER classes yesterday. She's our resident Junior in High School! She's been in soccer for a week now, and she also found out after tryouts that she made the Varsity Girl's Soccer Team. Very impressive, Kara :) :) :)

Good luck this semester, David, Teresa and Kara!