Palm Trees and Pencils

Hola Familia!

Here's a quick note to summarize the last couple of weeks.

We have Kara back from her volunteer experience in Fiji, so that is a good thing! She took some super long flights to get home, but now one of us has been "over" the North Pole. The last leg of her flight took her from Hong Kong to Boston, OOOOOoover that point on our earth!

David and Teresa are into their home stretch of the semester. A couple of days of class this week, then a reading day and then finals start. Ugh! But then they can breathe, until the next round. David has 1 more semester.

SUMMER JOBS. David has an internship here in Boston this summer, so he will be home. Yay! The company gives up-to-the-minute cost of living details for cities all over the world. Other companies hire THEM when they need to relocate someone, since they can tell them how much is housing, groceries, gas, etc., around the world.

Teresa is 9 here!
That turtle is heavy

Teresa has an internship in the Salt Lake area this summer, so she will NOT be home. Waaaaahhh! She will be studying and collecting data from the birds, small mammals, and other wildlife in a region west of the Great Salt Lake. The land is a big training ground for the Air Force. She won't be working for the Air Force, but all the data this company collects on animals and the environment, is reported to the Air Force.

Kara's job/internship is also with a company here in Boston. (Yay, again!) I can't remember the department she'll be working in, but it's marketing or finance or something.

WARM WATER. But before all that starts, we get a family vacation :) :) David and Teresa will finish their finals in about 10 days, then fly home and the NEXT day we'll fly to Panama. There we will begin our cruise, from Panama to Cartegena Colombia, then to 3 small islands close to Colombia. Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire. Warm temperatures for me, hanging out with some of my very favorite people. This will be the last few days of April/first week of May. Can't wait!

BOOK RECOMMENDATION. Here is a book I read recently, after listening to Zak Ebrahim's story on a TedTalk. Wow. He is the son of the man who planned the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. His amazing story had me hooked for the 9-minute Ted Talk, and then I looked up his book (the "full" story) in the library and read that.

Truly, if you have 9 minutes, it is a great Ted Talk. Then if you have some 10-minute snippets in your day to spend reading a pretty short 93-page-or-so book, he tells his whole story and it is So. Perspective-Changing. And. Uplifting. The Ted Talk is called "I am the son of a terrorist. Here's how I chose peace."

His book is called "The Terrorist's Son; A Story of Choice." Well worth your time.

HOLY WEEK. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and the day of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. I wondered what was the significance, of him entering the city on a donkey?

Triumphal Entry: the people place
palm fronds on the road in honor
of the Savior's arrival

It did fulfill prophecy: that the Savior would come on a donkey. But I looked it up further and the donkey is an eastern symbol of Peace. A King -- a leader of a kingdom -- can ride in on a horse, which is an animal of War. OR the king can ride in on a donkey, which is an animal of Peace. Hence one of the names Jesus is recognized by is the King of Peace, or the Prince of Peace.

Have a beautiful week!
Kari

NYC and Dengue

Hola Familia--
Well I wrote this about a week ago, and never sent it!

VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE. Kara is in Fiji at the moment, teaching English to local kindergarteners. She had a nasty bout with Dengue Fever (DEN-gee, with a hard 'g' like 'get'), brought on by a disgusting mosquito. Can't think of a single good thing about mosquitoes...bat food, I suppose. But bats can eat other things too. Let's say NO to mosquitoes. It was basically 8 days of fever, rash, nausea, vomiting. Feeling like you'd rather die, you may know the feeling from stomach-flu. When you're away from home it's worse, I think!

But she is finished with that, and was able to eat food this week. She and a group of friends went exploring another island (Fiji is a series of beautiful islands with this crystal clear, blue water) this past weekend. Gorgeous, just like a postcard. She'll be there another few days.

9/11 happened at 10:02:14--here's a
clock from one of the rooms

MY BIRTHDAY. I was super-spoiled for my birthday this year. Frank had meetings in New York City this week, and I joined him for a couple of days. It was kind of a 9/11 trip for me, going to a photo journal museum of sorts, getting dozens of stories, photos, and memorabilia about the trajedy and recovery efforts.

Model UN

One of David's favorites
the original is at the MoMA
(Museum of Modern Art)
right now!

David was also in town that week, with his byu "Model U.N." class. The whole class spends the semester preparing for a week of activity with 3000 other college students from around the country. They come prepared to represent specific countries in U.N. discussions and goal-setting, or problem-solving sessions. BYU's countries were Italy and _______, can't remember the other one.

close to the World Trade Center

So, on my birthday we got to meet David for dinner and we all went to My Fair Lady at the Lincoln Center. I love that music! I was humming it all weekend.

TEMPLE VISIT. Saturday morning Frank and I went to a session in the Manhattan Temple. It's amazing to have the normal bustle of people on the sidewalks outside in the big city, and then you step inside and it's so peaceful.

9/11 MEMORIAL. Then we went back to the hotel and changed, and took the subway to the 9/11 memorial. It's a beautiful display at the site where the Twin Towers used to be. They have created beautiful waterfalls in the footprints of the actual buildings, and carved names of those who lost their lives into granite surrounding the waterfalls.

Well my blog time is up. Happy Friday tomorrow! Spring may even come to us in the Arctic North pretty soon :) :) :)

Kari

Melting Snow and Coconuts

Hello, Family--

Just looking outside at the 'almost-melted' snow! We had a week of above-freezing temperatures, and it rained a little in there, too. I can see most of the yard now, and only patches of snow.

boat shot

SPRING IS COMING. In 3 more days, in fact! Friday was one of those "teaser" days, where it actually got up to 61, or something wonderful like that! I went outside after school and took a long walk. Beautiful, beautiful.

TEACHING IN PARADISE. Kara just finished her first week of teaching the local kindergarten kids in Fiji. She was going to go with a friend, then the friend backed out at the last minute.

Speaking of beautiful, it is Just. Gorgeous. There! Here are some pictures she has sent.

She landed, and then took her big suitcase on the bus to a resort for a couple of days. At that resort, there were 'coincidentally' some people -- about 10 -- from the same volunteer program she is with, there to take a vacation weekend.

bus stop

(People start and finish their volunteer experiences different weeks. These people had already been volunteering for a little while.) So she met them all and hung out with them, then they all went back to the volunteer "bunk-house" together.

view from inside the bus

VOLLEYBALL WINS. Otherwise, we've been watching the BYU Men's Volleyball team play this week. As usual, they are really good. Gymnastics was televised on Friday too. Always fun to watch them, but they don't get televised too often.

OH--speaking of gymnastics! It's crazy what these girls can do at the college level. Avery has been following Shannon Evans, a junior on the BYU gymnastics team. Avery recreated Shannon's floor routine on youtube -- it's really fun! Here's the link for Avery's routine.

Kara with some new
5-year-old friends :)

UCLA also has an amazing athlete on the team right now: Katelyn Ohashi. She has earned five scores of  "10" this year, 3 of them on floor and 2 on beam, or something like that. She's this little tiny girl, only 4 foot 10 inches, and she has so much fun doing the routine it can only make you smile. Here is Katelyn's floor routine on youtube.

CLEANING OUT. I'm still doing the Marie Kondo thing, chipping away at our bins in the garage and other places in the house.

I went to the dentist this week, too. Happily, it was uneventful :)

Have a great week, and especially this Wednesday...that day will be SPRING!

Kari

Snow, Splint and Survival Kit

beautiful snowy mountain range

Hello, All--

The weeks have slipped by a little, it seems!

Let's see if I can give a summary of the last couple of weeks...well, 3 maybe?

Kris, Mom, Me, Avery

LOOKING FOR SUN. I went to Arizona to visit the sun and warmth. Turns out they were both coincidentally out of town for a couple of days! Ugh!

So I left 40 degree weather in Boston to get to Tucson and get...40 degree weather and SNOW! Ha, can you believe it!

Trent is getting so tall :)

Mom's backyard

then a couple of days after the
snow: all gone! At 61 degrees
I could take a walk outside

It's okay though. I got over it. I still got to visit with Mom.

One day we drove to Kris's house, and we got to see Avery, Trent and Jessica :) :) :)

dice game: Tenzi

We went to Red Robin and of course I had to order Onion Rings. The perfect combination of salt and grease. And they delivered it in a tall, tall tower that reached above Avery's head.

AND, extra treat: the last day I was there, was an "overlap day" with Kim and Duane. Nice to visit with so many over the 4 days I was there.

at least her nails were painted :)

UNEXPECTED MISHAP. Of course, it was a rude awakening on Sunday morning when I was there, as Mom called me into her room because she had broken her foot. Ugh! She had dozed off in her recliner chair in her room, as she sometimes does. She did not realize her foot had fallen asleep. She woke up, and stood up, ready to go to the next place...her foot turned and she broke the outside bone, the one connected to her pinky toe. Blah.

We spent a couple of hours in the Emergency room, where they rolled in the x-ray machine and took pictures, and determined that it was a "nondisplaced fracture." They wrapped it with a splint, so she couldn't move the foot. She went to another appointment later in the week, and they said it was positioned well so they could leave the bone in the place it was, and wrap it better. 4 weeks with a heavy-duty brace. Not a very pleasant surprise!

our Games Night group

FRANK'S GAME NIGHT TURNING 50!! Frank has now 'caught up' to my decade :) He turned 50 last Sunday. We of course celebrated with a Games Night, and a good time was had by all. We pulled out Outburst -- we've had that one since we were married, believe that or not! Very comical, as the answers were so dated...referring to TV shows like Dukes of Hazard...

Kara holds the phone up for David and Teresa
to watch Frank open his gifts
(they facetimed in for gift opening)

OLD GUY'S SURVIVAL KIT. The kids pooled together to get Frank a "survival kit," now that he's 50...you know, prune juice, fiber crackers, preparation H. Kara and Angela wrapped the gifts, then Kara came back here to the house. She facetimed with both David and Teresa simultaneously, so they could see him open things.

(Their REAL gift was movie tickets for us, and a restaurant gift card. They do know how to celebrate a birthday for their pop!)

Birthday Pie before she left:
her 19th bday is actually
next week but we had
a mini-celebration
before she left

KARA'S NEXT ADVENTURE. Then last week, we sent Kara off to Fiji. She will be there for about 5 weeks, teaching English to the local kindergarteners like she did in Bali last fall. She had a friend she was going to go with, then at the last minute her friend could not go. So, she's winging it on her own. We're using WhatsApp to text and send pictures back and forth, and she texted to say that she made it to the right places and had her orientation Monday. Tuesday she started work in the schools.

hug before she left -- okay I woke her
up! I was leaving for school and
Frank would take her to the airport
a little later :)

Well that sums up the past couple of weeks! Meanwhile Massachusetts temperatures are c-r-e-e-p-i-n-g upwards. In the 40's this week, and Friday it should hit 61! Yep.

Empty-Nesting it for a few weeks

SIX MORE DAYS until spring, you know :) :) :)

Have a good week!
Kari

all her clothes laid out for the suitcase

Shoveling, Days Off and Furry Friends

Hello, All!

Just sitting at the computer, at the end of a lovely day. It LOOKED lovely, from the inside, at least, ha. The sun was shining and it was so bright all around. Probably still right around 30 degrees.

We're supposed to get just a little bit of snow tonight. Little bits are okay :)

This is the beginning of our "February Break," in the public schools. I think it's mostly for people to get away if they want to, AND it's a time to let all those cold and flu germs in the school buildings die. There are LOTS of them! Bleh.

COUNTING DOWN. What did I do this week? Well I made it through another week of winter. And THAT is HUGE. No, really. We're down to 31 days until spring! No matter the weather on that day (March 20), I will be calling it Spring.

This week: Merlin

FLUFFY ENTERTAINMENT. This week Kara has another dog-sitting gig, and we have Merlin here. He's a little fluffy dog; I think Kara said he's 9 lbs. Very cute! I don't know what kind he is, but he likes to play indoor fetch with a little squeaky bone toy. And, if you're just sitting on the couch not petting him, he will move his nose over to your hand and remind you that you need to do that.

I just snapped this pic of Merlin with my phone.

Last week: Chrissy

BOATLOADS OF SNOW. Oh I just remembered that Wednesday's exercise was shoveling. Wow. A LOT of shoveling, like 2 1/2 hours worth, since the storm coincided exactly with Frank's trip to New York and he missed it :0 Kara did do the driveway. I tackled the porch, sidewalk to the mailbox, clearing off 2 cars, and the deck. (Thinking our next abode may be an apartment where somebody ELSE does the outside cleanup!)

this is us!

Then, the temperatures stayed in the 40s and even (gasp) 50s a couple of days, and it's almost all melted now. Kind of weird for February.

FAB CHRISTMAS GIFT. I don't think I mentioned our Christmas present from the kids, either. Waaaay cool! They know I don't want to get more "stuff," to fill our already overflowing house. I am constantly donating things, and asking them to go through their stuff whenever they are home. So they went in together, and got Frank and I tickets to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical! I didn't even know it was a musical, so that was a great surprise. It was so much fun. We went about 4 weeks ago, to a theater in downtown Boston. Fantastic date night :)

the stage before it started

I hope your week has gone well. David and Teresa have very few 'breaks' at BYU. This weekend happens to be one of their few 3-day weekends, getting off for President's Day tomorrow.

Teresa is camping, so hopefully we'll hear about that later. I have heard that southern Utah has had some beautiful weather, and the hiking and camping has been good :)

This Wednesday I head for Tucson for a few days. Looking forward to seeing some family members :) :) :)

Time for bed! Have a wonderful week.
Kari