At the beginning of August (the 9th or so) Benjamin wrote these poem drafts:
Mirage. An illusion caused by heat.
The humid air condenses on the windows
forming an illusion of rain,
but there is no stead pitter patter of rain on the roof
the steady hum of air through the vents provides a
masquerade of wind in the trees out my window
it's an illusion of home
and it is my home.
Draft two:
Phoebe has been dreaming of riding on a ferris wheel (and in general to visit an amusement park) for quite some time and today that dream came true!
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We had a bit of a reverse school day today, spending the morning at the Gondolia Fun Fair with some friends and then the afternoon at home doing our lessons. It felt like an extravagance to take the kids to an amusement park, but as I was riding around on the carousel with Phoebe, I remembered many other times I'd taken my children on similar (contrived) adventures in the past.
It's just not something we've done in the past...while. I'm not sure quite how long, but it's been years. Living in Georgia, specifically, such outings felt unobtainable (too costly, etc.). So this felt like a luxury (and is surely a luxury), but it's not entirely out of the ordinary...it simply feels like it because we haven't done anything like it in a long while.
Phoebe started calling it the bubbly water, which was confusing because the kids have also taken a liking to sparkling water, which is also (actually) bubbly. When we pointed this out to her she started saying, "Pass the bubble solution!"
So that's fun (and funny)!
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Rachel didn't know this (per se), but she was in charge of the FHE lesson on Sunday night (which is when we do FHE now, I guess) because that's when she was scheduled to give her farewell talk!
Phoebe was so excited to see Rachel on the stand. She waved and waved and waved and waved and then said, "Why won't Rachel wave back to me?"
"Because she can't see us," I explained. "We can see her but she can't see us."
"Oh, fine!" Phoebe huffed, throwing herself backwards against the couch to pout.
This morning we headed to GUQ for part one of a service project (part two is next weekend). It was the kind of service project that felt almost like cheating because there were so many people there that (from our perspective) we hardly had to do anything (I'm sure the organizers feel differently). We showed up, sorted a few things, and then before we'd even gotten into a rhythm victory was declared!
The very embodiment of "many hands make light work."
After a light lunch (and some time spent playing in the student lounge), we headed home (technically some of the kids went to our friends' house to play, with plans to meet up later at IKEA). We did some laundry and some homework. I took a little nap. So did Miriam (that poor girl work up at 4:45 am to attend a lecture...and ended up only catching the tail end of it because it actually started at four in the morning, not five. It was recorded so she was able to watch the rest of it this evening, but she was rather frustrated about her miscalculation). And...then we headed out to Festival City (where IKEA is).
We picked out duvet covers and sifted through whatever was still available to cobble together some furnishings (there is quite a lot out of stock—we would love to see shipping passages open). I was excited to find an Arabic majlis sofa online (not from IKEA, which is going to be delivered next Monday). I love its versatility—it can be a couch or a bed!
I really wanted to get a play couch for the kids (like a Nugget or whatever) to put in our shipment, but wasn't able to get one in time. The kids love building cushion forts—I figure that these majlis sofas will do just the trick!
Anyway, we wandered all through IKEA with our friends, looking at all kinds of things (most of which was out of stock) and selecting many other things to purchase, and then had a little dinner in the cafe (not the restaurant) before heading home for the sad little cake I baked.
Rachel was pretty eager to get to talk to us on her first P-Day (preparation day: when missionaries get some time off of missionary duties to do laundry, grocery shop, catch up on correspondence, and relax a little). Phone calls home will typically be limited to P-Days, but Rachel's been calling a little more frequently since she's doing home MTC, has no companion, and is feeling a little lonely.
Miriam has been doing companion study time with Rachel (on the phone). And my mom is trying to see if any ladies in her ward would be willing to take Rachel out for a walk in the middle of the day (like she's a crate-bound puppy—Rachel has been walking laps in the backyard during her class breaks). It will get better for her, I'm sure.
And look! I don't know if you can see, but her name tags made it to her and she's now officially Chị Heiss! I mean, I suppose she was officially Chị Heiss when she was set apart earlier this week...but now she looks it!
Zoë was asked to give a talk this past Friday. She wrote a first draft all on her own but grew frustrated when she felt that she hadn't covered anything very well (though she had covered many things and still felt like she had more things to cover). Honestly, the topic "God promised to send Jesus Christ to be my Savior" is rather expansive and open-ended, so we read through her talk and I helped her identify some threads she could pull at. She spent quite a lot of time rewriting her talk and then spent even more time rehearsing her talk to an audience of stuffed animals (and then delivered the talk to us during our evening scripture study) before finally feeling like she was ready.
Here she is standing in front of the primary room delivering her talk:
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I think we're reaching one of those pivotal points in history where a ball has started rolling and...it's going to just keep gaining momentum having a kind of snowball-like influence on surrounding places until it becomes a somewhat standard thing.
I know there's a word for this. Andrew suggested "cascade" and I suppose "domino effect" would work as well. But I told him I was looking for less of a vocabulary word and more of a bit of jargon and he finally gave me "policy diffusion." I think that may have been what I was after!
Alberta just announced their new time system—Alberta Time! They have done away with clock-switches and are going to permanently stay at their current time, aligned with Mountain Daylight Time, the same time zone Utah is in right now.
BC made a similar announcement in March.
The Northwest Territories did so in April.
There's chatter about ending the practice in other places (such as throughout the United States—but that legislation is yet to become official), but I imagine we'll see other places adopting this practice soon.
Of course, I could be wrong because good ol' Saskatchewan has been...sticking to their tickings...since 1966, and Arizona has been the odd-duck out in the United States since ending their observation of Daylight Savings Time in 1968. They have been on Mountain Standard Time ever since.
(And I missed Hawaii in this list—they opted out of the Uniform Time Act 1967, the same year the act came into effect and they observed DST for a few weeks in 1933 before noping out of that, and again were "placed on" Hawaiian War Time in the 1940s for a couple of years—even then they only moved their clocks by half an hour. I'm still trying to figure out how changing clocks changes energy consumption...it seems largely like a remnant from wartime rationing than anything that sounds relevant for the way our power/consumption works today.)
Farmers don't like it (plants and animals don't care about it). Only 34% of the world observes it...
I'm team "changing the time twice a year is insanity!" and am happy to be in Qatar where they've never participated in such games.
When our house went under contract, the closing date was set to September 26 (the day before we're set to get the keys to our new apartment), but then the buyers asked if they could move that up to September 15, so we very quickly made arrangements for that.
This was mostly fine because selling our house was rather passive for us. We had given our neighbours power of attorney, so they went to sign the documents in our place. We just had to help arrange things and be present for an "alive and well" call with the lawyer (who we'd met previously).
Because of the time difference, this happened right during the dinner rush before mutual. Andrew was just getting out of class, I was in the middle of making dinner, and we were trying to figure out how everyone was going to get to mutual (Andrew was recently called as a teacher's quorum leader so now he goes to mutual as well). Still, we found a few minutes to sit down and hop on a call with the lawyer, verify all our information as correct (for money transfers and taxes and so forth), and then we went on our merry way.
Alive and well, having made it through most of September 15.
Rachel, meanwhile, had been having a rough morning and still had much of September 15 ahead of her.
She had gone to get a few vaccines the day before and woke up feeling very sore and rather overwhelmed.
Andrew and the kids came home from mutual, we put the little kids to bed, and then Benjamin and Miriam settled in to watch Inception (for Miriam's propaganda class) while Andrew and I sat down to hype up Rachel. We talked with her for a while, did our best to make her laugh, and motivated her to do a few of the "adulting" things she still needed to do before her mission started.
And then we had to get ready for bed because her 7-hour countdown to being set apart for a missionary was also our 7-hour countdown of how long we could possibly sleep before getting up to be present for her setting part (9 PM for her, 6 AM for us).
We did not get 7 hours of sleep...but we did eventually go to bed.
And we mostly got up to watch Rachel be set apart.
We decided to not wake Phoebe up, in part because...she's just a force to be reckoned with and once she's up, she's up. It seemed silly to wake her up for this when we could just...leave her sleeping. So we...didn't wake her up.
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