Memorial day and Moving people

This week was Memorial day. We got up with the best intentions to go on a new exciting hiking trail. We woke up and drove the the spot, but even though the website said they were open, the gate was locked! So, our first adventure of the morning was spoiled, but then I remember that Daniel had never been to Central Market,(that is a really, really big grocery store that has basically every kind of food!) so we turned on our trusty GPS unit on and got directions to the store. Upon arriving to the store we found out they were closed too! Foiled at every turn! We returned to our apartment in defeat, but we took a quick walk around the block and came home. Since we didn't have anything else to do, we got to work on our blanket for the family reunion service project. (And finished, it went really quickly.) Daniel told me not to tell any details on the blog because it is top secret until the reunion. I agreed, so you will all have to wait and see how it turned out!

It is now moving season in the ward. Daniel has now helped a couple of times, and he says that his arms might fall off if he moves too many more people out of the ward in the near future. The first was a move on Saturday, and so, he was gone all morning. I helped with the second move by watching the couple's child. (Daniel did all the lifting things, which explains why his arms are threatening to fall off.) I probably had the most fun of anyone helping to move, but they assured me that the help was appreciated.



Today my awesome visiting teachers took me out for ice cream for my birthday. We visited Amy's Ice Creams, which is an "Austin Original" ice cream shop. They had good ice cream in some interesting flavors. I have been near by there before (Austin's Five Guy's is right next door), but I had never been to their little park right behind. It has places to eat, grass, and some bit metal cows for kids to play on. It was fun because a cold front just moved in and there was a breeze making the heat nice instead of dreadful. When I came home, I told Daniel that we had to go hang out outside because it was nice. Our house didn't get quite the same breeze, but it was fun to use our porch for sitting (probably for the first time since we've moved here.)

Exercise and Ice Cream

Daniel and I decided this week it would be good to start go on morning walks. It is too hot in the afternoons after work (the warmest part of the day) to go out, so we started going on walks first thing in the morning. This means that we have to get up when our alarm clock goes off, the first time, in the moring. That is something we haven't done in a long time. It is fun to go out with Daniel in the mornings, and to be outside when it isn't really hot, but currently, I'm at the point where I'm sore, and (obviously) not seeing many results from the exercise. If Daniel wasn't encouraging me to get up on time, I would definitely roll over and hit the snooze button a few more times instead of getting up and moving. It is a good thing I have a good husband to make sure I get up instead of stay in bed!

We also thought it would be fun to get some reading done this week. We finished the first two books in the Prydian Chronicles. They weren't too long, and they were interesting and enjoyable. We'll probably pick up the next ones some time next week. (We considered picking them up today, but our closest library branch that has them is closed on Friday's and all of the branches are closed Saturday-Monday.) So, now we'll have to come up with something else that is fun to do for the upcoming holiday weekend. Hopefully we come up with something. If you have any fun Monday holiday ideas for us, we'd love to hear them!

I have also been craving ice cream, lately. It has been a long time since we've gotten ice cream and it has been getting warm out. Fortunately, this week, ice cream happened to be on sale! So, we bought a new flavor of ice cream to try! I'm not sure it is my new favorite flavor of ice cream, but it was probably some of the best Neapolitan ice cream I have had. (But that isn't too surprising because I do really like the blue bell strawberry ice cream!) We also got some delicious strawberries. They weren't just on sale, but they also smelled so good! It was a good grocery week!

This last Sunday we got to sing as a ward choir. Our choir director is moving away, but besides that it is the last time we'll sing until next fall. (Since there is so much going on in the summer time the ward cancels ward choir until the fall when people are a little more permanent in the ward.) I'm excited for the fall to come so we can have more choir!

Games, Books, and (Future) Goodies.

This week our ward hosted a game night. It was really fun. The really young kids had a nursery provided by our local singles' ward. The primary kids watched a movie and the grown ups all played games! We played a shortened game of Trivial Pursuit. We did okay at that, but we didn't win. I did much better at that than the three 80's themed games that we were offered. As one who didn't live a single day in the 80's I figured that would be like a slaughter. Then Daniel and I joined a huge game of Settlers of Catan. They were using the expansion pack to get to to 6 players and then each player was paired with their spouse which made one really large table of people playing the board game. We had a good time getting to spend some time with our ward members.

This week I realized how much I need to find a way to store larger amounts of flour and sugar at some point. This realization cames this week as I basically ran out of flour, white sugar, brown sugar, and cocoa powder at the same time. I can only get the smallish bags because I have no way to store a larger (maybe 20 lb) bag of flour or sugar, after I open it. Eventually I will buy something to store that kind of stuff in. This week I decided to put off my shopping trip until the weekend so I can get all of those baking supplies and my other things. Hopefully, I can find a good deal on all the baking goods that I'm going to buy. I plan to make something tasty with them at some point! Really, we need to seriously work on our food storage stuff around this house! Hopefully I will get all that figured out at some point.

I also finally got around to reading this month's book club book Heaven is Here. It was a pretty good book. I enjoyed the read. It wasn't too long of a read. I did have plenty of time to read it, but it only took a couple of hours to read it. I did end up enjoying the book, but it took a little mental pushing to get started reading it. Daniel and I have also been reading some books together. We just finished the Protector of the Small quartet by Tamora Pierce. It was fun to read some books together. This next week we'll probably start another series of books that Daniel will pick out since I picked out that last ones.

Sometimes When It Rains It Pours.

This week has been a good week here in Austin. It has been a very raining week. It has been cloudy most days, and we have gotten lots of rain! Several nights we got over an inch in rain. (Some nearby areas got more like 2 inches.) I know the locals are like "yawn, it is just raining outside," but for a high desert girl it seems like a lot of rain. 2 inches is what we'll get in a whole summer or something. It is pretty crazy to get that much rain in one night. It is like someone is taking huge buckets of water and dumping them over the area! The thunder here is louder too. I don't know why that is, but it is definitely louder here. I guess when they say everything is bigger in Texas, they are including the rain and thunder storms! It is good though because we need lots of rain to get us out of the drought. We aren't there yet, but if it keeps raining we might get there some time.

This weekend we also got to go to the baptism of one of the daughters in a family Daniel home teaches. Their family speaks both Japanese and English, and the little girl wanted her baptism to be in Japanese. The first talk was in Japanese, and I don't speak Japanese. But the principles are still the same, it was fun watch and know the gospel is the same in any language, even if I didn't know what was being said.

Our First Dance (at a dance)

Friday night we got to go to our first dance together.  It was a fund-raising dance put on by the young women in our ward.  They made felt corsages, 'sold' treats, did pictures, provided games, and of course turned the cultural hall into a dance floor.  The music was mostly the kind of music you'd have heard at high schools in the 70-80s, but it was still enjoyable.  They even provided babysitting for people so we got to spend some time getting to know some of the people in our ward with young kids.

The next day, I headed to the church to help out with a merit badge fair (I just signed up to be a merit badge counselor).  I got there right on time -- except that there was no one at the church!  I called Elissa up and we decided that I needed to drive 30 minutes to the right place.  I felt really bad being that late, but I guess every year they've done the fair someone has shown up at the church, so I'm not the first and may not be the last to do that.

I also got to work on a few repairs this week:  I've been working on fixing up a theremin for a family in the ward for a few months (off and on).  I got in the parts I needed to get it up and running and then started the tuning process (I used a tutorial I found online).  I'm sure it could be tuned much better, but it works!  The other repair I did was with Elissa's laptop.  Her fan started acting up so I cleaned it up and tried it out and it seemed fine, so I put it back (but we had to get some thermal grease).  It runs a little better now.

I'm not really sure what else we have to talk about this week.  Hope you enjoyed the post!

One (Fairly) Busy Week

It was just another week here in Austin at the Larsen house. We did to lots of church related activities though! Friday was our ward visiting teaching conference. We had delicious fajitas, and I felt so spiritually uplifted and motivated to do better as a visiting teacher and as a person in general. We also had a silent service auction based on points earned mostly through by identifying sisters from the ward by interesting facts about them. There were over 200 women on the list. I learned that we have smart, talented, amazing women in our ward! And the things that were provided for the auction were creative as well as showing the skills of the women in the ward. 

Daniel participated in the priesthood MAP activity. They asked the elders to go and find those members that are recorded by the church but that haven't been active in the ward. Generally where the ward is not sure whether you are just not coming to church or if you have moved to a new location. Daniel did have a few doors closed in his face, but at least one person was really nice and stopped to talk with him. As a reward, we got to go to a new and fancy restaurant. Daniel tried their salmon, and I had their steak. (along with salads, appetizers and desserts) We even ended up drinking water from fancy glass bottles. It was a fun evening.

Sunday we had a pretty standard meeting schedule, but we did get moved into a new classroom for our Sunday school class. This room is bigger, is not right next to all the adults in the ward AND it even has windows. What an upgrade! Unfortunately, the students in our class don't do well with change. They had a hard time settling down and getting ready to learn. I just have to remind myself that we all have those same instincts, but we've just learned to behave more maturely in certain situations. (It doesn't mean that we all aren't secretly like 12 year olds at heart!)

Today, I even had book club. We read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  We had a really good time talking about the book, and all agreeing that we don't quite understand why the character would behave in the manner they did, but that the story was very well executed in style. We did wonder why all the Bronte sisters wrote about angry/scary men. Conclusion: we have no idea! Anyway, it was a fun night!

  

Learning How to Make Trash into Treasure

This week Daniel didn't have a lot of plans of things to do, BUT the one thing we did have planned was to go to a one hour class on composting put on by the city of Austin. If we had a house, we could now get a voucher for 75% of the purchase up to $75 off of a composter, but where we rent, we aren't really eligible for the deal.  We did get a little kitchen compost collector to take home though! The City is putting on this class to get to their zero waste goal. They want to not send anything to the landfill. So they are doing lots of recycling, and composting helps reduce the waste that they have to process.

Even though we aren't getting the  money, the class was really informative about the basics of composting. I learned all about the difference between greens and browns. I also learned that you never compost meat products! (Who knew? Not me!) The best tip that I think we got was to reduce the risk of making your kitchen smelly, to store the kitchen keeper in the freezer or refrigerator. It seemed like good information to know because compost can make great mulch and is good for putting on gardens. 

All in all, the lady who gave the presentation did a good job making it fun and informative, but Daniel and I agreed that it seemed like it was part lecture and part interpretive dance. It was a fun and different home evening for us because usually we just stay home for our FHE nights. We found out later that she went to Daniel's work earlier in the day to give the same presentation, but I was glad that I got to go with Daniel to the talk for some family home evening!

There isn't much else to tell about this week. No exciting news. We haven't really gotten closer to house hunting stuff or anything. So, basically and average week!