Volleyball Season Begins

It's been a good week.  Probably one of the more exciting bits of news is that we played our first game of Volleyball on my work team this week.  I was really out of practice, and our team as a whole really stunk, but we only lost by a little bit.  I think we'll get better as we improve our communication and get some more practice.  In any case the reason we're doing this is for fun and exercise, which are both accomplished even if our team does stink.

Also, my Elders' Quorum president talked to me on Sunday about a calling that will remain secret until next blog post.  (I know, you're all waiting with baited breath for the announcement).  I'm not sure if we'll be keeping the 12-13 yr Sunday school calling so we'll just have to wait and see.

On Saturday we went to a home buyer seminar thing.  It was supposed to be 6 hours but it was only about 3 because there was only one other guy there for the course.  It felt kind of remedial after all the research Elissa has been doing to make sure that we are informed and make a good financial choice when we get a house.

I'm not sure there's much else new for this week.  Look to next week for another riveting post.

A Very Texas Birthday

This week has probably been the most humid we've had. It isn't unusual to hear the weather man say "well, today is going to be a muggy  day," "oh, dear... it is about 80% humidity," or " well, the 'real feel' is 5 degrees higher than the actual temperature." Suffice it to say, I'm glad that it isn't so dry or so hot as last summer yet (knock on wood!), but that it is really humid. That hasn't stopped Daniel and I from going on our morning walks. It really is the only time of day that feels like a reasonable time to go walking together since the evening is the warmest part of the day!

This week was also my birthday! We ended up going to a crawfish boil party with people from Daniel's work. Now, before you all go and boo him (or write mean things on his facebook wall), I told him that that having us go was perfectly acceptable, and he even woke up extra early to make me surprise, morning breakfast cake! (Which he chose because I really don't love frosting, and I really enjoy breakfast cake!) Anyway, I thought it was super cute and thoughtful. I did have a lovely birthday! (Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful birthday wishes!)

I did get to try crawfish at the crawfish boil, which I admit, was kind of a weird experience. Way out of my comfort zone because I really don't like to see a creature's head before I eat something. (Let along snap the poor thing in half!) I was a little nervous to start, but I did get the hang of it, I think. I did enjoy them more than I do shrimp. I really don't like shrimp, and I was worried that crawfish would be just like shrimp, and they weren't thank goodness.

My birthday presents from Daniel ended up coming in the mail a little later from my birthday, but we ended up getting more crossword puzzles to do together, among other things, because we just finished up our last book of them. Little did we know that this book would be the size of a phone book! That is okay because that means we have lots of puzzles left to do! We enjoy doing them together occasionally.

Along with my birthday presents in the mail, Daniel finally got to order the new Legend of Zelda game. (He has been diligently saving up his spending money for months and months. Now he finally saved up enough to buy this new game.) I don't know much about it, but apparently it takes advantage of the new Wii motion plus technology. Now I'll just have to find a project to do while he is playing the game. So he can play, and I can be productive.

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!