April happenings...some good, some less good!

 

 A new recipe tried for GC Sunday breakfast!

Happy April!  The month started out wonderfully with General Conference!  The next Sunday was Easter (Fast Sunday) and the church did  something new this year.  They changed it to a sacrament meeting only Sunday and a no testimonies Fast Sunday.  They made a very big push to have us do more as families at home to celebrate Easter pointing out how much we celebrate Christmas when Easter is even more important than that if you think about it.  

From the April Liahona Magazine:  For many of us, celebrating Jesus’s birth at Christmas comes more naturally than commemorating His suffering, death, and Resurrection at Easter.  The familiar and joyful traditions of Christmas begin early in December.  Yet we ought to remember what President Gordo B. Hinckley (1910-2008) taught: “There would be no Christmas if there had not been Easter.  The babe Jesus of Bethlehem would be but another baby without the redeeming Christ of Gethsemane and Calvary, and the triumphant fact of the Resurrection.”

We have tried to do better, though I feel like we have tried pretty hard in the past as well.  We always change out living room picture grouping each year at Easter and Christmas.  This year we did nightly study via the church website as well as our Sunday School study and today we enjoyed watching a wonderful concert with art and music about the Savior's life and resurrection.  We even figured out how to cast it to our TV for our very first time on our own!  

Easter is the time of year when I am always thinking of Weed and Bean and how wonderful it will be when we see Weed again and how wonderful it is to know she's alive and well...just not here now.  For Bean it brings me hope for his eventual healing from his health issues and the chance for  him to have the life that he has missed so much of here.  I know there are so many other people who have been sick or passed away, but these two really stand out for me since they both were taken by death or health issues at what seemed like way too early.  I am so grateful for my testimony of the Savior's atonement that will eventually "wipe away all tears" as I have shed many for these two.  Happy Easter!  Hosanna!

The Thursday evening before Easter, April 6th, we went on a date.  After dinner we decided to take a drive and then do a little hike up by Brookside.  It was so nice.  We wanted to see what the stream was doing with all of the extra water we've had this year.  It was much higher than usual.  As we were driving home after the hike we had a very unexpected and unfortunate accident when a deer suddenly crossed the road in front of our car.  It was dark, the moon hadn't risen yet, and it was so fast that we had no time at all to react.  There deer was there and then gone.  Thankfully we weren't injured at all, but the car was very damaged and will be totaled by the insurance company because there is way too much damage to fix for how old it is and how much it is worth.  Of course, to us it was still a wonderful car and replacing it is way more expensive than what we'll get for it unfortunately.  Thankfully we do have some money coming from our reverse mortgage that will make it possible for us to pay it off.  That's not what we had planned to spend the money for, but at least we won't have a car payment for very long.  So I'm can be grateful for both of those things.   Our new car is a Toyota Prius plug in hybrid.  We are excited to have a car that will still get good gas mileage because of the hybrid feature.  It's going to be a stretch to learn all of the new technology it also includes, but hopefully it will be a great car to get us through till were done with it! 

Here's the new car!  

Oh, speaking of lots of water this year, we took a drive over Cedar Mountain a few weeks ago at the end of March and the snowpack is so huge!  It is finally getting warm now and it's kind of a worry what's going to happen to all of that snow when it melts very quickly.  Some ski resorts have had over 66 feet of snow this year and the snowpack is said to be at 200%.  We have needed this water so badly.  Just hope it doesn't cause tremendous flooding with a quick warm up now.

I got called up for jury duty this month too.  I know it's a responsibility that we need to be a part of, but I wasn't thrilled because I didn't want a miss a bunch of work.  Luckily it was a short case.  I was chosen even though I knew the prosecuting attorney.  We spent one day going through the processing of being interviewed and then chosen or excused for one reason or another.  Then we came back the next day and heard the case and actually finished it up.  We went a little over regular hours which was clear when the lights went out in the court room at 5:00 pm, but we went ahead and finished up by about 6:30 pm, just before they were going to get us dinner.  So, it was a learning experience for sure.  I met some nice on the jury with me,  and some not so nice people, either the defendant or the plaintiff, who were pretty big liars.  Their stories matched on some details, but not on the things that counted the most.  We ended up giving a guilty verdict on 2 of 3 counts.  I have no idea how he was sentenced since they excused us to go home right after the verdict was read to the court.  So, now I have at least 2 years off from that from what I hear.  I was called up once in NM, but one of the lawyers excused me from a drunk driving case because I was a non-drinker.