Journal, Thanksgiving morning

We have had unusually bad weather the last week or so, with a series of storms one after another bringing wind and snow, first to the mountains and benches and then all over. We missed a Temple workers fireside in Provo Sunday evening because it was storming. A serious blizzard (“the storm of the decade”) was forecast starting Tuesday afternoon which caused an unusual number of cancellations of schools, office closures, in anticipation of the storm. You would have almost thought that we back in NC with these kinds of anticipatory closures. It turned out to be mostly a dud of a storm (we got about 2 inches of snow), but it had record Arctic cold behind it. This Thanksgiving morning as the sun rises, our thermometer is reading 3 degrees and there is our usual wind from the Spanish Fork canyon. I wonder what the chill factor might be, minus 10 or 15 perhaps. I am grateful for our warm house.

We had a pre-Thanksgiving family get-to-gether at Matthew and Kims last night (Wednesday) and all of our Utah families came, even those families who are doing something else for Thanksgiving dinner, Soderquists, Stanfords, and Nathan and Gloria. We counted 38 people.

We filled up on pizzas-to-bake from Papa Murphys, played games, and visited.

Matthew and Kim have nearly completed their basement project and their house can absorb at lot of people. They have added some 2400 square feet of finished space in their basement including a large open area. There were people in the one corner watching a movie and in another corner two sets of tables with people playing games at one and putting together a jigsaw puzzle at another, along with Krysta in the new downstairs kitchen making Rice Krispy-marshmallow squares. Upstairs there were people in the kitchen, a group playing a game at the dining table, another movie being watched in the family room, boys playing hide-and-seek throughout the house.

One of my goals for this fall was to get to the point where we could park the Ranger in out if the weather by eliminating the section of furniture and boxes that had been stored in the east side of our garage since mostly before our mission. We are making progress. We were able to pass on some of the things to help Andrew and Britain furnish their apartment in August, and this week we gave the oak dining table and some small furniture that had come from our Taylorsville house to Matthew and Kim to help populate their basement.

This oak table was JoAnn’s pride and joy. She used to joke with family members and say that if they did not do so and so, she would take them out of her will and they would not be in the running to inherit her dining table. Wendy remarked that JoAnn must have been very pleased this night to see a number of her family members again gathered happily around this table.

We left reluctantly while the party was still going strong, because our day had been very long and we were exhausted. Wendy for some reason was not able to sleep on Tuesday night and had spent most of the day in Thanksgiving Day dinner preparations. My face was sore from having a root canal first thing in the morning (Wednesday) at a Provo Dentist, Steve Osmond. (It turned out that my tooth problem over the last several weeks was from an abscess.)

Because of Thanksgiving, we are not having our usual Thursday at the Provo temple this week. We were able to slip in a session on Tuesday early afternoon, between storms.

Monday evening, we attended a production of the musical, Scarlet Pimpernel, at Maple Mountain HS with Matthew’s family. It was lot of fun to see Alyssa in the chorus and cast, especially seeing how much fun she seemed to be having. I sat by Brianna and charged her to tell me every time Alyssa appear on stage (she had a variety of costumes in various scenes and wasn’t always recognizable by me.)