Happy Birthday, Emily!

Today, Feb 7, is Emily's Birthday. She was a beautiful surprise at her birth--our first and only girl--and she still has many fine surprises left. This is a picture of her when she had her second birthday when we lived on Quince Street in Salt Lake. Now she's very much on her own, has many talents and a strong testimony, and is enjoying life wonderfully. We love you, Em.

Full-time Missionaries Staying in Our Home

We have needed things in our home put in more order and a lot of stuff purged for a long time, but we didn't anticipate that inviting the full-time Elders to live in our home to live would be the way we would really get it going. We learned of the Woods Cross Elders' need to find a new place to live less than a week ago. We felt it was the right thing for us to have them live in our basement. Once we had made the decision we knew it was right and a lot of preparation work began including having a shower installed over the existing bathtub downstairs. The sorting and purging have only just begun, but we're making progress after 39 years of accumulation. Our goal is to purge almost half of our possessions.

The Elders seemed very excited when they moved in today and saw their accommodations. Before they left to take care of teaching duties, they asked the Lord for a special blessing to be on us and our home. And how blessed we feel already!

Life Is Good!

I picked up my oil painting from Bountiful Davis Art Center on July 25. I called it “Bountiful’s Beacon” because it featured the Bountiful Temple on the mountainside watching protectively over the people of the valley like a beacon would for lost ships at sea. I had entered it a few weeks ago to be part of the Bountiful Handcart Days celebration. I'm sorry to say that I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t receive any awards for it. Then I got to thinking what this painting represents—it’s my first attempt to oil paint again in more than twenty years because I was letting life get too busy. Regardless of other perceptions, it has given me a great deal of personal satisfaction. It was not easy to start painting again, yet once I got into it, I felt truly elevated and enriched. I’m not making a livelihood of doing it, but now I plan on painting every six months or so to personally celebrate the beauty I perceive around me and can portray in some artful way. The Lord has blessed me with this joy. Life is good.

On the 24th, I watched on TV the Days of 47 Parade in Salt Lake especially to see our stake float. The evening before, I watched it pass by in the Handcart Days Parade on Main Street in Bountiful. Our brightly-colored-covered-wagon-and-space-shuttle float was visually and technologically awesome and involved a lot of hours of work for a lot of people. I, again was a little self-serving in hoping it would win some kind of recognition, but it didn’t. Most people I talk to about working on floats think such an assignment would be a terrible thing to have to do. But I recognize how much I really enjoyed working on the project and working with Brother Saltzgiver and Arrin Holt and his boys and Norma Jensen and Gary Lindsay and a bunch of others. It was truly worth the effort even if it didn’t end up in the “Who’s Who of Wasatch Front Floats.” The Lord blessed me with this opportunity to serve. Life is good.

I’ve been doing some thinking at work, where I’ve been for over 33 years, about what contribution I may have made through the years. In some ways have felt I didn't measure up. My assignments have greatly varied during that time. Sometimes I didn't accomplish all I had hoped. But the more I think about it, what a fantastic trip my employment has been and continues to be—(and this is not a brag rag, but a thanksgiving list and an opportunity for my children and theirs to know what grandpa was blessed to participate in while at work) learning to analyze and create and later manage the production of 1000’s of business forms; managing Records Management for a few years; working with Clerk Services; helping manage the production of many English and international publications; designing and setting up point-of-sale and other displays and posters for Deseret Industries; assisting with the documentation and development of visual identity logos in multiple languages; being in on the beginnings of our Church’s website and assisting in much of its initial content and concept design; managing the graphic production of scriptures in many languages; helping product-manage a major changeover in software for dozens of editors, designers, and production artists and overseeing the training for XML tagging and transformations; and now working with tech writing on a variety of ideas related to my product management assignment—all the while working with some of the best people in the world in an exceptional environment. What can be better than working to serve the Lord. He has truly blessed me in so many ways. Life is very good!