Friends, Field Trips, Phones and Flights

Two of our favorite people to eat, laugh and catch up with are Nolan and Margaret Archibald.  We met each other in Boston.  Margaret and I were teaching school and “Arch” and Rick were at Harvard Business School. Talking about Motherhood with Margaret is such fun because she is an extraordinary one and we are both passionate about that primary careers. They had seven boys and then finally a darling little girl who is one year younger than Charity.  Our paths have crossed over the years many times since we went our separate ways in from flying across the pristine snow under the Tetons on snowmobiles to joining us for fun at Bear Lake before we even had walls in our little cabin to many dinners and kids’ weddings.  What fun they are! I can count on my cheeks aching from laughing when we get together.

On Monday we met them for lunch across the street from the Capitol. Catching up with them (which really isn’t possible) is always fun and stimulating. Both guys are avid basketball players and they always argue about who is the tallest. I didn’t quite catch the feet but I’m quite sure that Dad/Rick is standing on his tiptoes in the picture below.

 

 

From there we walked straight (492 feet according to our phones) across the street to a really fun meeting at a huge well-known law firm with some enthusiastic entrepreneurs in the Washington D.C. area where we talked about what to do when kids are caught in The Entitlement Trap!  It was especially fun because this was such a pro-active and stellar group of leaders from all over the world who have located their many businesses in the D.C. area and  who really want to create an exciting family culture at home. And the best part was that we had Eli and Julie there to add the leaven and the spice to our presentation!  They were terrific!

 

After the presentation we had some scrumptious appetizers with the whole group and then went to dinner with some members of their board.  As Eli and Julie can attest, getting to know people afterward is the most interesting part for us because there are so many wildly creative people there who have accomplished amazing things!  E & J got some pretty awesome connections with people who live in the area. 

 

Field trips to the museums with Eli is even better than a picnic in the park with George! First, while Dad and Eli played tennis I wandered around the mall and loved seeing an exhibit at the National Archives Building about Ben Franklin and sucked in the positively incredible sculpture, flowers and museums on the mall.

 

Wish I’d had time to see this IMAX at the Natural History Museum:

 

Soon Eli came running up dripping with sweat from his tennis match to show me through his favorite museum which I had never seen.  The Hirshhorn.  It was a fantastical trip through light!

 

 

And literally walking through an exhibit:

It was a museum trip never to be forgotten. Eli introduces me to so many good things (including how to get out of messes on my computer). 

As for the phones and the flights….First, you will all be relieved to hear that after 24 hours in the rice, Julie’s phone kicked in and has been working perfectly…so far. We were all elated!

Then after our quick romp through the museum.Eli took us to Dulles airport early so dad could finagle some legroom for our long flight to Poland at 7 p.m. We were packed in like Sardines on our jumbo jet, Dad in the back with the leg room and I in the front with a cute young man who was on his way to climb Kilimanjaro, had a girlfriend who graduated from the Kennedy School and then lived in Mozambique for two years on a humanitarian project while he got his PHD at Cambridge, England. We had a lot to chat about for about a half an hour when the pilot came on the intercom and announced “some not so happy news.”  There was a fire in one of the engines and we were headed back to DC for inspection. He kept assuring us that everything was just fine, but we were greeted by several fire engines.  After about an hour of them trying to figure out what to do and us getting hotter and hotter as the plane’s air conditioning wasn’t working, they had us exit the plane and said there wasn’t another flight leaving until the next night.  A little card was handed to everyone to call if we needed help. Which we did. And a lot of it.

Of course Dad, being who he is not only didn’t take “no you can’t get there” for an answer but couldn’t take no for an answer. If we had waited until the next AirFrance/KLM flight out the next night we would miss our day long workshop with our YPO group in Poland. We had two 2 !//2 hour sessions to do with this group who were coming from all over Poland. There was no way to cancel.

SO we kept trying new avenues to get there until we found a British Airways flight that was leaving in two hours at 11:30 p.m. After going through several people who said there was not way we could get on that flight, Dad found a wonderful manager on the phone named Chris who became our new best friend. He arranged for the swap and even though one person had told us that the plane was full, there were only about 75 people on the entire jumbo flight.  Whew!  Thanks to dad and Chris we dodged a bullet on that one! 

HOWEVER, I decided I’d better call Eli and Julie to tell them that they almost had house guests for another might and couldn’t find my phone.  After completely emptying my all my bags twice I realized that it must have fallen out of my computer bag which wasn’t zipped when it fell over under my feet. I’m absolutely sure I put it in there and it was absolutely gone!  SO we have another crisis on our hands!  We called the lost and found and left an address and phone number but we’ve been on planes ever since and who knows if I will ever see my IPhone AGAIN!

Some days are just like that!  BUT, in balance that’s a small thing in the big picture and we are excited to be touching down in Poland in about 30 minutes to meet our hosts, get a little rest tonight and be ready for those workshops in the morning. More on that soon!

Lucy’s Precious Sight

Lucy is an artist! As her Grammie, I might be just a bit prejudice but just look at the detail in this drawing below from our five year old Seurat.  As you can see, she loves design and knows how to use the color wheel in her head to create masterpieces!

The problem here is a big one. Lucy has Bardet-Biedl Syndrome which is a rare syndrome that usually means that kids between 9 and 15 lose their sight.  Scientists are working on several encouraging clinical trials right now that may mean that we can save Lucy’s sight, but all that takes money. Lots of it!  Every year through The Foundation Fighting Blindness, each state sponsors a Vision Walk to raise money for research. The vision walk in Arizona is on March 31st but since most of you don’t live in AZ, it’s easy to be part of saving Lucy’s vision with a contribution online. Small contributions add up and we so appreciate those who are able to contribute larger ones!  It’s easy to contribute to the I Love Lucy team HERE. 

If you feel you can help Lucy continue her creations in years to come with those beautiful blue eyes, we thank you in advance! Or if you do happen to live in AZ and would like to take a short walk with the I Love Lucy Team on March 31st, see details here on Shawni’s blog. 

Almost Heaven

About four decades ago, when we were living in Boston we hopped in our old beat up car and drove south for many hours. At about 11 p.m. we drove into one of the most beautiful cities in the world at night…Washington D.C.  I felt as though I had died and gone to Europe with one gorgeous granite building after another lit up against the night sky. 

We were considering a move to the area after our two years in Boston. Dad/Rick was finishing his second year at HBS and I had taught music in a middle school for a year and then had gone home to our little student housing on the Charles River to give birth to Saren and to give private violin lessons.  If someone would have told me as we drove into that city for the first time that we would not only live in McLean (a suburb of D.C.) for several years off and on but that somewhere in the future most of our children would return there for internships and work, I would have been filled with wonder and disbelief!  After we left the area, Shawni and Dave worked there and then lived in our little house in McLean for five years with their first three little children. Saren, Saydi and Josh all worked there as single young adults. And most of our kids did Internships there with Senator Hatch when they were students.  At present Eli and his wife Julie live there on Capitol Hill much to our delight, and are now sharing their city with us!

On Friday, Eli picked us up at the Baltimore Airport despite horrendous traffic and we grabbed Julie from their cute condo and went straight to our favorite Asian fusion restaurant Oya.

It was fabulous food but there was one small problem. One of the waiters tipped over Julie’s glass of water into her lap which she handled with perfect grace but her new Apple 4S phone which was in her lap was not so gracious. The light went on, started blinking and it wouldn’t start. The management quickly agreed to pay for a new phone if the Apple store doesn’t replace it. Eli has it carefully packed in rice but we’ve never had much luck with that (i.e. Noah fell out of the canoe at the lake with a phone in his pocket last summer and the rice was useless). Eli was not happy, but he recovered in time to enjoy his beautiful meal! We’ll have the verdict on the phone tomorrow.

It’s been a very light winter in DC which also means an early spring and we hit the jackpot on the cherry blossoms!  The Tidal Basin was positively an enchanted fairy land! We were consumed with the beauty of it all!

 

 

Amazingly, just as we parked the car, a guy yelled, “Hey you took my parking place!” By the time we saw him, he had jumped out of the car to give us a big hug. It was Lorraine and Steve Swift!  Dear friends who live here and who have kids who are our kids’ dear friends and whom we haven’t seen since they returned 15 months ago from their mission in Ukraine. Serendipity reigned! It was so fun to see them and catch up as we wandered down the basin enjoying the splendor together.

 

 

 

 

 

Is this a cute guy or what???

The sun was just setting…..

 

…..as we approached the monolithic Martin Luther King Monument! Wandering amongst the giant granite monoliths the famous Martin Luther King quotes lifted us out of the world into the realm of a giant of our age!

 

 

A plethora of enormous and profound quotes like this were etched in granite and gracefully curved around this extraordinary monument a half a block in each direction. The walk through the enchanting cherry blossoms, a gift from the Japanese government long before we arrived all those years ago and the ethereal lighted granite reminded me of that drive into the city and our first glimpse of this stellar city of monuments. Almost heaven!

Here and There

We’ve been home for almost three weeks, which is a record!  And we’ve had a lot of fun being here! It’s been an unusual non-winter and other than the nice little blizzard that we had the last time we were home, we haven't seen much snow. We did have one  nice little snowstorm last week (after blizzards almost every day last winter).

 

We went to the Sunday morning performance of the Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra on Temple Square which is always an extraordinary experience! The Primary president had asked me to come into the Primary later that morning and tell a story about an ancestor that made a good choice which had made a difference. Thus I had just been reading about my darling Grandmother Elizabeth Jacobson from Denmark who had six children when they joined the church and immigrated to America, changing all our lives forever!

The family lost their oldest daughter before they left for America and then someone carried measles on board the ship they left on from Liverpool and four more of their little children died on the way, one just as they sighted the Statue of Liberty and they carried him to land for burial. Undaunted, she got pregnant again and walked 1000 miles across the plains beside their covered wagon and then gave birth to the Osmond Family's great, great Grandmother Amelia. Her last two children were born in mid-winter in a little log cabin in Bloomington, Idaho and her last child was my great grandfather Frederick.  Man, when the choir sang “God be with you ‘til we meet again,” at the close of the program, I was a basket case! I just couldn’t stop the tears thinking about meeting this amazing woman some day!

To our delight, the Pothiers came from AZ for Spring Break to ski. They opened the new pool at City Creek so we filled up the pool with the Looslis and the Pothiers. It was so fun to see the cousin’s fun reunion!

Jared can really chuck those kids like basketballs!

Here are a few “hot kids” in the hot tub!

Isaac took such good care of Lucy!

And these three little musketeers had a ball!

It’s Relief Society birthday season so we had the opportunity to give speeches in several stakes. It was SO fun to have Shawni and Lucy with us for one of them!  Shawni added just the right icing on the cake at the end of our remarks. These Relief Society women are truly amazing!

Afterward we had lunch with Daniel and Tamara Oswald who are our old and dear friends beginning in England when we went back the second time. Daniel is a bishop in that stake and Tamara, who is the harpist for the Orchestra on Temple Square and her flutist friend from the orchestra played the prelude music. Shawni babysat for them when we were in England, including while they went to the hospital to have a baby. In turn, they babysat for us while we went to Sri Lanka including taking Jonah to the hospital with pneumonia while we were gone. They are an amazing couple with kids to match!

 

The fun just never stopped!  We had the privilege one night of attending a Jazz game as the guests of Randy Rigby, the President of the Utah Jazz along with Elder Whitney Clayton of the Seventy. We were on the fourth row, right behind the team and I snatched some pictures of our beloved Jeff Hornacek and the winner of the slam dunk contest this year, Jeremy Evans. We were treated to fabulous food, great entertainment (we won) and terrific company.

 

On Sunday night we gathered with some of our favorite friends in a group started many years ago in Boston based on C.S. Lewis’ group of writers who met once a month called “Inklings.”  It was an especially fun night as we each shared one of our favorite poems. The art of reading, writing and thinking about poetry is being lost and it filled us up to delve into the delicious world of poetry. Delightfully, Noah’s mission president’s wife Sheri Bennett came along with their son Mason who has just returned from a mission in Romania.  He and Shawni had an instant affection! Why am I in this picture instead of Shawni?

 

Fun always abounds when we get together with my sister Lenna and her daughter Jessica. We met them at the Macaroni Grill along with Claire and Lucy for a quick “catch up” before we take off again.

We’re trying to suck all we can out of the Pothier’s visit before we both go our separate ways on Saturday morning.  They’ll head back home and we’re headed for D.C. for a speech and a fun visit with Eli and Julie, which will, thanks to the early spring, include cherry blossoms and then we’re off to Poland and Germany for speeches and then on to England (since we’re in the neighborhood) to visit our precious Shumway family!

Beloved Homes for Sale

Suddenly both Saren and Jared and Richard and Linda are selling their homes. The Loosli’s have moved to Ogden and are selling their beautiful home in a prime spot at The Cliffs at the mouth of Snow Canyon in St. George. For a look at this amazing house go to http://snowcanyonhome.blogspot.com/. 

As mentioned a few posts ago, we have moved out of our family home of 36 years and though several people have shown interest without families, we have decided that we really need to get it in the hands of a loving family who can continue to enjoy it as we did. It is in Salt Lake just above Hogle Zoo and is within 20 minutes of downtown and 5 minutes from Foothill Village. Also a hop skip and a jump to the U of U.  Owner financing and rental provisions may be possible if we can find a good family to “take the reigns” and make some new memories in this beloved home. 

To take a look go to http://1098augustaway.blogspot.com.