I Love It Here

This past weekend was General Conference.  As always, it's a pleasure to listen to the word of God be spoken by His chosen servants.  This time however I had new feelings associated with preparing for conference...gratitude.

Not the gratitude that I always feel for being a member of the church or the gratitude for the messages shared, but a deep, emotional gratitude for being born, raised and currently living in Zion.  I know, I know, true Zion is a state of being as read in the scriptures but there is another Zion.  In church history the headquarters of the church have always been referred to as Zion.  Zion is wherever the main body of the church resides.  I also know that this definition is getting thinner as the church grows worldwide.  There is just something special about living close to the center of the church here in Utah.

I love the fact that every 6 months as conference rolls around I know exactly what to expect.  I know that my very active neighborhood shuts down for 2 days.  The constant ring of children's voices are quiet and I know that all those friends are inside their homes watching conference just like my children.  I know that should I choose to venture out to the store on the first Saturday of October or April I will be met with enormous crowds between the hours of 9-10am, 12-2pm and 5pm.   I also know that the soccer crowds are smaller if your game happens to fall between the hours of 10-12am and 2-4pm.   I love that there are businesses that take the opportunity to market special "Ladies Night" sales and activities on those same Saturdays during the hours of 6-8pm.  I never go to these events but I smile thinking about all the ladies that do. 

I love that there are families choosing to dress in their Sunday best to sit in their family rooms and watch conference and I love that there are other families (like mine) that watch in their pajamas.  I love that I get to watch conference in my home, on regular old antenna TV.  Or if I choose, I can make advance arrangements and actually go to the Conference Center and watch it live.  Because I live here, I can literally sit at the prophets feet (or more appropriately above his head) and be taught.  What a blessing!  

Living in Utah along the Wasatch Front, I am minutes from Salt Lake, minutes from walking where the prophet of the Lord lives, works and walks. When I really think about it I am amazed.  I love living where a huge population of Latter-Day Saints live.  I love going on a walk with my friends and in the course of walking one hour in any direction we can pass through the boundaries of at least 7 wards and 3 stakes.  I love that for a family that does not travel much my children have personally walked on the grounds and touched 9 different temples.  I love that here, in my home state, a new record will be set of the first city in the world to have 2 temples. 

I know there are many wonderful and faithful members of the church living all over this world and I thank them for raising righteous families and living good lives where ever they are. I also know that many of them think that by living here in Utah it's like living in an unrealistic bubble.  I have heard it expressed by many members living here in Utah that they wish they could move out of the state to really know how it feels to be a Latter-Day Saint, to be truly converted. I get that mentality.  It's just not for me.


I love Utah.  I love living the gospel in Utah.  I can't imagine another place for me.  I feel so grateful, so blessed to have been born in the covenant, in the state that was founded by a prophet of God and that I have the opportunity to give that same blessing to my children. 

It Takes Two To Salsa

In between my two trips to St. George (previous post) I found a moment to get my salsa on.  I guess it was actually more than a moment, 7 hours, but who's counting?  When your having fun time flies.  My canning repertoire consists mainly of jam (freezer), peaches, grape juice, bread and butter pickles, red sauce, salsa and I canned tomatoes last year for the first time.  There is something satisfying about preserving your harvests but I'm no die hard.  I can when I run out of something.  If we don't use it all during the year, I won't can until the next year. Salsa however is one of those things we definitely use up every year.  This didn't use to be the case, but about 3 years ago I got a delicious recipe from my good friend Heidi and I've had to can salsa every year ever since.

This year my other good friend Melissa joined in the fun.  She had acquired quite a few tomatoes and was looking for a good salsa recipe to can.  I let her try mine and she was hooked!  She had to make some herself.  The only problem... she'd never canned anything before and she was nervous to do it alone.  So of course being the very service oriented person that I am ;)  I invited her to can with me and I'd show her the ropes.  It took us all day but that is to be expected when you end up making 4 batches between the two of us.

Here we are with some of JayDee's beautiful tomatoes.

 

 

      They were huge!  This baby is bigger than my hand.         And they are totally ripe even though they are not red.  Remember I live with a horticulturist, so the tomatoes we grow are not found in most backyard gardens.  In fact, out of the 12 tomato plants we planted this year only 3 were red.  Still very delicious and tomato tasting just not your

traditional colors.

  We loved cutting these guys up.  Look at how awesome they look inside - they're marbled.  They are also super meaty with hardly any seeds. They are great for canning.

Melissa struggled with the onions and peppers.  She is super sensitive to onion fumes and she had a bad run in with some hot pepper seeds so she thought if she put on some sunglasses they might block some of the onion potency. I was laughing so hard at her.  There was no way she was getting away without a picture of that.  

P.S. The glasses did not work.  

I ended up taking over the onion and pepper cutting.  

And just an FYI, it's not a good idea to get lazy with jalapeno seeds.  My hands were still burning the next day!

So even after all the dicing, peeling, burning and mess...

 we went home with beautiful jars of satisfaction.

Thanks Melissa!  Hopefully by next year you'll have forgotten about the mishaps and your taste buds will remember the goodness so you'll want to do it again.  :)

Oh and a quick shout out to my mom for the help with the bread and butter pickles this year.  I've only done them once before this year and all I could remember was how long they took.  I needed my mom's motivation to get me started and I was reminded that they really don't take that long at all and they sure are delicious.

These babies are well worth the effort.

 

St. George x 2

Wow! There is so much fun wrapped up in this post I don't know where to begin.  I guess the beginning is a great place to start.  Back in May my dad approached me with an idea, he wanted to do something special for my mom for her 60th birthday. I was pretty impressed because her birthday wasn't until September and here my dad was planning in advance.  He's not much of a planner, every Christmas Eve you would find my dad at the mall trying to figure out what to get Mom for Christmas. Dad thought she needed a big celebration so I started brainstorming ideas and, as usual, Dad listened and then said, "I was thinking of taking everyone (my whole family: brothers, sisters, etc.) to St. George for a surprise party."  Well, why didn't you say so in the first place!  It was a great idea.  I became the party planner and started making arrangements for Labor Day weekend. 

About a month into my planning, some friends started planning another getaway.  A girl's weekend in St. George.  What are the odds?  What was even more crazy was that they wanted to go the weekend after Labor Day. That would be two back-to-back weekends in St. George for me. I tried talking them into another weekend because I wanted to spread out my fun but it was the best weekend for everyone else so I went with the flow.

Needless to say, my September so far has been awesome!
Sept. 1st, we headed out for St. George.  We met up with my brother and his family, who drove down from Colorado. It was just us that first night and then everyone else showed up on Friday for the big surprise. My amazing cousin Mindy rented us her fabulous condo and we were able to rent another one next door so we could all be close together.  

The surprise was the greatest.  Over the course of the summer, my dad had to give my mom some details about the trip to make sure everything would work out.  First he needed to tell her something so she could get the time off work, so he told her he was taking her to Las Vegas for her birthday to shop and see a show.  Then he had to tell her they would be staying in Mindy's condo in St. George for a few nights because she gave him such a good deal and it's close to Las Vegas.  So the surprise by the end was just us.  She had no idea that all her children and grandchildren would be spending the weekend with them.  The moment we all jumped out of our hiding places and yelled surprise was priceless!  I have never in my life seen my Mom so happy or scream quite so loudly.  We had so much fun together.  We swam and ate and golfed and ate and shopped and ate and swam some more.  So fun! 

Thursday:

Friday:

Surprise! 

 Here are the kids waiting to jump out and surprise Grandma.

Here are the adults waiting to jump out and surprise Mom.
 

 Allison planned this?  Well I helped.

Fun with seashells

Just chillin'

 Rocket launch

Looked like so much fun I wanted in on that

 Yeah, almost out of the water.  Still fun.

Synchronized swimming anyone?

 

Swimming sure works up an appetite

And makes you really sleepy

Saturday:

The boys golfed

Nice form JayDee

The girls shopped but no pictures.  We were also treated to an amazing dinner at the Anasazi Steakhouse and then dessert... Yum!

Saturday was also mine and JayDee's 13th wedding anniversary.  I thanked my dad numerous times for paying for our anniversary getaway. :)

I made a video for JayDee to commemorate our special day, it was super cute and I'd upload it here but I barely am tech savvy enough to make the thing let alone upload it.  I did try, and I kept getting error messages so I just quit trying. If you'd like to see it let me know and I'll send you a DVD.  :)

Sunday:

We went to church and then after Sunday naps...

we visited the St. George Temple and Visitor's Center

 Joey had to go home Sunday after church for work on Monday.

So BriAnne was a single mother. :(

After dinner we got the kids involved in making their own dessert.  Ice cream!

Monday:

 We got one more swim in and then packed up and left with smiles on our faces.  Thanks Dad for the great memories!

I almost forgot! We did have a very cool pet/mascot on our little trip.  This guy built his perfect web right outside our door and we'd look at him every time we came and went.  

It was like having our own little Animal Planet show.  He was so cool.  He didn't move an inch for 2 days and we thought he was dead or digesting something he'd eaten but then when we were leaving for church on Sunday he was off to the side of his web hurriedly wrapping up a tasty snack.  I had never seen a spider in action in real life before.  He was hanging onto his web with his back legs and using both front legs to wrap up his snack, then he held onto the bug with two of his front legs and crawled with his six other legs back into the middle of his web and settled back in.  It was amazing.  Then when we got back from church he was still there but no bug.  He must have sucked it dry and dropped it. We loved our little pet and were very upset when we found out some hoodlum kids had come along our pathway and thrown a rock at our spider.  We don't know if they killed him but his web was destroyed.  Darn kids!

Take 2:  Hang in there!

So three and a half days after coming home from trip #1, I headed out for trip #2.  Same drive, different passengers.  I traded one condo for another (thanks Michelle's sister) and one kind of fun for another. I love these girls!  We have so much fun together.

On this trip there was shopping, eating, more shopping, more eating, a Tuacahn show and lots of relaxation.

Our only shopping picture...it may look like everything fit but the reason we took this picture was because the top is actually way too small.  I could barely get it down far enough to cover my rather large bosoms.  It was pulling all funny and practically busting at the seams.  We were laughing hysterically.  The picture does not do it justice.

I'm sorry Melissa...you and your body pillow 

are just too funny .  Plus, you fell asleep first.

This is where Heidi spent most of her condo time.

Oh I'm not taking a picture of you Melissa, 

I'm trying to get one of Dana behind you.  :)

 

 Work it Michelle!  

You mop that floor.

After all the fun and games we ended our trip with another (for me anyway) visit to the temple. 

 *Sigh*  Now all my fun is over and I have nothing to look forward to but it will be kind of nice to get back to regular life for a little while. . .I guess.