The Year of Sophomores

Like it always seems to do, summer came to a close. Troy and I spent one last lovely summer evening out with the Tuckfields, watching Howard Jones at the Sandy Amphitheater. He was performing along with ABC and Haircut 100, bands I really loved back in the day. What a fun night. I don't think I'm ever going to get sick of Howard Jones. I just love him.

I don't really know why I say it was one last summer evening - it has sure stayed plenty warm and summery. (In fact I'm writing this on the 29th of September, and we had a record high yesterday of 95 degrees.) But it was the last event we enjoyed before the school year began.

Emma started school on Tuesday the 20th. She was pretty excited to not be a freshman any more. I felt like we were really blessed as we were getting her schedule figured out. It was kind of a mess at first, with holes in her schedule and weird stuff she didn't sign up for. Those holes turned out to be a blessing though because before school started the only people the counselors would see were kids with missing classes. If kids just wanted to rearrange things, they had to wait for classes to actually start. Seems kind of dumb to me, but maybe it's just one way to control a very high volume of kids who need schedule changes. And Emma's classes worked out beautifully. She's taking so many music classes - AP music theory, madrigals and orchestra. She probably won't be one of those seniors with spaces open in their schedules but she's so happy to be involved in so much music. 

 

Figuring out her transportation is a little funky this year since I'm now working. Troy takes her Monday - Thursday, and she ends up getting to school pretty early on Mondays since that's the day she doesn't have early morning seminary. She seems fine though. And getting home? Well, she ends up waiting for me quite a bit since I can't get to her for about an hour after school ends. Luckily we are blessed with a very cheerful and patient gal. And besides that, the auditions for the first play of the year happened in only the second week of school, so she's often busy already.

The fall play this year is exciting. East High will be putting on a shorter version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I believe the original play is like 5 hours long or something. So yes, it's a school-length show, but what's really exciting about it is that this will be the first production in the state of Utah. I think that's pretty neat. And who will Emma be playing? Thanks to all of her practice with that Scottish accent, she'll be Minerva McGonagall. (And sadly, Dame Maggie Smith passed away just two days ago as I write this - we are extra sad around here.) I'm really looking forward to it.

Something really monumental happened with the start of school this year. It wasn't exactly on the first day - we kind of forgot about our annual first-day-height-measurement tradition this year and got to it a couple of weeks later. But....big news around here. Emma is officially taller than Romney. She's ecstatic. Romney is less joyful. 

And Romney and school? Well, that's a longer story. I mean, she did start. In fact, she started on her birthday, the 21st. Which is not unusual. She seems to do that a lot. She is mostly taking art classes at UVU this year, and has been excited about them. What she was not excited about was moving back to Orem. I think it's largely because she had a pretty great summer with work and dating and being with friends and family. She just didn't want to leave. However, she had signed a contract and couldn't get out of it. For a while she toyed with the idea of trying to sell her contract and commuting to and from Orem, but it only took a week or so of school before she realized that that was a way bigger pain than she was ready to deal with.

Finally, she decided to just move down to Orem. It was not a smooth move though - she had gotten a text from her roommates telling her that a girl had just moved into her spot, and no one knew what was going on. Romney tried for a couple of days to get intouch with the leasing office to figure it out, without success, so finally she and I just drove down there. It turns out that the apartment had changed management companies a couple of times and everything was a mess. She was pretty mad....until she found out that she had been moved to a bigger apartment. With only three other girls living in the space meant for eight. Well, FINE, I guess if I HAVE to move then I just HAVE to. Yeah, she's not even sharing a room right now, and she's gotten some space from one particular roommate that was a little challenging for her to live with. So...blessings. Thank you for that weird course of events.

Why the shopping cart, you ask? Because it was in the hallway and we put it to good use, thank you very much! Very handy thing to have lying around.

So the girls are both off on their sophomore years of school. Is Romney home more than she is in Orem? Yes, yes she is. WAY more. But that's okay. She's figuring it out. And Emma is loving her year so far, even if the tenor section in madrigals is a bit unruly at times. That's something we hear about pretty often, along with all of the other good stuff she has going on.

The Day We Almost Died but Went to a Play Instead

For the second year in a row I was the grateful recipient of tickets to see two plays at Tuacahn Theater, just outside of Snow Canyon in St. George. My sweet friend who volunteers there is very kind about giving us tickets. She wanted me to choose my dates almost a year in advance. It was kind of tricky to just guess what dates would work a full year out, but I did my best. Of course I had no idea that Troy and I would be in full swing on the bedroom project - back then we hadn't even started it yet. So yeah, Troy didn't come. He had moved on from drywall purgatory to mudding and sanding purgatory. He's such a good man. I felt quite bad going, actually. I hated to leave him at home working on his own, but after the gift of getting these tickets I felt I couldn't miss it. Romney stayed home as well, keeping dad company and working her shifts at This is the Place.

Emma and I headed down and had a lovely time driving together, singing along to musicals and having a good old mother-daughter chat. We arrived on Friday, not too long before our first play started. We picked up Cara and Siena who used our extra two tickets and headed to the lovely Tuacahn theater where we thoroughly enjoyed watching Anastasia. It was pretty magical. What a delightful musical. We've been playing it on repeat ever since. 

On Saturday, I'm pretty sure Sheri tried to kill us. We went for a "short little hike" out in the August sun and it's clear that Emma and I are not in the shape that the Romneys are, nor are we quite adapted to the heat. The trail did follow along a lovely river with some fun swimming spots and cute little froggies everywhere, but the hike back out almost did us in. There may have been a few tears, and I'm happy to say that there was no vomiting, which seemed possible at a couple of points. 

Our reward was to enjoy a tasty lunch at Oscar's. Emma basically fell face-first into her hamburger and I did a swan dive into my diet coke. We lived after all. 

 

Somehow we recovered enough to make it to the second play, Frozen. It was showy and fun and big, which is how Tuacahn does things. We needed some frozen treats to go along with the Frozen play, since we were all still slightly warm from the exciting day. Look at Emma's cheeks:

It's always a treat to see cousins, and always a treat to see a show. We are lucky ducks indeed.

Miracle Chicken

One evening as it was time to get the chickens into the run for the night, I had a naughty black silkie bantam chicken named Dutch who was just not going to follow directions and get her fluffy butt in there. So I let her be for a while, thinking I'd just give her a few more minutes and then try again. And I promptly forgot about her. A couple of hours later, in the dark of night, Troy and I spent at least a half hour looking for her. She had obviously gone to roost someplace, but we couldn't see where. Finally we just decided to let her try to live through the night on her own, without the protection of the coop.

In the morning, I went to let out the chickens and expected to see her out there on the lawn, pecking away at breakfast-bugs. But she wasn't there. My heart sank a bit. I looked around the yard again, in all the most hidey-hole of places. No Dutch. My heart sank lower, but I still held out hope. 

Fast forward. FIVE DAYS LATER. Still no Dutch. By this time I had given up hope, and begun to accept the fact that she was a goner. I was heartsick. Especially about the fact that I was going to have to change all my passwords from being based on my 8 chickens to my 7 chickens. So so sad.

Then, miracle of miracles, I was in the back area of the forest picking something up when I caught a glimpse of black fuzz. In shock (and maybe a few tears) I made my way over to what was basically a cave made out of roots. And there was my Dutch. Sitting on top of SEVENTEEN eggs. She had a been a busy girl. And a dedicated one too - five days of nest-sitting? I'd say she'd have given Horton a run for his money!

Sheetrock Purgatory

Tonight as Troy and I were working away, trying to finish up a task on The Room, he said a brilliant thing: 

"New stages. So fun to begin and so crappy to finish."

Have there ever been truer words? I don't think so. I can not express our delight at moving on to the drywalling stage of The Bedroom Project. So exciting to cover up all of the ugly Franken-insulation. It is always quite invigorating to get started on that next phase. But it didn't take us long to get totally bogged down by it, just like every other stage!

Part of the challenge is just getting the dang drywall sheets to our house. It is so awkward getting them in the minivan. And if poor Troy had a wife with any upper-body strength at all then we could move more than one sheet around at a time. However, weakling that I am, we just can't do it like that. On top of that, this room being the tiny thing that it is, there's not a single place where an entire sheet of drywall fits. Anywhere. It all had to be cut into the correct (and often not entirely square) pieces. Am I complaining too much? Well guess what, I'm just getting started. Because we also had to diagram out all of these crazy little cuts to make slots for the shelf brackets and outlets and junction boxes and light switches. It was a total pain, ok?

 

 

 

 

Getting the drywall installed was SUCH a relief! Then....came the mudding and sanding. The absolute worst. I am just going to leave it at that. I HATE SANDING DRYWALL. Troy did way more than I did, so he deserves to complain much more. 

One of our beautiful diagrams that we had to eventually paint over

 

 

I'm trying to think of concluding remarks here. I dunno. Maybe my expression on the right there says it all?