In March we started planning a move to the city where dh's new job was.  Our planned moving date was June 15th, whether the house was sold or not.  We started eating down our food supply, because who wants to move that stuff if you can just eat it instead?

Less than a week before we were to move, dh lost his job.  He'd had bad vibes from them from the beginning, but it was still a shock that they'd let him get to the point of signing a lease on a house (nearly--was going to do it that day), arrange for movers, and have his house on the market, then drop the bomb. 

Well, losing a job = a lot more eating out of food storage, believe you me.  Luckily I'm a pack rat and had quite a bit of food on hand, even before digging in to my real hardship supply (wheat, dried beans, rice, popcorn, four, sugar, dried fruits, pasta, drink mixes, etc, all sealed in #10 cans and 8 gallon plastic buckets).  However, meals have gotten simple and sometimes boring.  A pound of Anasazi beans cooked with bacon spice lasted our family three meals.  Once served with biscuits, once with corn bread, and once with yeast rolls.  Oh well.  Nutritious and filling.

I've figured out I need to have a lot more oil and powdered milk on hand if this happens again.  Once dh is back to work, I'll start rebuilding my supply, adding the things we have missed the most.

The good news is that I think he will have a job within another 10 days.  Dh is in an industry that is very "hire and fire," and this has happened several times before.  He is good at keeping up his networks and immediately started looking for a job and has been actively pursuing each lead as it has come and will continue to do so until he accepts a job somewhere.

And we have eaten pretty well the whole time. :-)

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Two Fridays ago my friend's husband killed himself.  This was a direct result of mental illness, but it was still a shock.  They were both in their 40s and have little children still at home.

She called last night.  She wanted to tell me she loves me and she is doing all right.  We talked for awhile about various things, including how she is handling things since her husband died.  As we talked I realized people grieve differently.  I'm part of an online group that has bereaved parents as one of its subgroups.  I've noticed some of the parents there want to make sure they still "hurt" for the loss of their children every single day.  I've had some losses myself, and yes, I hurt for awhile.  Badly, I might add.  But I didn't want to feel like that forever, so I did what I could to make sure I moved on and didn't feel that pain daily.  I've still have a terrible loss, but I don't dwell on it.

So my friend feels like she is in the group I'm in.  A terrible loss, yes, but one she does not want to have hurt her every day for the rest of her life.

I wonder how one chooses one way to grieve over another?

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I have been dreading something that ought to give me joy--making plane reservations for my older children to come home at Christmas.  Their father is supposed to send me their school calendar (but hasn't) and I kept putting off calling his wife to find out when school gets out and starts up again in January.  Tonight I broke down and called her because I knew the ticket prices would already be in the stratosphere and wanted to make sure I could at least buy one of the stratospheric tickets vs. nothing. 

It turns out there are twelve days between school's getting out and school's starting.  Travel on the 26th gives the kids five days there with no travel and five days here with no travel.  I was busy comparing prices on all the airlines when I received a call back from the EO's wife.  The EO says the 27th is the travel day.  Umm . . . excuse me?  He already has them 10+ months a year and now he wants to gyp me out of a day at Christmas as well?

I got a little tearful as I tried to express to the EO's wife why I didn't think that was right.  Poor thing--she is really caught in the middle of this.  For about two years she has been the go-between and it has truly given me peace in my life, to not have to deal with the EO.  But I decided if the EO was going to insist on the 27th, I wasn't going to see my children this Christmas (just too much $$$$ for only a few days).  It was worth not having them here to have peace in my life.

I asked the EO's wife to talk to him and to please call me back within half and hour or forty-five minutes as I really wanted to make a decision.  Happily, she called me back and said the EO agreed to the 26th.  Duh.  We each get five days of vacation with the kids.  I don't know what was so hard to figure out about that.

The EO played the power game for nine years and I was *not* going to be a victim again.  And I never will.

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You have to assemble that mattress YOURSELF!!!  When I heard dh ordered one (for my birthday, for HIS birthday, for BOTH of our Christmas presents, LOL!), I envisioned its arrival in a big flat box.  Uh uh.  It came in three squarish boxes, the largest of which was about twice the size of "blanket and pillow" boxes professional movers use.  I'll have to say the direction were good, and really, quite easy to follow, but we had to assemble every single piece of that thing!  The quilted mattress cover was packaged up, the air bladders were in another bag, the memory foam was tightly rolled up like a sleeping bag, the edge supports were folded and tied.  It was a bit of an adventure, but in about 45 minutes we had our mattress assembled. 

Gotta say . . . we've had it for about 2 weeks and I LOVE that thing!

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One of my friends told me her family's favorite camping spot is in a forested area about 25 miles from here.  We know this area a little, but weren't familiar with the camping areas in it.  Twenty-five miles is really close and it is a very different feel--the high desert with red rock mountain formations vs. little valleys and forested meadows.

Friday afternoon we loaded up the van, hooked up the trailer and took off.  It sure was easier getting ready for this trip vs. the trip we took two weeks ago in which we traveled and/or camped for six days.  That one was kind of a pain for a newbie like me to plan.  I'm getting better at it though.  The only thing I forgot this time was a kitchen towel and I could live with that. :-)

We found the campground (National Forest land) with no problem.  We were really surprised to find full hook ups available if you wanted them.  They were $15.  The downside was that due to drought conditions, there was no water in the water spouts nor in the bathrooms.   Instead there were "Johnny on the Spot" toilets.  Anyway, the electricity and sewer hook ups worked.  Since our toilet is self-contained and we didn't want to pay an extra $5 for just electricity, we opted for the $10 dry camp.  We were in the pines with a carpet of pine needles underfoot and it was lovely.

A mountain trail head was close to our camping spot and only 1.25 miles, so we decided to investigate it Saturday morning.  The four year olds walked the whole thing and even the two year old made it most of the way under her own steam.  It had a vertical climb of 360' although it seemed like more.

The goal of the hike was to get to the fire watch tower at the top of the mountain.  We didn't know if it was active or falling down or ???  It turned out to be a very active one, 60' tall on steel girders, and with a warm invitation from the watchman for us to climb up and take a look around.  That was the scariest part of the whole hike!  The steel switchback stairs were at a 45 degree angle going up and there was entirely too much space between the stairs for my comfort as the mother of small children.  The catwalk around the 13' x 13' living quarters also made me nervous because although there was chain link fencing from the guardrail to the metal catwalk, it wasn't tied down at the bottom and I could easily imagine a little girl slipping out between the bottom of the fence and the floor.  Dh and I had a hand holding onto each girl the entire time we were up there. 

The firewatchman gave each of the girls a bag of Smokey Bear goodies as a reward for climbing up the tower.  When we got back to our trailer I pulled them out to read them.  One was a comic book-style story about Smokey.  There was a strong emphasis on how bad forest fires are and how they should always be prevented.  It was vintage--probably originally published in the late 1950s.  There was another leaflet in the bag that gave information about the trail we hiked.  It was quite current and the emphasis was on preventing wildfires (out of control fires) but stressing that prescribed burns are very beneficial to the health of the forest and even to the animals.  In fact, the outside of the poly bag holding the goodies didn't say the traditional, "Smokey Bear says, 'Only YOU can prevent forest fires,'" it said, "Smokey Bear says, 'Only YOU can prevent wildfires."  I have no idea when they changed it.

Dh and I were trying to think when the prevailing though on forest fires changed.  We're pretty sure it was with the Yellowstone fire in the 1990s.  So many good and interesting things happened to the ecosystem after that fire that the powers that be started rethinking their philosophy of agressively keeping down forest fires.

In the afternoon we came home, showered, and one of the girls and I left for the airport 135 miles away to pick up my mom for a visit.  But that's a story for another day . . . .

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My four year old twin daughters both attend a nearby preschool and have since this time last year.  Last Thursday when I came to pick them up the teachers told me they had an idea.  They had noticed Twin B doesn't talk much when Twin A is around.  (Twin A is very talkative and bold).  Twin A is more advanced in her cutting, writing, and letter/number recognition. 

They suggested I bring Twin B alone on Tuesdays and Thursdays to encourage her to speak up and to speak for herself w/o letting Twin A speak for her.  They suggested I bring Twin A on Wednesdays and Fridays because they do more advanced things with the MWF group because they just happen to be more advanced.  I had not thought of splitting them up just yet, although that is my plan for Kindergarten next year.

Since this is a cooperative preschool, I need to have a day when both girls are in school so I can volunteer in the classroom.  So I decided to split it with the school--Twin B goes on Tuesdays, Twin A goes on Wednesdays, and both go together on Thursdays.  I think it will work out fine that way.

I thought Twin A would throw a fit today when she didn't get to stay at drop-off time but I had explained it to her well enough that she bounced right back out of the classroom waving and saying, "See you tomorrow!"  I was pleased and relieved.

Now . . . what happened to my time alone on Tuesday mornings . . . ?

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Today in Relief Society we had a lesson on wholesome activities to do with our children.  Of course I know all this stuff, but it is good to be reminded.  There are a lot of things to do that don't cost much, if anything.  Here are some of the ideas the ladies threw out:

Plant flowers in your yard

Go camping

Watch a DVD and eat popcorn

Play board games

Play tennis at the park

Visit nearby counties as tourists

Go for a walk

Have a picnic

Dh and I decided to take the girls on a walk after dinner tonight.  The weather has just started to cool off and there was a slight chill in the air.  Perfect for a walk up and down the hills in our neighborhood!  We walked down the back alley to our friends' alley so we could see the work being done on their backyard.  Their back door was open, so we called out to them.  No answer.  We walked around the block to come up to the front of their house.  We hoped they would be home, but they weren't.  No problem, as we continued on around the long block and back down our alley and in the back gate.

With Mommy and Daddy's undivided attention, the three girls decided to show off on the play set.  What great free entertainment for dh and me!  They climbed and slid and swung for a good half hour while dh and I cheered them on.  I love being an older Mommy and Daddy with preschoolers!

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Last night dh and I arrived home from his family reunion.  We did a ton of driving, but didn't have to hurry.  As we drove through southern Utah the landscape got drier and drier.  We briefly connected up with I-70 near Green River, Utah.  What a dry, dry place that is.  Those pioneers must have have had great faith in Brigham Young when he sent families to homestead in such difficult conditions.

The good part about Green River today is that it is a marvelous climate for growing melons!  And being the end of August, the melon growers are in full swing and so are the fruit stands.  Last year we stopped in at a little stand, but the proprietress took cash only and we didn't have cash (strange society we live in that we can travel far and wide with absolutely NO cash, huh?) and we drove away disappointed.  This year we returned with cash. 

We bought a casaba melon, a seedless watermelon, and three mini watermelons.  I've been wanting to try a mini watermelon, but they are $3.99 or $4.99 in the stores (yikes!).  No way would I buy one at that price!  But all the watermelons were 20 cents a pound, including the mini ones, so we loaded up.

We arrived home late last night so they all had to wait until today.  I hafta say this:  Green River melons are THE BEST!

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