"They dwell and abide on the rock"

Imagine our surprise on Thanksgiving Day when our children chose this opportunity to honor their parents. This holiday came pretty close to our 40th wedding anniversary. The kids gathered up rocks and placed them in a basket. Each rock carried the name of someone we love - and each one wrote a card expressing why they were thankful for us. They chose a scripture from Job that was used to describe the dwelling place of eagles. What an honor to have our children rejoice in having been raised in a home based on the rock of our salvation, even Jesus Christ. We tried hard to make our home a "strong place", a house of learning , a house of prayer and a home of love.

The inscription at the doorway to our house, placed in the concrete when the porch was formed, says" This Home is built on a foundation of love - May the Good Lord bless all who enter". That foundation has ever been a strength to our family. The kids chose the rock theme also because Janene and I met while looking for fossils in the mountains east of Coalville. Who knew there would be so many rocks in our basket?

We had a semi-large group here for Thanksgiving dinner, but we missed those who weren't here. Some who could not come, came later for dessert (including Heather's banana cream pie).

Our home is often full of family and friends. What a blessing for us to have this great family!

And no, Stephen, even though there was lots of the bubbly stuff, I did not partake!

Blowin' In The Wind

 Do you remember this house?  This was the Extreme Makeover House that was built in one week. This week, our hurricane force winds toppled two trees onto it.

 Our neighbors, the Park and the Carbiener families had a whole forest come down on them. Park's lost about six big trees and Carbiener's lost about ten big trees. Several landed on their homes causing big damage.

 The Anderson's new car was buried by their blue spruce.

 Many of the trees fell on power lines, killing the power. Bountiful City said every home in Bountiful lost power. Some, like Shon lost power for four days when trees took out their power lines.

 You know the wind is strong when it blows stoplights off their poles. I wonder what you can see from that webcam.

 This used to be a stately pine tree at the Lemmon's. We gathered up the tree trunk and took it to Heather's house for firewood. Heather's car window was smashed by falling debris.

 One of our neighbors described his street as a war zone. That was before the Toland's roof blew off and seven other trees fell on his short street. The Schnebly family was out of town. Won't they be surprised when they find their shed in a different place.

 Our friends, the Gerbers, lost their pine trees in the front yard. Who knows what they lost in the back yard.

 Samuelson's were awakened by the crash of a big pine on their roof.

 So may trees came down here, that even after they were cleaned up, the road was mostly blocked.

 While I was helping the Stats family with their tree, we watched as the Groberg's tree came crashing down blocking all of 400 East.

 The saddest thing was what happened at the cemetery.

 Big trees that were a hundred years old or more were uprooted, smashing some grave markers and dislodging others.

 So sad!

 When I first moved to Bountiful, I walked past the cemetery every day on my way to South Davis Junior High. I had never seen wind blow like it did here, but I could always count on shelter behind the cemetery's big pines.

 The snow drifted everywhere - but behind the big trees. Now they are all gone

 Here is a Chopper 5 picture of a job I had bid on in Farmington. Now I am glad I didn't get that job. I wonder if the general contractor makes all the subcontractors pay for the damage themselves.

 On Sunday, they let us out of church early, even though it was Stake Conference and we had visiting general authorities, to go help our neighbors clean up. One of the places we hauled storm debris was to a temporary "dump" at Bountiful High School. Look closely. That is my truck at the bottom of the picture.

Private companies helped by providing heavy equipment to help. We had about 250 people helping from our ward. This was repeated all over Davis County. Our bishop said this was a week he would never forget. We had work crews out within an hour of the start of the damage cutting down trees, running temporary power to homes and fixing roofs. The storm came Thursday morning and by Sunday afternoon, the cleanup which Bountiful City estimated would cost the city 20 million dollars had largely been accomplished by ordinary citizens with pickup trucks, and home trailers. Oh, the lines to get to the dump!

We learned a lot of lessons from this experience that will help us in case this ever happens again. We were fortunate that we still had natural gas and phone service. I hate to think what things would be like if we had the big one and lost access to those utilities. It was kind of nice to have a nice hot (albeit, dark) shower after a long cold day cutting up trees and running power lines.

It all started when I was only 14......

Science fair nerd - look closely, there is a pocket protector under that sweater. It was 8th grade, and I had just finished demonstrating my machine I made to measure the specific gravity of minerals. I thought it was a pretty cool project. I don't think I won any awards.

Enter the most beautiful girl in the world. I first saw her at an assembly at South Davis Jr. High. She sang a solo up on the big stage. I was at the back of the auditorium. How could anyone sing like that! My heart went aflutter, but she was a big ninth grader. Gorgeous, smart and no less than a rock star. She was out of my league. There was no use in even thinking about it. Even in a dream.

Fast forward one year. I couldn't believe what was happening to me. Here I was. Still every bit the nerdy kid, but I was sitting next to that girl from the assembly. We had really only met a month earlier. Of all things, my obsession with rocks and minerals had brought us together on top of a mountain where we were finding fossilized oyster shells. Here we were in Southern Utah, having just spent an evening on the banks of Duck Creek, where I first held her hand on a moonlit night under a starry sky.  It doesn't get much more romantic than that.

I went home from that summer science class and everything in my life was turned upside down. I had a girlfriend! When I got home, I went downstairs where Mom was ironing clothes and told her I thought I had found the girl I was going to marry. I can't imagine what my mother thought. I was only 15! You don't find your future wife at that age.

All through high school, I was in heaven. We would meet between classes and walk hand in hand to our lockers. The principal had to break us up a few times. He also insisted that I tuck in my shirt, but that is another story.

The next year, we took the summer science class again, I think just so that we would have an excuse to be together during the summer break. When I wasn't with her, we were on the phone. With the cord stretched across the house, we would each talk for hours, all while hiding in the closet. Janene's dad would not be too happy about that and tell her to get off the phone. They had a party line and other neighbors couldn't use the phone when we were on. What did we talk about? It didn't matter...... I just wanted to hear her voice and couldn't bear to be "disconnected" from her.

Head over heels - crazy in love. I was the luckiest guy in the world. It would make a great movie script. Geeky boy meets the beauty queen. They fall in love. The beauty queen falls in love with the nerd. Doesn't it just bring a tear to your eye? It does to me ... of course, what doesn't.

Almost as soon a I was out of high school (Janene was a college girl at SUSC, majoring in Geology) we got married in Cedar City. When we came back from our honeymoon, our parents held a reception for us. My grandfather was my best man. It was probably a little awkward for our parents, but I will always be grateful they did it for us. Our honeymoon was paid for by my Dad. He loaned us his Phillips 66 credit card. Otherwise, our little trip to Zion National Park would have been entirely out of our reach.

Working at the restaurant for $1.35 an hour was no way to support a family, so by the time Shon was born two years later, I had switched careers into the fire protection business. Those were lean years. We ate leftover food from the restaurant and put gas in the car two dollars at a time. When we ran out of money at the end of the pay period, it was heartbreaking to know that several dollars of gas was just sitting in the gas tank. Still, I was married to my best friend, and money really didn't matter. We were able to buy our first home only because of a government program to encourage poor people to buy a home and made it possible. Our first house payment was $70 a month.

Within one year of buying our first home together, we were off the government subsidy. I had a union job that paid pretty well and we could afford to put money down on our new property in Bountiful. By the time Heather was born, we had moved into our dream home that we built ourselves with my kid brother. I was 24 years old. I had the trophy wife, the dream home and three incredible children. I was living the dream that Janene and I had talked about since we first started talking about marriage in my junior year of high school

The biggest change in our lives came when we moved to Bountiful. Here I found the blessing of membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We took our little family to the Salt Lake Temple and were sealed for all eternity. We also started expanding our family reach as we added first Lisseth, and later, Doug to our family group.

The next years were a whirlwind of car pools, science fair projects, (our kids won several awards, unlike their father), and swim meets (more awards). As the proud parents of a beautiful family, the nerd was overworked. The beauty queen was constantly sleep deprived, had been pregnant eleven times, but was still as radiant as ever. We all were devastated when David died at the Grand Canyon, but we took strength from the knowledge that we are an Eternal Family, and always will be.

Now it has been 40 years since our first wedding night. Our hair is getting gray, our bodies ache sometimes, but I still am always with the smartest, most beautiful girl in the room. There have been times when things haven't gone too smoothly, There have been times when we each thought we could not bear the thought of another day, but through it all, that first crazy love has never dimmed. I am still head over heels in love with my best friend.

 
Even though our love has matured, we have grandchildren, (even great-grandchildren  when you count Lisseth's and Doug's grandkids), I still feel the same way I did when I first held Janene's hand at Duck Creek under a starlit sky. Twitterpated, indeed.  I am the luckiest guy in the whole world.

Family Night with the Spooks

Shon and Melinda came over with all their kids to help us carve pumpkins for the holiday. Most of us had our own pumpkins to work on. Some of us put elaborate designs together, while others just "dug" in.

One of the punkins was really a big orange gourd..... with a rock hard shell and lots of warts. Ping tried to cut off the top and broke two knives off. We decided a sawzall was the proper tool for this obstinate vegetable.

Here is Ping with the completed ghouls. Notice the guy with the big pumpkin ears.

Haiyan had to get Jake to help her get her masterful carving out onto the porch.

What a frightening sight to behold!

Spooks and goblins galore!

Spooks and goblins revealed by the camera flash! It was a regular Addams Phillips Family Halloween. Our fiends from China loved every minute of it. Ha! Ha!