The Quiet Week (FSY)

The Quiet Week Outline:

I. Heat Advisory
II. Lincoln Grade
III. Violin Surgery
IV. Presentation
V. FSY

I. Heat Advisory. It was very quiet at our house while Jay and Rose were at FSY. Two thirds of my children were suddenly not home for 5.5 days! I think I missed them more than they missed me! That's as it should be, but as a person who generally craves quiet, I was surprised at how hard it was to get used to a house with only 2 other people in it. I'd like to say we filled our time with yardwork and made our property into a garden of dreams, but what actually happened was a horrific heat wave with triple digit temperatures and red flag fire warning winds for 4 days straight. Jeff and I did some mowing and weeding on Tuesday, but for the rest of the week we did our cross country practice each the morning and then stayed inside after that. It was smoky and painfully hot outside. I think the dry wind scorched some of our plants. I think there's a chapter in Little House on the Prairie about that.

I used Google Lens to finally figure out what this one tree is, and I learned it's a hazelnut tree, right there at the end of a row of apple, peach, and cherry trees. Random! I looked more closely in the leaves and found hazelnuts actually growing on the tree!

Our fruit is not doing well this year. Late freezes killed all the cherry blossoms and most of the apricots, and over half of the peaches. The remaining fruit: one apple tree and two peach trees is attracting all the birds and bugs. So we may not have much fruit this year. 

We may need to spray our apple and peach trees next year if we don't want to share with the bugs.

The grass that was planted by the fruit trees is flourishing, but this patch that was planted on a section of old driveway is struggling. We put up hurdles to block cars from driving on the baby grass and stunting its growth further.

Our two pear trees seem to be impervious to birds and bugs. They are looking quite healthy after the severe pruning Jeff and I gave them a few months ago.

My pumpkins and squash are doing great, and our cute little flowers are surviving!

Using my 4 gallon backpack sprayer, I emptied 8 gallons of Roundup on the various weedy borders of our driveway on Tuesday. It was a drop in the bucket.

See that gross air? Smoke plus heat haze makes some pretty nasty air. That left side of the shed (the dark side of the shed) grows the biggest weeds! I sprayed them with Roundup, but they are so tall and prickly that I could only reach some of them. My next tactic will be the hedge trimmer.

The grapes just won't stay UP on the front right corner of the arbor.

II. Lincoln Grade Run. We chose to go to Prosser to run Lincoln Grade for our Friday adventure long run with the cross country kids this week. Good ole Lincoln Grade is a 3 mile climb with an average incline of an 8% grade. No shade. 2 current runners and one alumnus showed up to do the run with Jeff, Coach Winger, Amber, and me. It was not my fastest ascent of Lincoln Grade, but it was also not my slowest. The seven of us ate an entire watermelon after we finished the run!

The view on the far side of the hill, just after I turned around and started going down Lincoln Grade.

The ridgeline, with Prosser on the right and farmland on the left.

I pulled a little ahead and went back for Bethany so we could take a victory picture from the top! It was so hot, even at 8:30am. That smudge of icky air on the horizon says it all. Usually we can see Mt. Adams from here.

Amber has made friends with one of the runners from our team and they ran over 4 miles together up and down Lincoln Grade!

III. Violin Surgery. On Friday, while I was working on my Relief Society presentation, Amber decided to get our her violin. Grama Meri had bought this low-end violin years ago from eBay, and she gave it to Amber earlier this year. The violin strings were old and it only had one fine tuner on it, which made it very finicky to tune properly, even for an experienced violinist. Amber was undaunted and she began trying to tune her violin while I worked on my computer. After about ten minutes, I heard an ominous thwack and twang. 

"Mommm? Something is wrong."

The bridge had completely fallen! I found a stopping place with what I was doing and went to help Amber. It took over an hour of careful tweaking, twisting, turning, and balancing before the violin was put back together and tuned properly. I decided to put fine tuners on and change the strings while I was fixing up the violin, so it was quite the process. YouTube gave me a general idea of how to put on fine tuners, and I already knew how to change violin strings. It was just a very delicate process making sure the tailpiece stayed in place while gently pushing the fine tuners into place and screwing the two little pieces on top of each one. We spent some time looking at the bridge and positioning it carefully. 

Once the strings were all on and the fine tuners were screwed in place, I got it all beautifully tuned and taught Amber how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. But something felt off with the A and E strings...when I compared it with my violin's bridge, I realized that I had put Amber's bridge on backwards! I didn't even know that bridges had different slopes on each side, but I could actually tell something was wrong when it was backwards! Muscle memory runs deep, and my arm remembered  how far to move while switching strings. The distance between the A and E string was too close when the bridge was on backwards! We decided to redo the bridge another day: one hour of violin surgery was enough! 

Even with that bridge failure, it felt pretty cool to do such extensive surgery on a violin!

This was no small task.

Amber took a turn turning the tiny screws--my hands felt ready to cramp up from all the tiny pinching and twisting!

Success!

Our back porch thermometer made me want to cry on Friday.

Fresh picked divine juicy sweet blackberries on top of a croissant with Nutella made Amber swoon. Our blackberries aren't all ripening at once like I expected. We get a handful or two at a time right now.

Stuffy smoky heat wave sunset. It took almost all the way to 9pm to get below 90 degrees on Friday night.

IV. PRESENTATION! A project that consumed much of my free time this week was preparing a presentation for a stake Relief Society women's conference. I was asked to teach two 35 minute classes about journaling and record-keeping. I made an outline of what to cover and then created 27 slides to go along with it. I packed a laundry basket full of examples of various photo books, journals, and other memoirs to display. All in all, I probably spent over 15 hours getting ready for this presentation. The conference was on Saturday. I worked up a sweat rearranging the stake high council room--it had a massive table that took up the entire floor, with a ring of chairs around the wall on the outside. I shoved the table to one side and made rows of chairs on the other side of the room. It mostly worked. I moved one segment of the massive table to the back of the room and put all of my books on it. I practiced plugging my laptop into a TV using an HDMI cable the night before, and it actually worked on the stake center TV! 

My presentation went fine. About 25 people attended my first class and 15 came to the second one. I had a hard time finding my teaching groove because this felt like a church class, but it was also not a full-on Sunday church class. I never quite found the balance between class participation and straight-up lecturing. It was tricky! I also didn't know how long each section of my presentation would take, and the estimates I put in my outline were wrong, so I ended up rushing through the last half of the presentation in the first class. When I taught it again for the second group, I rushed through the beginning to leave time for the end. I'm not sure which class was better, but the women who came were very nice and it was just fine. All afternoon on Saturday, I had to actively work to switch off my brain's problem-fixing-and-improving tendency, because the presentation was OVER and I couldn't fix it anymore! The end! I felt like a new level of adulting was unlocked: I have now taught a class at a stake meeting.

The jumbled high council room after I finished rearranging it. The AC was either not working well or not turned on, because I got quite toasty while rearranging and also while standing up front teaching! It kicked on (or someone turned it on) during the last 15 minutes of my second class.

The table with all of my examples on display.

V. FSY. Jeff and I were glad that Jay and Rose seemed to be having a good enough time at FSY that they didn't need to send us any messages all week. I was dying to know how it was going, but I refrained from texting them so they could just be immersed in the FSY bubble of joy. On Thursday night, I got one message from Rose telling me how happy she was and how much she felt the spirit at FSY. Yay!

When Jay and Rose got home from FSY (the carpool dropped them off), Jeff and I were still in Yakima (I was teaching at the women's conference and Jeff was waiting for a car repair). When we were finally all home together on Saturday afternoon, all five of us sat on the couch together while Jay and Rose told us about FSY. Jay told us a little bit, but then Rose came in and told us SO MUCH. "Honestly, it was probably the best week of my life!" she said. She shared so much about all the spiritual experiences she had at FSY, and my heart was warm and happy. I love that she loved the spiritual aspect of it so much. She said "I have so many stories of spiritual experiences I had at FSY! I could talk for more than an hour about it, but I'll just share one more." 

Rose also felt strongly that she wants to serve a mission for real. "I have thought about it and wondered about it ever since I learned what a mission is," she said, "but I never knew if I for sure wanted to go until this week. It felt so good to say YES when someone asked me if I was going on a mission." She told me about how she was studying scriptures and certain phrases stood out to her, and then someone said one thing which led her to think another thing and when she heard another message, it all clicked. I probably got the order wrong and I don't remember the words or details, but it was very sweet hearing my dear daughter so excited about the gospel and about sharing the gospel. In sharing these things, I am toeing the line between sharing my experience and taking over my kids' experience, but I just wanted to remember these sweet details of the spiritual high Rose felt after FSY.

For family scripture on Saturday night, Jay shared a few verses from the BOM that he studied at FSY and really loved, and why he liked them: "have miracles ceased? Nay!" (from Moroni 7). He said he liked how straightforward this scripture was and how it was really the core of our beliefs, that revelation and miracles can and do happen today. Jay also shared a few more spiritual experiences from FSY with me later. I love my kids!! I am so impressed by their valiant faithfulness and goodness. FSY knocked it out of the park this year. Since Jeff and I coach our kids for all of their school sports, and Jeff teaches one of their classes at the high school, it feels extra special for them to get away from us parents every now and then and learn and feel and be on their own. I prayed all week while Jay and Rose were gone that they would have a good experience at FSY, and it was better than I expected.

Rose with her BFF FSY roomie, Elsie. I took this picture when I dropped them off and it felt super weird to just leave them there in a dorm room! They aren't old enough for college! Haha. Jay and his roommate Noah checked themselves in and disappeared before I could even say goodbye to them. They were ready and confidently took on the college campus. I sent Jay a text before I left: "Do you need anything before I leave?" He replied "Nah we good"

University of Puget Sound was a surprisingly pretty campus! I took a few pictures before I left.

Best text message I've received all year!

During the drive home, Jay and Rose sent several pictures and messages in our family group text.

Jay's group, without the girls (he didn't send me a picture with the girls in it, haha)

Something tells me Jay started this...the hilarious seal squawk and flop looks familiar.

Rose's group. She was in the 14-15 year old group, so she said the boys were kind of meh (younger boys and all that), but she said she loved her group and made friends with the girls.

Rose's girl group. Ahh, the memories: I was an EFY counselor (before it changed to FSY) one summer during college, and hearing Jay and Rose talk about their week brought back so many memories.

Rose sent me this picture of Jay swing dancing on Friday night when nobody was asking her to dance (I always encourage her not to be a distressed damsel at dances, and to ask someone to dance, but she doesn't like to ask.) I thought Jay would at least dance with her, but I guess I was wrong...

These messages came in while the kids were on the 3 hour car ride home from FSY. I had to take screenshots of the banter, because it was cracking me up! (Jay and Rose were in separate cars.) I asked Jay if he danced with Rose, and he responded with classic Jay dry humor. Rose can hold her own though!

I love my kids!

We get one more year with all 3 kids at home, and after our quiet week, I plan to savor it as much as possible.