Apollo 11

Good freaking Sunday evening Benjamin!

Your mother and I just got home from grandmas, your brothers are walking home with uncle Tim. I gave Jacob explicit instruction to not throw a bag of poo at Jordan. Let’s see how it goes. I don’t like it when everyone is not here, I’ll have to get used to it more and more I guess.

I had to go to grandmas separately from your mom and brothers. Bishop Powers has meetings every Sunday for youth conference. I hate to keep grandma waiting.

I guess Jacob drove to grandmas with mom and Joseph. I’m not really sure what happened, but they were both traumatized when I got there. I really need to try to get the pig going for Jacob. I haven’t been able to make much progress on it. Turns out that Vince left me with two flat tires. 😡 I just got told to not talk about it. 

Your brothers just got home, the house Is now alive how I like it.

After I wrote you Thursday morning, I spent the day sending my new resume out. Friday I was going to go to the temple. I saw a new listing for a job and got a strong feeling to stay home and apply for that instead. I’ve been really trying to follow those spiritual promptings, hopefully they will balance out the indulgence in fear I have from time-to-time. Today I fasted and prayed that at least one of the jobs I applied for would call me this week, leading for a job. President McMullen pulled me aside and asked about progress. I filled him in, he says they, the Stake leadership, are all praying for us.

Friday after I finished my job search, I went over to see your aunt Patti. She’s doing much better, but she’s very restricted in her movements and activity. She’s pain free, but has to wear a pretty significant back brace. I think she’s mostly bored. That night her and Artie came over and asked us to go grab a snack with them. Your brothers were at the church playing hoops, so your mom and I went with them to jcws. We had eaten, so we just got ice cream. It was nice to be with them though. Artie got a new car, an Audi A4. It’s used but a bit customized. It was pretty nice. After, we bought the Apollo 11 documentary. It was spectacular. I had seen it in the theater, but I appreciated it more this time. The entire thing was done with original NASA footage. There was no narration. The only narrative was the mission time, the elevation or distance from the earth or moon, and the velocity of the space craft, present in small animated titles. It covered the entire mission from pre countdown to post splashdown. The soundtrack was great. I look forward to watching it with you.

Yesterday we spent some time working in the yard. Mom planted some stuff. Remember where you guys pulled that dead tree out of the back yard last year? I’ve spent the year figuring out how I was going to move those giant rocks. The closest thing to being able to move them that I could think of was to bring my Jeep into the back to move them with my winch. That was problematic for several reasons. I had to move the Jeep inline to where I wanted to drag them. I could only move them in I straight vector towards the Jeep, anywhere that I actually wanted them was at the parameter of the yard, if I were to do that, would I be able to get the Jeep around them? What would the grass look like on there path, ripped to shreds? So, I decided to make the wise choice. I dug up the grass around the boulders, dug a big hole...and planted a new tree. A flowering pear. Joseph wasn’t thrilled, he’ll be even less thrilled to hear of my plan to eventually plant more trees back there, a lot more. Several of the existing trees are also dying. That white one by the basketball court has lost most of it branches and the fir tree on the northeastern corner has a total of about 75 green needles on it...it’s otherwise bald. I heard today that it’s the low quality of the secondary water the causes it, some trees don’t like the alkalinity of it.

My new imposed pastime is helping the Bishop finish the game pieces for his games for youth conference. He’s done most of the work. I’m painting symbol on some giant dice he has made, and coming up with interchangeable markings for these elaborate key/combination devices he made. They’re pretty ingenious.

Well, I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow, I hope your sabbath was joyful. I love you kid.

Pops