Five Gifts from Gramma

Feeling Lucky?
I saw this on christie's blog and it sounded fun!! The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2. What I create will be just for you.
3. It'll be done this year (hopefully sooner than later.)
4. You have no clue what it's going to be.
5. I reserve the right to do something extremely strange :)

The catch? Oh the catch is that you must re-post this on your blog. The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me you did will win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me!

** Oh, and be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!

Personal Histories and Blogs

Casey tagged me to write "Five Things I Like" that I published yesterday. However, I thought I should expound upon all of those things so my readers will understand a little more about me. I will have to do them separately because I will have so much to write on each one

As you all know, I am very interested in Family History. And that includes writing personal histories as well for those ancestors that you know something about. Of course, that also means that I cannot leave this life without also having my own personal history written or kept in some form. It may be easy for some descendant to come up with some kind of information about me, but I think we should also let them know something of what we are made of...that is: our personalities, our likes and dislikes, our sense of humor, our trials and our joys and most of all our testimonies.

So, I am also putting these blogs into "Personal Historian", so they will be found on my hard drive as well on CD's. And also to make it easier if I wanted to publish my histories as well. Or just parts of them.

Your blogs should be included in your personal history. They will give your grandchildren a glimpse of your everyday life and, of course, all your ups and downs. Blogs are great journals, but we need to store them in several different places.

Now, if I could only add my Facebook comments to it as well, then my grandkids will really know that I still had some wit about me in my old age.

A few years ago (and now I am off on another tangent), I transcribed all my old diaries and journals and put them into "Personal Historian"...and I kept the original spellings, etcs. However, I wrote comments on some of the events that I had written about as to how I felt about the event or what else I remembered about it, knowing that time changes our memories and our feelings about an event. I used a different font on the newer comments so that my readers would know what was then and what was now.

Here is the entry from January 15, 1947

To day I went to shool and had fun.

Transcribed:
"Today I went to school & had fun."

Looking back: (28 September 2006)
I really did enjoy school. At this time I was in the fourth grade. There were only five classrooms in the building, and so they built a lunchroom and a classroom to hold the sixth grade students next to the old building.
Mrs. Merlin L. Throlin was my fourth grade teacher. She was from American Fork.
I usually always had school lunch. I can still remember the smells of walking into that lunchroom. Even today when we come home from church on Sunday, and there is a pot roast in the oven, I will remark "Smells just like school lunch!"
I'm sure my family doesn't understand that remark because their school lunch room doesn't smell like pot roast. I don't remember if we had pot roast for school lunch, but the smell is the same. And it only cost 10 cents a day.


So, I encourage all of you to keep your blogs elsewhere as well, since you are most likely using these as journals. Anything we have posted on our computers and on the internet can be lost as easily as a piece of paper or a written journal. We need to have copies in multiple places and in different mediums. I am lucky to still have the journals I wrote when I was 9 years old. By transcribing them, hopefully I can save them for my grandchildren to read in the years to come.

Five Things I Like....

Casey tagged me for "Five Things I Like" (I didn't know until I scrolled down through his blog, but here it is)

Five Things I like...

1- Grampa
2- My Kids and Grandkids
3- The Gospel of Jesus Christ
4- Serving Others
5- Family History

I don't know how to tag anyone else, but my readers could just cut and paste and put this into their blog. :)

Did Your Time Drag by in 2008

If time dragged by this past year, you weren't just imagining it. The scientists at Greenwich in England have had to add a whole nano-second to our clocks. That means that the year 2008 needed to have more time.

As for me, I think it went by pretty fast. It was just a little over a year ago that we put Cyndi on the plane to go back to Utah after her Christmas visit with us in Hawaii. Her being in Hawaii with us on Christmas was really great and I think she had a great time as well. She was especially excited about all the "Lost" sites that I had researched out before she came.

I celebrated my 70th birthday while we were in Hawaii. It was a special day with special friends, those who dropped by the office during the day, and eating with them at the Ambassador restaurant in the evening. The PCC guides surprised me in the plaza with leis and "Happy Birthday" in the midst of the crowds there.



At the end of January, Cathy and Terry came over to visit us there as well. Where Cyndi had slept on one sofa, we pulled out the hide-a-bed for them. And topped it with an air mattress so it would be more comfortable. We were able to visit with them and go to all the great places on Oahu and still get our office work done. And the weather was great...not rainy nor hot.



On February 16th , after a great evening spent the night before at Sam Choys, a birthday gift with and from our friends and fellow missionaries, LaVere and Karelyn Adams, I got up to fix a birthday breakfast for Gordon, who was celebrating his 72nd birthday. I could feel my heart fluttering but didn't pay much attention to it until after it had gone on for several hours, I looked in the mirror and saw that my face was gray and I was in a cold sweat. I knew that was not a good sign, and told Gordon that we were not going to go to the New Zealand devotional that morning, but instead we would have to visit the E.R at the Kahuku hospital.

We drove over there and immediately the E.R. nurse admitted me and put me on a monitor. The EKG confirmed that my heart was in fibrillation. The E.R. doctor was one who flew in from another island several times a month. Thank goodness he had the presence of mind to call The Queen's Hospital in Honolulu and talked with a cardiologist. They could not stop my heart from fibrillating, and when the E.R. doctor asked about shocking my heart to get it to go back into normal rhythm, the cardiologist told me in no uncertain terms that he shouldn't do that because I could have developed some blood clots in my heart and shocking me would cause them to get pumped out and cause a stroke.

Meantime, Gordon called the kids at home and asked them to remember me in their prayers. We tried to call the Adams, so Bro Adams could help Gordon give me a blessing, but their cell phone was off. Finally, we found another missionary couple and that was Brother Wilcox. He came over to assist Gordon with the blessing. While Gordon was so worried, I felt very calm about the whole ordeal. I wasn't frightened and I knew that everything was going to be o.k.

Finally the E.R. people gave me coumidin to dissolve any clots that may have formed, and gave me some other heart medications...those of which they happened to have on hand. However, my heart continued to fibrillate. Finally about 11 p.m. the doctor decided to send me home after spending about 11 hours in their facility. He had wanted to send me down to Queens in Honolulu, but said that by the time the ambulance came up from town and got me down there that it would be about 3 in the morning and he didn't think that any of the residents on staff would be alert enough to check me out until morning. So, he gave me two kinds of medications (the only ones they had on hand) and told me to get an appointment with that cardiologist the coming week.

The next morning, Sunday the 17th, I woke up without any fibrillation, but decided to just stay at home from my meetings. Bishop Keala sent Gordon home after their Bishopric meeting and told me to be there with me. Monday was President's Day, and I knew that the cardiologist was off-island, so I continued to rest and research my problem. We called Gary Christensen in Utah, who was Gordon's doctor and I told me what had happened to me. I also told me that the doctor had given me amiodarone and metropolol as medications, and he verified what I suspected about the amiodarone. He told me not to take it unless I was near death. And he also told me not to try to come home on the plane until I was very stable. I had already stopped taking the amiodarone because of what I had read about it.

On Tuesday morning, I woke up feeling a heaviness in my chest and some pain. Knowing what the Kahuku hospital was like,we opted to go down to Queens. I checked in through their emergency room and was admitted to their observation floor. Dr Magno, the cardiologist, came into see me and started the a full workup of scans, EKGs, Stress Test, and complete blood work. They could not find anything out of the ordinary by then and so I was discharged on Wednesday afternoon.

What a birthday it had been for Gordon. I felt bad that I ruined his special occasion, but I was also very thankful that he was close by me all the time.

March was uneventful, except for the wonderful experiences we had with our BYU-Hawaii students, many of whom also worked at the Polynesian Cultural Center. They were so full of love and life. It was a joy to be around them.



In April, Christie and Randy and their family of six kids all came to visit us in Hawaii. Tyler who had just turned 8 was baptized by his father at Temple Beach in Laie, with both grandfathers as witnesses. It was a beautiful morning, 6:15 a.m., just as the sun came up over the ocean. The water was warm and calm. All of their children were there in addition to both sets of grandparents, a friend of Marsha's and Bishop Keala from the our student ward. Our friend, Karelyn, on her way to a seminary class that morning, stood up on the bluff and witnessed the baptism from there.

Casey who had just turned 12 a few weeks before received the Aaronic priesthood there on the beach as well. It was such a beautiful and sacred occasion for all of us.

Later on,at the end of April, Mike and his family came to visit. We got to meet Joseph who we had only seen each week on the web cam on Sunday afternoons since his birth the previous August. There again we got to visit all the Oahu visitor sites. Mike's family especially enjoyed the PCC and we spent three whole days looking and visiting all the various "islands" at the center.

May and part of June were spent in finishing up our work at the PCC so that the new missionaries could take over easily although they wouldn't be coming for about a month after we left. It was hard to leave that beautiful setting, the warm and gracious people there and hardest of all was leaving the students. I surprised the young sisters in Relief Society by telling them they could join me on my Face Book page. They laughed and thought it was pretty funny that an old lady would be on Face Book, but I have been able to keep track of most of the kids and still be part of their lives.

We came home on the 14th of June and I had a full-blown case of pneumonia. It took over a month for me to finally shake it. And, coming back to a high altitude after a year at sea level also took some adjustments as well. It was great to be back with our children and grandchildren, although we had seen most of them sometime during the year. Dave and his family and Steve came in the previous October. We regretted that Steve's family was not able to come, but hopefully we can go back with them sometime in the future. After all, Gordon and I have life-time admission to the PCC now.

The next six months have been busy with many doctor's appointments, surgery for Gordon, and Family History Conferences. We were able to visit Dave and his family in Tucson in September when Gavin had his farewell before he entered the MTC on his way to Thailand. Cathy and Terry were here for Melinda's 18th birthday at BYU Provo.

We went to Yellowstone with Steve and his family and Mike's family as well over UEA weekend, and we spent four days in December in cool, rainy California with Mike and his family and Cyndi.



Gordon is again teaching at the various Family History Conferences around the West. He is a popular speaker with topics on Beginning English Family History, Photographing your Family History, and Photography.



We hope to see some of our friends this coming year when we visit St. George, Denver, Sheridan Wyoming, Redding California and Logan Utah as well as Mesa again in Jan of 2010.



It has been a busy year. We have been richly blessed through it all in spite of having health problems that have taken months to resolve, if they are resolved, but we realize that while we are getting older we are still able to do many of the activities that we did before...just a little slower.

We realize that many of our friends are having difficulties too, but with our faith in God and our knowledge of His plans, we can endure. We pray that you too will recognize the blessings that are yours through this coming year, and that the year will not drag for you, but will be one of joy. We send you our love and if you can visit us, we'd love to see you. If you can't visit then go to our Face Book sites or to GrammaBlue@blogspot.com to see what else is going on in our lives.

Thanksgiving in Hawaii 2007

It is hard to believe that it has been a whole year since since we spent our Thanksgiving away from family, (but not away from friends). We were on our mission to the Polynesian Cultural Center in 2007. We had been there for almost seven months and were very comfortable and had many friends, but of course missing our family. Dave and his family had come the first part of October and had spent 10 days with us. And we were looking forward to having Cyndi there with us in another month for Christmas. It was lonely thinking that none of the family would be there with us for Thanksgiving. However, as most missionaries realize, there are blessings and other ways of enjoying holidays away from family.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the PCC missionaries got together for a Thanksgiving dinner out at Turtle Bay, at the clubhouse where several of the senior couples lived in the condos there. One of the couples cooked the turkey and the rest of us brought the usual "comfort" foods that we attribute to Thanksgiving. It was all so very good. And though we were a little crowded on that covered patio, we were with our new friends who were all missing family and family traditions together. It was a very pleasant day.

The following Thursday, which was Thanksgiving itself, we invited LaVere and Karolyn Adams to join us to have Thanksgiving dinner with the BYU-Hawaii 1st Ward. The BYU-H cafeteria cooked all the turkeys, dressing, potatoes, yams, rolls, and pumpkin pie for all of the University students to be served in their individual Wards.

We showed up at the appointed hour, sort of expecting to sit at tables with the students. However, the dear Elders who were on the activities committee had other ideas and planned for us all the sit in the classroom desks and watch a football game while we ate. Well, the sisters put their foot (feet) down, just as any mother would, and said, "No football. No TV." However, we still sat at the desks which made it a little difficult to talk with others around us. At least it was difficult for me and the balancing act I was performing to keep my food from falling off to the floor.

But, the food was delicious. And the students brought a certain levity to the occasion. For some of them, it was their first Thanksgiving dinner which also brought new tastes that they had never experienced before. Our dear neighbor, Spencer Tan, who was the BYU-H chef really went all out and everything was great. I know he was up all the night before, overseeing the kitchen to make sure everything was as it should be.

After the dinner, we excused ourselves, went to a movie at the only theatre in Laie, and then went to the Adam's for pie and games.

On Saturday, we went shopping with the Adam's at the swap-meet so we could get our Christmas shopping started and finished, so the packages could be sent early. I certainly wish I had a swap-meet here in Utah like that one to go to. It was great to take the list and know just what to buy for each individual. It only took us three hours at the meet, and for the most part, our shopping was done!

I am often asked, especially now that winter is coming, if I miss Hawaii. Well, I do and I don't. There was a special spirit there that may really only be prevalent in La'ie with all the great students from all over the world. I miss that spirit and those students. I don't miss being so far from family. I enjoyed the fair weather there, but I also enjoy the crispness of fall and winter. It was a wonderful place to be...for a short time, and even for one Thanksgiving, but I am looking forward to Thanksgiving here in my own sweet home.

The Big Tree

Well, we outlasted the tree we planted about 25 years ago.  When we got the cottonless cottonwood tree from Valley Nursery, we knew that it would grow big, but we didn't think we would be around when it had to be removed.  And maybe, under the right circumstances, it would have outlasted us.

When we got home from Hawaii in June, we could see that the top 1/3 of the tree had not leafed out.  And through the summer we could see that the leaves that did come out did not look healthy. We were worried that if we had another harsh winter that the tree may just fall or some of the large limbs would break off and perhaps damage the deck or the house. 

So, last week we contacted a tree removal company.  When the gentleman came out, he pointed out all the infestation holes in the bark and said that he could trim off the upper half and probably keep the tree going for another few years, but the cost would be almost as much as if we had the whole tree removed.  We decided that we might as well just have the whole tree taken and not have to go through it again.  It has only been about 5 years since we had another company come and prune it back from the roof.

This morning he came with his crew of three men who took that tree out in about 2 hours. In addition he pruned the Russian Olive and said it would be much healthier and provide more shade next summer.  

It is sad to see such a giant go that provided us with so much shade over the years.  It certainly made our deck much cooler to use and much more pleasant as well. And it kept our house a little cooler as well. 

Happily, however, it left a part of itself in the tall, fast growing tree that is on the hill to the south. Our tree surgeon said that it would be a healthier tree because it had come up on it's own and had most likely put down a tap root deep into the ground that a planted tree usually doesn't do because the planter does not take the time to  loosen all the roots that are wound around themselves in the pot.  

The big tree will be missed, especially next summer.

Free-range Children

Recently,while watching the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference,  I saw those sweet little Primary children's choir sing, and I was reminded of when I had to take my little brother Robbie to sing at the Tabernacle.  It was probably a General Primary Conference and not General Conference back in those days.  We were living in Sandy, Utah and it was summertime, so I must have been 10 years old and Robbie was 7.

We caught the bus on State Street on about 8500 South and rode into Salt Lake.  I knew where to take him in the Tabernacle so he could be with his group to sing.  While they were gathering, I recall looking around in the rooms  under the choir seats and at everything behind the scenes.  I thought it was fascinating, as I don't recall being in the Tabernacle before.  And during the program, I sat hidden behind the door that were up at the top of the choir seats.  After the program was over, we probably looked around Temple Square, and then we caught the bus back to Sandy. Oh, to be sure, we did go into the old museum and look at the Indian mummies that used to be in there. 

I was only 10 years old!   But at age 10, I knew how to read the bus schedules, how much change we needed for the bus, where to get on and where to get off.  

The years before that when we were living in Orem, my friends and I walked all over the Northern End of Orem. Once, my friends and I walked all the way up 8th North to where a German prisoner of war camp was.  The prisoners were working behind a fence tending to the orchards there. We weren't afraid of them, but we were curious

Across the street on the South side was a canal that was deep, fast and lined with concrete. There was a fence around the canal as well but a child could find a way into it, if they so wanted to.  We were warned and warned again of the dangers of that canal, so we were careful to stay away from it.

We always walked to school which was about 5 blocks away south on State Street.  Our chapel was right across the street from Sharon Elementary, and most Primary days, I would cross State Street by myself both ways to get to and from Primary which was held after school in those days. Some of my friends from my neighborhood may have gone to Primary, but many of them were not LDS. I don't remember walking home with friends, so most of the kids attending must have lived in different areas. 

I suppose I told my mother I would be going to Primary, but what if I didn't go, and I disappeared!  It would have been hours before someone started to look for me.  We had no phone, and my mother had no car.  Parents just didn't worry as much about their children's where-abouts in those days.  There must have been terrible things happening in the world to children, much like today, but they were not publicized as much, or not at all.

And during those years that we lived in Orem...from my 1st grade through the 4th, I often walked to the Scera Theatre to a movie or to the swimming pool in the summer.  It was located on 8th South on State Street, so that was  about a mile and half each way.  During those times, I did walk with my friends.  And most likely it was when we were older.  

But, I suppose we were really "Free-range Children".  Free to run and play. Free to explore our neighborhood and the world beyond. The world was different then, but not without it's dangers.

One time I remember very well, was the early evening when I was late coming home from Primary.  By the time I reached the open field on State Street about a block from 8th North,  I started the short cut to my neighborhood. When I was almost through the field, a dog from the Washburn's  farmhouse came out barking at me and wouldn't let me continue to the street I had to reach to get to my house.

I tried to walk around him, but he would move and get in front of me, barking and bearing his teeth.  I don't know why he was so mean that night, because I had been around him before when my Mom and I went to the Washburn's to get milk.

It was getting dark and I knew that I could not walk back through the field to State Street and walk the three blocks to my house from there as it would be dark and I knew that my Mom would be worried by then.

So, I knelt down in the dirt and prayed to Heavenly Father to make that dog stop barking and go away. I told Him that I knew my Mother would be worried if I had to walk the long way home. And I told Him that I was afraid that the dog would bite me if I tried to get around him. 

Within the minute, the dog did stop barking and he trotted off to his house and left me alone to continue onto my house. 

I have always remembered that simple prayer that I spoke as a little girl who had  learned in Primary that my Heavenly Father would watch over me, and that if I needed help, I only needed to  pray to Him.

I hope all of my grandchildren will remember that Heavenly Father is always watching out for them and will answer their prayers if they ask for help.