OASIS Landslide water slide

 I didn't do the water slide (too chicken. Fragile. Fat. Old. MANY excuses). But I did stand up on a paddle board. But only for a few seconds and Vicki Matheson got a picture of it. I mostly paddled while kneeling, or I paddled on a kayak. And I swam across the little lake to go get a paddle board to play on. 

It was our end of summer ward party at Three Peaks Oasis. Fun time. Good food, great company. The we were THOROUGHLY entertained by watching the youth and some younger adults (and a few young at heart) go go down a HUGE water slide. Little kids played on a water trampoline. The slide was the highlight, however. It's a jump from an Olympic training park, I was told.  The kind that ski-jumpers practice on and land in water. It works for bodies, too!. If I find any photos of the height, I'll add them later.

Emily's Blessing +Texarkana Reunion

Mike and I drove up to Herriman on Sunday after church. Traffic was heavy! But we got there by shortly after 4 pm. The blessing was at 5 pm. Kaylee's two brothers, her dad and Mike participated. It was lovely, they did it in their home and their Bishop also attended. Kaylee prepared a really nice dinner for everyone afterward. We spent the night there and retired fairly early as we were tired from out drive. 

We spent most of Monday there, Mike mostly reading and napping. I tried playing with kids and sometimes successfully completed a game or so. I tried reaching out to see Aunt Tuny or Deb Ashdown. Neither one worked out. 

But, at 6 pm in Provo was our Texarkana reunion. Norma Conner hosted and there were close to 20 of us there. Such a fun gathering! In attendance:

Norma Conner, Martha and Darrel Reavis, Tim and Debbie Brown, Karen and Kimberly Green, Kim and Xiwei Evans, Lynn Reamer and 2 grown sons, Randy and Karen Evans, Aubrey and Mindy Conner. I think that's all. 

Great food, good company. But we had to leave close to 8 pm. And we did! However, at the gas station in Springville UT, I discovered I left my purse at Norma's house. Grrr. So back we went to get it. We didn't get home til 11:35 pm. We just dropped into bed.

XiWei and Karen Evans

Martha Reavis

Randy Evans

Norma Conner

An exhausted Norma Conner. I think she said she is 83 now.

Kim Evans

Darrel and Martha Reavis

Lynn's son, and Tim Brown

Kimberly and Karen Green

Mendy and Aubrey Conner

Zhi Wei on right, Lynn in yellow

 

The disaster that was Breakfast

 Mike has been so generous about fixing meals. Breakfast is one that he prefers and does it lots, especially when I was working. Since retirement, he's slacked off a little just because our schedule has changed a little.

He still does do a lot of the dishes, so that's nice. Floors. He's working on our steps for the deck. He keeps busy.

This morning, he asked me if I wanted some blueberry pancakes for breakfast! We have fresh blueberries in our refrigerator. I was going to go pick some raspberries first, though. I have been trying to pick about every other day now. There are not tons, but if I leave them for more than a couple of days, I feel like too many of them get overly ripe and go to waste because they fall off the canes. So, I told him that blueberry pancakes would be excellent! But give me about 40 minutes to pick the berries and then we could eat. 

He watched my progress and noticed when I was near the end of the row and I could hear him clanking around in the kitchen as he mixed the batter etc. When I came in, I found that he had used a griddle that is just terrible. It looks like it would work good, but it does not. I did not buy it. I kind of think it may have come from his parents home. Because it looks good, we figured it might work good. But it might only be good for.. maybe warming up tortillas? I don't know. It's in the trash right now. It burned his pancakes! and they stuck so terribly that they fell apart. All those beautiful blueberry pancakes.

 He grabbed a metal spatula from our drawer for turning them over... That was also a reject from his parents house. It was kind of a cool tool. It was an expandable-handled spatula (telescoping?). You could use it at a barbecue. It will let you reach farther into the flames without being burnt. The only problem was, it swiveled on its expandable post. Or handle. Crazy! So you know, when you go to turn over a pancake, you kind of have to rotate and flip that spatula? That spatula did not rotate like you expected it to.  it just swiveled. What a mess. 

But we struggled through and ate them. I had actually told him, yes, blueberry pancakes on the deck this morning would be wonderful! So we went out to the deck to eat our semi- burnt blueberry pancakes. They weren't totally burned. Just some of them. And I took the one that was least burnt. :-) . As we were sitting outside eating our pancakes, I noticed that there was some uncooked batter in some of my pancake pieces. So they ran the gamut from being burnt to raw.! How funny. Plus, we were swatting flies. And, it was late enough that the sun was blazing in our eyes. And, I forgot to wipe off the table and the prior rain and wind and the construction dust had caused grittiness on the glass table top. Not quite the sublime breakfast I had pictured. But it was nice. Enough. :-) I hope yours was better.

And, you might have noticed that I have some lovely yellow squash up there on the counter that I picked this morning, too.