Spring and Summer Fun

Even though we had a cool spring in Utah, we enjoyed some great times together with family and friends. We celebrated John's birthday in Arizona, got to see Roy, Dana and Rachel when they were in Utah over Rachel's spring break (it even snowed one morning when they were here!), Curt's cousin's daughter, Sonia, spent a few days with us while she was looking for her first full-time teaching job and it was fun to get to know her better! Sid and Marcia came for a weekend and Curt helped them scan some family pictures for Marcia's upcoming family reunion. We watched Enchanted together, ate at Rumbi Island Grill and checked out a new bakery in town - Flour Girls and Dough Boys. We also had a fun weekend with Nathan - he helped us fix several things around the house and sold us on a cool timer switch for our bathroom fans! All our guests who have used the upstairs bathroom have loved it. We also used Nathan's great technical skills to get a TV set up that we can view when everything goes HD in a few months. John and Lacey overlapped on that weekend also - coming up to see a couple of Jazz play off games. And Irene came to pick up Hilary from BYU - after a little bit of car trouble, they got Hilary moved out of the dorms and back to Denver for the summer. We loved having them all here. We piled on the blankets on the downstairs beds, because it was cold again that weekend! Sunday we had a great stake conference with Elder Boyd K. Packer as our visiting General Authority. He had great counsel for all ages!! Our friend Maggie Conway came up at the end of April for BYU Women's Conference, too. So you can see that April passed very quickly and I definitely got behind on the blog! So moving on to May, we received the following gift for Mother's and Father's Day - the next best thing to a visit from our grandkids - a darling picture taken by Matt, Jayna and Rebecca of all five of them - Shaylin, Declan holding Emmalyn, Christian and Jessica. The boys are sporting suits that they received from their Baker grandparents and the girls are wearing some cute Grandma dresses from the Jolene's stores in Utah. We appreciate the time and effort it took to get everyone dressed up and take a lot of photos to get this great shot!

Emmalyn was blessed on May 18th at Matt and Jayna's home in Maricopa, Arizona. Jayna's grandparents were coming into town about midday, and their Sacrament meeting is at 8:30 a.m. so they decided to do the blessing at home. One of the Bishop's counselors came to the house and Matt gave her a name (Emmalyn Rose) and a beautiful blessing. Below are the proud parents and precious baby girl!
Grandma Olsen came to Arizona for the blessing and I drove back with her to Utah - we stopped by Henderson to spend the night with the Trouts on our way back. We had fun getting things ready for Memorial Day. On the Saturday before Memorial Day, Curt and I drove to Las Vegas to trade cars with John, he was in town for a friend from BYU Idaho's wedding. We met John and Lacey and Will and his girlfriend Karen at the Las Vegas Temple and then took them out to lunch before hitting the road for the 6 hour return trip. Here are a few pictures from our Memorial Day remembrances and celebrations - my dad's headstone in the Springville Evergreen Cemetery with all the beautiful flowers. We had a fun picnic at the park in Orem - Sheldon and Elaine came too - it was COLD as you can see from the next picture - Mom and I are wearing layers, coats, and we even used HANDWARMERS on May 26th!! I was about ready to sign up for a Phoenix summer!!!!
This is a picture of my aunts and uncles on the Olsen side --Mom - Bernice Olsen, Uncle Ben, Uncle Jim and Aunt Marilyn, Aunt Genny, Aunt Geneva and Uncle Ken, and Aunt Janet. We love them and miss those who have gone on before.

More posts to come (hopefully!) and June has been another fun month. We're looking forward to Hedges and Olsen family reunions in July!

Cherry Blossoms in Japan

While I was in Arizona playing Grandma, Curt traveled to Japan. On Sunday after he attended church with his associate, they visited this area near the Tokyo Temple to take pictures of the cherry blossoms. Yes, that is the Temple spire in the background. This next picture was taken in a different place near the Imperial Palace.
This is Curt's new screen saver - spring is arriving somewhere - it's being slow to arrive here in Highland - we've had snow 3 times during the past week!

Emmalyn Rose makes Five!

Jayna and Matt presented us with a beautiful granddaughter on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am. She weighed 6 pounds 13 ounces and of course is adorable! Big sister Shaylin is a big help, getting diapers and wipes and wanting to see the baby first thing when she gets up. I had fun staying for a few days - playing with Shaylin and holding Emmalyn!We got the call at 3:30 am and decided to head to the Salt Lake City airport and see if Southwest airlines could work their magic again. (This is the 3rd grandbaby that we have made it to the hospital to see with hours after a middle of the night call!) We had a flight booked for Monday morning, we were able to change it over the phone as we drove to the airport to the 8:45 am flight - they said the 6:40 am flight was full. But we had faith that we might be able to get on the earlier flight. We were at the airport by 5:30 am and they had room for us on the 6:40 am flight!! Since Utah has already changed to Daylight Savings Time, there is an hour time difference and we arrived in Phoenix around 7:10 am. We rented a car and went straight to the hospital - we were just a few minutes away from the hospital when Matt called and told us that she had arrived - so by the time we got there, they were ready for us to see and hold her. I grabbed my camer one day and got this picture of Shaylin after Jayna had fixed her hair so cute! We went on several walks and wagon rides - see Matt and Jayna's blog for pictures of the fun wagon.

Of course I also got to spend time with the Baker family while I was there. On Saturday, March 29th, Christian participated in a Fishing Derby held by the city of Maricopa at Pacana Park. They have quite a man-made lake there. It was catch-and-release - but everyone had a lot of fun. The afternoon sun was warm - Christian is sporting Andy's sun hat. He was thrilled to catch a fish after an hour!! But we overheard what some of the people used for bait and he'll be ready with the secret weapon next year.
Andy had to work Saturday morning and made it home in time to take Christian fishing. All I can say is there may be a new serious fisherman at the Olsen reunion this year!!
Christian and Declan and Jessica on Sunday, March 30th. She is growing up and the boys love to play with her!

Thai Visitors

In February we were privileged to share a few days with several visitors from Thailand. I met most of these wonderful people last year and it was fun to see them again and to show them around Disneyland and Utah. This is a picture of the group as we entered Disneyland - Mom Olsen also went with us that day and helped us get fast passes and ride all the best rides. It was a rather cool day but we still had a good time. It was the day after President's Day and the park was pretty busy, too. Next is the picture of us on Tower of Terror - my first time! Everyone was so impressed at how Mom likes all the scary rides and doesn't even look scared!

In Utah, another highlight was a snowmobile trip for the visitors. It was cold, but not too cold and you can see that everyone is well dressed for the weather. They had a fun day riding the machines and of course, a few times had to dig out if they got stuck in the snow.

After touring the corporate offices in Orem, a meeting was held with the visitors and exectutives. Sallee (who works in the office in Bangkok) also came to Utah and helped with translation when needed.
This was Sallee's first time to see snow (as it was for some of the others), we took some pictures in the deep snow before she left.One evening we all had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at the Hughes home and afterwards were favored by a violin duet by Stewart's and Christopher's daughters. It was a delightful evening. The next evening we enjoyed a delicious dinner featuring Korean and Japanese food at Chistopher's home - we enjoyed our time together very much!

Hi from Hong Kong

Curt and I spent a fun four days in Hong Kong recently - the best part was that Mom and Jill were able to go with us. It was quite chilly there, but we still had fun seeing the highlights, riding the fantastic subway system, eating new foods, meeting wonderful people and just being together! This picture shows part of the view from our hotel room.

Many fun things were going on in the Unicity Hong Kong Office to celebrate the Chinese New Year. This group were the winners of the office talent show. The next picture shows Curt getting ready to pass out new years gifts to the employees.

There is also a tradition to have a roast pig and to cut it from end to end in one long cut symbolizing that the new year will be prosperous from beginning to end. Mom and Jill and I let Curt enjoy this tradition without us!

We had fun attending a lunch before everyone headed back to work after the New Year Holiday. The good was delicious and fun to try - they just kept ordering new things for us! Curt is an expert in using chopsticks - I need to practice more!

For the "dim sum" meal, all the food is placed in the center of the table (it spins) and then you take the food from there. You have 2 sets of chopsticks, one to serve with and one to eat with.

Sylvia invited us to her apartment (a very nice one) for traditional Chinese New Year food. Then we went to a nearby Thai restaruant for dinner. We enjoyed our evening with Sylvia and Steven, her husband.

One night we went to the harbor for the Laser Show. The lights on the buildings were choreographed to music. We appreciate Stephen Ko, the General Manager, for taking us there.

A street in Hong Kong - usually there are more people on the streets! We had fun exploring different parts of Hong Kong.

A view of the harbor, unfortunately, there is a lot of haze there from the factories in China. We did a harbor tour on a boat similar to the one on the right in the picture.

We went to the south side of Hong Kong Island (about a 20 minute drive) to go to the Stanley Market. It is much less crowded on that side of the Island, and we saw this house boat.

The next few pictures are of Victoria's Peak - a mountain that you can ride a tram up to the top and have a great view of the Harbor. This interesting looking structure is the new observation deck and shopping/dining area.

Mom, Jill, Mitzi and Curt on Victoria's Peak.

Picture of the tram, but it doesn't show how steep it really is - it's a fun ride!

Chinese New Year Decorations in one of the malls we went into - most of the malls are connected to office buildings and have subway stations on a lower level.

China is hosting the Olympics this year and some of the events will be held in Hong Kong. We saw several posters and decorations about the Olympics.

Well, thanks for hanging in there to the end of this long post! As I'm sure you can guess, this is only a few of the pictures we took - we had a great time and a great visit together!!

New First Presidency

We were excited to hear the annoucement of the new First
Presidency that was made today. President Thomas S. Monson,
along with his counselors, Henry B. Eyring and Dieter F. Uctdorf,
held a news conference to make the annoucement and answer
questions. While we will miss President Hinckley, it is good
to know that the Lord's work will go forward in very capable
hands.

The Big Snow

Here is another picture taken Monday afternoon - a bright, sunny day before one remaining storm predicted for this week. We know there is a sidewalk out there - somewhere.

Well, it kept snowing and snowing. . . we think all told it snowed 18 inches at our house. We were all ready to walk to church because our street hadn't been plowed and we didn't think we could get out of our cul-de-sac, when the snowplow came and plowed us out. So we drove over to church and decided we couldn't get INTO the parking lot on the first 2 driveways we came to (too much snow), so we drove around to the 3rd driveway and it looked a little better - we were able to make it into that driveway - after helping a neighbor who got stuck trying to get into that driveway. There were a few people who got stuck trying to get out of their driveways who didn't make it to church, but most everyone made it. This is a picture taken on Monday afternoon looking out from the porch.

We woke up Sunday morning, Feb 3rd, to more snow! We got outside and shoveled about 8 inches off our driveway. Then our neighbor let us use his snowblower to help some of the other neighbors - this is a picture of Curt trying out this super-strength snowblower - it can throw a lot of snow! The picture doesn't do it justice, by the time I got back with the camera, he was doing a driveway that didn't have much on it! But the good thing is, he is now seriously thinking about getting a snowblower - of course, they are all sold out now because of all the snow. Maybe by next snow season. . . . . .