The Phantom of the Opera

What an awesome musical!! All of us went to the ASU Gammage Theater to see this production. Anna's critique..."I liked the movie better." WHATEVER! Live is always better. I guess you could say that this year's entertainment theme has been plays. We saw Snowflake High School do Oklahoma, which was so good. They have so much talent there! Now, we anticipate going to see You're a Good Man Charlie Brown this weekend at the Snowflake/Taylor Northern Pioneer College campus. I hope it's good!

Family Pictures

The Wreck

Introducing......Our new car! We are absolutely loving it so far. We needed new tires on the Pilot, it had a few scratches and a dome lightbulb was out. I guess we figure this was the only way we'd get stuff replaced or fixed. I'm actually happy to be rid of my leather seats. They are freezing during the cold months...which is 9 months out of the year, or so it seems.

What an adventure! And as I like to quote from The Little House on the Prairie books, "All's well that ends well". I feel so incredibly blessed. My first thoughts were, "We are so lucky!" But I know that luck had nothing to do with it. Yes, we had a safe car. Yes, we all had our seat belts on, sleeping at 4am. I know our Heavenly Father was watching over us. How else could we all have survived a rollover???

Looking at this picture just now makes me see that there were more windows busted out than I thought. WOW!

The internal structure held up beautifully! (See the orange cheetos? They were all over the car)

Anna got a nice goose egg and abrasion...probably from luggage hitting her.

Her cuts from climbing out of her broken window and climbing back in through the back

busted-out window.

Mike's air bag burn. It's healing nicely thanks to the wonderful salve they gave us for Anna at UVRMC (our favorite hospital in the whole wide world!)

Fortunately, it didn't "mess" our plans up too much. We did everything we went to Utah to do. We attended our Book of Mormon Evidence Conference in Midway, UT and we went to the Sunday morning session of General Conference.

Book of Mormon Evidence Conference

Midway was beautiful conference weekend. We attended a Book of Mormon Evidence Conference. We had heard quite a bit of the material before but it's always a good refresher. There is so much compelling evidence that the Book of Mormon took place in The United States. If you are interested in learning more go to http://www.bookofmormonevidence.org/. We had a sweet room, alot bigger and fancier than expected. And we paid hardly anything for it.

Look closely at the bottom....Raymond, Jen & Mike

Joseph Smith's sword, shown for the first time ever.
We stayed at the Zermatt Resort in Midway, UT
A huge, posh four poster bed. Mike doing what Mike does best?!?

The yummy seafood buffet

Going Green

I think we are really helping global warming?? I'm just SO concerned about it. If you can't hear, it's tongue and cheek. I do, however, have a problem contributing to so much landfill waste. So in the interest of the environment and $$, I have chosen to recycle...ALOT. Well, Mike helps out quite a bit. I'll give credit where credit is due. Since he travels to "the valley" every week, we save all our plastic, metal, etc. and send them down with him to put in the city of Gilbert recycling bin my parents have. We don't really have that kind of recycling in our town. Good think it's clean garbage. We do have paper recycle. Our sanitary district needs it to compost our waste. Yea, pretty gross. I know first hand, having gone on a field trip there. Smelly too. There are a couple of places we can drop it off and it's usually always on our way to and fro. You probably ask, what's the $$ interest? Well, I'm glad you asked. We cancelled our garbage service, saving us $20 a month. We recycle so much that we only have one garbage bag full a week or 3 walmart bags. I recycle there too. I use my Walmart-type bags as my garbage bags. Although Walmart and Safeway, both, have recycling for extras of those too. I take my extras there. Anyway, our good friend Raymond started recycling paper too and now we share his garbage. Or we use our neighbors across the street who is more often then not, staying in their home in "the valley". They don't mind that we use it and we are grateful. You may ask, how does the garbage company feel about this? Answer: They don't mind at all. I called and discussed my options with them. They do have other plans, like every other week garbage pick up. When I asked them about sharing a can, they pretty much said, Go for it. Work it out with your neighbor and it's good with us. So, the moral, where there's a will to save 20 bucks, there's a way.