Youth Fireside

Monday, February 17, 2025

Sunday (Jan 5) we kissed Kira and her kids good bye and then we tried to recover our house before the youth fireside that evening. We try to have a fireside for the youth in our ward every month or two but this fireswide was being broadcast from Salt Lake. We were trying to find a place where we could have it. When no one was volunteering, I talked to Lisa and she agreed that we could have it at our house.

The only problem was that after having dozens of kids in the house for two weeks the house was not ready to receive guests. To make matters worse, our Chinese kids were all coming home from their Christmas break in China so we had to do their rooms as well.

When I came home from my meetings, I saw Linda Bessey cleaning our toilet. I guess when they announced the fireside that evening at our house she knew that the last of our kids were leaving that morning and figured we would need help. She showed up on our doorstep unanounced. What a good friend. In the end, the house was beautiful when every one arrived.

Our next problem was that way more people arrived than we had planned on and people were tucked into every corner. It was a bit miraculous but in the end I think only me and one other person didn’t have a seat.

After the fireside, I asked the young men to haul the folding chairs into the back yard so we could have room to maneuver. Many of those young men had been to my backyard back when I first started to work on my yard. It was fun to see them reminising. They were pointing to where they had dug out a tree trunk or where they had dug up brush and where they had helped to haul out a huge pile of dirt. I was glad that they were able to see what finally became of their hard work. My back yard is beautiful, but it only happened with the help of a lot of people. Especially the Andrew family.

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NASA's Parker Solar probe hit a speed of 692,000 kilometers per hour. That is fast enough to travel from New York to Tokyo in under a minute.

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