Birds

Thursday, February 20, 2025

One of our favorite things about living on the canyon is the sounds of nature that surround us. At any time of the day we can hear birds singing and in the evening we can hear the frogs and crickets. We hear the cayotes howling and sometimes they can get quite excited. Probably when they’re eating someones cat.

In addition to hearing them, we have seen the following animals in our backyard. Racoons, Cayotes, Possums, Gophers, Rats, Mice, Lizards, and countless birds. About the only thing we haven’t seen in our yard is a Rattlesnake. I’ve seen plenty of those in the canyon though.

Lisa especially loves the birds. She has an app on her phone that can listen to a bird call and tell you what kind of bird it is.

There is a Red Tailed Hawk that is always flying up and down our Canyon and Lisa acts like they are best friends. Maybe they are, because the hawk frequently lands on our deck railing and will sometimes lay down like a chicken. It is pretty cool. The hawk isn’t afraid of us, but at the same time we can’t get too close to her either.

I remember one day I was working in the yard next to the deck and the hawk flew in and landed on the railing not fifteen feet from me. It looked over at me and I could read his mind. He said, “Oh, you’re here. This is a bit too close for my comfort”, and then he flew off.

Last Saturday Jeff and Tiffany came over to complete the Christmas gift they gave me. We have had too many people walk into our sliding screen on the back door and it is ripped completely off. For Christmas he gave me the screen and rubber bead to repair it, but I haven’t gotton around to fixing it. Last Saturday they repaired it and we were all sitting on the patio enjoying each others company and the beautiful weather. 

A humming bird had been harassing us all day and we just assumed it wanted to get to the humming bird feeder but as we were sitting there Jeff noticed that it had a nest not two feet from our back door. There are a few dead twigs remaining from the vine that used to cover our patio and this nest was built in the fork of one of them. It is pretty cool. I’m watching it every day looking for a couple of pea sized heads to peer over the edge.

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Newborn babies have no knee caps

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A Quick Trip to Arizona

Thursday, February 20, 2025

A few weeks ago Sarah told us that her and Sam would be in Arizona for a few days. It is so difficult to get to Wyomeng that we jumped at the chance to see her and her sweet little family. We were excited to see her. Unfortunately, a few days before we were to go, her kids got sick and she didn’t want to travel with sick kids. She postponed the trip. Our tickets were cheap, about $45 each, round trip, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we just didn’t go but we decided that we should just go anyway. It would be great to see Ben and Kira and their families. So as soon as Lisa was done work on Thursday, January 23, we headed to the airport.

Since our temple has been closed for so long, Lisa loves to turn every trip into a temple trip if at all possible. Just to give you an idea, Friday morning at 8:00 we did an endowment session in the Gilbert Temple with Kira, Friday afternoon at we did an endowment session in the Mesa Temple while Kira went to meetings and other commitments and then Saturday morning we did sealings in the Gilbert Temple with Kira and Justin.

So Friday morning, after the temple, we met up with Ben and Kit at this cool barbecue / antique store.

This huge building is filled with all kinds of antiques but in one corner they have this amazing barbecue place. The barbecue place uses buns and bread that are made in a bakery that is also located on site. It is a pretty amazing experience except that I’m done with the antique store after about ten minutes. Perhaps the best thing I saw in the antique store was this sign.

After we were done, Ben went back to work, Kira headed to an appointment and Lisa and I headed to the Mesa Temple.

We’ve always wanted to go to the Mesa Temple but it has never worked out before.

When we’re in Arizona we want to spend as much time as we can with family so we only go to early morning sessions but the Mesa Temple doesn’t have early morning sessions.

We all gathered at Kira’s on Friday night for dinner and hung out with each other.

Saturday, we got up early and Kira, Justin, Lisa and I did sealings at the Gilbert Temple. We weren’t able to do much after the temple because Lisa and I had to get back for the adult session of Stake Conference. We would normally have skipped that but Lisa was singing in it, so, after the temple Justin had to go be with his kids and we had a few hours to kill before our flight so we went to the hole in the rock.

The hole in the rock is an interesting place. It is right in the middle of the city but you feel like you’re in the mountains. It is a short walk from the parking lot to the hole and there were a ton of people, but it was amazing.

While there we also checked out the George Hunt pyramid. George was a very popular governor of Arizona in the early 1900’s. He decided he wanted to be entombed in a pyramid, so, he built himself a pyramid. He and his wife and a few other family members are entombed here.

The pyramid and the hole in the rock are located right next to the zoo. It was funny to look across the fence and see several zoo animals.

Do you see the mountain goat on top of that big rock?

From there Kira dropped us off at the airport and we headed home. We knew the timing would be tight so we packed our Sunday clothes in the car ahead of time so we could head straight to the church. We changed in the bathroom and Lisa was just in time for their short rehearsal before the session started. They had a couple of women from each ward, and they sang beautifully.

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There are over 200 corpses on Mt Everest. Many of them are used as way points for climbers.

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