Category: Life according to Angela

Moab Trip

The Ross family tour bus departed on Memorial Day, just as most people packed up their RV’s to come home. We passed masses of traffic traveling home in the other direction, and discovered that the places we visited near Moab were not crowded. Richard made excellent plans and accommodations for us. He is so good at this.

After such a wet winter, the landscape was more green than we can remember. There were so many wildflowers, that whole fields were dusted in color, mostly orange, but many other colors, too.

Do you spy Paige and Michael, and Daniel and McKenna traveling with us? Lucky us! My brother Joe shared his van with us so we could all ride together.

A book for the desk and a book for the nightstand

This is volume 2. I am working on volume 3, and have loved each one.

My books from this New Testament series are so full of personal marginalia that they are probably ruined for anyone else’s use.

I like to leave helpful notes to my future self in the Table of Contents and throughout the book.

I like having different kinds of books in different places in the house, and save lighter reading for the bedside table. Light fiction at bedtime is a wonderful idea.

My current light reading? 😂

I had forgotten how funny this book is. I laugh every day.

A drive into Salt Lake City

My friend Janine took me to the roof of the Conference Center so we could get a view of the construction surrounding the Salt Lake Temple. Each crane was in use, cement was being poured, and there were workers everywhere. There was a lot going on.
There are many beautiful pieces of art on display at the Conference Center. This is an enormous mural of the Savior greeting people of all nations. If you look carefully at the clouds, you will see that they are angels. 🤍

A few quotes I want to remember

Reading this book was like revisiting my old life as a college student, doing field work, collecting insects, identifying trees, and watching for wildlife. My interests in the Bible, theology, zoology, botany, and writing held a party in my mind as I read Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. I loved this book.

A few quotes:

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

I cannot cause the light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.

Fish gotta swim, and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.

The creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.

I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.

I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing, an angled pitch of the will, like the set of the wings of the monarch which climbed the hill by falling still.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Working and waiting.

Lately, I have experienced really low motivation to achieve, work, go out, and improve. I have needed to ignore how I feel, and like a robot, I continue to work each day.

I find satisfaction in accomplishing things I don’t feel like doing, and I’ll keep working until my motivation sneaks back in, well past curfew.

“Where have you been?” I will ask. But the answer won’t matter because I have continued to grow, regardless.

Workspace

I have a temporary workspace set up in Paige’s empty bedroom where I am sorting through family history documents and photos. I have two main goals: identify individuals in the photos so we can attach them on the FamilySearch website, and assemble a family tree of Great-grandmother Cerie’s Swedish relatives.

I have found a lot of incidental treasures in the process:

  • A collection of squares of toilet paper from various countries throughout Europe from 1957. These vary in quality and composition, ranging from waxed paper to gritty and rough-ridged. Strange souvenirs.
  • A lengthy journal which described a long journey from California to Sweden, only to be almost silent about the relatives they visited there.
  • A photograph of a great-great-great grandmother that I do not recognize. She is merely labeled, “Mormor,” which means maternal grandmother.
  • Menus from the Swedish American Line from 1957 with artwork so beautiful that I framed them to display in my house.
  • Hair samples of loved ones.
  • A scrapbook of sensational stories and pictures from newspapers from 100 years ago, highlighting the cute, macabre, and cultural. I think of this book as “Cerie’s Pinterest boards.”

It is a big puzzle, and I have spent many hours studying, reading, and cataloguing these things. It is incredibly slow work. I have learned that in 100 years, when your great-grandchild is sorting through your photos, she will not know the identities of your close loved ones. Please, label your photos with care, including first and last names and locations.

This disaster is actually a tender mercy.

Richard awoke at 3:30 am on Saturday and had an impression that he should check the furnace room. He found the beginnings of a flood in this basement area, and bleary-eyed, we cleared out the wet boxes and vacuumed up excess water on the floor through the early hours of the morning. We were able to discover the leak was from the water heater. There was minimal damage, and the carpets are fine.

We were disappointed, as we had plans to go to Susanna’s wedding reception on Saturday, which we had to miss. We were also without hot water for a couple of days.

The thing that we will remember is that we were so completely cared for by the Lord.

He inspired Richard to wake up so he could protect our home. The flood began before we were scheduled to be away from the house. Mark was home on Saturday and could help Richard move out the old water heater and bring inside the new one. Richard had tools, knowledge, skill, and some helpful insights from others so he could install the water heater himself, long before any plumber could come.

I don’t know why we were spared the trial of a fully flooded basement, but I know who spared us.