Week 72
A nice but mostly uneventful week.  FHE was kind of fun--Bob Ross Night.  He's that painting guy on public television.  Here are the YSAs painting along with him.

A relaxing FHE with the happy painter

Saturday we went to the temple as one of our YSAs, Kayla, received her endowment.  It has been such a privilege to share this sacred experience with every one of the YSAs who has received the endowment since we've been here.

Windy but wonderful day with Kayla (middle)

The General Women's Meeting last night was a spiritual feast.  My favorite new insight came from Sister Burton, as she discussed the "certain women" described several places in the scriptures in various settings with Christ.  The insight came as she shared the synonyms of "certain" that include convinced, positive, confident, firm, definite, assured, and dependable. I'll need to think and study that concept more, but that insight completely changes the way we can view those "certain women" and makes me want to be a "certain" woman as well.

Week 71
My sister, Gloria, returned from her mission in Croatia at midnight Tuesday.  She's going to come pay us a visit in a couple of weeks, and I can't wait to see her.

We took advantage of Spring Break to explore a little more of Oklahoma.  On Wednesday we headed east--first stop Tulsa to experience Hurts Donut Company.  This is a chain in the midwest that seems heavily influenced by Voodoo Donuts in Portland, OR.  The Tulsa shop just opened last month; between being new and being spring break around the state, the line was very long (we waited almost an hour), but it was fun and we got some wonderful donuts.  The selection is amazing and kind of crazy.

Our selections were rather tame 

Our next stop was Muskogee (as in Okie from. . . ).  We went to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which highlighted the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes; all of which were forced to leave their native regions and march the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in the 1800's.  The museum is right next to Honor Heights Park,  which was very lovely.  It will have an azalea festival in April, so we didn't see it in all its glory.  However, enough brave azaleas were blooming early that we could imagine how spectacular it will be in a few weeks. Then we went to the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame--located in the old train depot.  You kind of expect the country western stars from OK (Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Carrie Underwood, Toby Keith, etc) but there have been famous and influential jazz, classical, gospel, and even opera stars out of Oklahoma.  I came to the conclusion that there are far more musicians per capita from OK than from much larger states.

Hall of Fame and Five Tribes Museum

The highlight of Muskogee was the Muskogee War Memorial Park--it has a submarine, the USS Batfish, that fought in WWII, as well as the only surviving piece of the USS Oklahoma, the first ship sunk in Pearl Harbor. They floated the Batfish up the Arkansas River from a port in Texas to get it here.

Batfish in the distance, and part of the mast of USS Oklahoma recovered from the ocean

On the Batfish and the five military branches

We spent the night in Muskogee and then took the Cherokee Hills Byway to mosey up to Tahlequah.  The drive was beautiful because of the three lakes and the Arkansas and Illinois rivers along the way.  A very popular recreation area.  In Tahlequah we really enjoyed the Cherokee Heritage Center.  Our guide on the tour of the village was superb and really made history live for us.

The tallest Cherokee basket, a loom;  redbuds in bloom everywhere

More at the heritage center--bottom left he's making a flint arrowhead

We kept going north, then east almost to the Arkansas border to see Natural Falls State Park.  We only went to the Spring Falls, but it was very lovely.

The terrain was very different on that side of the state--we actually went up and down hills!  Haven't done that for a while.  

We continued to work on lessons on Friday, and are excited to have all our YSAs back from break. There was a big group at ward prayer tonight, so looked like most have arrived.

Week 70
For some reason this was an exceptionally good week. Our classes seemed just filled with the Spirit and the discussions were great.  It is so remarkable to see the overlap in concepts and principles between courses--so often what we're discussing in D & C relates to what happens in P of GP, and Jesus Christ and the Everlasting Gospel might draw from both of those.  We just love studying intently and teaching these great YSAs.

Monday was a fun FHE activity--a messy dinner.  Everyone donned a garbage bag and had to eat spaghetti and a cupcake without using their hands.

It helps to have a big mouth

Northwest Oklahoma has had devastating fires this week.  We smelled smoke on Friday night, but really haven't noticed any other effects here.  However, on Tuesday the sunset acted like there was smoke in the atmosphere and we drove home facing a giant red sun.  By the time we could stop for a picture the color intensity had dropped, but still quite a pretty sight.  A couple of years ago, a sister in the mission office lost everything she owned when her farm was caught in a wildfire. The combination of dry and wind can be deadly.

Our washing machine hasn't really worked properly the whole time we've been here, but it finally got worse and the repair didn't fix the problem.  Thursday the problem ended when the mission bought us a new machine.  Kerby kind of misses watching and waiting so he can manually move it to the spin cycle, but he thinks he can adjust to the new washer.

We had a special event Friday night.  My friend Paula, whose daughter (Heidi) lives here, drove down from Kansas City so she could be sealed to her parents.  Her mother died over 30 years ago, and her father passed away about 18 months ago.  Kerby was proxy for Paula's father and Heidi was proxy for her mother.  It was a marvelous experience for the four of us (and her parents, too!).  After that a few people came in and we then spent another hour doing sealings.  Very nice way to spend a Friday evening.

Saturday we went to Edmond for our CES in-service.  Brother Valletta addressed several things, but the bulk of the time was spent on Doctrinal Mastery and the Acquiring Spiritual Knowledge process.  The three principles to "guide us as we seek to learn and understand eternal truth and resolve questions or issues" are 1. Act in Faith 2. Examine Concepts and Questions with an Eternal Perspective, and 3. Seek Further Understanding through Divinely Appointed Sources.  This is the first academic year for Doctrinal Mastery (which replaced Scripture Mastery), and it's taking time for seminary teachers all over the world to understand and implement it fully, but I truly think it will revolutionize the seminary experience and the ability of youth to face an increasingly challenging world.

The coming week is spring break, so attendance at church was sparse today as so many students went home.  We'll take a couple of days off this week, so hope to have an adventure or two to report next week.

Week 69
Yikes!!  Two months from today we leave for Utah.  However, between now and then, we have 8 Soup Tuesdays and 24 lessons to prepare and teach. That keeps us a little too busy to get trunky.

Another baptism this week--yesterday Carson was baptized.  One of the neat things about this one is that his friend, John, who was baptized in October, got to perform the ordinance.

John, Carson, and Mason

On Tuesday morning when we left for the YMCA everything was wet and we assumed it had rained.  We were wrong--it was 96% humidity and the warm Gulf air had come up and hit the colder ground, resulting in more dew than we'd ever seen.  That's the weather condition that spawns tornadoes if it's cold air hitting the warm air.  We were fortunate to avoid that, but Missouri and Illinois weren't so lucky.

Ever since we got to OK we've seen signs like this:

Have it your way

We didn't know it was optional, but apparently in this oil and gas industry state, you can have it either way.  You pay more without ethanol.

To celebrate Kerby's birthday yesterday we ate lunch at the Smokey Pokey.  We liked their barbecue a couple of months ago and liked it again yesterday.  That and two designer cupcakes made the whole celebration.  He talked to his family, and got pictures of the grandkids.  I must say, in marrying Kerby I acquired incredibly handsome grandsons and incredibly darling granddaughters.  Such a nice bonus!