Update from Utah: May 'till Now

It occurs to us that there haven't been many updates or photos on what has been happening on the home front since Joseph and Tim left for Asia on May 2nd. Also what has been happening since their return. Here's the update:

Family Scrapbook Festival

Elizabeth along with Gloria and her nieces Natalie and Jennifer and extended family met together the first week of May in an annual scrapbook getaway in Park City. It was fun and frolic for all. It included scrapbooking, karaoke, more scrapbooking, games, scrapbooking and shopping. It didn't necessarily include much sleeping.

Other Family Gatherings

The Shaffer gathering for Mother's Day was a blast at nephew Eric and Natalie's house in Roy. Gloria's family celebrated together in style with food, fun and frolic.

Elizabeth and Denny had a wedding in his family. The kids were certainly cute all dressed up. In fact the whole family looked pretty great.

Elizabeth and the grandkids helped out cleaning up the basement from the flood remodeling. We appreciate all the help from everyone. We still have most of the stuff in the garage but the basement looks wonderful.

The best part of being home for Gloria and one of the best parts of coming home for Tim and Joseph was Ethan. Cheyenne, and Gavin. They are such a delight. The celebration of Uncle Joe being home for them was having him twirl them around on his wheelchair. Gavin started crawling since we returned home. . . AWESOME. They enjoyed using Uncle Joe's giant shower while he was gone too.

Since the Traveller's Return:

Tim spent most of the 4th of July weekend continuing the fixup on the basement. He was delighted to notice how excited he was to return to work (you always wonder when you are away for so long). Lots of changes continue to happen as the Church AV Department prepares for future growth.

Wheelchair Tune-up

One of the important first stops for Joseph was taking his wheelchair in for a tune-up. He put over 600 miles on it, but the real distress was turning over to the Airlines 3 times going to Qingdao and 5 times coming home. We fried the wheelchair battery charger in China and had to have Mom order a new one, we had a loaner waiting for us when we got home. The IHC Homecare folks are great (photo right), they enjoyed Joseph's tales of wheelchair adventures in China.

Grace Idaho and Cache Valley

Last week-end Tim and Gloria went up to see Arlen Mickelson (photo on Left) in Grace Idaho. During the summers when Tim taught Seminary in Grace he worked on the farm for Arlen's father Riley and his Uncle Lawrence. Lawrence died of cancer earlier this year. While Tim was in China, Riley had an accident on the farm and was killed. Arlen and the family are doing well because of their knowledge of the Plan of Happiness. It was great to be with them. The name of the farm is the "Superview Dairy" you can see why.

On the way back we stopped in to see Gloria's parents. It was wonderful to visit with Don and Barta and her daughters Diane, and her husband Dean Kohler from Bend OR, and Marlyne and her husband Bruce Lyman from Farmington UT. It is always a treat to visit with family.

Friday: Scrapbooks, License Plates and the Frontrunner:

This weekend Gloria had the annual conference with Heartstrings Designs (http://www.heartstringdesigners.com/) the company she sells scrapbook materials for. While she was gone on Friday Tim escaped from work and played tourist with Joseph. It was good to look around downtown SLC and see the progress on the Downtown Rising Project (the photo is of the block where the Crossroads Mall used to be)

License Plate Convention

The first event was the national convention for the Americal License Plate Collector's Assn (ALPCA http://www.alpca.org/ or the UT chapter http://www.alpcautah.org/). Joseph has been collecting for several years as mentioned in previous blogs. They had a blast at the Salt Palace gathering. There were terrific collections (note Tim's photo composite of the complete Utah collection, left) Joseph's collections include international plates (on his bedroom wall) all states for the year 1981 (his birthyear. . . he is missing several) and a collection of handicapped plates (about half the states so far). Also a pretty good collection of specialty Utah plates. Joseph found some good ones (photo on right) including Japan (1957) The Isle of Man for Dad (ancestors from there), Czech Republic, Switzerland and an awesome Air Force plate from Indonesia with brass insignia and numbers.

Chinese Lunch

We jumped on TRAX and met Tim's AV section for lunch. They were celebrating Dee Francke's birthday (their wonderful Church Service Missionary, photo on left) at a new and excellent Chinese restaurant (Hong Kong Tea House & Restaurant ). David Morris brought along his family's guest visiting from Colombia, Sofia Robinson (photo on right). She was a young child when David and his companion taught and baptized her family. Their conversion is a great story of a Colombian mother praying the missionaries to her grown sons and their families.

The Train, The Train

After lunch Joseph and Tim took TRAX the new rail hub to ride the new UTA Frontrunner. Their trip was delightful. They met a group of nearly twenty Senior Citizens from Ogden who rode the train to SLC, took TRAX to The Gateway for lunch and were returning to Ogden. This game of tourist in your own backyard is great. The Frontrunner lives up to all the positive hype, smooth comfortable and reasonably priced. It was a fun outing. We never supposed you could see a horse stable in downtown SLC with the Capitol Building and the Church Office Building in the background.