Marolynn was in Salt Lake during Spring vacation and stayed with her mother, Carma Mineer who celebrated her 93rd birthday on March 26. She continues healthy for her age and plans are still afoot for us all to do an Alaskan cruise in July.

The middle picture is of Carma Mineer and her daughters; from left to right, Marolynn (Griffin), Karen (Kilpack), Barbara (Butler), and Susan (Goodsell) who is the youngest, being 14 years younger than Marolynn. Notice the framed doily in the upper left of the picture. This intensive knitwork has been a specialty of Carma.

The lower picture shows four generations of the family, with Carma (93) on the left, Marolynn (64) on the right, Michael (25) in the middle and Nora (22 months) sitting on Michael's lap.

Marolynn returned today from Utah and brought the Church News with her with this article about the Smiths, our friends of 30 years ago in Oregon. Marolynn said that they were going to return to Accra in July where he'll serve as the Accra, Ghana mission president.

When we bought a house south of Oregon City in 1973, we became members of the Canby ward, with a phase-1 meetinghouse in Canby about 9 miles west of us - the chapel part was built while we were there - . Byron Smith was the bishop of the ward and he lived in the middle of the woods, a few miles south of us. He quickly gave me a Church calling as Scoutmaster and as he had two boys in Cub Scouts about to advance into Scouts, he and his family became very good friends of ours. We did a lot together and I remember traveling the rural roads around Canby with him in the evening with his commenting that there is no place on earth that is as dark as Oregon at night.

Next to his house, Byron had a kennel with several Saint Bernard dogs which he groomed and exhibited at dog shows all over the Northwest. He also had a Bernese Mountain dog as a house pet. Byron had a big motorhome and come time for a dog show, he would load the Saint Bernards in big dog crates into the back of the vehicle, and often, he and I would drive it to the dog show. I remember one time when we had an all-night trip to make to Vancouver, Canada and Byron asked me if we could share the driving up there. He drove the motorhome to a gas station and filled the tank and then got onto the highway only to pull off a mile or so later to tell me that he was really tired from the day's work, so I told him that I would drive for a hundred miles then turn it over to him. As it was, Byron was fast asleep at the hundred mile mark and I told myself that I'd drive another 50 miles. This was repeated all night until we were about 10 miles from the Canadian border, about 350 miles up the road, where I awakened him and told him that he'd have to drive the motorhome into Canada. He was quite refreshed by then and took over and the story ended happily with him winning the "best of breed" cup.

I liked Byron's Bernese Mountain dog and he proposed that we get one from a breeder - a lady in her 70s who lived really way out in the woods in the coast mountains south of Eugene. We'd split the cost and I would be the physical owner of the dog, and participate in dog shows., and in time, breed her and we would split the proceeds from sale of the pups. So we bought Lady, our Bernese Mountain dog which lived with us for 7 years, and I've always appreciated the breed.

A year before we left Oregon City for Richland, Washington, Byron was called to be the Oregon City Stake President, at about the same age that Steve Shipley served in a like calling back east. Soon, we were on our way to Richland and a new job and new experiences after 5 years in Oregon, and not long after, Byron sold his business in Portland and the Smiths moved to Tennessee. Somehow we lost contact with each other and 30 years have passed. So there were some tears when Marian identifed the Smiths as the couple she and Steve replaced in Accra. We sure hope that we can correspond and possibly converse with them to bring all of us up to date on happenings in that long time.

It has been a busy week at work in Santa Fe. Budget requests are in and I'm reviewing them to prepare for hearings in April. Today, lunch was planned to be at a restaurant to celebrate those having birthdays in March. I was working with budgets and spreadsheets and looked up just in time to determine that it was time to be at the restaurant, but everyone had cleared out of the office, so I headed out to the place where I thought we were eating. When I got there, I found it to be another restaurant, so with camera in hand I became another tourist and took a few pictures for the first time this year around the plaza. The pictures you see here were taken in a little nook of a store; the hanging peppers and fruits are ceramic and the flowers are paper, but the effect is nice. These photos may decorate a future budget document.

The earliest Easter weekend for another 250 years, and it warmed up enough to start some bedding plants in the flowerpots. Pansys can even handle a bit of frost which is good because we're not quite through with it yet. Nevertheless, I also pruned most of the roses in the back yard.

We got a half-day holiday on Good Friday for which I was thankful enough. Santa Fe had its stories this week as (a) an 83 year-old lady beat off a youthful mugger who tried to take her purse at a gas station, and (b) two days before his 20-year retirement, a County Sheriff's deputy desiring a police radio in order to converse with his buddies after retirement, shoplifted one that was in a repair shop. The storekeeper missing the raido ran his security camera tapes to discover the theft. The deputy was promptly fired, but will probably get his retirement anyway. Budget requests for the next fiscal year were received by their due date on Thursday, so the work docket is full.

Jonathan now has an apartment with his friend Thomas at the Dorado apartments just up the street from Eldorado High School. In the picture, he is being picked up this morning for Church - he is attending the Young Adult's ward, at least for now. Just before, he discoverd an easter basket on his doorstep with some of his favorites: marshmallow peeps and Cadbury creme filled chocolate eggs.

Winter came back to Santa Fe this week with bad roads and work and school delays. The climate record for more than a year now is pointing to a significant cooling world-round. During our summer, ice cover around the Antartic continent reached a record level in 30 years of satellite measurements and South America experienced their coldest winter in 90 years. This winter has been the coldest in most of asia in more than 100 years and much of the U.S has had the coldest winter since the '60s. The Arctic ice cap having declined to record levels last summer, has expanded to a size not seen since 1980 and Northern hemisphere snow cover reached record levels in the latter part of February. Does this prove anything -- no. No more than a few warm years prove "global warming." But for many other reasons, I'm all for national initiatives that would bring us heavily into solar power and also develop alternatives to petrolium based fuel which I think that history will finally look upon as a twentieth century phenominon.

March 1, and it actually got up to 70 today for the first time since November. The apple tree got pruned and we all went over to the neighbors to rake up their pine needles and cones in order to turn our Bobcat pins right side up. The neighbors on the other side of the house are in Hawaii and they sent us the beautiful flowers shown in the picture. Jonathan and his friend Thomas are about to move into an apartment - I went over to the complex today to do the preliminaries with them and the landlord this afternoon. Back home, I got onto Marian and Steve's blogsite and found that they were replacing the Smiths in Ghana, our good friends of Oregon City days - you can't make this stuff up. Be sure to see the Shipleymission sight, linked to the right. We ended the daylight hours with a good pizza; all in all a lot done and discovered in one day.

A quick photo of Jenny and Nora to give you an idea of how Nora (and her sister-to-be) has grown to this point. Nora likes to go get a "Baby Einstein" video from the shelf next to the TV; show the video case to Mike and say "Watch Daddy?" to get Mike to put it on the player.

I had to pick my way through the weather during the eitire trip in order to minimize snowy roads. Here's a picture of an arch alongside the highway south of Moab, just in case Marian and Steve have already forgotten how snow looks.