New Ride

My Taurus was having too many transmission problems so I traded it in for a cycle.  I'm just going to keep it for the summer until August.  Can't wait until Jacquelyn gets home from Arizona so I can show it too her.

Visit to Mesa

Went down to Mesa on another trip to visit with my Dad.

 Got the chance to go visit my Dad again.  It's nice to get away for a while and relax down in the desert.

 He lives at Discovery Point in Mesa.  This is the front of the facility.

 It's an independent living place but they have a dining room and serve two meals a day, breakfast and dinner.  It's different each day and they come around and serve you at your table.

 One thing Dad does is go for two walks each day, one in the morning and one in the evening.  The weather was great and it was so nice to be out.

 We did go out to eat twice.  We went to Red Lobster for dinner one evening.

 For breakfast one morning we went to IHop and got rotii totii pancakes.

One morning we went to the Swap Meet.  It was an open covered place and it wasn't too crowded on a Friday.  Dad got a car duster.

 We did watch a lot of TV.  We got to watching Chicago Fire in particular and must have watched 6 or 7 episodes.

 One night we went to bingo back at Leisure World.  Here's dad with two friends that lived by their old house in Mesa.

 Bingo game in process.

I had a great time.  Thanks Dad.

Easter

For Easter we celebrate the day Jesus Christ over come death and rose from the grave.  He took upon him the pain of our sins so we too could rise from death also and return to heaven and have forgiveness of our sins.

We keep this in remembrance throughout the day.  We also had LDS General Conference this weekend so we were able to listen to talks by church leaders from home.

We also did some Easter Egg hunting for the children.

 Scarlett

 Penelope

 Tucker.  They stayed the night so first thing in the morning they got to find three eggs each.

 Leon.  We did a big Easter Egg hunt in the afternoon.

 Penelope found a giant egg.  Talitha and David brought over some of the biggest eggs you've ever seen for the kids.

 Mallory.

 Penelope and Scarlett.

 Mallory.

 Penelope.

 Mallory.

 The adults watched from the deck.  They had an Easter Egg hunt too that was organized by Caleb.

 Tucker and Andrew.  They were a little less calm in their hunting for eggs.

 Andrew.

 Tucker.

 Andrew.

We also celebrated Leon's birthday with presents and a cake.

Baseball cake.

Easter is a good time to remember what Jesus did for us and to be with family.  Thank you Caleb, Doranda, Bob, Tucker, Penelope, Scarlett, Leon, Malachi, Layne, Andrew, Mallory, Talitha, and David for sharing Easter with us, and for those we talked to on the phone also.

Swimming Lessons

On Saturday we watched Mallory take swimming lessons.

 She seems to like being in the water and worked really hard swimming back and forth across the pool.

It's an Olympic size pool and we saw her go the length of it doing several different strokes:  American crawl, back stoke, side stroke, elementary back stoke, and frog kick.  She can do them all.  She's pretty good.

 Then she practiced some diving.

It looked like a lot of fun.

Dirt and Rocks

We had a huge job out at the triplex to fix up the back yard and get it ready for grass.  Jacquelyn, Caleb and I worked for about six hours. Fortunately it was a sunny day and the weather was great.

This is the finished product with Jacquelyn running the roller over the dirt after we put the grass seed down.  The yard got all messed up when they hooked us up to the sewer line and decommissioned the old septic tank system.

 It was full of rocks,  Small pieces like this and larger ones that all had to be sorted out and taken away in a wheel barrow.

Then we had five yards of dirt brought in that we spread over the area.

Forbidden Powers

New ebook coming out later this month.  Here's a look at a draft of the cover.

It's a fantasy tale full of intrigue, adventure, and magic.

Mallory's Birthday

Happy birthday Mallory.  She's seven years old.

 She came over to our house and we gave her a present and Talitha came over too and gave her a present.  We went out to eat at Taco Time.

We love Mallory.  She is so sweet and is very smart.  She is fun to be around and always smiles and brightens our day.  We are so lucky to be her grandparents.