Grandma's House

Yesterday, we went up to visit Ryan's grandmother, Roberta. She is the cutest lady. I love my grandmas, but I am jealous of Ryan for having this lady as a grandma growing up. She is very spunky, whitty, and opinionated. She is always telling you what she thinks. She is in pretty good health for her age, though I think her eye sight is failing her. She lives alone (though right down the street from two of her kids) and is very independant. We don't get up there as often as we should because life just gets so busy. I know that's not much of an excuse, but it's true. Weeknights are obviously out, and Saturdays are consumed with yard work, soccer, or doing stuff as a family. So we shoot for Sundays, except this year we have one o'clock church (YUCK!). We never have time to make it out to her house with that schedule. But yesterday was Stake Conference (more on that in a minute) and we were out of church by noon. So we packed a lunch, and headed off.

She is so fun to visit with. We talked about all the goings on with the family. Who's having babies, how school is going for the college grandkids, church gossip, etc. She gets pretty upset when we talk about how much her small town is growing. The constant flow of move-ins puts Grandma in a bad mood. "Why do these people have to move up here anyway?" We joke about how we could never move up there because we would get the same reception from the original residents, but Grandma insists it would be different because we are family, and family would be accepted. Ryan's Grandpa, Leo was the Mayor at one time, and now Uncle Blake is mayor, so we have an "in". I love small towns and their strong sense of community (as long as you are not an outsider). It must be frustrating to see your small town community get bigger and less tight-knit. It was a fun visit. We love you, Grandma! We will try and come up more often.

As for Stake Conference, it was really good. Ryan and I went to a really early temple session Saturday morning. That was a test of faith, because I didn't sleep well the night before and was functioning on about 2 hours sleep. But for what was a little sacrifice, I got big rewards in terms of an outpouring of the Spirit (and I stayed awake!) My body didn't like the lack of sleep, but that's OK, you can always make that up later, right? We also always try and go to the adult session on Saturday night. I think it is where the best talks are given (or maybe it's just I can actually listen instead of dealing with kids). I wasn't disappointed. The talks were on just staying on the path and enduring to the end. It wasn't one of those talks that leave you depressed or make you feel like you aren't doing enough. It was very uplifting. When we arrived on Sunday morning for the general session, the chapel was dark. The power had gone out earlier and hadn't come back on. We thought it was a little weird sitting in the dark, but enjoyed the speakers. The presiding general authority talked about how the priesthood leaders had met in the morning to discuss what to do about the outage. They prayed that the sound system would work so that the conference could be held. I hadn't realized it, but the lights were off, and the microphone still worked. We could hear everything perfectly. I don't know how it happened, but to me, it was a little miracle that strengthened my faith. What a neat weekend.