Busy Things

I'm hosting the invention club tonight at our house. 

Invention club (they call it "Simada") is turning out to be a really fun group. There are maybe four people my age, and the rest are much older ladies who are a great time. At last month's meeting, the older ladies started talking about their cataracts and cataract surgeries. I jumped right in the conversation and compared cataract and surgery experiences, and we talked about the pros and cons of the different lens options. I can't have these conversations with women who are my own age. Maybe these older ladies are the group I fit in with after all, haha.

I've been working on getting the inside of the house done (almost there!), and then we'll begin the backyard landscaping process. Until then, you can often find Dan reading and soaking up the endless sunshine in the dirt yard. 

I sent back the second dining table that came last week because there were several things we didn't like about it; for example, it was so rustic that it kept snagging our clothes. It's been very hard to find the right dining table with everything we want, but the third table came yesterday, and we're keeping it! I can stop searching now. 

One night we went outside and saw a strange ring around the moon. I searched online and found out it happens if there are ice crystals high in the atmosphere. We've never seen this before, but it feels like we're always seeing new things here in Arizona that we've never seen before. One night there was a SpaceX launch that Colby watched go across the sky. He called us, but by the time we ran outside to look, it was gone and just left a faint white streak behind it.

Last Friday Dan woke up early and went hiking by himself. (He gets every other Friday off work.) He climbed to the ridge of a mountain and then hiked along it for a while. 

This week Paige started an internship with a nearby city, helping with their historical collections. It's unpaid but will give her valuable experience. She started a job this week as well, just a temporary one for now. And this week she also started volunteering online for a group that researches stolen Nazi art. She's been applying to grad schools and has been accepted to a few for next fall. She's also applied to several internships for next summer. 

Last week was stressful for Leah, as she had four interviews with grad schools and internship programs. So far she's been told she's first on the waiting list for two of them, got into one, and she's waiting to hear from the other one. She has three more grad school interviews in the next weeks, then some big decisions to make.

Colby spends each weekend rock climbing and bouldering with friends and told us it never gets boring. Last week he met us after a day of bouldering, and we ate at a restaurant and then he came over to walk our neighborhood and watch a movie with us. The next day he met us at the zoo and we saw several animals we've never seen before, including this anteater that fascinated all of us. 

Carson's doing great and really likes the area where he's serving his mission and the down-to-earth people who live there. He's training a new companion and enjoys that. He's been gone five months. I feel like it was such a blur when he left...we had just moved into our house, had boxes everywhere, weren't settled in at all, didn't know anyone in the new ward yet, didn't know this new city, etc.