Monday Morning Grandma--Darren's Amazing Map

Sorry I’m late this week. Perhaps I should have written about something else, but I already had a plan:

It took longer than expected to finish staining and applying polyurethane to the frame around this amazing map of our 2012 trip to visit all 71 (at the time) temples in the contenental USA and Canada. (If you want to see more, go back on my blog. I’m deleting the posts between Monday Morning Grandma and the trip, so it shouldn’t take too long.) We only visited a couple of them under construction or renovation that were in the area we were visiting. I have a picture of each temple we visited under the Temple page of this blog.

Already there are several new temples finished. To answer the question we usually get, “No, we aren’t going to go back and see them.” It would be nice, but one magnificent trip like that is enough for a lifetime. The orange flags are where the Latter-day Saint temples are.  

One more big thank you to our son Darren for making this map. You can see the detail in the close ups.

Monday Morning Grandma--My Writing

This blog is mostly about my writing, or will be once I get published, so I thought I’d bring my readers up to date on what I’m doing in that vein.

I finished the first draft of Escape from Fire (temporary title). I’m re-editing Hidden Heritage while I let EFF rest. I plan to submit HH again in the next few months. I’ve started one I’m calling Car Crash for lack of a better title. Then there’s Divine Love, my first novel, and the second one called Diane’s Story (centered on the heroine of DL’s roommate). I need to decide whether DL is strong enough, or if I should drop it, and write DS after I finish the Car Crash story. On-going is my life story that I’m going to write as a semi-autobiography about growing up in the 50’s because there is no way I could get permission from my childhood classmates to use them. There are a few other bits and pieces hanging out on my computer, but those are the main ones. Everything BC (before computer) has been lost or thrown away. 

Monday Morning Grandma: Alaska

Today I thought I’d post some pictures from our trip to Alaska:

Our ship the Norwegian Jewel

My husband, me, our son-in-law, our daughter

Whale watching in Juneau

Lumberjack show in Ketchikan

Sawyer Glacier

Skagway train ride--Dead Horse Trail from gold rush of '98: White Pass 

Sunset in Victoria, British Columbia

Monday Morning Grandma--Washy Washy

I was right about not having Internet access--$.75 per minute. I’m home now. I know it isn’t Monday, but we got in late last night. Today’s post is about doing something special with something simple. The job of spraying hands with sanitizer at the entrance to the dining room on a ship may seem like a mundane boring job, but Rowen brightens everyone’s day with his “Washy Washy” song. That is called going the extra mile. In the video clip, he is probably on a tropical cruise. Ours was to Alaska, thus the more formal white shirt. If you want to see him in action, go to the youtube link below, or on the U Tube web site type in "washy washy" he was the second one when I went there. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRaUayv-wWY

If we all put that type of extra effort into whatever we do not only to enhance our own life, we can touch and cheer other people. I’m going to try and follow his example.