We miss our friends in the former 'hood. Miss the Garden Heights Ward crowd. But the new ward seems good, too. I suppose they're all good (except when sometimes they're not). There are more children here for Emma to fraternize with (or maybe sororotize, since she's a girl). She has been making many acquaintances.
We like our new home very much, although it is more of a commute if, say for example, Joe wants to go to work in the morning. Sometimes he takes the train...catches it at A Hundredth South (dont'cha love Utah...One Hundredth South???) and listens to Dennis Miller on the I-Pod.
From our front yard we can see hang gliders off the point of the mountain in the late afternoon. The other day we drove up to where they take off and land. What a spectacle. A sea of high-sensation-seeking individuals nearly bumping into each other in mid-air.
There are more birdsounds out here, which I like. And wind in the trees, which I REALLY like. That might be my favorite sound, wind in the trees. That and train whistles, which we hear more of here, too. Reminds me of my youth in La Grande, the sound of the train. (But Paul Simon says everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. One winter night, two houses ago, when the furnace came whooshing on, I said "I love the sound of a furnace coming on," and Joe mumbled, "Everyone loves the sound of a furnace in the distance.")
We like the neighborhood a lot so far and hope Emma will be happy growing up here. There are a few internationally adopted children in the ward (one from Nepal, one from Cuba, one from Russia). And two little Thai girls, aged 3 and 5, up the street whom Emma has played with a few times. And our next door neighbors are, get this, native Chinese. They have a 20-year-old daughter who goes to school in New York City. So ethnic diversity is, surprisingly, alive and well in Draper, Utah. That's a good thing. Plus, Draper Elementary School has a Mandarin immersion program starting in first grade (which is one of the reasons we chose this house, because it's in Draper Elementary boundaries and I really want Emma to be in this program).
Everything seems so fraught with significance when you first move in...you see somebody crossing the street out your window and think, "Am I going to know that person for the next 25 years?" When the Primary kids got up to sing on Mother's Day I told Joe, "We're going to be going to these kids' wedding receptions." "That's a lot of nested bowls," he replied.
Haven't been taking tons of photos lately. I took some the other day at an end-of-the-preschool-year assembly for Emma. They had a Crocodile Hunter type of guy come in and show a bunch of reptiles, snakes, turtles, etc. to a group of about 40 four-year-olds. It was pretty intense and halfway through Emma came and sat on my lap; she was a bit leery of the critters. He put a live scorpion in his mouth, for crying out loud. He said the way you could tell whether a scorpion was harmful or not was to put it in your mouth to see if it stung you. Har har. Then at the end he hauled out a 10-foot albino boa constrictor for everyone to pet. It was half fascinating and half creepy. And the photos didn't turn out very well, maybe all for the best.
But I do have a dandy photo from two weeks ago, when we went to Andy and Kathryn's graduation from the School of Accounting at the U. We are ULTRA proud of them. Andy graduated in December, but went through the ceremony this semester with Kat (who, by the by, was chosen as the outstanding senior in Accounting). They are smart AND photogenic.
Congratulations, AndyKat.
