Fathers' Day

The fathers at Cove Fort were feted last night at a social in their honor.  At the end of the evening the ladies sang some “ballads” to them.  Below are the words to my favorite one:

            Five Handsome Husbands

        (sung to tune of 5 Little Ducks)

Many handsome husbands we do know –

Fat ones, skinny ones, tall ones so,

But the one in the middle that belongs to me

I love him and he loves me.

Down to Cove Fort we did go

Wibble, wobble, wibble, wobble to and from

But the one in the middle that belongs to me

I love him and he loves me.

I am happy to say that I was not the lyricist for this, but it was fun to sing along while one of the sisters played her accordion.  They were all presented with aprons afterwards with an embroidered picture of Cove Fort.  Quite the nice gift.

We were expecting Chris DeWoody this week, but due to time constraints and prior commitments she wasn’t able to make it.  It was nice to have been thought of at least.  As soon as we knew that Chris wouldn’t make it, I joined the carpool to go watch a woven rug demonstration up in Kanosh.  The lady who weaves all the rugs at Cove Fort had invited the sisters to come up and see how she does it.  The loom was similar in many aspects to the one at the fort, but since it was too big for her needs, she had her husband cut off part of it and now has a traveling loom for when she goes around to do demonstrations.  One of the amazing things was that she strings the loom with enough warp to make about fifty-five foot long rugs.  Someone asked her how much material it took to weave one five foot rug and she said 180 yards.  I really couldn’t understand how she used so much, until someone said that the fabric was only 2 inches wide, so she really used ten yards per rug.  She can make one rug every two hours and charges $60 for one.  We even got to give it a try.  It requires the coordination of hands on the shuttle and feet on the pedals.  It would be an interesting pastime as long as you had enough room to store the loom.

Stephen and I had the opportunity to go on a ride on the bike path along the Sevier River.  Luckily, our directors, the Christensens, have a bike carrier for four bikes so we were able to get the bikes there.  We started at Big Rock Candy Mountain and coasted down the trail.  Unfortunately going back was uphill.  I was very glad to finally get to the top of the trail at the end of the ride.  I’ve included a picture of the train tunnel that we rode to before turning around. 

On our P-day we drove over to Monroe, a small farming community that my mother lived in for a few years when she remarried.  We were geocaching and had an opportunity to drive up into Monrovian Canyon.  It had the steep high rock faces with a beautiful stream running through it.  I wish now that I had selected a few more caches in the canyon so that we would have spent more time there.  We must have been there at just the right time of year because there were swallowtail butterflies all over the roadside.

One of the things that Stephen did for me this week was to go get the rider mower so that I could cut the grass in our fenced in area.  I can see why people enjoy cutting grass when they have one of those.  Who knows, I may turn into Forrest Gump and start offering to cut the grass for everyone in Clovis.

Linda riding her new toy.

On Thursday and Friday I was excited in that I received a referral card on both of those days.  The first card was from a Korean family from Wisconsin.  They said that they would like a Book of Mormon in Korean but the best I could do was English.  They are on vacation, so I will contact them in a week or so to see if they have any questions and to see if we can have missionaries bring them a Book of Mormon in Korean.  Then the next day a couple from San Diego stopped by on their journey to Massachusetts where they are moving.  The husband actually gave me the name of a friend that he thought might benefit from the Gospel.  We’ll see how these turn out.  Even yesterday I had a family who did not want a Book of Mormon but accepted the Joseph Smith Story and the Family Proclamation.  The mom said she was going to read them.  The Missionary Department is encouraging the missionaries to stay in contact (phone, email) with those who show interest and be their bridge until they are ready to meet with the missionaries in their local areas.

Things are starting to get busier at the fort all the time.  On Saturday, our count for the day was 620.  It was great, because as soon as you finished one tour there was another one waiting for you.  This is SO much better than just sitting around waiting for people to show up.