Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona...almost

As of Saturday of last week, we were 1009 miles from home, soaking up some air conditioning at my parent's condo in Las Vegas. Lubbock was three day behind us, along with the entire states of New Mexico and Arizona, the The South rim of the Grand Canyon, two Motel 6s, bags and bags of candy and veggies and fruit, about 12 audio chapters of The Deathly Hallows, and the winding traffic crawling across the top of the Hoover Dam.

Now we're in Utah with the QB's family and we just finished vegetarian rueben sandwiches, French onion soup, and key lime cheese cake for the QB's birthday. We've got lots of pictures to share and we'll slowly get them up, but we just wanted to update you all on our adventure.

Here's the first set of pictures, mostly from the Grand Canyon.

"The canyon was Grand," says the QB. Mr. Baseball wanted to take a lot of pictures.

The Monkey conked about 4pm near the end of the shuttle line on the south rim. He slept for about fifteen minutes before getting his energy back. As a result of his nap he missed both a water break and a potty break.

He went from wiggly and bouncing off the walls to this in about two minutes.

The cannon ball (that's the name we've decided on, by the way) was asleep too.

The boys thought the canyon was sooo big.

We wish the cannon ball could have gotten more of a kick out of the view. As far as he was concerned, the trip was great because he got held all day. We could have been back home for all he cared.

Aubrey, the QBs little sister, came along for the trip and was a big help. We were glad to have her around.

We stayed at a hotel in Holbrook, AZ, a few hours east of the Canyon, and spent the evening swimming and eating microwave dinners in the hotel room. The Cannon Ball didn't want to go in the water much, but he liked watchi

We brought sandwiches for lunch--and I didn't want to share.

The thing about going to the grand canyon is...all your photos look like you're standing in front of a fake cardboard backdrop. But really, we were there.

Really.

We took this at the John Wesley Powell overlook. In 1869 Powell led his men down the canyon on long boats. I kept thinking the canyon looked like a photograph, but Powell and his men wouldn't have had that reference point--how did they describe the vista? the way the horizon performs the double magic of both foreshortening into a two-dimensional screen and fading away into an ever expanding horizon?

The first great trick of the Grand Canyon's South Rim is that you get there, but you aren't really there yet. We figured we would arrive at about 10:30 a.m, but that was just to the town outside the park. We didn't actually get to the rim until almost noon. That's where we ate lunch and started our tour.

We had no idea until we chanced upon this Motor Inn (called the Wigwam Hotel) in Holbrook, AZ, but the town we stayed in our first night is a historical oute 66 town and one of the places used as a model for the movie Cars.

It's on the historical registry and looks like an incredible place to stay for kiddos. We thought all the old cars were a nice touch.

Post Script to New Carpet

So...

...I've been thinking lately that just having a roof over our heads makes us in better shape than a whole lot of people in the world, and that it seems ridiculous to let a little dust and dead skin cells get to me, and that a certain amount of ingratitude, or a sense of entitlement or delusion hides behind such feelings. And yet, I'm really excited about the sheer cleanliness of the new carpet. I know what's underneath it, because I swept and mopped it all (well, I or the QB, but you get the idea). And I feel happier, more comfortable, more at peace in a home that feels inviting and new.

Hmmm...liberal guilt is a befuddling phenomenon. Can't feel excited about anything without also feeling a little guilty.

I guess that's better than the mindset of the guy I saw the other day driving a truck with a bumper sticker that said, "I love my carbon footprint."


And that is, sadly, the most common remedy for liberal guilt: a mantra that says, more or less: "At least I'm not THAT bad."

well...it took us a week, but...

We got the house put back together after the carpet installation.

And it's starting to look good.

Here's the rest of the story...


A week before the install, I put in a small tile entry by the front door. Check out the dust here beneath the old carpet we pulled up. Yuck!


It was my first real tile job, and if you ever come over to the house, don't look too closely. Instead, step into the house quickly and then say something like, "wow, what great tile, it looks so good, you must have had a professional install that."

Definitely don't say, "ouch, I stubbed my toe on this uneven tile."
Copper likes it.

flash forward a week or so to Friday morning. We thought the carpet would come Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. Friday had come and the carpet and pad had arrived at the store and the store was just lining up an installer.

We woke up early and started moving furniture and boxes and children outside. I expected the installation crew to show up at about 10:00 a.m.

At 11:00 a.m I called the carpet company for an ETA. Do to a laundry-list of scheduling and personnel problems, none of their regular installers were available. The folks at the store told me they'd keep calling people until they found someone they could trust.

In the meantime we decided to pull up carpet and pad and clean while we were waiting.

This is how we took care of the old carpet....


The boys were really good about all the chaos. They helped move a ton of stuff out of the house and they helped pull up a lot of pad. I felt an immense amount of satisfaction doing such a big, dirty job with my boys along for the trip.

Here is the lovely linoleum sub-floor.

The QB got us all McDonald's for lunch (because it was close--why do I feel like I have to make an excuse for that? because its McDonald's! anyway...) and the boys played basketball and rode bikes and tried to build a fort out of the piled-up rolls of old, disgusting, smelly, dusty, dirty carpet (this after twice telling them not to climb on it--GUHross)

At 3:30pm, after all the carpet and pad had been pulled and we'd swept and mopped the sub floor, we got a call from the carpet company with news that installers were on the way, but wouldn't be there for an hour.

So I decided to paint our bedroom (the furniture was out, and we already had all the paint and tools, so I figured, hey, why not).

The installers (Victor and Eric were their names) showed up about 5pm, measured the floor, and set to work. They told us they weren't sure how much they could get done that night, but they assured us they would work fast and do a good job.

They did.

It took them five hours (with a short break for some Domino's pizza that the QB picked up for dinner--yeah, that's right. we had McDonald's for lunch and Domino's for dinner. Our stomachs paid for it later) but the floor looked great.

Malachi, our home teacher came over about 8:30 pm to help us move furniture back into the house and by 9:30 pm everything was back inside and the installation crew had gone home.

Everything we owned was crammed into the living room, family room, and kitchen, and it took us an entire week to get the furniture back in place, the boxes unpacked, and the pictures hung.

But now it's really starting to feel like a home, and not just a place to live.




I remember lying in bed our first night in the house and struggling to fall asleep. I could almost feel the fibers of the carpet beneath the bed scratching at me, crawling beneath me, bristling under our foreign footprints. The shadow of the bodies that had slept (and died) in the house seemed to saturate every room, but the carpet in particular. How do I describe the feeling of living on that old, dusty, smelly carpet? It was a little like putting on someone else's dirty underwear.

Carpet is on a short list of things I don't ever really want to share with someone else (right up there with the aforementioned underwear, as well as with toothbrushes and week-old fridge leftovers).

But we got used to the carpet and by necessity stopped letting it bother us (we had no idea when we would be able to get new carpet, so complaining about it would have been useless). It wasn't until the new carpet was within striking distance that the numbness wore off and we began to let the carpet bug us again. And so, it was with great pleasure that we piled it all on our driveway and made room for the new, shiny carpet.

Now, I've got to go rub my face in it one more time, just to remind myself it's real.

Really.

I rubbed my face in it.

Really.

New Carpet Eve

About two months ago I posted here about our carpet dilemma, and my no-cash proposition to solve it. The two carpet companies I talked with both responded positively to my inquiry about bartering, but after following up twice with both stores and not getting anywhere, I'd given up on the idea.

Then, I got a call.

And that's how I ended up spending three weeks in June remodeling the office space at a local carpet company. I put in a new corrugated steel ceiling (very cool, looks a little like this ceiling in an Austin Restaurant) and hanging lights. I repaired some pretty severe water damage on one wall, and painted the entire office. I cut, painted, and installed baseboards and I spray painted eight filing cabinets. The only thing in the room I didn't do was rewire some plugs and install a new floor.

If I'd only done the work and gotten some carpet out of the deal, we would have been pleased, but the job has turned out to be so much more. In the process of working at the store I have gotten to know the owners (a husband and wife who've been in the carpet business for about ten years and spend their weekends playing elite little league baseball with their boys) and the handful of employees, installers, and contractors that frequent the store.

Good people. Every last one of them.

I mentioned the arrangement to my mom on the phone a few weeks ago--how I'd become friends with everyone at the store and how they'd not only been willing to work with me, but really welcomed me into their store family--and she said something like, "I wish carpet store owners in Vegas were more like that." And that got me thinking--what is it about one place that breeds selfishness and cynicism, while another place fosters trust and charity? It's not that Lubbock isn't without scoundrels or that Vegas isn't without saints--no, its something else.

Maybe its Texas. Maybe its the South. Maybe its the way that Lubbock maintains a "small town" feel despite the population climbing to nearly a quarter of a million people. Maybe its the power of putting yourself out there for someone.

I remember the first day I went to the carpet store to talk with Kim, one of the owners, about the work I would be doing for them. The end of the conversation came down to deciding how to calculate the value of my labor and after passing a few ideas back and forth, there was this kind of awkward moment in which I was trying to explain to her that I wanted to be compensated fairly, but I also wanted them to feel like they were getting a good deal.

Talking about money is hard.

really hard.

for me.

But I'm glad I explained myself, because Kim said she'd felt the same way and that she'd been a little nervous because I was a stranger and she and her husband had no idea what to expect.

We never signed a contract.

But we had a verbal one--I won't take advantage of you, and you won't take advantage of me.

During the three weeks I spent at the store they lent me their tools, let me drive their trucks, gave me the store credit card to make purchases, bought me lunch, gave me some flooring supplies for another project, and gave me free reign to come up with a way to put their remodeling ideas into reality.

Trust is a wonderful, terrible, awesome, essential, and risky venture.

And without it, none of us could ever get anything done.

And thanks to it, we've made some new friends...and to boot, we're getting new carpet tomorrow.

"Pour You Out a Blessing"

I haven't been writing much at all on the blog lately. Not because I don't want to, just busy. But today I felt like I needed to take time to write about this.


I get asked these questions a lot:
You mean you don't work? Your husband is a graduate student, you have 3 kids and you don't work? How do you live?

There's a lot to that question, much of it is a personal decision, but part of it is continually giving back. Sometimes financial blessings come to us at different times and different ways but we as a family have come to recognize the Lord's hand in our financial life. It's not something to brag or boast about, we don't even have two cars or money to go see movies in the theater, but the Lord always provides somehow.
The Lord and the church don't need our money. Our personal Franklin Family Contribution is not figured into our congregation's budget, and the Lord already has access to all the resources he needs. But He knows that we need to give, that something fundamentally changes inside us when we willingly and faithfully give. I paid tithes (more about that here) my whole life, it was a good experience as a child and a teenager but it didn't really mean anything until I had a husband and we had hungry mouths to feed and little bodies to keep warm and healthy.

Twice in our life we desperately needed money. Avoiding loans as much as possible and trying to be creative with our money and time we were coming up short. That's not the only two times we needed money, but both times prayers were answered in the same way.
A car accident.
Anyone could probably argue that's not a blessing. But when both times it meant a hit on the rear quarter panel on an older paid-for car and an insurance payout that still left it safely drivable without being fixed, I call it a blessing. It took some perspective of course, but I'm thankful anyway.

Many, many, many times in our nearly 8 years of marriage we've been surprised by the way just the right amount of money shows up in our life at just the right time. It doesn't mean we never have financial issues. When we do though, I'm never scared.

Tomorrow will bring new carpet into our house. If you knew our yearly 'salary' you would know replacing the older carpet throughout the house would not be in the budget. I am so so grateful. The Student often remarks that we cannot afford to not pay tithing. The blessings are just too great.



"Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it" (Malachi 3:10).

Amarillo--Land of the 72oz stake.

Not every city can say it is famous for a restaurant that offers a steak the size and weight of a laptop computer, but this is Texas, and Amarillo is a particularly Texan part of Texas. The city's logo has a pair of cowboy boots for LLs and in the brief history found in one of the tourist pamphlets we picked up at the hotel, we read that when the city got started, it had something like 500 people and 500,000 head of cattle.


We were not there, however, for the cattle, or the steaks, but for our cousins, who were coming through town on their way from Arizona to a new job in Wisconsin. We used Travelocity to find a cheap hotel with a pool and free breakfast and the boys chanted "Swimming! Swimming! Swimming!" the whole drive there. I think we were spoiled last summer when our apartment complex had a swimming pool and we got to go swimming every day.


Driving north out of Lubbock always makes me think of our drive from Ohio. The Interstate between Oklahoma city and Lubbock was the last leg of our journey and our first glimpse of Texas. We counted dead Armadillos on the road and watched cotton fields spread out like billowy quilts on all sides. We counted pick-up truck after pick-up truck and craned our necks in a small town called Groom where we passed this 190 foot cross:



Texas felt like a foreign country then, and it still does, in a lot of ways, but now I don't notice the cotton fields so much anymore, or the size of the sky, which stretches out before you on the road and runs all the way to the horizon line, like the whole world is divided into two great swaths of blue and brown.




The boys handled the drive really well and didn't fight at all. They read books and slept and we listened to some kids' music, all the while reminding the boys that we'd go swimming as soon as we got to the hotel. We even had their swim suits on the top of the suitcase.

We pulled up into the parking lot of the hotel, checked in and walked up the three flights of stairs toward our room, which was in the back of the hotel overlooking the pool.

As we walked down the open air hallway toward our room I said, "the pool is just around the corner boys!"

It was hot, and we were all ready for a dip.

Then we turned the corner.


Travelocity advertised this hotel as having a pool, and I guess, technically, they weren't lying. The boys were again sad, but they managed their disappointment and reverted to jumping on the hotel beds while I got on the phone with Travelocity to figure something out.

Eventually, Travelocity paid for us to move to a hotel right next door and the boys got to go swimming. The next day we met our cousins, ate some breakfast and headed off to the Amarillo Zoo. We had Pizza Planet for lunch with a coupon out of the gas station phone book and hit the local science museum on our way out of town.

All in all, it was a nice mini-vacation.

Even without the 72 ounce steak.

Yikes.

I can't resist I good English Major joke...

Notice, this one was taken at the botany pond at BYU....small world, this internet is.


I think I'll use this when I talk to my Freshman comp students about the difference between serif and sans serif fonts.