The first group of photos this week are from Helen's trip to San Francisco. The group went to a men's basketball game between BYU and San Francisco. BYU won at the last minute by 2 points, 71-69. Back row: Seth, Scott and Jason. Front row: Mary, Annie and Helen.
Here is a photo after the game. Back row Seth, Helen, Justin, Scott and Greg. Front row; Kate, Mary, Tiffany, Mary, Elsa, Angel, Jason and Sam. To the right: Beka and Brant.
On Sunday the group watched zoom church and walked around the temple grounds at the Oakland temple. This is a photo of Elsa, Annie, Helen, Kate, Mary and Vienna.
They also went to the beach. Back row: Sam, Kate, Helen, Annie, Scott, Mary and Jason. Front row: Elsa, Ike and Seth.
Mary, Kate, Annie and Helen.
Annie, Kate, Mary and Helen.
On Monday they stopped at the Jelly Belly factory on the drive home. These pictures of Superman and Wonder Woman are constructed from jelly beans. The kids are using their hands to make the letter S for Superman on their chests.
Helen had a great time. We're happy she got to go and thankful for kind friends who included her.
On Monday Brandan and Becky helped with a stake service project. A non profit in our community is turning an old hotel into low income housing. Each of the hotel rooms will be a comfortable, fully furnished studio apartment. The apartments are nearly finished, but the non profit had a big, dirty job to tackle. In the decades the hotel operated, the owners used a large space under the hotel to discard any unwanted items: broken and outdated furniture, toilets, showers, empty paint cans, leftover supplies from repairs and countless other items were all crowded into the space. The result was a dangerous fire hazard. The space needed to be cleared out and fire walls need to be built before anyone can move into the apartments. We piled the junk outside the building, then loaded it onto trailers to take to the landfill.
The space was bigger than a crawl space and not quite a basement. When we started, this room was packed. Our crew of about 20 cleared it out in about 2 hours. Everything was very dusty and we were thankful for our N95 masks.
This sign looks very out of date with such low prices.
We found an even older sign advertising cheaper prices.
This sign made Becky laugh. Most hotels today require a credit card in order to make a reservation. We felt like this was a great project. We made a visible difference in a short time and it was the kind of low skill work that would be a shame for the non profit to pay a crew to do.
Gibson spent a lot of his quarantine time building a 3D model of DNA for his biology class.
Here is his finished model, showing the base pairs, the anti-parallel phosphate and sugar chain and the double helix structure. Gibson got to go back to school on Tuesday. We are thankful that he didn't get very sick with covid and just had a sore throat for a couple of days.
Back at school, Gibson worked on new projects at Craterworks. He is learning how to cast items out of pewter. This is a Bigfoot figurine he cast using a pattern made of wood to make mold.
He also helped Ross, the shop master, build a prototype for a bike hook. Gibson got to use a metal band saw and a plasma cutter and weld for the first time.
Several months ago we noticed an opportunity to cook dinner for a homeless shelter on the Just Serve app. This planted a seed and we started thinking if it would be possible for our family to prepare and serve dinner for 64 people. We signed up for a date and planned a simple menu of huli huli chicken and coconut rice. We spent a good portion of Saturday cooking dinner and with some careful strategizing, cooked dinner in our not-that-big kitchen. In this photo, Gibson is prepping the coconut rice. All 6 pans fit in our oven at once and we extended the cooking time and rotated the pans to make sure the rice cooked thoroughly. Brandan is shredding some of the 30 pounds of chicken that we cooked in batches in an instant pot.
The shelter had the option of dropping dinner off for the staff to serve or staying to serve ourselves. We wanted to serve dinner so we could learn as much as we could about the process and to let Helen and Gibson help. First we learned that because of the current covid spike, the shelter is only about half full right now. We only served dinner to 35 people. The leftover food doesn't go to waste, though. The staff reuses food for days when donations run short and also shares food donations with the Urban Campground which is home to over 100 other homeless people. The shelter has lots of rules for the residents which probably help ease the way for so many strangers to live together, but overall it seemed friendly and well run. We will definitely make dinner for the shelter again.
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