27 February 2022

Gibson made pizza with the Young Men from our ward on Wednesday night. In the photo are Gibson, Noah and Ed.

Helen and Gibson went to the Crater Boys' Basketball game on Friday night. Here is a photo of Helen and friends.

After the game, Helen took Jason, Gibson and Daniel to Chick-fil-A.

On Saturday, our stake Relief Society organized a walk to the temple. Women met at the fairgrounds, an elementary school and a park depending on the distance they wanted to walk. The longest walk started first and gathered together with the other groups as we got closer to the temple. Becky started with the group at the fairgrounds. The walk was advertised as 6 miles long, but our town just isn't that big. We wove back and forth on some streets and made some loops around neighborhoods and might have walked 5 miles. This is a photo of some of them women just before we turned down the street toward the temple. 

This is a photo at the temple with a larger group of women. After being closed for covid and remodeling, our temple has finally reopened! When the stake Relief Society presidency planned the activity, they did not know when it would reopen. With the activity lining up in the same time period as the reopening, the walk felt like celebration of the temple and the joy we experience from having a temple in our small town.

20 February 2022

Gibson played in the last concert for the winter series on Sunday afternoon. Becky volunteered as an usher and took this photo of Gibson before the performance.

This container of drumsticks behind the snare drums caught her eye. We didn't know there was such a wide variety of styles.

This is a photo of Samuel, Ezra and Gibson after the concert. The symphony will take a few weeks off from rehearsing and then begin preparing for their spring concert.

Helen spent the first half of the week in Portland at the state DECA competition. They walked to a Trailblazers game on Saturday. From the left are Collin, Tyler, Helen, Noah, Hannah, Clara, Malia, Lily, Mackenzie, Chloe, Lucy, Mary, Rowen, Tayvon, Ryder and Bryan.

They stopped for dinner at a food truck parking lot. Clockwise from the left: Collin, Rowen, Mary, Mackenzie, Lucy, Lily, Clara, Tyler, Noah, Malia, Hannah, Tayvon, Ryder, Helen, Chloe and Bryan.

They met lots of great people from around the state. This is a photo of Crater kids playing cards with Will, Colin and Olin from Bend.

Here is the Crater team all dressed in their DECA blazers. Front row: Malia, Lily, Mackenzie, Lucy, Collin and Rowen. Back row: Bryan, Noah, Clara, Tyler, Chloe, Hannah, Tayvon, Helen, Ryder and Mary.

They spent lots of their spare time preparing for their role plays and getting ready for competition which occurred on Monday and Tuesday. The event ended with an awards ceremony Tuesday night. Helen sent us a link so we could watch from home. Helen won 5th place in the Retail Marketing event and she and her teammate, Chloe, won 2nd place in the Business Ethics event. This is a screenshot from the awards ceremony of Helen waiting onstage for the awards to be announced.

This is a photo of Helen and Chloe with their trophies. Their win means they will travel to Atlanta in April for the International Career Development Conference.

Helen went to Kate's birthday party on Saturday night and a bunch of kids ended up in our backyard playing hide and seek. Front row: Lila, Danny and Elise. Middle row: Kate, Luci, Karrah, Emma, Noah and Natalya. Back row: Helen, Addi, Mary and Shaun.

Our stake held stake conference this weekend. Elder Vo'i Taeoalii from Hawaii presided at the conference. A Polynesian family in our stake made leis for Elder Taeoalii and the members of the stake presidency. This is a photo of Elder Taeoalii and President Idiart, showing their leis.

And this is a photo of Brandan with his lei, along with our friend, Erik. We enjoyed the beautiful conference and the spirit of Hawaii added to the spirit of the meeting

13 February 2022

The Thurmans invited several people over last Sunday to make Valentines for senior citizens. For the left are Jason, Seth, Kate, Ike, Helen, Vienna and Sam. 

This is a photo of Gibson with his charming Valentine's Day tiger.

After a year and a half of learning, volunteering, working and teaching at Craterworks, Gibson has to step away for a bit to make room for other kids who want to intern at the maker space. He can still use the space for his own projects, but he's not a peer teacher this semester. Nathan, the Craterworks teacher, invited the original group of students to make t-shirts to commemorate their role in getting the Crater High School/Craterworks partnership off the ground.

This weekend the Youth Symphony had their winter concert series, with concerts in Grants Pass, Medford and Ashland. Brandan and Becky attended the concert in Grants Pass. The symphony played a terrific selection of music from the 19th century, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2 finale, Elgar's Nimrod, Beethoven's 5th Symphony, movement 1 and the finale and selections from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. If you closed your eyes, you'd never guess a how young the performers were. This is a photo of the symphony warming up.

Brandan and Becky drove up to Portland on Saturday to attend the temple. We had a beautiful day. Great news! Our temple's remodeling is complete and will reopen on Tuesday, February 15. Some restrictions due to covid are still in place, but we are looking forward to a quick 5 minute drive instead of a 4 hour drive. We're thankful for all of the opportunities we had to be in temples in Oregon, California, Idaho and Utah while our temple was closed. We took easy access to the temple for granted before covid, and now we have even greater appreciation for the peace and strength that come from temple service and worship.

Meanwhile, back home, Gibson had another concert. Jason and Ed showed their support by coming to hear him play. True friendship is listening to an hour of classical music with no distractions. Ed and Jason thought the music was surprisingly good.

Helen is in Portland for five days for the state DECA competition. She sent some photos which we'll try to describe and then edit the captions when Helen is back home and can fill in the names. This is a photo of some of the team with their Crater DECA t-shirts. Back row: Lily, Malia, Rowen, Mr. Rogan, Helen, Lucy and Clara. Front row: Chloe, Mary, Hannah and Mackenzie.

They went shopping at a mall. Here are Rowen, Helen and Mary.

The team drove up in two vans.

Making the DECA square.

They went to a Portland Trailblazers game on Saturday. Here are Helen, Lucy, Mackenzie, Ryder and Tayvon.

Chloe, Mary and Helen.

One more game photo. The kids have more sight seeing today. The competition begins on Monday. The event is shorter this year (blame it on covid?), but at least they got to go. Helen is having a great time and we are excited to hear her stories.

6 February 2022

 The Youth Symphony is preparing for their next concert. This is a photo of one of their rehearsals. Gibson is in the middle of the photo.

Helen is traveling to Portland later this week for the state DECA tournament. To pay for the trip, her advisor gave all of the students an entrepreneurial challenge. He gave them $20 as an initial investment and they needed to use that money to earn the rest of the fee for state, plus pay him back his $20. Helen decided to sell handpainted Valentine cookies. She created a flyer and texted it to friends to get orders. The first 5 people she texted ordered 8 dozen cookies so she stopped collecting orders, knowing it would be a big task to complete all the cookies. Helen spent the weekend baking, frosting and decorating the cookies.

Helen individually handpainted each cookie. She used gel food coloring mixed with almond extract as paint. She used brand new paintbrushes since someone will eat the cookies, maybe. They might be too pretty to eat, although Brandan, Becky and Gibson verified that the cookies taste very good.

Here are a dozen cookies boxed up to deliver. They look exquisite! Between the cookies she sold and the ones she made to experiment with, Helen painted over 100 cookies.

The next two photos are from Abe's mission facebook page. He and his companion, Elder Sutton, baptized Son Juwon this week. Son Juwon met missionaries online who referred him to Abe and his last companion, Elder Randall, to teach. 

We are happy for Brother Son and happy that Abe's mission shared these photos so quickly!