30 June 2024

This is a photo of our ward from Father's Day. We're blessed to live and serve with these wonderful people. 

One of our beds broke when Abe was visiting earlier this month. We still feel the need for a bed for Abe, even if Abe no longer lives at home. Brandan and Gibson repaired and reinforced the bed this week and it is back in action.

Brandan spent three days this week in Utah visiting Dan and Martha. Brandan enjoyed the time visiting with them, working on a bit of family history and helping out with some projects. They met up with Helen for dinner one night.

Becky took part in an externship this week, touring construction and manufacturing sites in Klamath, Josephine and Jackson counties. The purpose of the externship was to help teachers connect students with a variety of career pathways. Below are a few photos from the externship. Altogether we visited 10 sites.

This site is retrofitting a bridge on Highway 97 to prevent it from collapsing in an earthquake.

We toured a construction site that is expanding a juvenile detention center.

This is a large project building a reservoir.

We toured a pre-apprenticeship program that introduces students to the wood shop by helping them build birdhouses. This is the house Becky built. After building hundreds of bird houses with students, the program has developed a very efficient process and novices can build a birdhouse in about an hour.

Our dear friend, Masood Badizadegan, died earlier this month from cancer. Masood recently retired and was looking forward to golden years spent with family and friends. It feels like he is gone too soon. His death is a good reminder not to take relationships for granted.

We met Masood about 10 years ago when his wife, Debbie, was dying of cancer. Debbie was a member of our church who grew up in Utah. Masood was a Muslim who grew up in Iran. They met at the University of Utah. Masood and Debbie agreed on core values, but raised their children without religion. Over the years, we've become friends with Desi and Ari, Masood's daughters, and have gotten to know Majeed, his son. Majeed, Desi and Ari asked Brandan to conduct Masood's funeral service and speak at the funeral. Brandan counseled with the family to make sure he was respectful of everyone's feelings and gave an uplifting Muslim/Mormon talk, quoting from the Qur'an, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Majeed gave a beautiful eulogy and Masood's brother, Saeed, offered Muslim prayers at the burial site. Following Muslim tradition, family and friends helped bury the coffin with some symbolic handfuls of dirt and flowers from the floral arrangements and then stayed until the cemetery staff completed the burial.

Masood was an extraordinary and complex man: generous, compassionate, intelligent, observant, funny, curious. However, everyone has at least one story about Masood and food. Masood loved good food and was an excellent cook himself. We especially enjoyed his Persian food.

Brandan has been working on our backyard, pulling out the grass and redesigning the sprinkler system. This week we went to the nursery and picked up two new tress and a bunch of smaller shrubs to fill in space where there used to be grass.

We took the trees home by getting them most of the way into the trunk and back of our cars. Luckily the nursery is only a mile from our house. We drove slowly and got home without any incidents.

Becky's brother, Joe, was in town for work and his family joined him on Friday. Joe, Brandan and Gibson planted the new trees in our backyard. In the photo Gibson is planting a maple tree and Joe is Planting a dogwood tree.

Joe is a geologist so we stopped by the Crater Rock Museum to see some mineral specimens. We have always liked visiting the museum, but it was even more interesting to tour the museum with Joe. Sunstone is the state gem for the state of Oregon and Joe brought us a piece of volcanic rock that has some rough sunstones embedded in it. This is a photo of some cut and polished sunstones that were in a display case.

Keri, Sawyer, Hayden, Gage and Kolter arrived Friday night. Sy stayed home to work and take care of their dogs. Kolter tried out Gibson's cello.

Sawyer turned 17 on Friday. We celebrated with cake, ice cream and lots of candles.

Joe and his family spent Saturday and Sunday at the Oregon coast, stopping by again before heading home on Monday morning. It was terrific to spend time with them. This is a photo of Gibson, Kolter, Gage, Sawyer and Hayden.

23 June 2024

Helen met up with her cousin, Kaylee, at freshman orientation this week. The Hulls will be well represented at the U in the coming school year. Besides Helen, Logan will be returning to the U following his mission and Kaylee and Salem will be freshmen.

 

Becky repotted the plants in her classroom this week. The plants love the wall of windows along one side of the room. It's fun to watch the plants grow.

Gibson and friends planned an overnighter at the coast this week. Here is a photo of the sandcastle they built. From the left are Jason, Ed and Gibson. Not pictured, but also on the trip were Grace and Adia.

Becky joined them as the responsible adult on the trip. Although after getting lost on the way to the campground, losing cell service and then leaving in the morning before most of the kids were awake, she questions her value as a chaperone. Not wanting to sleep in a tent, Becky just threw her sleeping bag, a change of clothes and a toothbrush in the back of the car. Easiest camping trip ever,

It would be more accurate to say Becky had a parallel overnighter with Gibson at the coast. The following photos are Becky's version of the trip. The kids chose to camp at Clifford Kampf State Park in Northern California. It's a tiny campground on a cliff above a beautiful beach.

The short path from the campground to the beach passes this natural grotto that frames a waterfall.

Although Becky was at the campground for less than 12 hours, she was fortunate to walk down to the beach in the morning at low tide. There was exactly one large rock on the acres of sandy beach.

And on that rock there was a tide pool! Becky finds tide pools magical, full of interesting creatures: plant-like animals, tiny crabs and fish. The biodiversity of God's creations is breathtaking.

The road to the coast passes by Stout Grove, a patch of redwoods that maintains its beauty and stillness even though hundreds of visitors pass through every day. Becky took a few laps around the grove before heading home.

Abe finished up spring semester at BYU this week. This is a photo of Abe with his roommate, Hyrum, after a game of ultimate frisbee.

Abe went to see the movie Inside Out 2 with friends.

On Saturday Abe headed out to his first assignment as an FSY counselor. He ran into his friend, Ethan, at the Salt Lake airport. Ethan was headed to Tacoma, Washington and Abe was headed to Rohnert Park, California.

Here's a photo of Abe at Sonoma State University, his home for the next week. Today is a bit of a break before hundreds of teenagers arrive tomorrow for FSY.

16 June 2024

Happy Father's Day! Brandan celebrated his day by talking to beloved family.

 

Abe completed his FSY counselor training this week. His first assignment begins the last week in June.

More FSY photos.

FSY

FSY

Abe and his roommates tried out an all-you-can-eat cold cereal buffet restaurant, Between the 5 of them they ate 35 bowls of cold cereal. The buffet costs $11 a person, so we think the restaurant still made money.

Abe's intramural volleyball team last year was named Beef, after Abe's high school nickname. His current roommates liked his intramural T-shirt so well that they ordered their own. After eating cold cereal, they took their photo in the meat section of Walmart.

Friday was the last day of school. Becky borrowed the school popcorn popper and  her classes watched Twilight spoof videos and ate popcorn. She greatly underestimated how much popcorn to bring. Using the big popcorn popper was pretty fun.

Our school is being rebranded over the summer so everything with Renaissance logos needed to come down. This is the sign Becky had hanging outside her classroom this year.

Becky was surprised by an assortment of gifts and thank you notes from students.

This is a photo of an unexpected note at the end of a test a student retook the last week of school. This student spent September until June arguing about cell phones, tardies, seating charts, note taking, assignments, tests and pretty much everything else school related every day. This thank you note was a nice surprise.

The mom of another student dropped off two dozen roses as a thank you for helping her son. He stayed after school until 5 pm every day for 2 weeks getting caught up so he could pass math.

Our school district is abandoning its Mandarin program due to lack of student interest. We are sad to see it go. Our kids have all taken Mandarin and benefited from the experience. The Mandarin teacher gave Becky two photos she has used to promote Mandarin for the past few years. This shows Sofi, the only advanced Mandarin student her junior year, teaching a group of 2nd grade students.

Helen was a 4th grader the same year and Sofi volunteered in her classroom, too. Zheng, the Mandarin teacher, will stay at the high school and teach other subjects.

Helen went to West Fest with some friends from Freshman Orientation and sent these photos.

West Fest.

West Fest

West Fest

Our friend, Lauren, graduated from Rogue Community College and we joined a group of friends celebrating her accomplishment. From the left are Angel, Greg, Brandan, Becky, Lauren, Beka and Brant.

Gibson helped make breakfast for Brandan this morning, including a delicious berry smoothie.

He and Mary played a duet of O My Father in sacrament meeting. Mary is headed to BYU to start college later this month.