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.