18 May 2025

 

Brandan has been working on this puzzle for the last month or so. Gibson put in a few pieces this week.

Our school district was the target of a cyberattack early Wednesday morning. When the IT manager realized the servers were under attack, he unplugged all of the servers to foil the attackers. As a result, we spent three days without our network. The wi-fi still worked, but nothing school related was connected to it. Besides being locked out of email and accounts that used district passwords, this meant no access to to attendance records, grade books, phones, copy machines or pretty much anything related to normal school operations. Our school office manager rebranded herself as the chaos coordinator. As for Becky, math pivots fairly easily to paper and pencil so her classes ran all week. The IT staff worked through the weekend and school should be back to normal on Monday.

Brandan and Becky hiked Lower Tablerock on Saturday morning. Brandan pointed out how lush and green the poison oak looks. Quite lovely as long as you don't touch it.

Becky and Gibson went to the pear orchard to thin the Asian pears.

The orchard mostly grows Bartlett pears. It intersperses Asian pear trees with the Bartletts because they are excellent cross-pollinators. After the trees have blossomed, they trim off almost all of the fruit so the tree will focus on growing stronger and producing even more blossoms next year.

Sofi's former roommate and our dear friend, Emma, celebrated her wedding and sealing with a reception on Saturday. Helen went with Sofi and Nate. Helen caught Emma's bouquet!

Brandan's niece, Kaylee, went to the temple for the first time on Saturday. Abe drove up to Taylorsville to attend with her family. From the left are Abe, Parker, Halie, Wade, Steph, Kaylee, Martha and Dan.

Gibson played in his last two concerts for the Youth Symphony of Southern Oregon this weekend. They played Saturday in Ashland, 

And Sunday in Medford.

This was also the director, Dr. Cynthia Hutton's, last concert. She is retiring after 30 years conducting the youth symphony.

Each of the graduating seniors was recognized in the middle of the program.

Gibson started in the youth symphony 4 years ago and has had the opportunity to play lots of gorgeous music with talented musicians from across our region. Dr. Hutton demonstrates her skill year after year as she molds the students into mature musicians capable of playing challenging pieces. We're enjoyed every concert, but this last one was especially sweet with several extended standing ovations for Dr. Hutton and the musicians.