Daily Tender Mercies

Yesterday morning when I went to take a shower I found that I had no hot water. Somehow the pilot light went out. Ken came over and helped me get it started again. It keeps going out though. We had a plumber come look at it an said it would cost about $400 to repair it, between $970 – $1500 to replace it. We currently have a 40 gallon tank, be we run out quickly so I want to replace it with a 50 gallon tank. I found them at Home Depot for $488. I called around and found a plumber that would install it for $175 plus the cost of whatever parts he needs. Ken was able to get a better deal on a 50 gallon water heater. He picked one up for about $300. So now instead of paying $400 to fix it, for about $100 more we ard getting a new one installed with greater capacity. It sure pays to shop around and I’m grateful for Ken for making a special trip for us to pick up a new water heater.

The bummer in all this is that we just had to replace the water heater in our old house about 9 months before we moved.

Last Friday we went grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. While checking out we decided to get a gift card for my mom’s wedding. This is brand new Wal-Mart that opened about a week ago, so it seems all the employees are brand new. The girl at the check-out messed up trying to activate the gift card and billed us twice then while trying to fix it she messed it up even more. I was there for about 20 minutes more than I wanted to be and eventually just asked them to take the charges off for the gift card and forget it.

Today I noticed our bank account showed that they refunded the whole purchase. So basically we got $132 woth of groceries for free. It was pretty obvious that we couldn’t just live with that, so we went back today to pay for the groceries. We were there for quite a while as another new girl had to hand enter each 12 digit code for every item on our receipt. What made it worse was that she didn’t know 10-key. It was really a pain in the butt, but I’m glad we did the right thing.

I had PPIs with Gracie and Gehrig today. It was a neat experience. I found that Gracie is really a girl because she loves to talk! It was fun just taking the time to listen to here and let her tell me stories from school and stuff. Apparently she has a “boyfriend” in her kindergarten class. She likes to chase him and hug him. I would probably discourage her from kissing if that came up, but I guess hugging boys in kindergarten can’t be too harmful So I just enjoyed letting her talk to me and I’m glad that she likes to tell me these things because I get nervous for when she gets older and might be too embarrassed to talk to me.

Gehrig was less talkative obviously. I just kept asking him questions and the answer was usually affirmative “uh-huh”. I think he mostly just like the idea of comeing down into the office to be with me and spinning in circles on my little doctor stool.

This morning Rachels parents came over. Nani talked with kids about helping out and keeping their toy room clean. She gave Gracie & Gehrig timers to help them “clean fast”. We then spent about an hour organizing the toy room and getting rid of a lot of stuff. They also brought over a little bell to tie to Nolan’s pants. Whereever he goes now you can hear that bell ringing. It is so helpful because he gets into everything. We don’t have to say “Where is Nolan!?” all the time.

My mom got married to Harvey tonight! It was a big deal to me. Today was their 15th anniversary from their first date. It’s about time they got married! It was a simple ceremony that took place at Market Street Grill. It was mainly just family and a few close friends. It was good and I’m so glad they are married now.

Today Rachel started cleaning and reorganizing the garage. I helped once I got off work. We made room for our freezer I bought yesterday. We then spent our friday night shopping at Costco and Walmart for groceries. After we put the kids to bed I made Rachel stay up and watch a movie with me.

Tonight we made use of our budget for dining out and went to dinner at Cafe Rio. That place is so delicious. Rachel always gets the pork barbacoa salad and I get the pork barbacoa borrito. The kids split a pork barbacoa quesadilla.

Also, I found a used freezer on KSL Classifieds. I’ve been trying to get one for almost a year now. It seems whenever I call on one they are gone. Today I finally got a hold of one that was still available so I dropped everything and drove to Sandy to buy it. While I was loading it in the truck someone else called and he had to say that I was taking it away right now. It will be nice to have more freezer room to make less frequent trips to the grocery store.

I went to the temple this morning. I don’t know why I convince myself each week that I’m too busy, because I never regret going. It snowed most of the day. I hear a lot of people complaining about the cold and snow, but I don’t mind at all. It looks beatiful, it clears the sky, it fills our resevoirs, and it melts the next day! What’s not to like?

We took our car in for its 90,000 mile service this morning. Unfortunately, the total bill came to about $200 more than we had budgeted for it. Fortunately, I sold the dishwasher that was sitting in our garage tonight for $200.

Rachel sure got a lot done today. I went upstairs after work and our king size bed was covered in laundry that she had washed and folded. I tried to help out from there and put everything away. She also had everything ready for me to make dinner. After dinner she made cinnamon rolls… Mmmm. They were heavenly!

Today was a relaxing day. After church we watched a couple of movies together. The kids were good at church – except for Nolan who was tired and ornery. It was really quite an uneventful day. I was thinking that it had been a while since we read scriptures and wrote in our journal so I made sure we did it tonight. It had been a while – almost two months since we last wrote in our gratitude journal. I’m going to work on getting back into the habbit of that.