May 2025

May was an enjoyable month - here are all our photos/videos, and a description of what we've been up to below.

Strawberry Shortcake

Rob: At church, we try to put on a special treat for the women on Mother’s Day. This is my third year leading that effort as Elders Quorum president. This year, I decided to do strawberry shortcake with buttermilk biscuits and macerated strawberries. I made several batches of it at home to work out the recipe before scaling it up for about 50 servings. I added some blueberries and edible flowers to make it fancy. Most of the guys helped out in Primary so the teachers there could have a break, and I had the young men help serve. It turned out well I think. Here’s the recipe I used, highly recommended.

Local Outings

Rob: Good weather brought us outside a lot this month, mostly to many of the usual places. Becky and Alex had a nice outing at Bear Mountain State Park, and there are several photos/videos of them walking around the lake there, finding turtles, and going out on the paddle boat. There are also photos of us at the county arboretum, where Alex found many frogs to poke. And at the Benedict Farm playground, me and Alex were greeted by a very nice double rainbow.

Goodbye to Mary

Rob: This month, our landlord/neighbor/friend Mary moved out and went into an assisted living facility. The move made sense, as her husband Jack passed away last year and so she is over there alone a lot and things are getting harder for her to do on her own. She has lived on this property for decades and they raised their kids here, so it wasn’t easy to move out. But her son came from Seattle to help, and he organized an estate sale to get rid of some things. Everything else either went in a dumpster or in storage below for now. For us, this means that we’ll get new neighbors eventually, but we plan to go visit Mary soon.

Trip to Utah

Rob: We booked a 10-day trip to Utah, from Memorial Day weekend through the following weekend. This was a few days longer than we usually stay when traveling west to visit family. We mostly stayed at my parents’ place in Murray. The trip also included a few days in Orem for Becky and Alex, where Becky’s mom was able to come join them in an AirBnB so they could spend time with her brother Nate and his wife Rylee, who are both at BYU. Unfortunately, Alex and Becky both got a stomach bug that kept them down for much of that time. But they still got to enjoy visiting with family and taking a tour of BYU’s campus, where Becky and her mom both attended. Meanwhile, I visited with my family and worked on clearing out some old things stored in the basement and taking them to the DI (a couple car loads). I later met up with Becky and her family (when they were feeling better) at Thanksgiving Point where we had lunch and visited the insect display and butterfly greenhouse, which was full of huge butterflies and a lot of fun.

During our stay we enjoyed a few gatherings and visits at the homes of my siblings, including a little celebration for my birthday. We also enjoyed eating out at restaurants that we miss, visiting a few friends that we also miss, and doing some things that Alex enjoys like going for rides around the neighborhood in Grandpa’s Model A hot rod, watching movies on the big projector screen in the basement, hitting the Nickel Arcade, and going to the various parks, libraries, malls, and the kids pool in Murray. Also, Becky and Alex enjoyed another visit with Nate and Rylee while I went to go hang out with my brother Bill and a few of my nephews (Braden, Sebastian, and Isaak) at the Ogden Twilight concert, where we saw the band Khruangbin perform (they were excellent). So for the most part, it was a relaxed visit without too much planned, which allowed us to spend as much time as we could with people. We truly appreciate everyone’s hospitality and taking time to hang out with us despite being busy with the end of the school year. We really had a good time being there.

Apart from our flight out of Newark being delayed for a few hours (with enough notice before we left the house), all the travels went really well. Alex was once again a very happy and compliant little traveler, eager to move along to the shuttle and through the lines and eventually onto the plane on his scooter, and adequately entertained on the plane with snacks and his iPad. And I was even able to haul back a KitchenAid stand mixer I found in my parents’ basement in my carry-on luggage, which added about 30 pounds of weight and 10 minutes of wait going through airport security. I’ve been wanting one of those, but haven’t been willing to shell out for one. My mom hasn’t used it in years and it's still in good shape,  so I look forward to giving it a second life.

What Else Is New:

Rob: In my aquarium, my clown killifish have produced several babies that didn't live more than a couple weeks, but after trying a few things I was able to raise one up that is now a couple months old and doing well. The challenge is feeding them because they are especially small and feed on things at the microscopic level at first. I hope to get better at raising them so I can have more and sell some locally too. Since they are hard to find, there's a bit of a demand. I told Becky I want to be the clown killifish kingpin of the Hudson Valley.

Alex: After trying to get Alex to drink from a straw (or cup, or anything besides his sippy cup) for years, we've finally seen some real progress. At his school, they've been able to get him to drink a good amount from a simple container with a flip-up straw. We are working on getting him to do it more at home or when we are eating out. We started him on a medication called Sertraline, an SSRI that can help with anxiety and OCD in some cases. It's hard to say how much of a factor that has been, as it hasn't really caused a huge shift in  behavior for certain, except maybe he is a tiny bit more bold. For instance, whereas he usually has relied on us to get food for him, he is now going into the pantry or getting on the countertops and opening bags or peeling bananas on his own. Sometimes we'll find him scarfing several bags of dehydrated apples in the pantry with the door closed, because he doesn't want us to know he's getting into things.

Becky: Several good things to mention this month since the weather is nice and we got to vacation a little.  Enjoyed seeing my mom, brother, sister-in-law and old college roomate in Utah.  My old roomate, Julianne, and her husband, Brenden, are always a treat to visit with- they're smart, funny, and a breath of fresh air.  I have to mention how great my mom and brother, Nate, were for hanging out with Alex and I while we laid around with a stomach bug.  They're the best.  My day with Alex at Bear Mountain was perfect- the weather made for a great day outdoors with my pal. 

I've been enjoying a couple of books.  I highly recommend "Who is Government?"  Everything Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short) writes is good.  This book is about the life-saving, crime-solving, income-generating work that many very smart, often genius, civil servants quietly do each day within our government- and how many are currently being replaced by Trump loyalists who are typically clueless.  So many people will continue to suffer and die due to cutbacks and firings across federal agencies (USAID, NIH, the IRS (which generates huge amounts of income, particularly thru its busting up of money being sent via crypto currency to  groups that threaten our national security).