the joys of organizing old pictures and videos

I still have hours of work left to do...so far I just have them in seasons and years, but I DID find this little treasure, which made me laugh:

This was last summer, and the caulk job turned out great. I just thought you might enjoy watching this as much as I do--I just think Miles's videos are so entertaining! Even when he's talking about our bathroom.

Another reason that Miles loves his job

Apparently the LDS church down here has been having quite a few run-ins lately with bees building hives in steeples, walls, etc.. Miles has been telling me about them, and how they have to get people to come out and extract them, and then ONE day, he came home to tell me about another hive they'd found in one of his buildings. The bees had gotten into a wall from a little pipe left sticking out, and they'd built a hive inside the wall.

When Miles showed me some pictures of him trying on a bee suit, I began to realize that this was going to be no ordinary work week. On the 14th we stayed up late working on a bee smoker--you know, the smoke you blow in the hive to calm them?--but we didn't get it done in time, so that just barely got finished.

Instead, Miles left for work with his bee suit, some cans of wasp spray, and some tape to make sure there were no gaps in his clothes. I spent some good time in fervent prayer that morning! Sometimes I let my imagination run away with me, but I was also excited to see the pictures he promised to take. Here are some of the best ones, and since they tell the story pretty well, I'm not going to write a ton more.

First Miles (and some helpful painters) taped off the hallway so that no bees could get inside the church

he could hear the bees and knew he'd opened the right section of wall. Now for the flash...

An entire hive! See them in between their honeycomb? SO COOL!

Miles demonstrates the safe gear for any bee removal tasks.

This wall is going to need some repair. No more bees, though!

Honeycomb, dead bees, and...a rat! Gross!

 Since Miles is at work and can't type this himself, here are some of the videos he took, so you can hear him explain. Pretty cool!

The job. s.

After looking for what seemed like forever, suddenly in the past two or three weeks everything has fallen together. I'm trying to think of what I learned from my four months of unemployment, because I know that whenever things don't go according to MY plan, it's always been because there's a better plan out there.
I was thinking, and some of the blessings I can see from that long wait are: I learned to type (finally! that has been looming over my head for years), I had time to set up my violin studio the way I wanted to, I really really REALLY value the time I have together with Miles, had free time to get to know some people in our ward and go on adventures, and learned that my attitude has everything to do with how I feel about my day. Also how much work I put into things!

Anyway, so now the waiting is over. I have three great little violin students and have a part time job as a nanny for two kids that live at the beach. Here is a pic of one of my work days...at the beach! ---------->

<---this part here actually was hard work, and I still don't really know what possessed me to go down all those stairs with a stroller. Don't worry, though; I had the older one walk and held the little one, and we went slow, despite the 3-yr-old's encouragement to "let go of the stroller! Let it bounce down all by itself!" :) I know it's not the most prestigious job in the world, but it is one of my very favorite things ever!

The big news

After about a million years, or really just sixteen or so, I've finally learned how to type! And along with that, I also have some mad backspacing skills.

Okay, so somehow I made it through all those middle-school programs by memorizing what I had to type and looking at my fingers. The result: I could type about 40 wpm with three of my fingers but was lost in a dark room :)

So... this week I found a free typing teacher thing online, and now I'm up to about 30 wpm NOT looking at one little finger. Yay! No laughing, all you master typists out there...I don't think I could have even typed 10 wpm before without looking!

The other GREAT news is that after playing in church on Sunday, a couple moms came and asked about violin lessons! I totally forgot that that might be a side benefit of playing in church, and I'm glad, because I would have felt guilty if I felt like I was advertising. So now I'm in the process of setting that all up and emailing back and forth with the moms, and hopefully this will be the beginning of my little studio that I've been working on. I'm so excited!