Missing entry found...on Randy's blog Nov. 23

The last couple of weeks I have been increasing my education about
insurance, car, and home ownership. We found last week that the back
of the van had been backed into by some large something and damaged
the handle so that we couldn't open the back (something that I usually

do daily). Since no one came to the door to fess up to the
destruction, our insurance has been helping me to make arrangements.
It is scheduled to be fixed in about a week's time and in the mean
time, the insurance is covering a rental vehicle (in full they say
though the car rental was trying to tell me that they only cover part
of it). The Dodge we are using is not as nice as our Chrysler and it
has been hard on my back to lift children over folded seats to put
them in car seats in the back. When we switched the car seats forward
we started getting to listen to the complaints from the bigger kids
because there isn't any leg room (just imaging if anyone bigger was
trying to sit back there)!

The other thing that I have been learning about is heat pumps. When
ours was checked it had all sorts of issues (which you would expect at

20 years old). We had gotten a home warranty to cover appliances so
they have sent in someone and decided to replace one piece of the
equipment. That will happen on Tuesday. In the meantime I am finding
all the little maintenance items that they expect us to perform to
keep up the equipment if they will fix it when it is broken. So we
have pulled out the fridge and vacuumed the coil, replaced and cleaned

the dryer vent, cleaned the washer basin, cleaned out the garbage
disposal, used degreaser to clean coils on the outdoor heatpump unit,
and am getting ready to drain and flush the hot water heater and get
estimates for cleaning out the air ducts. It has been quite the
education...my house didn't come with an owner's guide to
appliances...although my car did and I didn't ever bother looking at
it (isn't that the job of the spouse?)!

The other activities of the week were pretty normal. For the science
class we met at Randy's work. His coworker took half the group to tour

the lab facitilies while another coworker kept the other half to talk
about snake. He breeds them and had enough for all the students to
hold. Some were as small as worms and even those who claimed to be
deathly afraid of snakes were holding snakes by the end. Randy brought

the kids over to enjoy the snake part of it and the whole time went
really well. Only three more to go...and one will be student
presentations. I will be glad when that is done.

We started putting up some Christmas decorations so that we would have

a little time to enjoy them before our trip. We had a book club with
Peter and read "A House Divided". Peter earned his Pizza Hut award on
that book and when Ada got hers we went for lunch, on Friday. The
stake was having a temple day then so Randy had gone down to do two
sessions in the morning and I managed to get three sisters done that
afternoon.

In other news: Randy is officially registered for school again. Paul
is walking more than crawling and going both up and down stairs. Mary
Joy is a BIG girl so don't try to tell her any different. Ada can read

some scriptures with us only needing a little bit of help here and
there. Peter is reading everything or at least everything HE wants to
read.

At this Thanksgiving season, I sure have a lot to be thankful for!
I'll spend more on that next time.