Learning to fly

This month Lisa attended SOAR, a BYU summer program that is kind of like a college-prep version of EFY.

She left on Sunday, July14.  She rode down to Provo with a Moe Graviet, a friend from Emmett who was also attending that week.

Here are a few photos she took while there.  They did lots of fun activities, including a  ropes course, a service project, a dance, and hiking to the "Y."

Here she is with her group.

She had a fabulously good time.

On Friday, July 19, I drove down to Provo to pick her up. We were supposed to go to the ending banquet at 5:00 Friday evening. I got into Provo about 4:10, and went to see the progress of the old Tabernacle / new temple. It looks like they’re one concrete pour away from having the basement walls in place, and then it will be time to set the superstructure down on the concrete and get it off of the stilts it’s standing on now. That would be an interesting procedure, shifting a 3000+ ton building from one foundation to another. I still don’t understand how the heck they dug out the ground under it as it is.

They're also excavating south of the temple down to the street two blocks south, creating a humongous hole.  They must be putting in a really huge underground parking area or something.  They're taking out a tremendous amount of dirt.

Anyway, the banquet was at 5:00. Rachel was supposed to be home from work at 4:30 so I went over to her apartment then, but she didn’t get home until 4:47. I sat outside her apartment and connected my iPhone to her wireless router and read Andrew's weekly e-mail while I waited. When she got there we hurried and changed and drove up to BYU. We got there about 5:15, fifteen minutes late – and were the first people to arrive. Talk about Mormon Standard Time!

Each SOAR kid could bring two guests, so we claimed Justin as Moe Graviet’s guest so he and Rachel and I could all go. Moe was running a marathon in McCall Saturday morning, so they actually skipped the banquet to go home so they could be ready to get up to McCall, so Justin attended as a guest of somebody who wasn’t even there. Dinner was from Tucanos, and then there were a bunch of speakers and presentations.

Rachel and Justin were getting into the listening to the speakers.

All the SOAR kids got up and sang for the closing. (Lisa is in the front row at stage right.)

Then there was a really long parents’ meeting while the SOAR kids went to a dance. After that Rachel and Justin and I got some frozen yogurt and talked for a while, then I rolled out a sleeping bag on their living room floor and got some sleep. We picked up Lisa the next morning, did a few errands (like buying Krispy Kreme donuts and having them delivered to Andrew in the MTC), then drove home in time to go to Johnny and Lauren McMurray's open house before their mission farewell Sunday.