September 26, 2018
Morning shenanigans before hitting the road for Utah.
Two happily volunteered as photographer.
{One, Alana, Rachel, Maddie, Three, me, Five}
On our way out, we drove through the west side of Lake Mead National Recreation Area. SUCH a beautiful drive!
We stopped at the Lost City Museum in Overton, thinking it was all about the city that got flooded in the dam. The women working there said there were a couple artifacts, but that's it. The museum is really just about many cities that ceased to exist in Nevada's history. On that count, I figured we'd just continue on our drive. Did see this book on my way out, though! That'll be a fun read.
Driving through the GORGEOUS canyon again! I certainly didn't mind.
Out of the canyon, but such a beautiful drive!
As promised for Two, we stopped at the Arizona sign.
{Two, One, Three}
{Two}
And then there I was, driving through St. George, reminiscing about the fun park date we had had with Sharley and Jonah a week earlier...JONAH! I completely forgot that he said I should stop by their house in Cedar City on my way back up to American Fork. So I quickly called him and gave him very short notice that I'd be there in an hour and needed his address. At least it still worked out and I didn't stand him up. The kids played in the playhouse and on the trampoline in the yard while we waited for Jonah to get back from picking up Elias and Ann. Then we got the tour of the house and yard.
We met the goat (I don't remember her name)...
...collected eggs from their 24 chickens...
{One}
{One and Two}
...held a chicken...
{Jonah and I}
...and explored the rock yard.
We couldn't stay long and had to be on our way, but Jonah is always good for a dose of positive energy! We got back to driving and I found that none of the audiobooks I had downloaded were any good. I think I only had one for me at the time, which is always a bad idea. There has to be more than one book ready to go at any given time. Because the one book I had for myself was The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer...and I was done five minutes into that. No, it's not just the Twilight content that's repulsive. It's Stephenie and her writing and thinking and everything. So I switched to the book I had for the kids to listen to over the car speakers, Towers Falling. Nope. The reader was so whiny. Perhaps the text itself was whiny, but I could read it in a non-whiny voice if I got the book and read aloud myself. But no, I cannot listen to a whiny book while trapped in a car with five kids for hours. Ugh. So I ended up making phone calls...and finally succeeding in getting to talk to my friend Squirrel, aka Paul Jones, which was GREAT because at that point, I was starting to need help staying awake after our late night on the Strip the night before. So, thank you, Squirrel, for keeping me awake. We made it safely to American Fork some time around 7 pm.
Suzanne and I let our kids stay up for a bit in their excitement at seeing their cousins again (technically, Suzanne's kids are MY cousins, but it makes more sense for them to be my kids' cousins, as written in the Louisville post with Aubrey's "Aunt Megan"). Then we put them to bed to whisper quietly until they dropped off to sleep and I went to walk the neighborhood for 2 hours while talking to my friend Rick and unloading everything off my chest that I had been holding onto for weeks, not wanting to open and reopen to every different person I was with over the course of my travels.
And the number one thing I needed to unload was that back at the beginning of September when I was in Minnesota, Shad called me out of the blue, saying that crap happened with his paperwork before he went to basic training, stuff got filled out wrong and his recruiter kept telling him not to change it, and now the Air Force doesn't want to keep him. That he can quit now and move to Med Hold, or he can try to petition them to change their minds, but he was advised that he'd most likely not win in that and it would only waste a few weeks. So he was given a 5-minute phone call to discuss the situation with me and make a decision...and I was out in rural Minnesota, dropping the call. Fantastic! He felt really dejected and defeated, didn't want to fight it, just wanted to move to Med Hold so he could be processed out. On his end, he had been dealing with this since a few days into training. He'd been doing great with Basic and excelling at everything, just that little screw up in paperwork was enough to disqualify him. After I got off the phone with him, I decided I wanted to fight it anyway and I called his brother, Dan, who works at Buckley AFB where Shad had already been offered a job to join when he got through training. This has taken me forever to write because I still hate it. So now I'm really just gonna push to type out the rest in a burst. He moved to Med Hold, which Dan called purgatory, which is like boot camp combined with prison and a psyche ward. Dan and Shad's Buckley commander tried everything they could to fight the situation, but everything failed. Shad was in Med Hold for a little over 3 weeks (some are in there for 2 months), and was allowed a 20-minute phone call once a week for morale. He wasn't allowed to walk for more than 20 minutes or stand for more than 15 or do any kind of exercise because the Air Force didn't want to be liable for any injuries. And because some of the guys in there were actually clinically insane, when Shad was finally released on September 28, it was with anxiety and panic attacks that we've had the pleasure of dealing with ever since, on top of having our world turned upside down and no longer having the next 7 months of our lives figured out and planned, the next 6 years of his enlistment and potentially more, and the GI bill for our kids to use for college. It's been a real bundle of fun.
But at least I got to watch a majestic and serene moonrise over the mountains while I walked.
