The most admirable women in America

Last week the Internet news reported results of a survey asking who were the "most admirable women in America." Of course most of the votes went to some of the well known political figures such as Hillary, Sarah and Oprah, but what do those voters know?



When I asked Sylvia what women she admired the most, her thoughtful decision was that it was our daughters!


Now that may sound a bit prejudiced, but I have thought
a lot about that issue since then and have decided that I totally agree.



We are so richly blessed to have such wonderful women in our family!



You ladies are such fabulous mothers, wives, daughters, citizens and Latter-Day-Saints that I very truly can't think of anyone in the world that I admire more!




Our family is the most important thing in the world to us, and we love you.

Merry Christmas 2009! We had a great time with the Jerry and Heather family. There was good food, football, great gifts, the traditional crossword puzzle, and reading of "The night before Christmas."

David is still loyal to his Jaguars.

Keeping young

We have gotten to the stage in life where we have found that doing everything that we used to do is not automatic, so we have to work at it.
Here is Sylvia working out with her long time trainer Nazi Kevin. She says that he is the best at being stern enough to keep her going, and he has done a great job.

Sometime they leave the stuffy gym and go for hikes or bike rides, but usually not at this time of year.

Also she often walks down to the temple or Rock Canyon and back, and then there are her famous hikes through Waterton/Glacier park or
across England, Scotland and New Zealand.

This is her dipping her toe, according to tradition, in St. Bee's bay before starting out for her 220 mile hike across the lakes district of northern England. What a woman!

BYU Utah game

Yesterday David proved how brave and loyal he was by taking this poster with us to the BYU vs Utah football game. He's such a charmer that none of the home team fans complained about it and he even got a longish interview with KSL TV!

By the way, the Cougars won in overtime about one minute after I took this picture which took some of the fun out of it for him, but he still seemed to have a great time!

Hunter Jerry

As usual Jerry went archery elk hunting in New Mexico this fall, and as usual he came home with a nice big bull. Archery hunting is a very difficult sport, and only about 1 out of 7 hunters is successful, but Jerry has really got it figured out and comes home with meat every year. I think this is about his 8th elk. As with everything he else does, he pays the price of learning how to do it well, and then exerts the effort required to succeed. Way to go Jerry!

Little red hen

One of Sylvia's favorite children's stories is the one about the little red hen who asked who wanted to help her do some cooking, and none did so she ended up doing it all herself'. Well she is the ward compassionate service leader and when we had a funeral of a wonderful neighbor last week, she did a really good job of assigning several ladies to help with the family dinner, but you can see here how much she ended up doing herself. The funeral was for a really nice old guy that we all loved and she didn't want to serve just any kind of baked goods so the family really was blessed by her work.
Later I was talking to a neighbor about baking some pies for a Christmas event, and her reply was "don't expect me to go pie to pie against Sylvia!" She has an awesome reputation.
Being as humble as she is, she was kind of hoping that I wouldn't post this, but my love and admiration for her made me do it.

Fall trip to Cancun

We just got a new computer last month and it had some windows 7 problems that the tech-support lady in India couldn't solve in two and a half hours on the phone, but we have finally got most of the kinks worked out and are ready for another blog post.

Last week we went back to Cancun where our friends have a time share and have taken us down a couple of times.
Here we are with the the Thomas's.




This is Glen and Kim Overton, and Paul and Deon Coon. They are super people and really fun to play with.

We stayed at this cool place called Moon Palace. It is a self-contained resort with it's own mile of beach, 2500 rooms, about 12 restaurants, Spa's, a nice Gym, 8 or 10 interconnecting swimming pools and a fabulous 27-hole golf course.

It is "all-inclusive", so when you check in they put this bracelet on you and that allows you to eat and golf and go to the shows and everything else as much as you want.

Most of our time was spent on the golf course which was very challenging with some interesting hazards, including crocodiles!

This is a coati, a friendly racoon type of critter. They come out by the dozens in the evening. There were also lots of kinds of birds and lizards.

Here are 2 kinds of wildlife- a lizard and Sylvia. (you'd better believe it!)

Sylvia played well but was glad that she had brought plenty of balls.

In the distance you can see the jungle that this course was carved out of. It is so thick that if you are off the fairway, you may as well be in the water.

The resort has a guard house on the entry road, and other than that doesn't even need fences, because no intruder could possibly get through that jungle. We never saw a place where you could walk more than 5 feet into it!

This scene was fun, but for endurance races I think that I will stick with Lacy!