Author: cosmo

We left El Centro a month ago, and said goodbye to many friends. Woody, my lunch buddy and photography companion, decided it had been too long, so he and his wife Marilyn arranged a trip to visit us. They traded the 110-degree weather in southern California for the beautiful budding summer days of northern Montana. It was awesome to see them again so soon, and we showed them all the sights. We started with Flathead Lake:

Naturally we headed to Glacier, where they oohed and ahhed as we climbed Going-to-the-Sun Road up to Logan Pass. I love this shot of me and Woody exercising our cameras:

We toured downtown Bigfork and saw– you guessed it– the Big Fork.

They asked about the Miracle of America Museum down in Polson. In six years living here, we’d never visited it, so we piled into the car and gave it a go. I feel like it should be called the Miracle of Some Guy’s Rusted-out Junk, but I’m a bit cynical. Woody (a historian) enjoyed the historic vehicles and displays.

Marilyn is a retired English teacher and plays Scrabble online every day. She and I had played a couple games back in California, so I brought out my board.

She looks like she’s struggling with a word here, but the truth is she absolutely crushed me. She has lots of practice (I haven’t played in years) and knows all those unusual words that are useful in the game but never used in actual spoken English.

All in all, it was a grand time and we’re looking forward to getting together again soon… likely in the winter, when we’ll trade twenty-below temperatures here for seventy and sunny there.

A few days after returning from our mission, both Pepper and I were called to new positions in our ward. I’m a clerk, which means I’m responsible for exciting things like finances and recordkeeping. I was given a key to the church office, and went in to scope it out. I found this shelf of ancient tomes:

Wow. A book about MS-DOS! That pre-dates Windows. And WordPerfect? My favorite word processor, dating back to the mid-1990s. These are the manuals we’re keeping in the office. It’s funny not only because these books are for software that’s thirty years old and long gone, but because other people in the church (previous clerks, ahem) are afraid to throw them away. “But we might need it!” they cry. You’d hate to get rid of something and then find that you need it, right?

Well, I think these will be safe to toss. I guess it’s time for the new clerk to do some cleaning…

We’ve only been home for a few weeks, and it’s already time to start entertaining guests. Our friends the Gundersons asked to stop in on their way to Canada. We saw them in 2022 and again in 2023, and apparently the kids were bummed they couldn’t visit in 2024 while we were gone. It’s nice to be missed! We even had bonus visitors: Cindy’s cousin, and a friend of Rhys.

So of course we were thrilled to see them. The jet skis are a perennial favorite.

As is tradition, we also had dinner at Burgertown.

Fortunately their family enjoys board games, and Skull King is always good for a laugh.

Plans are already in the works for their 2026 visit. We love having friends who love visiting us.

As we were in the final few weeks of our mission, we visited Camp Wildwood in north San Diego. The camp is for church and family events, and has a whole host of entertaining stuff: soccer fields, pool, archery range, zipline, mess hall, and so on. A handful of senior missionaries manage the camp, supervising the stations and keeping everything running smoothly. Unfortunately one couple had to return home early, so they’re short-handed and desperately looking for help.

Pepper’s brother Randy, and his wife Nancy, recently retired and have been talking about serving a mission “someday”. Well, after hearing about the camp’s plight, Pepper called Randy and explained the situation. Not only would they be a ton of fun hosting youth and families, but Randy is a mechanic and incredibly good at fixing and maintaining things like the camp (sprinkler systems, pool plumbing, buildings, ATVs, yada yada). They’re perfect for this assignment!

After a couple days considering it, Randy and Nancy compiled their mission papers and sent them in. Within just a few weeks they’d been accepted, trained, and were on their way to San Diego! Interestingly, we finished our mission and headed home the week before they arrived. We didn’t overlap at all, but today we received this photo of them at the camp:

Yep, they’re official with their nametags. And this is the first time in the thirty years I’ve known Randy that he doesn’t have facial hair (full-time missionaries are expected to be clean-shaven).

They’re having a grand time, and it’s cool to chat with them about the people we both know from the mission.

At tonight’s board game session, Kyle brought his massive “big box” version of Terraforming Mars and he, Sonya, and I played for a couple hours. This game is quite impressive, with 3D-printed board pieces, a big rubber playmat, real metal pieces, sleeved cards, and on and on.

It was a lot of fun, and I managed to eke out a victory. Our Thursday-night gaming is awesome.

Sidenote: a few weeks after this post, Kyle passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. I’ll miss him.

Ahh, our driveway. It’s what allows us to have a magnificent view of Flathead Lake. And it’s one of the most infuriating things about our house. There are many stories here in my blog about the problems it’s caused. Now that winter is definitely over, once again we have a layer of fine gravel on the entire driveway– the result of sanding it during the winter months to keep it passable for Kyra and Hannah while they lived here.

I’d resigned myself to sweeping it again, which is a tedious two-day chore. But Hannah suggested I get a leaf blower. Hmm. If it’s powerful enough, it’ll just blow the little rocks out of the way. Since raking the pine needles every fall is another tedious chore, I figured I’d see what a leaf blower would do. I picked up a Husky electric model and went to work.

Sure enough, the gravel wiggled and danced and then slid right off the asphalt! It was still a slow job, but I was finished in two hours instead of two days, and didn’t have to push a broom a thousand times. The end result looks pretty nice.

I’m interested to see how it does against the pine needles. But at least my spring driveway cleanup won’t be as bad any more…

Now that we’re back, I have a list of house projects that I’ve been compiling over the past year. On that list– and something that seemed like a fun activity today– is getting a new hot tub. The one we have is almost twenty-five years old, and is starting to show its age. It leaks, several jets have failed, and it feels kind of cramped. I have no idea how much a hot tub costs, or how you even pick a good one, so the best way to answer those questions is to go to the hot tub store!

Kyra and Hannah like this one. It’s huge.

I like this one. It’s tiny.

Most of the time it’ll be just the two of us using the hot tub, but when we have company we’ll need something that’ll fit at least four people. We test-drove (test-sat?) this one and all agreed it was a good compromise between huge and tiny.

I’m not quite ready to place an order yet, but at least we have answers to our questions. We’ll see what happens…

Although we’ve finished our mission, the road home is long. That means plenty of time to stop and see people…

When our young missionary friends heard we’d be in Orem, three of them said “Hey, my parents live there– you should totally stop in and see them!” So we did.

Sister Packer’s parents:

Sister Tennis’ parents:

What a blast to spend a little time talking about these fine young women and the good times we’d had together. Parents always love hearing about their missionary kids, and we loved learning a little more about their lives and families. (Unfortunately our third stop to see Elder Searcy’s parents didn’t work out.)

Later that day we reconnected with a gaggle of friends from our days in Longmont. All of them live in Utah now, and it seemed worth throwing a party. The Nielsens, Robisons, Galazes, von Niederhauserns, and Bartholomews all congratulated us on the end of our mission. Interestingly, the Bartholomews just started serving a mission of their own in Heber!

It was also good to see Tara and her family. She and Trent came out to visit us on our mission…

We hung out with Cil and Jim…

And we met up with six of our senior missionary friends for dinner! They’d all finished their missions a few weeks before we did.

After a few more days with the boys, and a few pinball games…

… it was time to finally go home. We started the long drive from Utah to Montana. And when we crossed into Montana, I was reminded why I love living up here.

The scenery was so familiar, and yet it was strange to see it again after so long in the desert of the Imperial Valley and the green hills and beaches of San Diego. It did my heart good.

Back in Bigfork, the first order of business– even before unpacking the car– was to jump in Kyra’s shiny new car and head down the road to Rosa’s for some pizza.

Kyra’s been house-sitting for us, although she took a few days to visit us in San Diego last August. It was nice to see her again.

Yep, it’s good to be home. We sent this picture to all our California friends to let them know we’d made it safely back.

Well, this is it. The end of the mission.

After over a year in California, we packed our car (absolutely stuffed it full) and headed out of town. As we were shoving the final items into the car, a few of the missionaries stopped by to say their final farewell.

I’ve said it many times in my blog posts over the past year, but these young missionaries were one of the greatest things about our mission service. All of them are amazing, talented, smart, funny, hard-working, spiritual, dedicated servants. I learned so much from their examples. We’re going to miss them just as much as the other (older) friends we’ve made here.

We pulled out onto “The Eight” and headed east. These highway signs are so familiar. We’d either turn north to Brawley or south to Calexico. Today we chose Yuma.

Since we drove right through the Imperial Sand Dunes on Highway 78, we simply had to stop one last time.

We cruised through southern California, into northwest Arizona, then Nevada, and ended up in St George Utah. It was awesome to spend the night with our sort-of-in-laws (Kaitlyn’s parents Brett and Andrea).

In the morning we stopped in to see our friends the Jongewards, who had just moved to St George from Brawley! In other words, we’d said goodbye to them just a few weeks ago as they headed out of California. And here they are again. Weird.

We enjoyed lunch with our friend Tania, formerly Sister Maravilla on her mission. She finished a few weeks before us and is home with her family before heading to school. Don’t tell the other missionaries, but she’s one of our favorites.

Late in the day we made it to the Villa, where our boys were waiting.

It was so good to see them after a year apart.

It feels a little strange to be a “civilian” again, to not wear my name tag any more.

As we close this chapter of our lives, I have much to reflect on. I’m grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to serve the Lord for a year, doing so many things that had an impact on people, meeting so many amazing friends, and fully dedicating myself to one purpose in a way I’ve never done before.

This is the end of our mission, but it won’t be our final mission.

We’ve loved the opportunity to teach seminary on our mission. High-school youth in the early morning present an interesting teaching challenge, not only because we need to engage them with thoughtful discussion and spiritual fulfillment, but because we have to keep them awake! On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve loved the opportunity to teach Institute. It’s traditionally a class for young adults, but there aren’t a lot in our area so we’ve adapted and taught older adults. Our classes are on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, and tend to delve quite a bit deeper into gospel topics.

Well, this was the end. We finished our Tuesday evening class with (of course) a party, and took a group photo afterward.

This evening we had another party with our Wednesday evening group, and another photo.

Although most of the “regulars” are in these pictures, several were missing and we had others who came occasionally. All of them were great fun, and brought a lot of great insights into our discussions. Thank you to Willa, Eileen, Jerry, Karen, Dale, Veronica, Monica, Celia, Keja, Valentina, Natalie, Vicki, Dave, Marilyn, Woody, Lorraine, Cathy, Judy, Tom, and Miles!