There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir

October was a fun month.  We were gypsies, did some traveling, dressed up, and enjoyed being outside since the weather had finally cooled off (Unfortunately, though, not many of these activities were accompanied with the camera, so there are no pictures!).  Here are some things we did:

The first weekend in October was General Conference.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had their semiannual General Conference on October 1-2.  This is when members are addressed by the general leaders of the church (based in Utah) in about 10 hours of meetings stretched out over the 2 days.  Men and women speak, and discuss different topics and issues that members of the church and people outside of the church are faced with in today’s world.  I really enjoy General Conference every 6 months.  Some of the talks that I enjoyed were Elder Uchtdorf's talk You Matter to Him, Elder Ardern's talk A Time to Prepare, Elder Waddell's talk The Opportunity of a Lifetime, and Sister Dalton's talk Love Her Mother.

The second weekend in October, I got to speak at a baptism.  A woman and her teenage daughter joined the church and were baptized into our ward.  I had been meeting with them with the missionaries as they learned about the church, so they asked me to give one of the talks.  I spoke about the gift of the Holy Ghost, which people receive after they are baptized, when they are confirmed as members of the church.

Then, after the baptism, Dave and I jetted out of town to meet my mission companion Emily.  She was visiting southern Utah from her home in Georgia, and I got to meet her, her husband Benjamin, and her children Joshua and Caleb in Mesquite, Nevada.  It was a long drive (6 hours total) for a short visit (about 2.5 hours), but it was worth it!  I haven’t seen her in a while, and we live all the way across the country from each other!  We hung out at a park for a while, and then ate dinner together.  Here we are at the end of the visit:

 

The third weekend in October was kind of crazy.  I was having some eye troubles, where my right eye was pretty red and tender to the touch.  I thought I had pink eye, but my eye wasn’t itchy.  Since I couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment, I thought that I would just ride it out.  But by Saturday, my eye was so sensitive to light that I couldn’t open it, and there were tears streaming out of my eyes.  We went to the urgent care office in Pahrump and got a prescription for eye drops.  I had some good days after that, and some more bad days where I had to lay in bed with a blanket over the windows to block out the light.  On the good days over the next week, I was able to get out and do some fun things, but eventually I had to go see an eye doctor, which is when I found out that my eyes had developed an immune reaction to my contacts!  They are doing much better now, but I wore my glasses for about a month while we were letting my eyes heal.

Fortunately one of the days that my eyes were doing fine was the Saturday of the next weekend, because that was the day of the Monster Dash!  It was a 5-k race that Dave and I did.  We even made costumes for it (although we didn’t run in them).  Dave came in in 9th place, and I got 16th place.  And we won a free pizza, got awesome scary-looking t-shirts, and our entry fee got us into a Pumpkin Day carnival.  Okay, the carnival was mostly for kids, but it was still fun to walk around and look at the animals, work our way through a hay maze, and get my hand painted!

The last weekend in October was a fun one.  We had to head to Utah for Dave to be sworn in as a lawyer on the 31st.  Since our friends, the Ashtons, were driving from Phoenix through Vegas to go to Utah for the swearing in too, we decided to meet up with them in Vegas and explore the strip.  Our camera battery died, so I will have to get pictures from Ann to post here.

We got to see family that weekend.  Dave’s cousin Jill and I dressed up and went to a BYU Halloween party.  We dressed up by putting on hats, attaching leaves to the hat brims so they dangled in front of our faces, and then blew the leaves whenever they got in our way.  We were leaf-blowers.  :D  We went through a maze made out of all of the recycled trash from BYU’s campus and won Frisbees made out of recycled plastic.  It was fun.

Then the actual swearing in ceremony was good.  It felt like such an accomplishment to be there, listen to the speakers talk about the profession, and hear the oath be administered, and I wasn’t even the lawyer!!!  I was so proud of Dave, I could have burst!  Dave put so much work into passing the Bar in Utah, and I’m sure he’ll do just as well in Nevada.

And that was the month of October for us!