Happy Birthday, Benjamin!

Those of you who pay attention to Benjamin's preferences know that his favorite color is green. So today, for his 19th birthday, he got three ties, and two of them were green. We don't have any announcements to make on the mission front, but he has started the paperwork (all online, so no paper is involved, but you know) so we hope to know before we move when and where he'll be going.

His preference for green apparently extends to flavors, and the brave young man repeated his request for a lime cake, and we also had mint chocolate chip ice cream. I have tried before to make a lemon chiffon cake, just substituting lime everywhere it said lemon, with pretty awful results. If I recall correctly, that had something to do with not reading the recipe carefully enough. Well, I've now made this recipe four times and it gets better each time. And I think I can say it was a success today! No dense, chewy layer in the middle. I frosted it with whipped cream flavored with a little lime juice, and it was ok, not overpowering like whatever I tried last time.

Anyway, Benjamin has now finished his freshman year at the University of Utah, majoring in Computer Engineering, and he's getting ready to move on a bit. Happy birthday, Benjamin!

Changes coming up

We have been pretty stable for a while now, so it's time for some changes, and they're good:

Change #1 (not unexpected): Michael is coming home July 21, the day before my birthday. We're very excited, but school starts just a few weeks later so he'll be off to SUU before he has time to be bored. He has, however, offered to help with the manual labor parts of change #2. He is still planning on a cello career and can hardly wait to get home and play.

Change #2 (somewhat unexpected): When it came time to apply to the PhD program last fall, Joe offered me a surprising option, to apply to schools outside our area. I didn't give him a chance to back out, and quickly sent off applications to six schools, of which I was accepted at two. Whee! But neither of those was the University of Utah. So we took a couple of weeks to make our decision, and in August we'll be moving to Albuquerque for me to start the PhD program in Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. They have several faculty who work in sign language linguistics, and Phyllis Wilcox, who will be my advisor, has written a book called Metaphor in American Sign Language--I can hardly wait.

This means selling our house here and buying another in Albuquerque, all while writing my thesis (long story, but I'm writing it this summer before I go--no stress--and my MA should be official in the Fall). We have a likely buyer for our house, a friend who is pretty cramped in their house and wants something bigger, and have made some contacts in Albuquerque, so we're hoping the transition will go smoothly, or at least with shreds of sanity still intact. It looks like all the kids will be coming with us when we move, though Michael will be off immediately to Cedar City and SUU. Joe will be able to keep his job and telecommute full time, which we consider to be a great blessing, things bein' how they are.