This was officially July 31, 2024. July ended up being such a long post. I thought I’d add it here. Rel and I were flying back to Utah and when we landed around 6:30 pm, we turned on our phones to a series of many text messages from Lelu that went something like this:
“Hey do you want to go see Olivia Rodrigo tonight?” “I can see there’s tickets available?” “For my birthday, what do you think?” “Okay I talked to dad. He said it was okay. I’m picking you up from the airport. We are going to see her with Kenna, Miranda, and Kenna’s sister” “Okay I’m here at the airport”. haha. I honestly only knew one song by her about getting her drivers license and driving past an old boyfriend’s house. But I really liked her and it was really fun! Perfect spontaneous concert experience with very good last minute seats. Kenna and Savannah were higher up. We had two empty seats next to us, so they came down with us.
The boat broke down out in the middle of the lake while the Zimms were visiting. At one point they got in the water to push it back. Thank heavens, we got rescued by our boat guy’s dad coming out to tow us.
Kenzie and Bridger got the super experience of Big Sky gym. It is the foulest and grossest gym I’ve ever been forced to go to for a summer. I started heavy weight lifting a couple times a week at Dave’s suggestion. I’m writing this a year later and I’m still going (literally) strong.
Of course, Cherie must catch these moments.
B’s friend Chuck and his son’s family came to stay for a few days. Thank heavens, the boat got fixed.
Jake and Lelu came back up for her birthday. Rel and her friend Shannon came up. Full disclaimer: These are completely out of order. I’m pretty sure the Zimms came up in July. We also had B’s friend David T and his family come while the boat was broken. Then all of TT’s friends came up for Labor Day. I don’t have any photos of either of these events. I do have one photo of our friendly neighborhood marshmallow, dog food eating teddy bear.
On our very last Saturday, Lelu and I decided to go walk the entire point (6.7 miles). We were in the last half mile stretch. We saw this MASSIVE bear amble across the road. It was not too far in front of us. I did not want to use my bear spray. We also wanted to give them their own space. So, we turned around and jogged back to where we had service to call for a ride. B picked us up in the Polaris, but we did not see Teddy going by. Later that night, TT and all his friends left marshmallows on our back patio table. They also left the sliding glass door open. Mr Bear visited our property. He hit the jackpot with the bag of marshmallows. Then he found our entire Rubbermaid container of dog food. The next morning I went out to feed Cinco and it was gone. Checking the cameras, we discovered just how incredibly lucky we were that he didn’t come in the house. Instead he went under the neighbors deck for the entire next day trying to get into the dog food. The kids didn’t seem too worried about him. They still had a fire with s’mores. Then they went up on the balcony. They watched him leave the property. First, he knocked over our trash cans. Then he moseyed up the driveway.
We cleaned everything up. We put all the bags of trash to take to the dump on our way out of town. Unfortunately, we did not realize the dump was closed on Labor Day. The kids had all taken off. We tried to go to a campground to dump it, but none would let us. We ended up going to the church dumpster, and phew! it was mostly empty and we fit all that nasty stuff in there. Hopefully all the tithing we’ve paid over the years covered it.