Swiss Days 2019

Another Swiss Days come and gone!  Bevan and I have been slowly handing our 10k race duties over to the new race director.  Jennie Hoover and her husband, Kody, are amazing!  They are outdoor enthusiasts, small business owners, super organized and willing to take on this beast!

I didn't sleep at all the night before.  We went to bed super late and the fear of sleeping-in kept me half-awake.  Not off to a good start.  Thankfully, the rest of the morning went off without a hitch!  We had so many volunteers, it was great!  Jennie has captured the true spirit of Swiss Days by roping in her family to help.  I don't know what we would have done all these years without my amazing family, Tom and his kids, Nora and her kids, and John with his truck.  They have totally been there for us every race day.

It felt weird when we were cleaning up.  Everything got loaded into Jennie's car.  It was time to let go.  And I was okay with that.  I'm excited to start a new chapter and get involved with another part of Swiss Days.  We turned in the cash box, went to breakfast, watched the parade, and went home for a short break.  Addie and Paige were going to spend the night with us so I talked them into working a shift at our ward's food booth: Knockwurst Sandwiches!  We spent the next 4 hours assembling sandwiches for hundreds of hungry swiss days shoppers.  Rye bread, bratwursts, swiss cheese, pickles, mayo, mustard, and a huge glob of sauerkraut!  I forced the teenagers to try a sandwich at the end of our shift and they actually liked it!  I mean, it was a pretty amazing sandwich!  We took our well-earned meal tickets and went to get Bevan and the littles.  We ate dinner on the square and then headed to the bouncy houses.  At the end of the day, the workers stop taking tickets and it's a giant free-for-all!  It got the kids nice and worn out!  We all slept so well that night.

Memories and a whole lot of snail-mail!

I got this crazy urge to de-clutter yesterday.  After finishing clothes-sorting for Anna and Dallin for the upcoming school year, I moved on to the garage.  I had 3 boxes of "stuff", yearbooks, mission, binders from school, diplomas, etc.  I decided that I needed to consolidate, which I do once every 10 years or so.  When high school and college are far behind, and those things don't seem so important anymore.  It was easy to toss AP binders (except "Woody's" English Lit binder of course!) and various calendars and mementos.  I was making great headway until I got to the last box of mission stuff.  Into the trash goes the MTC daily schedule and monthly newsletters from the Everett mission.  That was easy.  But then I got to the LETTERS!

Remember when we all used to write letters to each other?  And not like it was back in the 1960's... it was early 2000's!  I LIVED on writing and receiving letters!  It was when I was at the North Rim, Crested Butte, and my mission.  I wrote to my family and friends and they all wrote back!  I just loved getting letters (have I said that yet?!).  Anyway, I'm not normally a pack rat, but I had saved just about every letter/ card that I received during those 4(ish) years.  It was crazy!   I wasn't about to read them all, and there were some I really didn't WANT to read again.  Mom had the amazing forethought to type up and save all my mission letters on a cd.  I can easily hang on to that one disc.  I had some faithful letter writers, my amazing sisters and my Grandma and Grandpa Allen, who have since passed away.  Reading their letters meant something special to me, different than back then.  In the end, I knew I couldn't hang on to all these letters.  I had to toss them, but needed some closure.  So I piled all the letters on the the counter, took a picture of the pile, and threw them all away!  It's done.  It made me feel slightly better.  Anyway, I easily achieved my goal of one tote of memories to go back in the garage.  And now I should be good for another 10 years.