Standring Family Update 2023

Hi dear friends and family-- 2023 has been quite a year with so much happening! It started with us arriving home from our Utah holiday trip discovering that our dental office remodeling project had a major issue going on. The local contracting company (who you would think would be aware enough to know better) had removed the roof prior to the holidays and covered the whole top of the building with tarps in a questionable plan to hold out the inevitable rains we always have in the winter in Crescent City. Well, sadly, we discovered how inadequate that plan was and we were horrified to find it was raining iINSIDE the building (as well as outside) throughout the whole place when we got back and checked on the progress of the construction. Staff members helped put kiddie pools and buckets all over and carpet had to be pulled up, down to the plank flooring, and ceiling tiles were leaking and falling all over the place. It was a nightmare scenario, but due to needing to keep up dental work for patients in need and to keep the office production going for funding of the remodel, the work went on with patients warned of the almost war-zone conditions of the place and asked if they still wanted to come for treatment. Most people did, so the intrepid staff continued on and sometimes had patients hold buckets to catch drips or streams of water as they were in the chairs for their dental procedures. Kudos to all those staff members and patients who trudged through the slosh on the floors and the absolutely crazy conditions to carry on! As that situation continued, our daughter Kira had meanwhile planned a dream vacation trip as a reward for her Dental Hygiene School graduation accomplished in December 2022, and she invited me, as her mom, to come along with her! Of course I said yes! She chose to go to Alaska...yes, in January (because she wanted to see the Northern Lights which are best seen in the winter months I guess and because she wanted to go before starting the new job she'd accepted to work doing research in the dental and dental hygiene fields with the famed "Clinical Research Associates" organization which is the best known group doing work of its kind in the dental world. They publish research and present at conferences for dental professionals throughout the country and world. Quite an exciting opportunity for Kira who was offered a job with them after she interviewed them for a dental hygiene school informational project. Anyway, so as crazy as it was in January, off to Alaska we headed--the mother-daughter team from California! (I've posted tons of pictures over this past year, a little at a time, on my facebook page if you want to see some visuals!) Kira planned out all the details to a "T" which made it wonderful for me to just show up for...however a surprise to me once we arrived and picked up the first rental car of the trip, was Kira saying "I was hoping you could be the driver, because I'm scared to drive in winter conditions!"-- What??! And she thought I liked to drive in snowy, icy winter conditions?? Actually I'm terrified of that in general too (having already had many scares and even an accident on slippery ice and snow)....but mothers will do anything for their daughters, I guess, because I grit my teeth and clenched the steering wheel and did it because she wanted me to! I tried to keep my winter PTSD in check and off we drove into the winter squalls (praying all the while) in sometimes zero and sub zero temperatures! We actually ended up having a wonderfully fun adventure with many exciting events planned by Kira including driving along the Kenai Peninsula to visit a friend of hers who lives near Seward in a little town by "Resurrection Bay"-- so beautiful in its wintery majesty, despite the name conjuring up thoughts of what happens after death! There's a very interesting "Alaska Sea Life Center" there that we spent a lot of time at, plus we got to attend a small branch of our church there with a few hardy residents in the dawn hours (which happens there at like 10:00 a.m. with dusk or sunset shortly after about 3 p.m.)! We were going to take a Bay boat trip one of the days there, but the water was too formidable and choppy, so we just observed the beauty safely from ashore. AFter that time in Seward visiting Kira's friend Madison and husband and their adorable little baby girl, we headed back toward Anchorage and then drove up to a small place called Willow and did actual dogsledding! Despite me getting thrown off the sled at one point (luckily snow is somewhat softer for landing than plain rock hard ground), it was fun and exhilarating and an exciting adventure! We topped that off by visiting Wasilla and the Iditerod Dog Sled Race museum and I got myself a cute, warm sled-doggy-eared winter cap! After driving back to Anchorage and staying overnight, we flew up to Fairbanks the next day and visited the magical and charming North Pole, Alaska (and the Santa Claus House and store) where it is Christmas all year round. They have live reindeer and a self-proclaimed world's largest giant Santa as well. I even bought a one-inch square "deed" to be a part-owner of the place. Very enchanting! We then started out with a rental car to drive the long, lonely and icy road to a place called "Chena Hot Springs" but broke down part way there! That was scary knowing we would have no heat in the sub-zero weather and maybe no lights to be seen by other cars as the sun began to set in the early afternoon there! Luckily Kira was able to get ahold of the people that rented us the car and they were able to drive us out another car after not too terribly long a wait, and then off we continued. At Chena Hot Springs, we got checked into a cabin and then visited their onsite Ice Museum which was amazing and breathtaking (because it was so cold!--And cool as well!) and we spent some time in the actual Hot Springs (getting our hair literally frozen from the cold air and hot steam!!), and enjoying a lovely meal in their restaurant. That night we headed off on a group expedition in military style all-weather/terrain Sus-V vehicles to some high snowy mountain peak for a night of searching for views of the Northern Lights! They had a big yurt up there with a heater/stove to try to keep us warm since even our bundling up like Eskimos wasn't enough to feel warm in those circumstances. They also had the most horrifying and frozen outdoor outhouse for a bathroom, which I hoped and prayed I wouldn't have to use to no avail. It was beyond description and causes PTSD just thinking about it...but we survived (They also provided hot chocolate and hot noodle cups and oatmeal to keep us warm on the inside as well, but we still had to venture out periodically to see if the Northern Lights would appear), and we were rewarded for our efforts by getting to see the Lights! We saw mostly just green colors (rather than some pictures that may show multiple colors) but we were glad to have even been able to see some Northern Lights! Truly amazing! We then headed back down to the resort with the bumpy, loud ride in the Sus-V again and got at least some sleep in our cabin. The next dark morning we visited the hot springs one last time and made the drive out from the resort and back to Fairbanks to fly back to Anchorage and then back home. What an incredible adventure and I'm so grateful my dear daughter invited me along to share it and that her dad (Jim) footed the bill as a graduation present for her! Then on with the rest of the year!...Our son, Daniel, got engaged on Valentine's Day 2023, so we all headed into wedding planning mode (with a May wedding planned), while the two of them continued on with their BYU college studies. In February over President's Day, along with newly engaged Daniel and Abby, we visited Jim's mom who now lives in the Bay Area full time at a nice, family place for seniors called El Cerrito Royale. The school district speech department asked me to come back and substitute for a speech therapist going out on maternity leave for the rest of the school year, so I helped covered 2 elementary schools (part-time) for that. March brought rare hail and snow to Crescent City and the schools had some closures. Amongst this rather harsh spring, when our spring break came, Jim had figured he'd always wanted to take a road trip to Southern Utah to see all the National Parks they have there: Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Arches and Canyonlands. Jim did lots of research on how to camp in your Tesla! So that's what we did. Some of the parks still had coverings of snow and ice and we even had to use some crampons (spikes) on our hiking boots and poles to help with the many hikes. We hadn't done so much hiking in a long time and it was oftem quite extremely strenous (like up to the start of Angel's Landing in Zion's, Sunrise Point in the snow in Bryce, and to Cassidy Arch at Capitol Reef, and Delicate Arch in Arches and Mesa Arch at Sunrise in Canyonlands, among others)--we were hiking fools and sometimes wondered if we could complete the hikes, but we did them ,uch to our great surprise! We also hit Goblin Valley State Park which had some super cool "hoodoo" tall rock formations (and where they filmed a memorable scene of "Galaxy Quest"--a family favorite space travel comedy movie). At the final of the Big 5 National Parks, it began to be a blizzard in Canyonlands, so we didn't stay until dusk or dark like we had in some of the other parks, but instead decided we'd better head back to civilization before we got snowed in there! So we headed back to the center of the state to Provo where we have my parents' former house as our own now. We had rented out the upstairs and sometimes used the bottom section as a place for ourselves to stay during our many visits to Utah since so many of our kids live there now. In March, Jim's brother Eric and Eric's 2 sons also visited us in our hometown of Crescent City. We're hoping that the younger son, Michael who is halfway through Dental School in Illinois, will come and work with us in our office in Crescent City once he graduates. He loves the outdoors and fishing, etc. and is single, so doesn't have a spouse to veto living in a small town, and he has indicated that he would like that, so we are hopeful! (Even though we have 2 dentist sons ourselves now, both are pretty entreched with their families and offices in Utah and Arizona at this point.) And Kira had a bad car accident when someone hit her in an intersection while she was on her way to a rehearsal for a Spanish-language Easter choir program she had tried out for and was a part of ("The Lamb of God"). The car was totaled and luckily after crutches and physical therapy she was able to recover enough to be in the final performances. Jim and I were able to attend one of the rehearsals and watch the final performance on a live stream. We also attended our church's General Conference at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, and Kira attended with her boyfriend and Jason and some of his kids also attended. After we drove the long way home to Crescent City, I turned around not long afterwards and flew to Daytona Beach to watch Daniel's BYU Cheer Team compete on the famous Bandshell on the beach at the National Cheerleading Championships. It was quite an experience to see Cheer teams from all over the country there, and many of them practicing out on the beach in the beautiful sunshine! Then, Easter followed on April 9th and I got to be in Utah for that along with many of the grandkids and our kids. [More to be continued...forthcoming....]