Through the looking-glass

Conference was amazing once again. I loved Elder Holland's talk, President Uchtdorf's talk and especially Elder Andersen's talk. The story about the family in Haiti was absolutely incredible. It made me so grateful for my own family and for the miracles that have happened in my own life that I don't even realize. I feel very blessed and happy today. I'm also feeling blessed to live in Salt Lake. I don't always appreciate it (especially around this time of year, when I'm missing Idaho and Montana and Jackson Hole, Wyoming), but it's wonderful to be so close to Temple Square and feel of the wonderful spirit there. I love it, and I love the great history of this city. It's really pretty amazing.

On Saturday morning, Andrew and I used a Groupon at Holdman Studios, a glassmaking shop at Thanksgiving Point (near Highland, Utah), to make two glass flowers. It was SO COOL. I could not stop smiling! When we got there, the glass wasn't quite hot enough yet, so the owner gave us a tour of the studio and showed us stained glass windows they're making for temples around the world, including the Paris and Rome temples. Then Andrew and I took an extremely long time to decide on colors for our flowers (you could pick two, but it was impossible to choose) and went in.

The kiln was 2700 degrees (seriously -- I don't know how they can work in there) and the guy who was helping us let us take all the pictures we wanted. Unfortunately, someone (ahem -- me) lost our card reader, so I don't have any pictures of Andrew and his glass flower until the new card reader comes this week, but you can see pictures of me making mine! It's going to be an awesome sea green and white when it's cooled down.

Seriously. This was one of the best things Andrew and I have ever done together. It was so fun! And on Monday we can go pick up our flowers. Now we just have to decide where to display them. Hmm.

After making our flowers, we were hungry (of course), so we got lunch at the Thanksgiving Point deli. In keeping with the trend of taking pictures, since we have been really bad about taking them lately, we had to also snap pictures of our delicious lunch. Yum!

Notice anything funny about this?

Before we left Thanksgiving Point, we had someone snap our picture. It was really windy that day and very bright, so it's not the greatest, but I've decided that I have to suck it up about the braces and let people take pictures of me.

Aren't spring weekends wonderful? This was a great one. I feel so renewed.