A Lovely Weekend

We had a busy, busy weekend, but highly productive and enjoyable.

On Saturday Alex, Nolan and I met up with Valerie and Denis for an overdue temple trip and dinner. We went to one of my favorite temples, here's a clue:


After our session, we were all starving - a normal occurrence for me. As planned, our next stop was dinner - a Thai restaurant (earlier in the week Nolan mentioned had had yet to try Thai food). After discovering our usual place was closed for reasons unknown, we ventured out to a new place in Provo - Spicy Thai. We've seen this place a few times, but I figured it wasn't going to be anything special. It was surprisingly excellent. Check this place out -


It's totally misleading.
Inside those doors is one of the best Thai restaurants we've found in Utah. Not only was the food amazing (reminiscent of the good stuff we ate back in Bellingham), it's literally 10 minutes or less from home. We were both pleasantly surprised and overjoyed with our find. My only regret is that I didn't order my favorite dish - the beef waterfall. Definitely going to try that next time. We ordered several entrees between the 5 of us - it was like something out of a dream. The food just kept coming and coming and it was all delicious. What can I say, I just love food.

Later in the day we got a call from Richie, one of Alex's mission companions, inviting me and Alex to join him and his soon-to-be wife, Laurie, for the Mormon Tabernacle Spoken Word and mini Christmas concert performance this morning (Sunday) at the Conference Center in Salt Lake.


I had secretly been hoping we could go to this event after hearing about it from a co-worker this last week. The thing is, with this specific event you had to request tickets months in advance and then pray you'd be randomly selected to receive them (max of 4 per household). There was no way we would have been able to get them this late in the game. Thankfully Laurie did get tickets and was kind enough to invite us to use the extra 2.

I've seen the choir perform before, but this time was different. They had ballet dancers, bell ringers and a guest singer, Brian Stokes Mitchell, from Broadway. It was incredible to watch. At one point in the program they sang the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. It was beautiful. I could feel a tear starting in my eye and quickly looked to Alex in hopes that he was in the same boat. He was. His Grinch heart grows larger everyday. As my sisters have experienced, whenever I feel an emotional response coming on, I have to distract myself by focusing on someone else. This time was no different. Shortly thereafter the concert ended and we made our way back to the car like a herd of cattle. I guess that's expected when you have 21,000 people parked within 5 blocks of each other.

That was the busy part of the weekend. The productive came when I stumbled upon a wonderful sale at Macy*s. I made a mad dash Saturday morning to replace my favorite black sweater and buy myself a new coat (3 inches of snow and butt cold wind chill convinced me this was a necessity). I was pleased to find that they were having some sort of holiday sale (aren't they always having a sale?) and offering additional 20% off of that. I found a super cute black cowl neck sweater normally $59 for $21 and a $200 wool pea coat for $81. I left the store feeling very accomplished. Later that evening we went back and got Alex outfitted in some new duds. $70 dress pants for $24, one pair was $12. A couple $40 dress shirts for $21, and a pair of Rockport shoes for $75. Needless to say, he won't be needing to go back anytime soon. Thank goodness.

There's only one stop we didn't get to this weekend, but after the disappointment we felt last time and the wonderful Christmas spirit we've experienced today, I think it's a blessing we missed this stop:


The overpriced tree lot!