Dear family,
The month began, once again, at American Preparatory Academy, though I didn’t spend long there.
By the time we hit June, the rest of Utah was out of school already (though Maryland still had a few weeks to go) and APA was only continuing to educate children by the loosest definition possible. The last four days of school consisted, of course, of field day, assemblies, and celebrations that just barely kept everyone busy enough to justify half a day of school.
It was fun seeing the students enjoy themselves and relax with their friends. I got many little gifts and cards and students asking me to sign a yearbook, and the week left a rather enjoyable taste in my mouth after a year of many complex emotions regarding the school.
I guess that’s how they get everyone to keep coming back.
Not me though! I’m finished for the time being, and even when I do decide it’s time to go back to teaching, it probably won’t be at APA. I loved the students and the staff, but I will be happy to find somewhere else to teach.
Luke wanted to do something fun that weekend, and he may have used the end of my school year as an excuse, or he may not have. He doesn’t usually need an excuse to compel me to join him on a spontaneous adventure.
This time it was camping, and it ended up being much more enjoyable than our last spontaneous camping trip.
I think I offered the usual resistances:
“I’m uncomfortable sleeping in my bed these days and I don’t really want to sleep on the ground.”
”Where would we even go?”
“Don’t you have that thing tomorrow?”
“What will we eat?”
I can be a bit of a whiner.
I gave into the idea after little effort, and we drove to some nearby federal land1. I don’t think I knew anything about federal land (what one can use it for or that it even really existed) before I met Luke, but it is probably his favorite thing about living in Utah. I’ve learned this, and it makes a lot of sense to me, as it seems to be a libertarian’s dream2.
You can hunt on federal land, you can camp on federal land, you can shoot at targets on federal land, you can have a campfire on federal land, you can dirt bike on federal land.
It seems like you can do just about anything Luke would ever want to do on federal land.
Luke took advantage of our nation’s land that weekend and hunted jackrabbits, which are apparently always in season (poor guys).
It took him about five minutes to find and shoot one, and another five to walk back to our campsite, where I had barely started setting up the tent. He then asked me if I wanted to know how to skin a jackrabbit, and I said, “not really,” at which point he proceeded to do it right in front of me anyway.
So I ran away and let him figure all of that out while I figured out how to inflate the air mattress.
The weather was perfect, the air mattress worked, and I slept as well as I ever do.
All in all, it was probably the most comfortable camping trip I’d ever been on, and we both really enjoyed ourselves.
The school year at APA ended on June 4th, a Thursday, and after that I had two days of post-service to help repair all damages done to book and building throughout the school year.
And since then…nothing. I have been blissfully (or somewhat restlessly) unemployed for the last three weeks and have been feeling the effects of it.
The first week of unemployment was similar to all of my week-long breaks from school throughout the last semester. I spent it largely watching a tv show with spurts of productivity in between couch sessions. I always seem to need to get this out of system once the school year ends.
But that lifestyle has usually already begun bothering me long before I need to go back to school.
I established a routine. I started baking a lot and always having dinner ready when Luke got home; I went on a walk around the neighborhood everyday to pass out flyers advertising my (mostly untapped) services as a piano teacher; I worked on little house projects that Luke and I have been wanting to make happen for a few months; I started actually studying the Old Testament using the Come Follow Me manual.
I applied to a few remote jobs as well—things that I felt I’d be able to keep up come September. But none of them have taken me up on my offer to let them pay me money.
One success is that I do now have one piano student! Her name is Brynn and she is my age and attends my ward! She came up to me during church one day and told me that she’d gotten my flyer and that she had been thinking about taking piano lessons to brush up on the piano skills that she’d let fall to the wayside when she stopped her lessons at age 14.
She has been my one and only student for the past few weeks, and I am very grateful for her.
I have also acquired a walking buddy, a house chore companion, and a few pregnant friends who appreciate companionship while trying to forget that they’re ten pounds heavier while swimming at the pool.
Mostly though, I spent the day alone, trying to get house projects done, waiting for Luke to get home. It can get a little lonely and discouraging sometimes, so if anyone has ideas for me, I’m open to them.
One day, Luke texted me from work to say that he wanted to take me on a date out to dinner and that the location was a surprise. I think I had already started making dinner that day, so we decided to postpone it to the following week, but the anticipation was well worth the surprise.
He had found a Greek restaurant in Orem!
I’m not sure how many people know this about me, but there have been many days since I moved to Utah that I probably would’ve done something a little immoral to get my hands on a good gyro. I don’t get homesick very often anymore, but I am still susceptible to pangs of envy when I call my family on a Friday evening and they’re eating takeout from one of our favorite Montgomery County haunts.
One of those haunts is the Big Greek Cafe, which actually catered our wedding, and which had to up the price of their $5 gyro Wednesday to $7, I’m pretty sure exclusively because of my family’s frequent abuse of the deal3.
Anyway, Luke and I are now officially fans of Meráki and will likely visit there again soon, even though our hearts will always belong to Big Greek in Maryland.
This little trip to a new restaurant with my husband broke up the monotony of being at home very nicely, and I’m grateful for Luke and his desire to share his new discoveries with me more than with anyone else.
And now for a few baby updates.
I went to a maternal fetal medicine clinic at some point this month because I was referred there by my OBGYN for some abnormality with my placenta that they had picked up in one of my scans. That turned out to be nothing and everything is totally fine4, but I got this really exciting picture of the baby out of it!
She’s healthy, normal-sized (except for her head, which is apparently in the 91st percentile (thanks, Luke)), and in a good position! I’m getting very excited to have her out of me and in my arms, but there are still (theoretically) two whole months before that happens.
Both of Luke’s sisters-in-law who were pregnant with me have had their babies now, which means I’m the only one left! It’s been really exciting to see this new little niece and nephew born into such wonderful families, and I’m so curious to watch everyone grow up together.
We saw June to its end in Sun Valley, Idaho as attendees of the 118th Annual Utah Banker’s Association Conference. Two questions that I had that you might also have are these:
- Why do the Utah bankers convene in Sun Valley, Idaho?
- Is Luke a banker?
The answer to question number one is, I’m assuming, that it’s just more exciting. The conference is more of a family getaway than anything, and since the Utah bankers are spread all over Utah, it probably just seems the most fun to go to Idaho’s version of Park City rather than just going to, you know, Park City.
It’s also just always been there. The Utah bankers have become completely expected in Sun Valley every year, perhaps by no one more than by the local ward. We showed up to a 10 AM sacrament meeting to find an overflow area full of chairs that extended all the way to the back of the cultural center and onto the stage. Few chairs were empty by the time the sacrament began, and the parking lot was not big enough to accommodate all of the bankers, but the ward graciously prepared for and accepted us.
The answer to question number two is no, but bankers give him work to do.
PROFi attends the conference as a sponsor, which gives them the opportunity to make connections with local Utah banks and hopefully build relationships that will lead to banks with no internal wealth management arm referring clients to them or hiring them directly to manage 401k plans for their own employees.
The reason I came along is because Luke’s bosses5 are very kind and were willing to provide us with a place to stay and provide me with access to the conference as a guest, even though that surely cost a little extra money. I wasn’t terribly out of place, since all of the big bankers of Utah brought along their entire family and treated the conference as a vacation. It was a lovely environment and everyone was quite friendly.
Some highlights from the conference include bingo night; sitting at hole seventeen during the golf tournament with Luke (one of the privileges of a sponsor); the final dinner, at which I met a Ukrainian woman who was very happy to talk to me about Ukraine and speak with me in Russian; several vendors and out-of-town bankers exposing themselves as people who don’t know how to pronounce “Zions” over the microphone; and the 80s concert put on just for (and I believe largely by the wallets of) the Utah bankers.
One thing I learned about Luke (and I think that Luke learned about himself) on this trip is that he does not like concerts. Both of us determined that our ears were not made for this concert, and I was luckily able to scrounge up some earplugs that I had in my purse from when I went to watch him shoot shotguns earlier in the week and my AirPods with noise cancellation.
I quite enjoyed the concert once I had earplugs in (and I noticed several elderly bankers with the same idea), but Luke remained overstimulated the whole time. I’ll leave that to my siblings to diagnose, as they are sometimes inclined to do.
One of my favorite parts of the whole thing was probably the golf tournament. Luke’s coworker got sick, which meant there would be a seat open at the table PROFi was supposed to occupy as sponsors of the hole-in-one competition. I asked to tag along so that I could spend the morning with Luke, and it was a highly enjoyable morning, greeting and chatting with bankers in high spirits and with slim hopes of winning golfing competitions throughout the day.
The hole-in-one competition was part of the larger golf tournament, offering the first person to get a hole in one at hole seventeen a reward of $50,000. It was during this competition that I learned that hole-in-one competition insurance exists. I don’t how expensive it is, but apparently you can cover your competitions that rarely result in a winner.
I learned this when we told a golfer that the prize for getting a hole in one was $1000 from PROFi and he said, “Wait, $1000? This schedule here says $50,000!” Once his group left (with no one even close to the pin), Luke called his boss to figure out whether they were offering $50,000 to a very lucky golfer, and Bruce explained the insurance policy. PROFi would be adding an additional $1000 to those who made the shot. So every banker after that group got a much more exciting temptation.
Didn’t matter much in the end, but it sure is more exciting to say $50,000 than $1000. The only winner of this contest was the golf competition insurance company.
As I finish up this letter, I’m on Luke’s uncle’s sofa in Colorado Springs. What I’m sure was initially one brother inviting another over for the Fourth of July has turned into a sort of miniature family reunion, featuring three of Luke’s uncles, his grandparents, and several cousins, all traveling in from different states.
After the long weeks of filling time that I wrote about earlier, I’m feeling hopeful about a July that started with a drive home from a Utah banker’s conference in Idaho, immediately followed by a drive to Colorado Springs less then a day later. Long drives aren’t necessarily comfortable while I’m as pregnant as I am, but I suppose they never really are. And neither is being pregnant. So what else am I to do?
Hopefully I’ll have more to say about this trip to Colorado next month, but I’ll just say now that I’m excited, despite the fact that Utah and Colorado have both banned fireworks this year because of the risk of fires. So, please consider praying for the west to get lots and lots of rain. Nothing about the drought or fires has affected me personally yet, but it is a little scary to see just how much has been burning in Utah recently.
Thank you for all of your love and support. I hope you have the most amazing Fourth and that you enjoy the rest of July. Hopefully I will too!
Love,
Sophie et al
- I suppose it’s more accurate to say Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, but I didn’t know what that meant when Luke first said it. I assumed it wasn’t Black Lives Matter land, but I really couldn’t know for sure. ↩︎
- Ironically. A libertarian’s dream is actually probably just owning his own land and doing whatever he wants with it, but the BLM land is probably a poor libertarian’s dream. ↩︎
- Whatever the reason, it was a smart move. The price change did not put a stop to our patronage. ↩︎
- I actually got pegged with a $1,700 bill from this visit that turned out to be about nothing important, which is a really big pain. Before going I checked with insurance and with the office like a million times and was assured that the clinic was in-network and the service would be completely covered with a $25 co-pay. So now I’ve faxed an appeal and had the clinic do the same, so hopefully I don’t have to pay so much for what turned out to be a completely unnecessary scan. But I got a cute picture! ↩︎
- Bruce and Mary Miller are the owners of PROFi and are absolutely lovely, honest people. I think Luke finding them as employers was probably divinely inspired, and I’m grateful for how welcoming they’ve been to both of us. They’ve recently adopted a habit of acquiring employees in their twenty-somethings, making PROFi a really funny place to walk into when they aren’t around. Not because of any amount of unprofessionalism, but because it’s just…all these young people, and you know their clients are all over the age of sixty. ↩︎
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly
Loved reading this! Wishing the best to your family!
💜Cara Kent