Dining--Out and About Town

Last Sunday when I reviewed the week's activities, I realized that I was not having dinner at home any of days Monday through Friday AND Saturday lunch was not at home, either.  It was all good stuff, but just funny that it all fell on this same week---

It went like this:

Monday-- Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in City Creek Mall, Salt Lake City---with three of the sweet missionaries we served with in the Church History Library--Jim and Linda Twelmeyer and Marianne Jones. The Twelmeyers were in town visiting family and called to set up this meal.  This was a place we went a few times with them so it was a perfect place to gather for a meal and conversation.  Before dinner, the three of us were able to visit The Light the World Giving Machines where we donated to Special Olympics, The Stella Oaks Foundation, and another place I can't remember that provided computer training for refugees--Gary's choice.

It was so great to be together and so much to talk about that we ran out of time.  We will actually spend time with the Twelmeyers in their home in South Carolina in May and then Marianne is going with us to Africa next July.

Tuesday--  Dinner at City Creek Mall-Food Court with Ben.  Ben likes the Celtic Woman and they were performing that night at Abravanel Hall.  It made him very nervous, but he was brave and made the trip to downtown despite those fears and we had a fun Christmas concert.  (The food from the food court was just average.)

Tuesday's meal

Lights in the Mall

At the concert

I enjoyed the concert, but Ben was a bit disappointed because his favorite singer is no longer in the group and they sang mostly Christmas songs.  We will watch for other concerts in our area in the future--non Christmas ones.  Glad to share this one with Ben.

Wednesday--  In preparation for the film screening that was hosted by USSC on Thursday, some of us met for dinner with the film maker Gail Freeman.  We met at J Wong in (you guessed it-) in downtown Salt Lake.  It is also great to have time with these amazing people, to meet Gail and also to spend time with Crystal Fox and her daughter, from Angry Moms Arizona. The food was great--I had yellow curry and conversations were even better. They have a robot server who carries out the food.  So fun!

L-R: Debby Anderson, Deb Widmer, Therese Cavlovic, Gail Freeman,
Crystal Fox and her daughter, Mia, me, Sherri Wittwer, Angela Provstgaard and
last but not least Nick Pensari from the County DA's office

Thursday-- This was the night of our pre-screening of Gail's documentary "No One Cares About Crazy People."  We (USSC) sponsored this event and held it at the Main Salt Lake County Library.  The auditorium holds about 300 people and we had about 280 pre-register and about 200-220 in attendance.  It was a great event and a good connector with others who are interested in this population of individuals with severe mental illnesses. I headed down around 4 to help get things set up and then just talked to people before and after the movie.  Five people (at least) came from DBH which was so great including Ben's psychiatrist, Dr. Schenk and Dr. Todd Souter who runs Crisis and CIT in the state.

Deb Widmer welcoming our guests

I did have dinner that night again but it was at 9:15 pm at a downtown drive up window of McDonalds.  I realized I felt too hungry to wait 45 minutes to get home. Meal #4 in Salt Lake.

Friday--  This time dinner wasn't in Salt Lake, but at our Stake Center for our Ward Christmas Party.  It was good food, good conversation, and a sweet program--a video interviewing youth and Primary kids in our ward about Christmas and Jesus Christ.  It was so awesome.  Just the right thing for a Ward Christmas Party.

Saturday-- This was one of Jena's busy performance days so I will make a separate post about that--but in keeping with the "theme" of the week, she and I ate a late lunch in Bountiful between her performance there and her later one down at the Festival of Trees in Sandy.

For the record--we did eat dinner at home--around 8:00 pm---Jena had burrittos and I ate a salad.

In addition to all of these things--and the prep work related to them, we also attended the temple and kept working on getting our house ready for guests next week.  The basement carpet is being cleaned tomorrow so I was busy with the total cleaning and reorganizing and de junking of the storage room.  Good progress is being made and hopefully that continues into this next week.

And Christmas decorating and gifting getting are in full swing.....