The Year of the Rooster

Our Spendlove family is half Oriental.  I grew up in Asia, and Dave and I have visited China, Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, and Cambodia together.  Mike spent six weeks traipsing through Bhutan, Nepal and other exotic spots alone, and then took Heidi to Japan.  Camille's family has traveled together to China, Japan, and Taiwan, and Emilie and Jono have served humanitarian missions in India. Jonny and Jenny spent a summer in Delhi, Bangalore, and Bengal.  No wonder celebrating Chinese New Year is a beloved family tradition!

On January 29, 2017, we gathered to celebrate the "Year of the Rooster."  I cleared the Buddhas out of my living room for Christmas and brought them back for Chinese New Year.  We had 18 guests and 10 dishes, a Chinese proportion.

 Part of the fun of Chinese New Year, for me, is assembling the decorations. There are posters for the walls, with Chinese good luck sayings,  My long red dragon emerges from the garage and takes his place on the table.  I stuff goodie bags with fortune cookies, chopsticks, fans, Chinese yo-yos, and pencils and notepads emblazoned with the logo, "Year of the Rooster".

Almost everyone gets into the act of cooking.  Naomi and Spencer fried the eggrolls, Emilie served the mango juice, Kirsten and her friend Lauren stir-fried the beef with broccoli and chicken cashew, and Camille was the chief taste-tester, making sure all the dishes were flavored just right!

 Other family members knew it was their job to stay out of the way until dinner was served!

 Spencer pronounced the eggrolls good, indeed.

 Naomi and Heidi shared a tale or two.

Jono and Emilie made sure their Grandpa knew they loved him.

 And then it was time to eat.

 After dinner, everyone told how China had touched their lives, from "It made all my clothes" (Spencer) and "It made all my grandchildren's toys" (Dave's sister Janice) to "It was on my first trip to China that I decided I wanted to spend my life traveling" (Mike).

Love, Sweat, and Tears

We love the beauty of the desert more and more, as we spend weekends at our home in St. George. We drove to Southern Utah on Thursday evening, January 26, 2017, so we could have two full days soaking in that beauty, before returning to Salt Lake City on Sunday morning.  We did a little sweating as we hiked through the red rock hills, and shed some inner tears when it was time to go home.

On Friday, Dave and I took a five mile hike to the water tower, high above Coral Canyon, and then along the ridge encircling Coral Canyon.  We savored views past cactus to blue mountains far away.

On Friday night, we attended a recital at Dixie State University by Stephen Beus, a pianist who won the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition.  He is now a music professor at BYU, as well as touring the world giving concerts.  Beus played gorgeous music, including Bach's Chaconne, and several pieces by Liszt.  He also had a professor's skill of telling facts and stories about the music, to help us understand it better.

On Saturday, we explored the arts town of Kayenta, then drove along the "Joshua tree highway" to Mesquite, Nevada.

Everything about Kayenta is well-designed (except, maybe, the town sign).  Art galleries surround a plaza covered with chalk art, and building codes are so strict that the homes melt away into the desert.

Kayenta has a new community arts center, with auditorium and exhibit space which Kayenta hopes will attract local concerts, dance programs, and art shows.

We wandered through the galleries, filled with landscape paintings, kachina dolls, and jewelry by my own jeweler, Jeanne Fagen.

 The community center sponsored an open house, with brownies and a dance performance.

 The buildings, plants, and landscapes of Kayenta are iconic Southern Utah.

We drove into Nevada along the road which bypasses the Virgin Gorge.  We were nearly alone, as we wound past rugged cliffs, red hills, and joshua trees.

Dave had warned that we needed to hurry to make our 8:30 p.m. concert in Mesquite.  Predictably, we arrived three hours early, with an unexpected time change between Utah and Nevada.  What to do?  The best movie option was "Moana" a top-rated Disney movie.  It was great, and would have been even greater with Sam, Ezra, and Mia with us.

We had time for dinner at the Casa Blanca buffet--"seafood night."  I promised myself I would honor my diet by eating only plain seafood, fruits, and salad.  I was seduced, though, by the prime rib, breaded shrimp, and oysters casino.

We rocked along with fellow Baby Boomers at the Casa Blanca concert of the "Love, Sweat, and Tears" band.  The lead singer admitted he was 71, so we felt right at home!

The female vocalist was especially charming.  We didn't get back to St. George until after midnight, but we truly felt that we'd had a "night out" and a day of adventure.

Bastian Beef

Dave and I immediately liked Gay and Bevan Bastian, when we met them in spring 2015, before Mike married their daughter, Heidi.  Since then, we have had several fun visits with the Bastians, including joining them at the sheepdog trials in Midway and going fishing with them on the creek near their ranch in Axtell, Utah.  On Saturday, January 21, 2017, the Bastians were in Salt Lake City to see the Utah Opera production of "Man of La Mancha," and we enjoyed visiting with them again.

 Mike and Heidi invited both Gay and Bevan and Dave and me to dinner at their home.

The Mike Spendloves just bought a Peruvian cookbook, so the dinner consisted of South American specialties--potato and pea soup, garnished with kalamata olives, followed by beef and chorizo stew served over mashed plantains and garnished with red onion.  Heidi baked brownies for dessert, served with mint chocolate chip ice cream.

As ranchers, Gay and Bevan are very practical about their animals.  The beef in Michael and Heidi's stew was Bastian beef, from a butchered cow from the Bastian ranch which Michael helped to wrangle into a meat locker one weekend when he visited Axtell.  "It was a very big cow," Bevan said, and "It was a friendly cow," Gay added.  It was also a delicious cow.

Bevan and Gay stayed the night with Dave and me, chatting about the "Man of La Mancha" performance over a nightcap of Red Barn apple cider.  They were up early Sunday morning to drive to Twin Falls, Idaho, for a nephew's missionary homecoming.  They didn't make it there.  Their car hit a patch of black ice and rolled twice, shattering all the glass in the windows but, miraculously, leaving Gay and Bevan unscathed.  We were thankful and relieved that they survived that accident, and we look forward to more good times with them.