Jenny's blog

Happy New Year!

It’s a new year! I’ve set a goal to add new content to the site each day of 2012. Most of the time I’ll be blogging since I am blogging about my Seminary class, but on off days I will try to add some new content related to Young Women or Primary.

I’ve been working on a theme for the new Drupal 7 server. Since I had to make some pretty significant changes to my node template files to upgrade to D7, I’m switching base themes, too. It’s taking some time, but I hope to be done by the end of the month. I’m not pushing very hard because Jared has some work to do on the new shopping cart. We are changing from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce, which will take a lot of customization. Once he gets imports working, things will go better for us. It’s just taking time. He’s discovered a PostGres bug he’s trying to get resolved or patched. And then there isn’t any documentation on how to set up credit card payments — that makes me laugh, actually. Write up a shopping cart but don’t teach anyone how to accept payments. LOL.

Today I finished up with my lessons for this week. I’m covering Deuteronomy 4 and 6 tomorrow and doing a verbal summary of Deuteronomy 1-3. I told the kids that I would pay them a dollar for each scripture mastery that they memorized over the holidays. I’m hoping to have 10 or so passed off tomorrow, but I’m not really expecting too much. Everyone’s so busy over the holidays — hence, the monetary incentive.

We bought new chainsaw parts and finally took the tree down and moved some of the trim that was blocking my space in the basement and now I’ve been able to figure out a way to get all 12 kids around the 3 tables. It’s a little crowded, but they’ll live. They’ll all be sad they have to sit at tables, but I am getting sick of the fighting over the couches every morning. They will sit on couches and then move to their regular seats later, since we sing around the TV. Plus there’s a movie early in tomorrow’s lesson. I’m showing Elder Oaks’ “Welcome to Seminary” talk again and inviting the kids to seek to improve their scripture study in some way this coming year.

Brother Dingess asked me and Brother Hoemann to speak later in the month during Sacrament meeting along with the Seminary class presidents. I can’t remember what the topic is, but I think it’s a talk. I hope I get to go last :).

Christmas was great this year — my aunt and brothers and parents all went to Houston to visit my sister and her family, so we were all alone. It was a welcome break after the chaos of the past few years. Jared and I were able to get a lot of work done on the websites and even got some work done on the trim in the basement. We finally rented a table saw and were able to rip cut those weird pieces that were too narrow around some of the door jambs. The rest of the pieces I can cut on my compound miter saw, but the weather is so terribly cold that I don’t want to cut it any time soon. Wind chill temperature tomorrow is supposed to be a high of 20 degrees.

New Year’s eve we had a few friends over for dinner and stayed up to midnight playing games. We had a good time, but I was so tired Sunday I took a 3 hour nap after (****NINE*** AM) Church. We’ve been cleaning up the party and such and rearranging the furniture downstairs. The kids love that :)

Posted by Jenny Smith

I'm Jenny Smith. I blog about life on the 300+ acres of rolling farmland in Northern Virginia where I live. I like tomatoes, all things Star Trek, watercolor, and reading. I spend most days in the garden fighting deer and groundhogs while trying to find my life's meaning. I'm trying to be like Jesus -- emphasis on the trying.