Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Dear Family and Friends,

As this eventful year winds up we want to wish you all the best during the Christmas season and for the New Year. We are now living on the Triangle Ranch. If you are ever in the Phoenix, Arizona, area please give us a call so we can arrange a visit. We keep ourselves busy by taking care of our house and our big property. We have lots of projects planned (writing stories, taking on-line computer classes, genealogy research, reading a book a week) and hope to get started on them no later than January 1, 2009.

Since most of you have been faithful readers of our mission reports and our blog we will not rehash old news but just give a synopsis of the past four months. We intend to keep adding to our blog so check it periodically.

We left Hungary on 20 August 2008 after a whirlwind tour of Central Europe with our daughter Gwyndolynn and her husband, Eric and Ryan and Kelly. We flew first to the Washington DC area and enjoyed meeting old friends. On 28 August we flew to Phoenix, Arizona. This was a memorable day not just because of our arrival but also because of a huge storm that blew down trees and power lines. When people ask us when we came to the area we use the storm as our common reference. We were attracted to this area because our daughters Rebecca and Lydia live here.

We bought a Toyota Matrix our first weekend in Arizona. We then started looking for our dream home and found it in the Triangle Ranch. While our home was in escrow we visited our daughters Laura and Gwyndolynn in Utah. We saw snow in Utah during the first week of October. We were still using our unheated pool in Arizona the first week in November. We feel blessed to be in a very nice neighborhood and members of a great congregation. Our oldest new friend is 92 years old and there are many other men who are much older than Bob. That makes him happy as he can learn much from this group.

Rose is up to her usual activities when we are in a new home. She has everything in the house organized and has met all the neighbors. She invited them all to our church’s Christmas program but only one came with us. We have a very sociable neighborhood, not too nosy but concerned about the others’ welfare. Part of this bonding may be due to the fact that all the 12 properties on our street use flood irrigation and we have to coordinate and cooperate to prevent water damage when it is our turn to irrigate.

We are healthy and happy to be back in the USA. We voted in the November elections and are anxious to see how the new administration works out the problems it will inherit. We are a bit anxious about the state of the US economy but are also fully confident in the promise God gave through the prophet Malachi as found in the Bible.
We have joined a garden club. We think it will really help us learn about what to plant and how to garden here in Arizona. It is fun visiting other people’s gardens!

We had a great event-filled year with no serious accidents, injuries, or illnesses. We are enjoying resort life living and only working when we want to. We have made many new friends but we want to keep our old friends (remembering the Brownie song) so we would love to hear from you by what ever means it takes, e-mail, phone call, postal service, runner, visit, jungle drums, etc.

We sincerely wish you all the best. We hope this Christmas season brings you peace and joy in your lives and that you are able to enjoy your family members. Families really are of most value and we are thankful for ours!!!

Love,
Rose and Bob

Ryan and Kelly

We enjoyed getting to know our two grandchildren, Ryan and Kelly.

Eve loves water

When Eve gets a chance, she loves to play in the water such as this past Saturday when they irrigated at her apartment.

Camping

The weekend before we moved into our new home we went camping with our new Windrift Ward in the mountains near Payson, Arizona. We took our grand-daughter, Eve. It was a little cool but very pleasant. We got to know many of our new ward members. Brother Knight cooked our bishop a giant pancake.

New trees

We ordered 10 fruit trees for our yard that were delivered on 27 October. Bob and Gary Brown dug the holes with the help of a big auger. Bob and Rose planted the trees. The new trees include almond, apricot, fig, peach, pear, plumb, and pecan. They are all growing nicely after two weeks in the ground. For those who may not know, Arizona has some of the most difficult soil to work with we have ever encountered. When the soil is dry it is hard as a brick. When the soil is wet it is similar to sticky paste. We ordered a big dump truck full of top soil mixed with mulch and manure to give our trees a better chance of survival.

Our new home

We moved into our new home on 18 October. Bob's cousin, Bill Tryon, and his sons and a couple of room mates helped us load our belongings out of our storage unit into Bill's big trailer. We had arranged for our new ward to help us unload on Saturday morning at 10AM. Because Bill's crew worked so quickly and efficiently, by the time the ward help arrived there were only a few boxes left for them to carry into the house.












We bought some new furniture to replace that which we had sold before our mission. We also hung up several of our Afghan rugs.

After General Conference

We had a little bit of snow on the mountains in Utah on General Conference Sunday.








On our way home we stopped in Blanding, Utah to visit Bob's relatives, Eva and Stan Byrd. They have some fancy quilts in their visitors center.










They took us on a little outing to see some cliff dwellings.

many pictures from October

We attended our first Hungarian mission reunion.

Our new home is now under contract

We finally were able to negotiate an acceptable offer for a very nice home in Gilbert, Arizona.  It is close to a big park, close to an LDS chapel, and close to a Trader Joe's store.  It is not as big as many of the houses we looked at, not as fancy, and most importantly, not as expensive.  It should do nicely for us.  It has a 3/4 acre park like yard with desert landscaping in front and luxury oasis in the rear.  It has a detached 900 square foot guest house with its own garage.  The neighborhood is very nice and several of the homes on our street are being renovated.  The house we are buying has been renovated from top to bottom.  We hope to have many visitors.  Here are some pictures:

as you can see the paint choices are very nice

the tile, carpet, and stone work is top quality

House hunting in Phoenix area

Below you may see pictures of some of the houses we looked at.  You will also see pictures from a birthday party we had with our girls and Natalie on the far right, our friend and realtor.  Eve, our grand-daughter has her own picture.  

hunting houses in phoenix

This property on Jerome in Mesa has a barn and a 30 foot square sand box.  It needs a pool but the price is right.

Rose and Bob received a fish pedicure while in Alexandria.  Little fish nibbled the dead skin from our feet.

Our new car is a Toyota Matrix.