Moscow's Christmas in January

My side-gig these days is as a short term consultant for the World Bank to assist the Eurasian Center for Food Security in Moscow, Russia. The World Bank and ECFS hire researchers to produce case studies about food security in Eastern Europe/Western Asia. I came out in Nov 2016 to help the first cohort of case study authors learn how to adapt their case studies so they could be used by teachers and demonstrate to interested faculty and students at Moscow State University how to teach with case studies. I gave a couple presentations that were very well received, but didn't hear anything else about it for a long time. 

In 2019 the World Bank asked if I would grab a colleague (Jim Gentry!) to run a week-long all-day intensive training program for professors in the area to learn how to teach using case studies. It was a wonderful experience, and it occurred to me this week (for reasons that will become clear in a future post) that I never blogged about that wonderful experience.

So I spent the last week of January in Moscow! Russia celebrates Christmas later than we do, on January 7 (blame the Gregorian/Julian calendar switch). That meant the Christmas decorations were still up when we were there. Here are some pictures and videos of Christmas in Moscow:

An Unexpected Journey, part 4 - The Voyage Home

After the funeral, we picked up some more ice cream from the Creamery across the street and some Tiny Spicy and joined the other kids at the park.

Princess @I liked the swings because I got to play when I first got there. After that I ate some lunch and I played with my cousins. It was really fun.@

Superstar ~At the beginning I was just walking around, not really doing anything. I ended up playing a little bit with JT on the playground set and then pushing Princess on the tire swing. There were other small kids that joined the tire swing, but all of them left dizzy.~

Takes after his old man.

S: ~It was sad when we had to say goodbye to all the rest of our family. I also got to dip my toes in the really cold water on the really hot day.~

John-Thomas #During the park, I did this amazing thing. I didn't know how to get down. I was stuck. But then I found a cool way to get down: I could jump! The first time I jumped, hoping I would land on my feet. When my feet slammed into the ground, it was so hard that I had to use my hands. I tried over and over and I finally made the point where I jumped off and I didn't have to use anything to get down. So I showed Superstar and I think I showed Princess, and then I did it a couple more times. And then we left.#

Joy: "We sat by Dustin and Christine. It was nice to spend some time with them."

Friday after dinner at the park we drove 5 hours into Colorado and stopped at a hotel in Grand Junction. I brought in the luggage and carried my sleeping children to the room. When Princess woke up, she felt very grateful, because she knew I must have carried her into the soft bed.

S: ~In the hotel, they s a i d they served breakfast.~

My future football players, tired after a hard game

One of the biggest impacts of Covid to our trip was the devastation of the hotel breakfast bar. Our Grand Junction hotel at least made an attempt. There were empty bowls for fruit, and some pomegranate juice, but there was also a nice lady who would drop a premade omelets and some bacon into a paper box for you to take with you. Princess and I got a couple. That was something at least.

S: ~When we [S, JT, J] came to her, she had run out of omelette, so we only got a little bacon and I'm a vegetarian! At our second hotel, they had a bag with an apple - just an apple, not cut up and stuff - and a granola bar and a bottle of water. I was expecting, like, a waffle bar or something, but it was all closed because they didn't want anyone touching their stuff. I don't know why they couldn't have cooked the waffles for us. It was really frustrating.~

JT: #Why? They gave us food.#

We stopped by my Uncle Sherm for brunch and a game of Uno. His kids were in town, but most had left again before we got there. We all needed to sleep in after the week we'd had.

S: ~At Uncle Sherm's we got to have Eggo Waffles for the first time. They go in the toaster and come out as nice little cooked waffles. We played Uno three times: I won one; Princess won one; and Sherm won one.~

Then we drove up the road a piece to visit my Aunt Virginia near Aspen. We met each other halfway and had lunch. You may remember the post about things my kids said and the episode with the elk burger. That was here. That was fun. John-Thomas ate a lot of chips.

JT: #Yeah :)#

S: ~I got to show Aunt Virginia some magic tricks, like she picks a number on a clock face and I guessed what number she ended up on. I got to have noodles with Parmesan cheese and french fries.~

It was very nice to spend time with Virginia again. We're hoping to drive out and see her a couple more times this summer.

J: "I love Aunt Virginia. I'm so glad she felt well enough to come see us. And I was overwhelmed by her gratitude and how much she loved us being there."

We drove the rest of the day and night, finally stopping just inside the Texas border on Sunday. This part of our journey was really hit by Covid. We had discovered just before the funeral that my white shirt was missing. I had borrowed one from Fran's husband, Casey, for the funeral, but I didn't have one for Sunday. So we tried to stop at a WalMart in Colorado. There were police officers at each one, waving people along because they were closed. The website claimed they were open until 8:30 and we had plenty of time before then! We asked one of the police at the second WalMart what was going on, and CO had declared WalMart needed to close at 5. Here it was 5:15 and 5:30, so we just missed it. :(

Then we needed gas and potties along the road, and the gas stations and restaurants were a lot less willing than usual to let people use the facilities. We had to stop several times just to find a bathroom - for paying customers only. We were good and had worn our masks most anywhere we got out along the way, but that road is no longer traveler-friendly. Plan on shorter driving days or else leave a lot earlier in the morning. We were fortunate to have a little kids' potty in the car.

Sunday we decided the bishop had given us permission to have sacrament in our home, and our home that day was the hotel. So we took the sacrament, trusting that God will accept the good intentions and drove the rest of the way home. We almost made it on just the one tank of gas, but not quite. I had forgotten about the time zone change, and if I had remembered we would have stopped a little closer to home so we could make it in one tank. We listened to scriptures and conference talks and played the Ungame and gospel trivia as we drove. The last day's drive didn't take very long and we made it home around dinner time.

J: "It was nice to stay in hotels on the way back even if they didn't have a breakfast. I appreciated a comfy place to sleep, and happy children during the day."

JT: #I really like driving. I get to play DS! I don't like squishy beds. I'm glad I'm home and get to have my normal bed because I'm six years old.#

S: ~Driving on Sunday was pretty hard because we don't get to do the things we normally do on drives. And there was only one movie we got to watch: Fantasia 2000. And at the end of every song, we had to stop and talk about what it meant. A lot of looking out the window took place then. And my iPad managed to stay at 1% the entire drive because I forgot to charge it that night and it stayed on that line between alive and dead without crossing over the entire drive. That was a nice miracle.

All the kids are really good travelers. They are much better behaved as a rule on the road than I was as a kid, or than they are at home even, so we enjoy these long trips. And the next few days, everyone is so thankful to have more space again that we have greater peace than normal.

J: "It was really nice, driving out to visit my mom because I feel more in control when I'm driving than flying. It was nice after my mom died to feel like I was in control. I appreciate, Derrill, that you would just let us drive through. I was sorry for the kids' discomfort, but it was nice for me to be able to just drive through until we got there."

An Unexpected Journey, part 3 - Speaker for the Dead

Aunt Coralee offered to host a picnic get-together before the funeral. We decided that having the kids run around at a park before time to be reverent was not the best strategy, so we sent Joy by herself as a family rep.

Joy: "My sister Fran offered to take me so that I could leave the car behind. I'm glad that she decided to come with me. She even stayed for a little while. It was great to see some of my mom's family. My mom's family always used to get together for Thanksgiving and a family reunion in the summer, but after my grandma died it's mostly been for funerals and maybe special birthdays. So it was really sweet to have Coralee invite people to get together, like old times.

"My aunt Carla was there with Jackie and her daughter, . Brent and Howard were there and Howard's daughter that's Christine's friend. My uncle Dennis and his wife and her daughter were there. My aunt Wendy and my uncle Blair came. I haven't seen either one of them since they got married, or nearly so. It was really nice to seem them. I had felt really close to them as a kid. I had hardly recognized Aunt Wendy. Actually, I saw Aunt Wendy on my way out to Pennsylvania; I stayed overnight in her house in Ohio."

"My aunt Carla passed out family group sheets and she visited my mom every week in Ogden before Covid happened. She had told me that she felt like she was standing in the place of my mom's Mom, who would visit her that regularly if she could. It was always on Sunday. My aunt Rose came. I've always really loved my aunt Rose. Her husband is not doing well, and stays in their home all year long. I got to hear about that because I told her to remember to tell him to behave and be nice to her because he always used to tease her in public."

"My aunt Nonie was there with her new husband. It was nice to meet him - seems calm and reserved. I'm sure that's why they suit each other. Nonie's kind of quiet. But anytime I tried to talk to him, he was very eager to talk to me."

Sounds like me!

"And of course Dustin and Christine came with their children. Christine expressed a desire, quite persistently, that she wanted them to come and visit us in Texas. That just made me so happy! She even talked about doing so this year. :)   I'm going to need to follow up. I really had a good time visiting with the people I love in my mom's family."

DeWayne, Doug, and Dustin - sons
Christopher, Jude, Superstar, Sammy, and Anna - grandchildren

Superstar ~ I got to be a pall bearer for the funeral, which was very exciting. ~

"Jake and Amy came for the funeral" even though they are on your dad's side of the family. "I think though it has to do with Doug making such close friends with people. He had some friends there from high school!

There was a canopy set up outside at the gravesite. It was a hot day, so most people either congregated inside the canopy or in the shade of the trees around. It was quite a good turnout, with maybe 10-20% wearing masks for Covid.

Uncle DeWayne conducted the service. It was recorded on a webcam and is preserved for posterity here*****. Uncle Doug gave the official talk about life. He took Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" as an inspiration, trying to tell a deeper truth about life and Mom - not glossing over the hard times and human foibles, but still in an attempt to honor their mother. I was particularly impressed with the rhetorical flourish near the end, when he shared something along the lines of 'She didn't teach us responsibility, but she taught us independence. She didn't give us _this___, but she gave us __that_____.' It was very poetic.

Dustin, Fran, Joy, Doug, DeWayne

His talk gave others permission to also be honest yet kind. He and they mentioned the poverty she always lived in. We heard about how the family didn't have food some days, about needing to move from place to place often, about the judgment they faced from others in the community. And yet despite it all, she was loving and kind and forgiving; she held firm to her love of Jesus and the gospel.

John-Thomas # I liked the broom talk. That was really fun. Like, "Ahhhh! I'm coming for you with the broom!"#

Uncle Doug told a favorite story of his mother. He, DeWayne, and Joy were sharing a room in the attic. DeWayne and Joy were asleep, but Doug was running and jumping around until his mother called upstairs to get him to stop. He didn't. She warned that she was going to come upstairs with a broom. Li'l Dougie poked his head around the corner and saw her marching up the stairs with a broom.

Uhoh! Quickly he jumped into bed and pretended to be asleep. His mom entered the room, looked around at three "sleeping" forms and announced, "Alright! Who's really sleeping and who's just pretending?!" Then she took the broom and WHAPPED DeWayne multiple times. Doug laid in bed, silently laughing to himself. Until his mother left the room and DeWayne returned the favor, that is.

JT #That one was funny.#

They had some time for anyone who wanted to to come up and share thoughts and feelings and memories about Grandma Joy. Superstar and Princess both did.

S ~ I spoke about how we went to Grandma Joy's nursing home and they had some of the yummiest hot chocolate there. I always looked forward to going there to have the hot chocolate because I was 8 the last time I had seen her. At the end I got to place the pall-bearer flower from my shirt on the casket. ~

In his closing remarks, DeWayne mentioned that mom was not very good with the Rules of the gospel, but she taught her children to Love the gospel.

J: "Mom always took us to church. Some people who get excommunicated don't come to church anymore, but my mom never stopped going."

For those who don't know, Mom did come back into full fellowship and died in the faith. Many people praised her acceptance and non-judgmental attitude. I had thought of sharing about how she accepted me with open arms, but Mari and Amy gave very similar accounts of how welcoming she was already, and I wanted to leave more time for people actually related to her.

Sister Paige, who led music and was a close family friend, was there and shared some very interesting family experiences "in a big white van." Aunt Coralee accompanied the congregation on the mandolin, singing "You Are My Sunshine" and "I Often Go Walking". So overall it was an interesting graveside service. My favorite line was one of her brothers saying, "Elona always loved men" and describing how as a toddler she would follow just about any male around. She would get into strange men's cars without them knowing about it. She was too young to know her address, and so the folks just took her to the police station. The police would give her a cookie and call her folks to say Elona was there again. "She thought that was a great time." We've occasionally had one of our kids wander off, but never for more than 15-30 minutes. We can't even imagine how much we would freak out if, Princess say, decided to wander into strangers' cars. "Eek!" Some people will say that life is different today, but I tend to think that people haven't actually changed that much - most people are decent. We just hear a lot more about the scary things. Anyway.

J: "DeWayne ended by talking about forgiveness. That week I decided to practice forgiving at a deeper level as well."

Things my children have said (mostly JT)

Someone reminded me recently to make a copy of these somewhere other than Facebook. So here are some fascinating things my kids have come out with in the last month or so.

June 14 - Superstar was examining his cargo pants for the first time. Together we wrote a parody to the tune of "Hinges"

I'm all made of pockets, cause everything opens

From the top of my pants, way down to my toes.

I've pockets in front and I've pockets in back.

If I didn't have pockets I wouldn't have pants!

June 10 - John-Thomas says, "Fear me, for I am cute!" He also says, "Happily ever after happens when you get married, and not to the wrong person. And when your life is over."

June 7 - As we drove through Colorado on Saturday, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch. I was talking to JT about whether he would like a regular burger or an elk burger, and explained that the difference was that one of them he was eating an elk and the other he was eating a cow.

JT: I want a regular burger. Don't kill the innocent animal!

Superstar, our resident demi-vegetarian, quickly leaned over and informed him that cows are innocent animals too. But this had no effect.

JT further explained: When you kill the innocent animal, you shed its blood and you shouldn't eat the blood.

June 1 - As we drove up to UT we were playing a religious trivia game.

JT said, "Come on, brain! Tell me the answer!"

We asked him, "If President Nelson died, who would become the next prophet?" He answered, "Daddy!" Terrifying thought, really, though it's nice to know I have his vote of confidence for now.

May 24 - Overheard at church: Jesus had to suffer and die, and you have to eat the crust.

May 20 - I wish I could remember what originally prompted JT to say "That warms my heart," but he has learned that we think it's cute so now he comes out with it at random moments. Looking through his schoolwork for Kindergarten, he occasionally announced to Joy, "This is my greatest creation!"

May 18 - Princess declared during dinner: "Chicken are almost fish. If only they were a bit more curved and didn't have a beak and had a tail instead of legs and scales instead of feathers."

Superstar suggested they might need gills too.

"Gills come with the scales!"

May 16 - My favorite part about introducing Raiders of the Lost Ark to Superstar was when they started explaining the ark was the ultimate weapon, that any army that carried it into battle couldn't be defeated. Superstar blurted out something like, "No! It's not the ark that's a weapon! Come on! It's keeping your covenants with God that gave the Isrealites power, and when they broke their covenants they lost!"

An Unexpected Journey, part 2 - Our week in UT

Joy - "When we finally got to Utah, my mom was not in the hospital in Ogden anymore. The mortuary, Allen-Hall in Logan had quickly come to pick her up an hour or two after her death, so she was in Logan. We had planned on going to Ogden, but changed our course to Logan. Then DeWayne called me and asked if we could pick up her white clothing from the nursing home in Ogden. So we did a quick stop through Ogden to the nursing home and got her clothing and her stimulus check."

Superstar ~While mom was in the nursing home, Dad watched us while we played tag in between some trees. I had my hand against the tree and my knee accidentally went up and hit the tree. I still have a bad scrape on my knee for the last two weeks because of that.~

D: We stayed the week with Joy's sister in Logan. It's always so nice when someone in her family is able to make space for us. I know that John-Thomas' favorite part of the week was being able to play the Nintendo Switch at their home. Princess told me her favorite part was playing with her cousin L and that cousin L gave her a necklace.

I had two jobs during the week. First, this was a week I had not intended on taking off of work - I had taken the LAST week off to play with family and recharge. So I had a bunch of deadlines. That week my main deadline was preparing for a case study research program with the World Bank in Russia. I also needed to review a bunch of papers for a special Food Security edition on the impacts of COVID-19 on food systems and prepare for my classes that start TOMORROW and ... yeah. My other, real job though was to provide emotional support for my sweetheart and watch the kids so that Joy could spend the time she needed with her family preparing for the funeral and just being family.

It was actually a lot of fun, listening in to Joy and her siblings talking about their mother and planning things out. Seldom have I heard such laughter and joy among a group of people discussing a funeral.

Joy: "We were all that kind of people."

Superstar ~During the first three days, if we hadn't known we were here for a funeral we still wouldn't know until the night before the funeral. Most of the time we were staying at Fran's house and playing with cousins, aunts, and uncles. At first there were only a few people, but every day some more people came in until at the end there were a Bunch of people in the house. We set up a 'Grandpa Golf' game where we tied pairs of golf balls together and slung them at poles, hoping to loop the balls around the poles. We also got to play a lot of boardgames, which I was very excited about.~

Joy: "I thought it was cool that he played chess with my brothers. That's a Lazenby tradition. Really. You played chess with Uncle Matthew, too, didn't you, last time we were there? That's a tradition among the boys!"

Superstar ~I played three games. Uncle DeWayne and I each won one game and I beat Uncle Doug.~

D: It really was wonderful to spend so much time with folks.

Joy: "I got to go see my mom at the mortuary the day we got there, which was still the day that she had died. Thursday I put her temple packet things on her and had a good conversation with DeWayne at the mortuary. He'd like me to become the president of the Joy Watson Fan Club."

D: I am more than happy to share the title with you, or be your vice president. Either way.

Joy: "My other siblings were kind of quiet. I was so excited to see Mari (right). We went to dinner on Thursday night at Liz Sedwick's home. I stayed a little later than my family and Mari and I had a really good conversation when she took me home. I was so happy to learn that her and DeWayne have really been able to make their marriage work and that they are happier now than they were before. My heart needed to know that."

D: It was nice to see how happy all the couples looked. We pray for Joy's siblings often and their marriages and children. We may not get to see or talk to them all that often, but we love them and think about them a lot.

D: There are two main reasons why we go to Logan. The first is family - Fran, Dustin, and Elona. The second - and it's a close second ;) - is some Chinese food known as "tiny spicy." It's a sweet and sour chicken from Mandarin Gardens that is just out of this world wonderful, and a tiny bit spicy as the name implies. So John-Thomas got his first taste of tiny spicy. He LOVED it. He ate three helpings that night. He ate leftovers for breakfast the next day. He wanted it for lunch, but I said no. He ate it for dinner! He ate so much tiny spicy that Uncle DeWayne joked his blood was now 1% tiny spicy. And he asked for more "red chicken" every day. We did get some more the last day to enjoy with everyone in the park before we started driving home.

Joy: "The third reason to go to Logan is the ice cream at the Utah State University creamery. Princess had her heart set on that."

D: Right! And since Elona was buried just across the street, we got ice cream twice. Superstar and I had fun at the creamery. They had set out some blue tape on the floor to show where your party was allowed to stand to keep everyone six feet apart. So he and I pretended to be Indiana Jones and jumped from square to square to avoid the deadly traps. Cousin Christopher was also a great babysitter and a favorite friend to little JT. Princess spent a great deal of her time on the trip reading the Fablehaven series - made it almost all the way through all five books. Here she is reading in the hammock.

D: I was also very pleased to see how our nieces and nephews have grown - not just in height, though we did discuss Christopher's amazing 6'4" height. There's been a lot of personal, spiritual growth evident in Christopher and Anna and Sammy. That was heart-warming.

Joy: "Abby was looking like a pretty cute mom too."

D: It was the first time I met her husband, and of course their baby. I like him (the husband). Here is Princess wi
th their child, her youngest cousin.

An Unexpected Journey, part 1 - The Call to Adventure

May 31 - Joy got a phone call from the nursing home where her mother, Elona Joy Floyd, had been living. Her mother was having trouble breathing and had been sent to the ICU. This had happened a few other times to her over the last few years so we were not overly worried, but offered prayers for her and let the family know. This all happened during our home Sabbath worship - Superstar got to pass the sacrament to the people in the foyer, as we put it. The phone call ended just as I finished my talk on resilience in hard times so she could give hers.

June 1 - Around 9:30am the hospital called. Normally Elona (or anyone else) would have been responding to treatment by this point, but she wasn't. She was going downhill very fast and it was clear to the doctor that some very difficult decisions had to be made. Joy assembled DeWayne, Doug, and Fran on a group text, but had difficulty reaching Dustin - her brothers and sister. The question was whether they should a) put her on a ventilator in an induced coma to keep her alive and not in as much pain, b) leave her on the CPAP machine until people could come to say goodbye, or c) allow her to pass on from this world.

Joy: "In hindsight, I realize that the doctor wanted the decision to already have been made. But it was a really hard decision for us and it took us until about 11 to make the decision. At first I was hesitant to turn off the machines until we had talked to Dustin, but both DeWayne and Doug were leaning towards letting her go. We prayed about it together on the phone before talking to Fran. DeWayne said it would be okay to wait until we could talk to Dustin. I think after we talked to Dustin we should have just let her go. Dustin started sending me texts, because he was out of area on his phone and couldn't call. But there wasn't any direction. He was pretty much saying 'I don't know.'

"Eventually we got everybody on the phone. As DeWayne and Doug and Fran and Dustin all talked about their feelings, I remembered going to visit my mom when she stopped taking her medications and how she revived in a couple days. I started seeing the truth in my heart of what the doctor had said about her not reviving and how that meant it was a more permanent state. So eventually I started feeling like she wouldn't want to live the way she was living in the hospital either. I joined them in the decision to let her go."

Hearing all this, I called the children together to pray for Elona and for Joy and her brothers and sister that they would make the right decision for Elona. In between conversations, Joy and I discussed the possibility of all of us going up to Utah for the funeral. Around 11 I told the kids it was 90% certain we were driving up as soon as we could get out of the house and started them packing their clothes. By 11:30 it was certain and while Joy made preparations with her family, I was working with the kids to get everything packed as quickly as possible. I threw all the food I could conveniently carry into a couple suitcases and the cooler, gathered 3 days' of clothing for everyone and a Sunday outfit, and had the kids gather fun things to do. I hurried out to return Superstar's saxophone and something that belonged to the school, and by the time I got back nearly everything was together. We left by 3pm with the intent to drive straight through to Ogden and Logan - a journey of 21 hours or so.

Superstar ~ For the past few days we had been making some plans for what we would do next week. We had finally gotten everything readied when we were starting to do the beginning of the schedule, but then we had to pack and leave for a weeklong trip. That was kind of inconvenient.~

Joy: "Absolutely. Princess was going to take a pair of STAAR tests for school."

Superstar ~We had a new 'point schedule' for fun. We had figured out what I was going to do daily.

Superstar ~Along the way we got to use some DSs and watched movies and sometimes read the family book. The rest of the time we just read our own books or looked out the window of the car or something like that. When it came to night time, it was very hard to get to sleep. I didn't get to sleep until like 1 or 2am. I'm pretty glad that the seats could recline!~

I had the silly idea that I would get some work done during the night hours and so I spent time focusing on the kids instead during the daytime. But while I drove Joy would get phone and text messages from family and ward members, so the kids had a little less interaction from us than they normally would. I got us up to midnight and Joy took the 12am-5am shift as I dozed. It was a wonder to me that we made it so safely and with so little trouble. Joy even managed a short nap during the morning once I spelled her.

Joy was surprised when she heard from Doug that someone had the idea they were keeping Elona live until DeWayne and we could get there. When DeWayne arrived, he asked the hospital staff if it was customary to leave someone on CPAP when the family had said to disconnect her, when it was clear she was in so much pain. The staff and doctor were relieved to hear that - they had wanted to stop treatment earlier as well. There must have been a miscommunication somewhere about why we were hurrying to Utah. After confirming again that we wanted Elona to not be in pain

Joy: "They let me listen in while DeWayne gave Mom a blessing. Then he talked to the nurse about disconnecting her machines. That was around 1am. She died about 2:13am on June 2."