How do you spell portulaca?

Dear Sister Payne and Elder Payne,

It took me several tries to get "portulaca" spelled right.  Microsoft still doesn't like it, but Google is okay with it.

Mom has put me in charge of the weekly geography trivia this summer.  Here are the questions I came up with for Austin, Texas:

1. Austin is among the southern-most capitals in the United States.  Are any other state capitals farther south than Austin?  What capital has the closest latitude to Austin?
2. The Rio Grande River forms part of the southern border of Texas. What other river in Texas has the same name as another American River?
3. Texas borders Mexico on the south.  How many other states border a foreign country?  (Oceans aren't countries.)

Bonus trivia facts:

1. The Texas State Capitol building is the largest state capitol building in the United States.  The only Capitol building that is bigger is the United States Capitol.
2. Nearly 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats live under the Congress Avenue bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin.  This is the largest urban bat colony in North America and is one of Austin's many tourist attractions.
3. Austin is the only city in the world that maintains "moonlight towers."  These are like very tall streetlamps.  Each one is 165 feet high, has 6 lamps, and can illuminate an area 3,000 feet in diameter.  That's over half a mile!

And now a journal entry.  I love you both and hope you have a great day!

Love,

Dad

The chickens are not cold.  It's 76 degrees outside, and my kids are worried that the chickens are going to freeze tonight.  Sheesh.

Work today was pretty good.  I closed the general ledger for May and got started on the financial reports.  It wasn't a great month, but given the coronavirus, it was probably as good as we can expect.

David and Lisa and their kids joined us for dinner.  They are looking for a house in Utah County and came down to check out a few possibilities.  The one that sounded most promising was disappointing, which is a bummer.  We had tacos for dinner, and they were great, as usual.

After dinner we pulled some weeds from the front flower beds.  They are looking good.  I especially like how the Portulaca looks this year.  Then we played duck, duck, goose for a while.  Now all the kids are telling me that they're not tired and need to go downstairs.

Thankful: I'm thankful for how nice our flower beds look this year.  Last fall I cut our front hedge way back, and it has grown back very nicely.  The flowers are looking good, including on the left side where they usually look lousy.  So far, so good.

Ministering: On my way to work this morning I stopped at SunPro to get an outlet cover.  As I walked in an elderly woman mistook me for an employee, so I helped her find an appliance light bulb for her oven.  A small thing to help someone.  I also sent a text to Jared Robinson, someone I minister to.

I'm really tired.  Time for sleep.  More later…