Service With a Smile | At the Simper's

Sister Simper has a cozy home with fairly decent size backyard. The weeds seemed to have taken over even though Brett, bless his heart, has done all that he can to fight them off!The Boy Scouts and their Dads met at the Simpers on Saturday morning (9/27/08) at 8am. I had got up a little early and went and picked up some doughnuts and water for the hard work that lay ahead. Eleven people came to participate; Ben Hoy, George Hoy, Brett Simper, Forrest Packard, Steven Packard, Kyle Packard, Todd Gray, Tyler Gray, James LaLanne, Austin LaLanne, and our full time missionaries in the ward Elder Bernard and Elder Parker.

We started by raking... and we raked some more, and as we raked we started finding things under all the debris - baseballs, tools, bowls and plates, and old cars:) just kidding no old cars, but it does remind me of a joke by Jeff Foxworthy that goes: "You know you're a Redneck if you mow your lawn and you find a car:)"

Todd Gray had a pair of loppers and he started pruning this huge bush in the middle of the back yard. While he was working an ant crawled in his eye and was creating some pretty significant irritation. So we had to flush his eye out with a hose to get the ant out of there. Then he returned to the bush and started pruning it again. After he was done we discovered that what we though was a bush was actually a TREE! It just had not been shaped in a while so the branches were growing every where.

Elder Bernard and his Companion Elder Parker worked on the back part of yard most of the day. Elder Bernard said, "This yard needs some work, but I have seen a lot worse." Elder Bernard is from Arkansas. He said that there are yards just like this one, but all of the weeds come with thorns that will stick really good as you try to pull them out.

Forrest Packard arrived with his boys Steven and Kyle. I saw that Brother Packard had a pretty decent pile of weeds raked up within a short period of time. We decided that we would turn it into a competition and see who could get the bigger pile. I do not even know if we told Forrest or not that we were competing against him - doesn't matter anyway because he beat us pretty good whether he knew or not. I blame our defeat on Kyle:)

Deb Simper came out with huge bowl of Watermelon. It was probably the best watermelon that I had ever had. It was crisp, tasty and fresh! We all devoured it within a couple of minutes.

Forrest had Steven go and get their chipper shredder from home. Forrest and Steven spent a couple of hours chipping and shredding the bush-tree that Todd Gray had cut down. They reduced at least 4 truck loads of debris in to what would probably be only one trash bag of mulch.

At about 11:30am we started realizing that we were doing more standing around and talking than we were working and decided that it was time to call it quits for the day. So we packed up and left. Clearly there is still a lot of work to do, and whether it looks like it or not we really did get a good start on it.

The next day in Church Forrest Packard said that this is going to be a large project and that we need to get more Scouts and Dads involved. He said, "Usually service projects are fairly easy, but this one wore me out yesterday." Needless to say we have some follow visits in the works and we hope to get more people out there and get this thing knocked out.