Not only did we not encounter persecution, we encountered warm and friendly folks and strong and growing Mormon congregations. At work I was not only able to pick up where I had left the previous summer, but soon had an offer for a position as hospital controller. It completely shocked me but that's another story.
The winter following my promotion to Controller and Vice President, Finance, the executive staff traveled up the mountains to a small conference center close to Twin Peaks and Lake Arrowhead for the purpose of an administrative retreat.
The center was named Monte Corona and was interestingly designed with all the guest rooms forming a large circle with the dining room, kitchen, large meeting rooms and other common areas in the center of the circle. That made it very convenient to visit other guests as well as find your way to breakfast in the morning. The food was served cafeteria style.It was our practice at the hospital to invite the spouses along on retreats so they could join us for the meals and social activities. And while we were in meetings, they could find places to go, visit with each other, or sit in their rooms and read. I think Carolyn did all three and, in addition, stuffed a toy giraffe - probably for Jessica.
The second or third day into the retreat Carolyn realized that her wedding/engagement ring combination was missing. She turned our room upside down trying to find it, grilled the maid, and talked to the front desk. She and I even retraced where she had walked around the conference center grounds thinking it might have been in her coat pocket and been ejected when she pulled out her gloves. But there was snow on the ground and more snow falling. It would be spring before we could find it on the ground.
After we had looked everywhere we could, we decided there was a chance it had slipped off her finger while she was stuffing the giraffe. After we returned from the retreat we hustled the giraffe into the X-Ray department and had them do a full body x-ray on the giraffe. By now we were convinced it really was there but didn't want to pull all the stuffing out if the ring were in the head, for instance. Once we localized the ring's location, we could minimize the mess in taking him apart.
Much to our disappointment, however, the x-ray came back negative, totally negative. Carolyn was indeed ringless.
Since Carolyn had expressed concern that her engagement ring stuck up so high that it caught on too many things. So I looked around and found a small, low profile ring that has teeny, tiny diamonds around it. I sprang it on Carolyn completely by surprise while we were at a drive-in theater watching Charlotte's Web. We've always loved that story and the music from that movie. This just made it all the more meaningful to us.
Several months later we were window shopping at the Cerritos Mall and happened to look at the diamond ring display at Sears. We just hadn't seen any ring that even resembled Carolyn's first ring and I was beginning to think I'd have to find an excuse to visit some of the jewelers in Salt Lake City where I had found the first ring. Thus, we were really surprised to see the ring pictured next. This ring is almost identical to Carolyn's first ring except that it has 6 pins holding the diamond in the setting whereas the first one only had 4 pins. That's actually one of the reasons I bought that one - it was unusual. Of course they might have discontinued the other model because of a problem with settings.
So we traded her second wedding ring for a wedding/engagement ring set that looked to most people like the original rings. (Actually she kept the second ring so she could use it as a temporary ring when the other might snag on or damage things.)
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