I recently finished reading this book and I really enjoyed it. I imagine that biographies of Church leaders are pretty difficult to write well. These leaders have accomplished so much and have so many good qualities that it can be difficult to portray them as actual humans while still preserving some of their privacy in a world where they have very little. In addition, there are less interesting moments in everyone's life that need to be included in a biography without losing the audience.  While not perfect, this book generally does a good job of dealing with those issues. Here are some things I learned about him: 1.  Elder Ballard's parents were less active while he was growing up--even though both his mother and father had apostles for fathers.  They just got distracted by the less important things of life. There are a surprising number of current apostles whose fathers were less active or not members:  Pres. Nelson, Elders Ballard, Holland, Cook, and Bedna...

On our way home from California, we stopped in Parowan to see the Jesse N. Smith Home Museum. This was the first house he built when he was just 18 shortly after he got married. He is especially impressive in the amount of responsibility he took on at a young age. In visiting the house, I was worried about finding someone to let us in. I didn't find someone until we were there but fortunately it worked out. It turns out that one of the challenges with this house is that since the family moved to Snowflake a long time ago, the descendants of Jesse N. Smith don't live in Parowan so there aren't many people to give tours. But this woman did a great job and we enjoyed seeing the house! This is the front room of the house where they received visitors. Jesse N. Smith had a lot of visitors because he was the mayor of Parowan for a while as well as being a church leader. The pictures are of Mary Aikens Smith and her two sons: Jesse N. Smith and Silas Smith. ...

 For the rest of our trip to California, we stayed in Palm Desert which is right by Palm Springs. Susanna served the first part of her mission in Palm Springs. Thursday we went on a hike. The weather was good and we enjoyed being outside. The next day was Friday and we decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park. It was New Year's Eve and we thought it might be crowded so we got an early start, arriving about 8:30am at the south entrance. There weren't very many people at that time but it started getting crowded later.  Joshua Tree is a unique place. We especially enjoyed seeing the cactus in the Cholla (pronounced choy-ya) Cactus Garden. Working our way north, we started seeing Joshua trees which are in the northern part of the park. They need a certain environment to grow. I thought they were more like cactus but they are more like palm trees. They're part of the yucca plant family. Definitely cool plants. The kids also really enjoyed scrambling on the huge rocks which are...