Week Seven…A Little Bit of Heaven!

  So what did we learn this week?! Quite a few things. 

We learned that even though it still isn’t getting above 50° here that nature knows it is about to warm up and become Spring. On our way to and from church today we saw these flowers which are making their way up through the cold soil to find the warmth of the sun. I first noticed them, the small white ones in the middle picture, when a young man that was walking towards us looked over at the flower bed in front of the Conference Center and paused a second to look a little closer then he walked on. I wondered what he was looking at, so when we got to the spot where he had paused I looked over and voila, there were these small white flowers breaking through the dry dirt. I pointed them out to mom and she of course had to take a picture. It is kind of cool to see them because they are in a flower bed with a bunch of what look like dead bushes. It 

 doesn’t look like anything should/could be growing there, but there they were coming up anyway. Speaking of plants, last Sunday mom participated in a  gardening class in Bellingham (via Zoom) and is excited to get a garden started when we get back there in couple of years. She learned all about how and what and when to plant there in Washington and is excited to try to grow Brussels sprouts and cantaloupe and cabbage and lettuce. Fun times ahead!

On Pi Day we didn’t have any pie, but I did get some new (temporary) teeth to eat future pies with. My front tooth that was part of the bridge for my four fake teeth got an abscess. The dentist treated it with antibiotics and then sent me off to get a root canal. That was done over a week ago, so on Tuesday I went back to the dentist and he pulled off my old bridge and we learned that he was right, that front tooth was in poor condition. So he got rid of a bunch of decay and put a fiber post in there and built up a “tooth” for the new bridge to be attached to. He also prepped the tooth next to that one so that the bridge would have a stronger foundation to be attached to. He also decided to do the same thing on the other side, so I will have two crowned teeth attached to two fake teeth in the bridge which are then attached to two crowned teeth on the other side. I hope that makes sense. I was going to put a picture of my mouth without the temporary teeth so you can see how bad it is, but decided you don’t need that in your memory. I will get the permanent bridge on the 30th. I knew that dentistry was expensive, but learned just how expensive 6 new fake teeth can be. Ouch!!

On Wednesday it was our Pday, so Mom and I went to the temple in the morning. We went to the Jordan River Temple this time and decided to do sealings. We learned that the Jordan River Temple is the same as the Oquirrh Mountain Temple, they limit the number of sealings you can do. So we decided to do two appointments back-to-back so that we could get some more names done. We were able to seal 18 children to parents and 2 couples. Wish we could do more, but glad we were able to do those. BTW, there were a ton of people here doing sealings as well. 10am on a Wednesday and the temple was full of people doing work for their ancestors. We have learned that the spirit of Elijah, ”the heart of the children…turned to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) is a real thing. More and more people are doing their family history work and then going on to do the temple work for their families as well. Pretty cool.

After going to the temple we stopped by to see my “Mission Mom”, Lorna Wood. Her husband, Lowell D. Wood was my mission president. He passed away in March of 1997. She has been living on her own since then and just recently she and her family decided to have her move into an apartment that is a little more manageable to take care of. One of my mission sisters, Judy Bester Brummer told me about her new place and encouraged me to stop by to say hi…so we did. It was so fun to reminisce about my time in South Africa and to bring Sis. Wood up-to-date with the happenings of our family and to hear about hers. She also pulled out a couple of books that she put together of pictures she had taken over the years and then added some commentary to. Mom was thumbing through one of them and found this beauty! That’s my MTC group,  plus a couple of people, on 

our second day in South Africa. It was kind of cool to learn that we had made it into Sis. Wood’s memories book. One of the last things I told her before we left was about when my Mom passed away in September of 1997 that I was thinking about how many people that I knew who had died that year. The thought came into my mind that maybe President Wood was President Wood again in the Spirit World and how awesome it would be for my Mom to be able to serve with him there like I was able to serve with him here. Sister Wood liked that thought as well.

We learned that you can cram quite a bit of stuff into one day, because after visiting with Sis. Wood we drove up to the Church Office building where we were given a tour of the translation department. We got that tour because we are going to be helping out during the translation of General Conference in a couple weeks.

No, we aren’t doing any translating, we just get to clean these. This is one of the booths that will be used to translate all the talks in General Conference into over 90 different languages. Between each session they clean and sanitize the booths and the equipment. That’s our job! Pretty glamorous, hey? We’re just happy to help any way that we can. We learned that this is the largest translation process anywhere in the world. Even the United Nations doesn’t translate their 

proceedings in real time into as many languages as does the Church. Pretty impressive. We’re excited to get an up close and personal view of the behind-the-scenes activities of General Conference. 

I passed off my Dutch beginner course on Tuesday and was rewarded with being put right into the WaitWhile System…the system they use here to connect guests with specialists for the countries they are wanting to do research in. So I got matched up to help 4 different people this week, but none from The Netherlands. I was asked to help a couple that was looking for information about his father from Ecuador. That’s where Chris served his mission, but I don’t know much Spanish and I don’t know anything about records in Ecuador. It was doubly difficult because all the guest had was a name…no age or place of birth or death. So we searched for what records I did know about, but found nothing, and then asked if he had time to wait for someone with more knowledge to come back from lunch. He didn’t, so I showed him how to do some simple searches on his own and sent him on his way. Sadness. No found ancestor. The next person I was called on to help had ancestors from Uruguay. That’s where Shaun served his mission. I was able to help this lady though, because all she needed was to merge two people in the system who were the same people, and add a daughter that she had found the record for. Easy peezy! Did that nothing flat and Shaun would have been proud of how well I was able to read the Spanish record to verify that it was indeed a daughter that needed to be added to the family. Then I was asked to help a lady whose grandparents had immigrated from Spain, (that’s where Zoë served her mission) to Cuba. We searched and we searched and we searched and it wasn’t looking good, but then I saw a record out to the side of one of the searches we had done and felt like we should open that up to see what it was. It was linked to a tree in another genealogical website, Geneanet, and boom! up pops a whole family tree for her. She got so excited pointing at the screen saying, “That’s my father and my grandfather! That’s my grandmother and look, there’s me.” She pulled out her phone and started taking pictures. I then showed her how to sign up for an account there on that website so that she could access the information any time she wanted and also noticed who the contributor was. There was a link saying she could message her. She was so excited hoping to connect to a long lost family member. Fun times! The last lady I helped was looking for her father’s marriage record from Ghana. What?! Africa!? That’s where I served my mission. But I do Holland now, why do I keep getting all of these people looking for ancestors in other countries? We didn’t have much to go on and found that Africa is one of the countries that have the least amount of records available online. But she was excited to learn how to use the system to search and to see what was there and said she was going to work on getting courageous enough to ask her mom some more questions to see if she can get more information about her dad. Wow, fun week, even if it wasn’t about The Netherlands.

We finished the week off with dinner tonight with our neighbors across the hall, the Henkels and their next door neighbors, the Watts. Sister Henkel cooked steak in this souped up George Forman type of grill and it was fantastic! I don’t like much meat, and especially not steak because it is usually so chewy, but this steak was so tender…almost like pot roast. Yum!! I think I need to learn what that grilling contraption is that she has and buy one for Mom for Mother’s Day. I might become as much a carnivore as Mom is. Who knows.

That is what we learned this week. Love you all.

BE GOOD.

Sister and Elder Phillips