This week’s post might be a bit shorter than others, because we were made zone leaders and now have more things going on to keep us on the run. Here’s what we learned…
Monday started off with no morning devotional because it was a holiday. So we headed into the library and got to work. The day started off slow then it started to grow. I was asked to help a man who was looking for his ancestor from Slovakia. We went to the
Wiki page for Slovakia and found some records for the town that his grandmother told him that her father and mother came from. So we went searching in there, looking especially for the mother, because he had a birth record of one of her sons stating her name…Emilie von S….. (I can’t remember the actual name, but it started with an S)…von meaning she was from that town. So we searched and found birth records from that town about the time that she was born. We started browsing through them, stopping at every Emilie or Emilia or Amalia. He was moving pretty quickly through the record and as he went to change to another page I noticed an Amalia at the bottom of that page. So I told him to go back and as we looked at the record she was from that little town and it
stated her father had the surname of Pohl. Suddenly I felt prompted to ask to look at that birth record of this Emilie’s son that he had brought in on his phone, and I noticed that between the name of Emilie and the von S….. name there was this little scribble that we had dismissed as decoration. When I looked at the scribble again more closely I could see it was Pol. I felt the Spirit tell me that this was her, and I asked the man what he thought. He said, “I think this is her.” He was so happy. What a great feeling, to be able to find that which was lost. I then ran off to do some training for library tours. They want some of our missionaries to know how to do these tours in case we get super busy in the summer. So I was being trained on how to train these other missionaries. After that I came back and was assigned to help a mom and her son with finding an ancestor in some Norwegian farm books. They had found some books, but couldn’t find their ancestor, Peder Rasmussen. Well after looking at what information they had I learned that they were looking in the wrong farm book. So we went and found the correct one, and after looking through the index we were able to find their Peder. It of course also gave them a ton of other information about this family and showed some information about their living arrangements on this farm. They were excited. Unfortunately, we closed an hour earlier that day because of the holiday and they had to leave, but now they had places to come back and search for more information.
We then came home and had dinner and went to FHE. We learned that it was kind of cold in the lobby, so a bunch of the sisters went and got blankets…that’s Mom’s red and white checked blanket in the lower right of the picture. Our lesson was a quick share of things we do to study the Book of Mormon, since this year that is the
Come Follow Me scripture we will reading. They brought some popcorn and root beer floats for dessert, which were yummy, then we ran back upstairs to watch the end of the Eagles/Bucs game. I learned that Mom was rooting for the Eagles because they have Jason Kelce on their team
, the brother of Travis Kelce who is dating Taylor Swift. What!? I just learned that my wife is a
Swiftie. Oh my.
Tuesday was a cold day! We went and worked out and then ran home to eat and change and get to the library to attend our
Dutch Paleography class. Wahoo, finally we get to have this class, which is the last requirement for our Dutch Advanced training, plus it will be helpful in teaching us how to better read the Dutch records. Then we served in the library the rest of the day, until 8pm. I actually had someone ask for help for ancestors from the Netherlands that afternoon, which was cool. Also a lady that needed some help with her Swedish line and then finally a young lady from Palestine. She knew the village where her grandmother was from, but that was about it. We searched the
Wiki and found some civil records from that area, Acre, but they were divided into districts and were in Arabic. I learned that she could read a little Arabic, but not super well, so we decided that now that she knew how to find these records she would enlist the help of her parents to try
to pinpoint which set of records they should search and get them to help read the Arabic. Wahoo, another generation-connecting experience. Fun, fun!
We got home and learned that the hat I had ordered for myself had arrived. I’m not sure why this happened, but during the week last week I suddenly remembered that I had never gone to the UH Hilo student store to buy a Vulcans hat, before we left Hilo. I loved when we moved there learning that their mascot was the Vulcans. Yes!! “Live long and prosper” Vulcans . I of course learned later that Vulcans was short for volcanoes, not for members of Spock’s race, but it still is a pretty cool mascot name to have. Anyway, I searched the internet and found a college licensed apparel site that had these hats for sale and bought one. It’s not quite like the ones I saw in the student store, but it is still pretty cool. I actually only bought one other hat from Hawaii while living in Hawaii, one from Volcanoes National Park. I guess it’s because I usually buy hats from places I visit to have a memory from there, not from places I live. Hmmmm.
Wednesday was Pday and we decided to head out early to do Costco shopping, before the huge crowds got there. We were low on gas, so I dropped Mom at the door and went to the pumps where I learned that gas had dropped quite a bit since I last bought gas. I am pretty sure the last time I got gas it was $3.37/gal. What a pleasant surprise. So after finishing filling the tank I went into the store to find Mom. I found her near the back and then took over pushing the cart around while we got the rest of the groceries on our list. We got milk and yogurt and butter and some other basic essentials, then grabbed a couple different bags of chocolate goodies. I got
Bark Thins, the dark chocolate mint ones and Mom got
Chocxo, which are dark chocolate coconut cups. I like mine better. The
Chocxo are too much chocolate and not enough coconut for me, and even though the
Bark Thins are just solid chocolate the mint flavor totally makes up for the lack of any nuts or other ingredients to offset the chocolate.
We then ran back home and quickly dropped off groceries and headed to the COB for lunch with John.I forgot to mention that when we woke up that morning we learned that it was snowing most of the night and it was still snowing when we headed to lunch. Lunch was great and visiting with John made it even better. After lunch we went back to the apartment for me to attend a Nordic study group meeting via
Zoom and then we changed into non-Pday attire and headed off to our first zone leaders
meeting, even though we wouldn’t be officially announced as zone leaders until the next day. I thought the meeting was at the library, but Mom remembered that it was at the NOB (North Office Building) so we had to run to make it there on time. Ughhh. After the meeting we came home and played
Mah-Jongg with the Engstroms. Terese cracked us all up as she kept making comments that sounded like she had no idea what she was doing, but ended up winning the first game. I actually won a game, even though I had foolishly abandoned my first idea and had gone for a more difficult combination instead. Who’d have guessed that would happen. Scott won the last game and we learned that he actually isn’t much of a
game person, but he really likes
Mah-Jongg. I forgot to get a picture of us playing, so instead you get to see a picture of the
Pandora station we listened to while we were playing. Anyone surprised? After going to that
Toast concert we have been listening to
Bread a lot. They of course mix in a bunch of songs from other bands that were popular at the same time and we love it!
Thursday morning we headed into the library for our regular shift, but also knowing that President and Sister Faerber were coming to announce the change in zone leadership. While waiting for them to come we did our normal
get ready for prayer meeting stuff and Debbie Gurtler, the Assistant Director of FamilySearch, showed up to attend our meeting along with President Holmes, so I think most people figured out something was happening more than our regular prayer meeting. They made the announcement and had the Deckers speak and Mom and me as well, then it was off to our normal duties. The rest of the day
kind of whizzed right by as we were floor leads. I spent most of the time trying to change all of the references on our zone online sites to reflect the zone leader change. Usually we go to the temple on Thursday night, but Sammi came to stay with us that night. We met her at the
Trax station on South Temple and walked over to
J Dawgs for dinner. After dinner we came home and watched a couple of movies…
A Haunting in Venice and
Ford vs Ferrari. Friday morning we slept in a bit and then got up and went to the gym. When we got home we had a cold cereal breakfast with Sam then took a couple of the tables that we use for our
break-the-fast gatherings that we store in our extra bedroom down the hall to a couple that was celebrating the man’s 80th birthday with all of his kids that night. Then we headed off to the library early to cover for the Blacks who were floor leads, but had signed up for the
Latin Paleography class. We then stayed the rest of the day in the library and it was pretty uneventful. We came home and had dinner with Sam and Jorge, who came down to pick her up to go to a friend’s wedding the next day down in Payson, and played a quick game of
Mah-Jongg and then they were off.
Saturday morning I got up early and went to give platelets. They had a girl that was training and they asked if it was ok with me that she be assigned to do my donation. I said sure, and so off we went. Because she was learning everything took a bit longer, but they finally got me going. But then the machine started making funny noises, kind of like sucking, gurgling sounds, and then it stopped and started beeping. Apparently my needle stick on my left arm wasn’t in quite right. So they adjusted it and away I went again. But about 10 minutes later it happened again. This time one of the managers came over and moved the needle around, going deeper into my arm and from there on out I was good-to-go. I watched the movie
The Hill on Netflix which based on the true story of a kid named Rickey Hill who was born with a degenerative spine disease and wore
Forrest Gump type of leg braces as a kid and was told he would never walk or run, but loved baseball and wanted to be a major league player. He was drafted by the Montreal Expos and played 4 years in the minor leagues. Cool story.
I got home just in time to change and head into the library. We were super busy all day, running here and there in a bunch of different assignments. Shortly after we arrived I looked down at the sleeve of my shirt and there was blood soaking through it from my bandage underneath. Ugh. So I put my coat on and wore it the rest of the day. I should have got a picture of it, but I didn’t. When we got home Mom did get it all cleaned up, but she doesn’t have “an oil” for it, she used hydrogen peroxide. Presto! During the rest of the day Mom got to help a lady with Korea research, which was basically to tell her there wasn’t much available to research, but showed her all of the website help that we do have. I was steward for an hour and during that time I assigned 12 missionaries to help guests. That’s about 3 times as many people as we helped last Friday, so it was definitely more busy than it has been. I got to
help someone with Sweden and with Norway as well. Mom also went up and led a group of YSAs from Ephraim, UT through the
Escape Room and said it was a fun group. The last person I helped was a lady doing Swedish research. She had located some records of a family, but was trying to piece together some dates and find birth records. We had to go back and look at some of the records she already had to find some clues that would help us locate the birth records…things like the fact that the first son’s birth record only mentioned his mother, no father, but it didn’t say he was illegitimate. But it did tell us where the mother was from, so we began a search for records in that parish and found other clues. We were getting close to figuring it all out when we noticed we were ruining out of time and the library was closing. But she was excited because she could see where to go from there and what she should do next. I have learned that studying carefully what you already have helps a ton, and also that helping someone learn to do it for themselves is super satisfying.
Today, both Mom and I taught a class at church…Mom her CTR 6 class and me the Gospel Doctrine class. Mom said her lesson went really well and she has good kids. My class went great as well. I began the class by telling the story of when I was asked to teach Melissa’s seminary class and someone in the class asked her if we were going to have
AP Seminary because I was an institute teacher. I told my class we were going to have
AP Gospel Doctrine and they had to share what they had learned or what questions they had. We spent most of the time talking about Lehi’s vision of the
Tree of Life. I think my favorite comment came from someone who said she has come to realize that this vision represents our daily journey in this life, and sometimes we are at the tree and partaking and enjoying the fruits thereof, and sometimes we are dealing with the mists of darkness and struggling to find the path, and sometimes we are trying to just hold onto the rod and not listen to the comments from those in the great and
spacious building. There were tons of great comments. It was fun.
We finished the night playing Mah-Jongg with the Barneys and I won 4 of the 5 games. Wahooo! Hot streak! Now I need to get an agenda ready for our Zone Meeting tomorrow as we are now in charge of that. We look forward to this new assignment, but will also miss the opportunity to be on the floor helping guests as much as we used to. We’ll have lots more meetings and interviews and prepping for upcoming events and assignments. We have about 130 missionaries in our zone with about 15 of them working remotely, and we will be in charge of finding out who wants to extend (especially for the Senior Service Missionaries) and who needs to be released as well as to welcome and orient new missionaries that come into our zone. Many adventures to come and new things to learn. Wahoo.
Love you all.
BE GOOD!
Elder and Sister Phillips
Comments
Post a Comment