If news about Mom’s squash plant makes the headline, you can guess what this week was like. Here’s what we learned… We began Monday morning with a mission devotional where Sister Brown, wife of the second counselor, spoke. She talked about change and quoted from CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity,  “ Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace...

Quick story about my rhyming word levan. I googled what words rhyme with seven and one was levan. When I rode to the Grand Canyon with my young men back in 1984 we stayed in a town called Levan, but they pronounce in Le ‘van, with the emphasis on “van”. This levan I found is a  “ homopolysaccharide  composed of D-fructofuranosyl ”. It is used to make medical bandages as well as in some food products to sweeten them. Interesting stuff. I learned a new word. Wahoo. Monday started like usual with a devotional. I decided to take some clothes and go workout and then shower at the gym, change and then go downstairs for the devotional. That worked. Then it was into the library. I didn’t get to help anyone early on, even though it was busy, I just worked on missionary extensions and prepping for meetings. After lunch it was two meetings in a row. But during the second meeting Beatrice and I were called out by Mom to come back to our floor to helped with two French families that came. ...

Wow, Sunday again?! We can’t believe how fast the “ticks” of the clock seem to be ticking off. We only have about 5 months left of our mission, which seems unbelievable. Only 22 more of these blog posts. Well here goes post number 76… This week started with a devotional in the morning. It was a fairly typical devotional with some good stories shared by the people who presented. Then off to the library where it seemed we became busy pretty quickly. Mom was handed a little request for missionary helpers for three upcoming VIP groups, one a Marine Corps recruiting team, one a Spanish dance troupe, and a group organized by Mitt Romney. They are asking us to send 5 or so missionaries to help the group members start accounts and learn about how to use FamilySearch.  Of course they would like us to send as many Spanish speakers as we can when the Spanish dance group comes, so we are having some missionaries come in tomorrow, on a day they normally don’t come in, to help with them. Mom is ...

We actually got a day off for a holiday this week. Wahoo. The library was closed for the Fourth of July. It seems like we are open most holidays, but they decided to closed for this one. It was nice to have an extra day off.  We started the week by going into the library on Monday morning and having it quickly get busy on our floor. Mom and I first worked on some zone leader stuff, but then I was asked to help with a Sweden research guest. She was trying to find the parents of one of her ancestors, so we went into the records to see what we could find. It was back a ways…mid 1700’s…but fortunately there were records. We found a marriage record and a death record, but unfortunately they did not list any parent’s names. So we looked for birth records and household records. We found a household record after she was married, but not one with her parents and still no birth record. I got one of the staff to come look and he suggested maybe tax records. So I showed the guest how to find t...