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. They were fun. We helped find family members for them, mostly on
Geneanet and printed out some small fan charts for their kids. The kids loved it, especially when one of the pedigrees actually showed her and her brother. Then we left a little early from the library to drive up to the Faerber’s new home in Heber City. They wanted to have a final farewell dinner with all the zone leaders that they supervised before they finished their service in the mission presidency, but he got sick the day it was planned. So they invited us to their new home instead. It is very nice, and has an indoor pickleball court. This pic is off their back balcony, facing East. They gave us a little tour of the house and we saw some ideas for our home, and some things we had already planned to do that they did and we can see now exactly what they will look like, which is always nice to see. Luanns’s pantry is set up almost exactly as Mom pictured hers to be, so it was particularly nice for Mom to get an actual image in her mind of what it will look like, not just a two dimensional line drawing. They also did almost exactly what we are thinking for our fireplace and shelf units on each side. Great visual. We had a nice dinner of Cafe Rio foods and sat and chatted with other zone leaders, including the Hammonds who finished their mission this week. Then we took a picture with the Faerbers, thanked them for a wonderful evening and drove the hour or so back to Salt Lake City.
Tuesday I woke up late and by the time I was ready for a ride there wasn’t time for a ride. Ugh. I got notice on Monday that my bike was ready to pick up at
Ari Bikes (used to be Fezzari) so we had planned to go down there and go to JoAnns first so Mom could get some material for baby quilts, and then get lunch at JCW’s before picking up my bike. So off we went. I have learned when going to JoAnns to just hang around and be ready to carry bolts of material, which is what I did this time, although I also was asked to give my opinion about which colors looked good together. Mom trusts me on that. So I took a quick selfie to document my feeling on the JoAnns visit, which really didn’t take too long, except we had to wait for quite awhile to get the material cut, because there was this lady in line in front of us doing a project that was using like a 1/4 yard or a 1/3 yard of about 25 different fabrics. Anyway, we were out of there and on our way to JCW’s pretty quickly.
Here is my selfie at
JCW’s. I used my Father’s Day gift from the Mangelsons to buy me a peanut butter shake. It was the perfect flavoring…not too much, not too little peanut butter flavor
. Yum! Mom got a strawberry breeze shake which was basically a strawberry shake with lemonade added. It was yummy as well. We split a steak sandwich and fries and then headed over to Ari Bikes. The lady there was very helpful and showed me everything I need to know about my new mountain e-bike. She threw in a water bottle for free when she couldn’t find me a Fezzari hat to buy. I guess I should have just bought the Ari logoed hat but it wouldn’t have matched my bike. I thought for sure since they had switched their brand name they would have some old merchandise in the back, but all they had was Fezzari tshirts, and I have enough tshirts, but hats you can never have too many of! I didn’t get a picture of me with my bike there, although I should have since she offered, but here is a pic of my new bike. It is very nice. I haven’t been able to get in a maiden voyage ride yet as I didn’t have pedals until Friday, and yesterday I woke up feeling not well, so hopefully I’ll be able to get in a ride on Tuesday. We drove home and I unloaded my bike and took off the bike rack and carried it back up to the apartment. I have learned that in the future I definitely want a short distance between the back end of my car and where I plan to store the rack, as it is bulky and heavy and not easy to carry. I rested for awhile and then drove down to the Red Cross Blood Center to give my bi-weekly platelet donation. I was able to watch the ending of Nyad, the movie I had started two weeks ago, so that was nice to see the ending to the movie. Since there wasn’t a whole lot of time left after finishing that movie I didn’t start a new one and just waited around for the machine to beep and let me know I was done. I went to grab snacks and learned that all of the Lorna Doones had been eaten, there was an empty box sitting there. Sadness. I guess I could have, and probably should have, asked if there were more in the back, but I didn’t and just made do with a mixed nuts bag and apple juice.
Thursday I went for a ride…road bike since I didn’t have any mountain bike pedals yet. I was able to do 35 miles and got back in plenty of time to get ready for our library shift. We got in and found it busy already. Mom helped someone with Italy and I helped someone with France. I’m pretty sure I helped some other folks, but can’t remember and I didn’t write it down. I do remember that we went to lunch late and barely made it in time to get food before they shut down. Afterwards I was asked to help a family up on the main floor from the Netherlands. They were a family of five and their oldest son and the dad were really into learning about how to search and what websites to use. We were trying to find the dad’s grandfather born in 1899, but couldn’t find any records. It was frustrating. We then looked for any census records and found a book that claimed it had a census record, so we went down to the books. When we got down there they were amazed at how many books we had from the Netherlands. Unfortunately the one we went to look at didn’t have any help for us, but I was able to take them to our floor and sign them up for help from one of the specialists to see if I had missed anything. Then I ran off to catch up with Mom and Sister Pruner as it was our temple day. We did an endowment and then Mom wanted to see if they had any room for us to also do a sealing session. They did. So we didn’t get out of the temple until about 8pm and just went straight home after dropping off Sharon and Yoriko. Friday morning we had to be into the library early to meet President and Sister Craven, who were visiting our zone. They brought with them President and Sister Howes, who had just arrived the day before from Australia. The pic is of the Howes. They also brought President and Sister Brown, so we had the whole presidency there. They attended our zone prayer meeting and then just chatted with me and the other missionaries about what we do in our zone and how everything works. They seemed to be very impressed. It was then time to get out on the floor, so we broke that up, but they continued to ask me questions and I took them on a very brief tour of our floor. They then left to go visit the US/Canada zone and we went to work on our floor. I got to help another man with Swedish research and showed him how to use ArkivDigital which is always a plus since they can learn how to do the research on their own. We left late for lunch, but with plenty of time this time before they closed. It was pizza Friday so I got a pizza. Mom got enchiladas. Then last minute she decided, along with Elder Clarkson who we ate lunch with along with his wife, to get a pizza to take home for lunch and/or dinner on Saturday. After lunch we went home and I really wanted to go for a bike ride. But it was hot outside so I planned to go workout instead. But then my stomach started grumbling and I didn’t feel very good. So I just sat around assuming I probably ate something that didn’t agree with it. Eventually I just went to bed. I woke up yesterday morning still not feeling well. I had some slight chills and so I checked with Mom and she said I was little warm. So I guess it wasn’t something I ate, but something I caught from someone else. Ugh! So I stayed home and Mom went walking. On her walk she met these two ladies from Malaysia, Atty and Zura, who were looking for a place to go walking. Mom showed them City Creek Canyon and walked with them for awhile. They are visiting Salt Lake for an Essential Oils convention. When Mom got back I told her I was planning to stay home so she went into the library without me. I slept and watched Fall Guy as well as the next episodes of Alone and Race to Survive: New Zealand and of course the latest stage of the Tour de France. I also worked on some zone leader paperwork. Mom came home a little after 6pm and I learned that it had not been a super busy day for them, except for the last hour when there weren’t many missionaries left in the library and a bunch of people came in. She also took this pic of a fire up in the hills above the city. Yikes. Luckily they were able to put it out pretty quickly as there isn’t a ton of foliage up there, mostly just dry grass and shrubs. So we just sat around and chatted and watched tv and I didn’t eat, as I still felt bloated and rumbling tummy from my lunch that I had eaten about 1pm. Yuck! I did get to watch Boys in the Boat before I went to bed. That was my reward for finishing the book again, BTW, as is usually the case the book is so much better than the movie. They only focus on the 1936 rowing season and try to show things that happened as they qualified for and participated in the Olympics, but they really missed a lot of good parts of the story and actually got some things out of sequence. Oh well, it is still a decent movie. I got up this morning and still felt crummy. So Mom went to church without me. She was teaching the lesson today and focused on the teachings about real and not real things. She bought some fake fruit and fake dollar bills and took one of her fake and one of her real plants as object lessons. It turned out that only one of their class members was there today, so they combined with another class, the one just younger than theirs, but Mom still taught the lesson. She said it went well and got home here as I was working on this blog post.
There isn’t anything else planned for today, so I think I will just relax and hope I feel better by tomorrow morning to go into the library.
Hope you all had a great week. Love you all.
BE GOOD!
Elder Dad and Sister Mom
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