Wow, another week is past. It doesn’t seem to slow down anymore, everything keeps going by faster and faster. Here was our week…
Monday I didn’t get up early enough to go to the gym, but I did make it to the library on time. I wasn’t there long when I was asked to help a guest with Sweden research. But when I got to her I learned she really wanted help with Sweden and Norway and Denmark, and actually wanted mostly Norway. So we jumped right in and found some records, but she didn’t have an exact birthdate, so she was going to have to peruse quite a few records. I helped show her how to read the names and places and dates and left her to her search. It made me late for my 10am meeting, but I got up to speed pretty quickly when they handed me an agenda. The meeting ran long and since today we had an extended lunch starting at 12pm and going until 2pm I just worked on a couple of ZL things and Mom and I had a nice leisurely walk to the COB for lunch. After lunch we had another meeting and then I was asked to help a couple from the Netherlands. They were amazed at seeing Dutch records in America. They kept saying they couldn’t believe they came all the way to America to learn about their Dutch ancestors. Fun times! Then I helped a French guest who
wanted to know what records there are that he could search to find his ancestors. So that was a pretty easy task, since I have learned there are a ton of French records available, especially the
archives en ligne. We weren’t super busy and were able to close down very easily and head over to the Evening Devotional with Sister Sharon Eubank. Our mission choir sang that arrangement of
The Lord is My Light that sister Roth of our mission arranged. I videoed it, but the video is too large to insert here, so instead here is a link if you'd like to listen.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TwvACRnVN3ziVB266 . Sister Eubank, who is now the director of Latter-day Saint Charities, spoke for almost an hour and told a
bunch of great stories about how the Church is teaming up with lots of other organizations to help people all over the world, including a story about Elder Ballard going to Africa to figure out what they needed the most there and how the Church could use its resources to help as many people as possible. She also shared this great quote from J. Reuben Clark. Giving definitely builds character. I am learning that, as we serve and give of our time here in this little small part of the vast kingdom of our Heavenly Father.
Tuesday we woke up to rain! I checked the forecast and learned that the rain was supposed to be around all day, so no outside ride! I instead went and got the oil changed in the car and while I was waiting it really started to come down. This picture didn’t quite capture how hard it was raining, but it was impressive. I was definitely glad that I was not out on my bike in the middle of this. I bought my oil change using a
Groupon coupon and learned that I had to pay the tax still. So I pulled out $5 for the tax and got my change. While sitting in the waiting room I remembered that the donut shop where we bought donuts last April was nearby, so I went there and got an apple fritter. I learned that my change was the perfect amount to pay for it. Wahoo, no coins rattling around in my pocket. When I got home Mom was trying to figure out something to watch on tv and decided to watch a documentary on Thomas Jefferson. It was pretty slow and I didn’t pay much attention to it, but I did learn that he took about 28 years to build Monticello, his cool home in Virginia. I am hoping it won’t take
that long to build our home. We then had lunch at the COB with the Carpenters and then they came home with us to play mahjong. Mom won all 4 games! One was on the last discard tile. I was close only once. We had a chat with Adam Andelin and learned that we have some investments doing well and we will have the needed money for our house. That was nice to learn. There was a little break in the rain so Mom and I went to the gym to workout. We did wear our jackets for the first time in a long while. Mom was on the treadmill for about 2 miles. I needed to get some miles in to keep up my pace on route to getting 500 miles for the
Great Cycle Challenge, so I rode the bike 30 miles. The first 23 were a Tour de France preprogrammed route. The last 7 was a “fat burn” program. That was hard because I learned they had me climb most of the time…5%, 7% and even 10% grades. Yikes! When I got home Mom was watching the newer (2018) Laura Croft movie. (Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it) I forgot how she finds her dad in that movie. I can’t remember what the first movies said about how her father had died, but now I want to watch them to see if they are accurate with what we learned in this movie.
Wednesday I got in another ride and then went into the library. We did the orientation for the new missionaries and two of them were Mike and Holly Meiners who used to serve with us in the California North Area for Seminaries and Institutes. He was at the Modesto Institute. They are going to serve in the Denmark Mission, where he served as a young man. They are here with us waiting for a visa. We then got a little work in and headed off to our
Leadership Pattern Journey class that we are facilitating for members of our zone. We are doing it at lunch so that we can just do it at the library and not have to stick around for another hour after our shift. It went great! One of my favorite quotes in the first lesson is from Elder Dale G. Renlund. “Eternal progression is based on rendering an account. It is making an honest appraisal of where we are and deciding where we want to go. So, the most effective prayers that I have are when, in the morning, I pray to Heavenly Father and I outline what I think I should do that day. And ask for His help. And in the process, I’m making certain commitments. And in the evening, especially when
I’ve done them, I look forward to talking to Him again and telling Him what I’ve done with His help. And I think that is the basis in a day-to-day situation. It’s the basis of eternal progression.” I need to pray more like this. I have done well a few times, but then forget and revert to less effective prayers. After the class we had a meeting at the NOB for all of the zone leaders involved in Family or Church History. There we learned that the mission presidency is still working out their new vision of what a
Leave of Absence can look like. We are waiting to see if this new policy will allow us to come to Thanksgiving in Las Vegas or not and if I will have to accompany Mom to Bellingham in November for Mara’s birth. We shall see. The meeting started earlier than normal and ended earlier, so we were able to go back to the library for another couple of hours in which I helped two more couples from the Netherlands. They just keep coming and it seems I am the only one available when they do. Fun times! It
suddenly was 6pm and we hurried home to get the car to go to our Hale Center Theater performance of
The Magician’s Elephant. I had never heard of this musical before and learned the reason was because it was only 3 years old. It premiered in 2021 at the
Royal Shakespeare Theatre in England. The reviews said it was a “quirky” production and I would agree with that and add it was a slow moving story. I actually dozed off a couple of times. I did learn that Netflix just made an animated version of this. It might be better.
Thursday I didn’t get in a ride. Ugh. We got into the library and learned it was pretty slow, but I wasn’t there very long before I was asked to go up on the main floor to help a guest with Netherlands research. It was a lady and her husband and unfortunately she didn’t have a lot of information about her family, but I was kind of shocked that we couldn’t find her father’s birth record in any of the places we looked, as it seemed to have been long enough ago for the records to be released. I left her with the homework to talk to her mom, who is still alive, and get some more information and then showed her how to access these sites to search for records. I was downstairs for 2 minutes when I was asked to go back upstairs to help with Norway. When I looked at the slip telling me where to find the guest I realized it was the lady‘s, who I had just helped, husband. So I went up and was
there only about 2 minutes when Geoff, the Nordic specialist from our floor, came to help. He let me know that he had taken it because the request was for mid 1900’s research and he came to tell him that the best he could do was to show him some newspaper sites from Norway that might have some articles about his family. That was news to me. It is always fun to learn new things. We had another
Leadership Pattern Journey class at lunch in the small conference room on our floor and we barely fit, but it was also a great class. Afterwards I was asked to help another guest from ??? you guessed it, the Netherlands. This one I was successful with and they loved seeing records of their family. We then hurried off to the
Go Forth meeting because we had learned we are getting another missionary, Elder Wayne Jones. So we attended the end of the meeting and were introduced to him and brought he and his wife, who will be serving in the scanning zone, over to the library. We were excited to learn that he speaks Japanese. Wahoo! We are losing many of our Asian language speakers in the next three
months. We did a super fast orientation for him because we needed to go to the temple. We took Sharon and Teresa to the Taylorsville Temple where Mom had scheduled a sealings appointment, but that only lasted 45 minutes, so we decided to attend an endowment session as well. Afterwards Mom wanted to go to Walmart to get some items to make an apple cake. While there we found the first eggnog of the season, and I couldn’t pass it up. They had regular and
Old Fashioned. I checked the ingredients and nutrition label and learned that the
Old Fashioned had more cream and was probably thicker so I bought that. My plan was to thin it down with milk when I got home and thicker would be better. I could make more! Yum! We came home and watched the first two episodes of this season’s
Claim to Fame which was kind of fun. I like watching how people play the game and how clueless some of the people are about older things.
Friday we have changed our schedule to be in at 8:30am so I couldn’t ride. I was informed Thursday afternoon that the mission presidency would like us to do our devotional this Monday, the 23rd, instead of the following Monday, the 30th. So I spent the morning sending out notifications and making sure everyone knew about the change and would be able to make it. Some were worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to practice our musical number,
I Am a Child of God in twelve different languages, but I
think we can pull it off. We shall see. I then was asked by a fellow missionary to help a guest find a microfiche. She had looked for it and it wasn’t in the drawer. So we went together to look and I learned she was right, it wasn’t in the drawer. I looked online and it seems it should be there. So I contacted Collections and they informed me that it had been digitized, but was only available to view with a special Family History account which we could get at guest services. So we went upstairs and Sam was able to give us the login information for that account. We then went back downstairs and were able to view the book that was on the microfiche. In it was a picture that the guest had remembered seeing and had discovered was of her grandfather as a young child. We were able to get a copy of that for her and put it in a thumb drive. Success! “I love it when a plan comes together.”
While I was doing that Mom took off to the COB to get there before lunch ended. We had our T/R day and ended at 1pm so when I finished with the guest I ran to the COB. I didn’t get there before they locked the doors, but Mom came to the exit doors and let me in. We had some of their
healthy choice meal…Mom steak and me chicken. It was good. Mom also got pizza for our dinner. So after lunch I went for a ride. About 12 miles in I flatted. Sadness. But I fixed the flat and got on the road again. I was able to get in a 40 mile ride. When I came into the apartment I found Mom cleaning the sliding glass doors. She had cleared off all of the plants on her balcony and it looks weird without them. Then Chris called on his drive home from work and updated us on the latest in his life. It was good to hear that he is enjoying derm. Mom then went off to play pickleball and I worked on some emails and watched tv. Nice way to unwind.
Yesterday morning we went in early because it was the last day for Sister Doris Beesley. She is one of our full time missionaries and has been such a wonderful resource to have. She speaks German, Spanish and French as well as English and learned to do research in all of those countries. We will miss her. I then got to work on ZL stuff and overheard one of the missionaries talking with a guest about Germans from Russia. So I went over and told them about the
Concordia Project and all of the resources available from that, including pedigrees. So I got on the computer to figure out how to search for them and learned that the best way was to put in a surname and the keyword pedigree. Cool stuff. We then got a call from Mason who had just completed his soccer game and was waiting for Paige’s game. We were able to
wish him a belated happy birthday and catch up on what is new in his life. He is becoming more conversational and it was fun chatting with him. I then got to help get a couple started on a family tree. He was from France and she was from Madagascar. They didn’t speak much English so I suggested Kay Carpenter, who has been working in her French, take over. I then worked a bit on my Swedish line and we closed the library at 6pm. We got home and ate some dinner and then I started watching football. I ended the night watching the BYU vs Kansas State game. Wow, fun game to watch! This play right before the end of the half started the madness.
Today we had a lovely walk to church. We started the meeting by singing
They the Builders of the Nation at about half the tempo it should be sung at. Excruciating. Not a great way to begin the meeting with me complaining in my mind about the hymn. Then the sacrament came and the water cups were filled maybe a third of the way. Again some negative thoughts entered my mind wondering why they couldn’t seem to fill the cup all the way. I was feeling like I was getting gypped. But then suddenly a thought came into my mind that this cup represented the Savior’s blood spilled for me and wouldn’t it be nice if I could say that I only caused Him to spill a third of a cup for me, not a full cup. I was humbled and felt gratitude enter my heart instead of complaint. Nice moment. I also watched a little boy drain every last drop from his cup and then tear it before putting it in the used cup portion of the tray. I thought at first that he ought to be taught to respect the sacrament more, but then thought again about this representing the Savior’s atonement and how he was getting every last drop. I need to do that. Right after sacrament meeting we took a
picture of everyone in the chapel and then went outside in front of the church and took another picture. It is the 100th birthday of our building there on 2nd Ave and G Street and they wanted to commemorate the day. We then had a good discussion in our Elders quorum about Elder Christofferson’s talk
The Testimony of Jesus. I hope you all know that I have a testimony of Jesus. I know He lived and died and lives. I know He is our Savior. I know we can be most happy and peaceful in this life trying to become like Him. I know this Church is His. I love Him.
I hope you had a great week.
BE GOOD!
Love Sister Mom and Elder Dad
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