Aloha everyone. Thanksgiving week came and went and now we are only 19 days away from the conclusion of this mission. Wow. We did have a great Thanksgiving though. Here is what we did and learned.
Monday we didn’t have a morning devotional so we just had a causal morning at home. We have learned that we need these casual mornings now and then. It helps keep us energetic and happy. We went in at 10am and actually found the library what I would call
mildly busy. We were helping some guests here and there and people were filling up parts of our computer workstations. That didn’t last however and it quieted down pretty quickly. I went to work on more Segerstedt line peoples. I have found it pretty difficult with some of them. Lunch was at the COB and I decided to go lite, since I have learned that not riding my bike and eating the same tend towards
fatness. Ugh. On the way back we took a slight detour to see the workers setting up the nativity in the reflection pool. They also added shepherds on the sides. Christmas decorations are almost up everywhere. They usually turn them on the day after Thanksgiving, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they are just about everywhere now. After lunch it was back to the library where it continued to be slow. It was actually lucky for us that it was slow because with LOAs and sickness we ended up having only 6 missionaries and two staff there to help the last hour. But we did it, and all worked out ok. Then it was home quick to put on a tie for the
Elijah Choir Christmas Devotional at the COB auditorium. They did a good job. I think my favorite numbers were a clarinet/oboe duet of
Stars Were Gleaming and the choir doing
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. I am not sure why I liked
O Come, but maybe it was because I have sung that one a number of times in choirs for Christmas programs and really like the bass part.
Tuesday we got up and I was going to head to the gym to workout, but then Mom reminded me that the Carpenters were coming over to play mahjong. But they didn’t come at the appointed time so Mom sent a text, but didn’t get an answer. Finally an answer came that they thought we weren’t playing this week and they had gone to the temple. Oops. So then it was too late to go to the gym so we just got ready and went in to the library at noon. It was VERY quiet. Almost like just before we close. We did have a few guys, who were in Salt Lake for an APS convention, come in. These were scholars from around the world, physicists, here to discuss fluid dynamics. I love physics, but just the title of this convention is above my head! Anyway, some of them were from the Netherlands and one was from Turkey. Guess which ones I got to help? Yup, the guy from Turkey. He was not surprised that we didn’t have anything more than British military records, but was also surprised that we had a whole Wiki page devoted to explaining how to do research in
Turkey and where you could go to find records. I also showed him the link we have to the
MyHeritage site and when we looked up his name there it showed many of the articles he has written for his profession. Unfortunately nobody had begun any family trees for his family. The rest of the day I got to usher a couple of times and work on trying to find the parents of
Eric Holmberg and
Lena Andersdotter. No luck. I have a record saying where each of them was born, but when I go to that parish record and look in the indicated year there is no record of their birth. Someone messed up somewhere! We closed down at 8pm and came home where I watched
The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve, with Kelsey Grammer. It was a typical
Groundhog Day type of movie, but I liked how they had him interact with Santa Claus and actually remark about how he thought he knew why all this was happening and how he could fix it. Fun movie.
Wednesday was Pday and we got up early, packed the car with a bunch of stuff we want Lindsay to take to Chris and Julie’s for us, and went to pick up Sami. We got on the road about 7am and learned that we had chosen wisely…not much traffic at that time. We made good time heading south to Las Vegas. I hadn’t filled the gas tank up before we left so I needed to stop for gas and learned from a billboard on the side of the road that there was a gas station in Fillmore that had gas for $2.16/gallon. Wow! We made it there, no problem and I learned that they were almost correct, gas was $2.19/gallon. Still…Wow! I haven’t seen it that cheap for quite awhile. I munched peanut
M&Ms the whole way down, so when we got to Brittany and Shaun’s place and met up with Lindsay and Trevor, we all decided to go out for lunch. We road in Lindsay’s car, which is very nice, and went to
Cane’s for lunch. I saw there was a
Burger King across the parking lot, so I walked over there and got a milkshake to go with my lunch because I am not a huge lemonade fan, which
Cane’s is famous for. We then did some shopping at WinCo and Costco and then back to the Mangelson’s place to play
Ticket to Ride, which I must admit is not in my favorite list of games. I have learned that I don’t really enjoy games where I have to build or create something…
Risk, Settlers of Catan, etc… I’m not exactly sure why I don’t like those so much, I just don’t. We then initiated Trevor into the
Remember the Titans club. He had never seen the movie before. He liked it of course. We then just chatted and planned on when we wanted to go see
Wicked the next day. I then watched tv for awhile before heading to up to bed.
Thursday we slept in and then got ready and went to watch
Wicked. It was very good. Very faithful to the play and all of the actors did a great job. I also loved the little surprise cameo, which I won’t tell you about so it will remain a surprise if you haven’t seen it yet. I also like the fact that they expanded some of the dialogue which makes the film longer,
but this then became Part 1 of a two part movie so they don’t have to leave anything out. What I didn’t like was that we have to wait until next Thanksgiving to see Part 2. Ugh. After the movie we came back to the Mangelson’s so that Mom could make mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and Lindsay could make rolls. I sat down and started reading and began to fall asleep, so I went upstairs and took a nap. Wahoo, another nap! When I woke up it was almost time to head over to Keith and Tammy’s for dinner. We loaded up the potatoes and rolls in Lindsay’s car and got there just as Keith was finishing carving the turkey. Mom grabbed some of the juices from it to make some gravy and we all filled plates and sat
around their big dining room table to eat. It was us five, Keith Tammy, Linda, Eunice, Amber, Tag, Kim and Kyle. I didn’t get a picture of us all, but we had a nice time eating and chatting. I did learn that Kyle and Keith were having the same problem with not enough exercise and food that I was having. Nice to know I am not alone. We talked about movies that Trevor needed to see, and Keith suggested he needed to see
The Three Musketeers. So we retired to the family room to watch that one. I haven’t seen that in quite awhile. We talked for a bit after that and then headed home for bed. We had planned to go to an 8:00am temple session the next morning so we needed to get to bed early.
We indeed did get up early Friday morning and packed up and drove out to the Las Vegas Temple for our 8:00am session. They actually were overbooked, so they put us with a second group in a smaller endowment room, but we began still at 8am. After the temple we went to breakfast at
The Blue Skillet, a little local breakfast joint down the road from the temple it was nice. We then said goodbye to Lindsay and Trevor, they had driven separately, and we “hit the bricks” to Salt Lake. We had to stop for gas first, so we found our favorite Maverik gas station by the freeway as you head out of town…it’s our “favorite” because it always seems to have the cheapest price for gas, except for Costco…and fueled up and used the restroom. Traffic was minimal and I was able to drive 80mph most of the way home. We did stop in Beaver to visit
The Creamery. Every time we have driven to or from Vegas we have always seen this place, but realized we had missed the exit to go there. So this time I learned from a billboard which exit I needed to take to go there and I took it. They had very good ice cream. Mom and I got
I’m Your Huckleberry (huckleberry ice cream blended with natural blueberries and huckleberry swirls),
Coconut Castaway (coconut ice cream
with a coconut swirl, chocolate chunks and almond pieces) and
Barking Pretzel (brown sugar-flavored ice cream with a peanut butter swirl, chocolaty coated pretzel pieces and salty pretzel bark pieces). Any guesses which was my favorite?
Barking Pretzel for the win. It sounds like it could be a horse’s name, right? We weren’t super low on gas and the prices were around $2.89/gallon there in Beaver, so we drove on up to Fillmore and filled up at our new favorite gas station for $2.19/gallon again. We got home to Salt Lake just before 6pm and were able to rest and eat some food before heading off to the
Come and Behold Him concert in the Tabernacle. This was a concert with 11 new arrangements of Christmas songs done by Jonathan Keith, a film score composer who has done the music for
The Monkey King and
Christopher Robin and a bunch of other lesser known films and tv
shows. There was an orchestra and the Salt Lake Choral Artists and about 8 other soloists that performed. What I learned there was that a good sound technician is worth his weight in gold. They had the choir on risers just behind the orchestra, but the Tabernacle is set up with microphones only up front where the orchestra was or up in the seats where the Tabernacle Choir usually sits. They brought in mics for the choir, but they were overwhelmed by the orchestra most of the time, unless the orchestra was playing very softly. Also, a couple of the soloists didn’t have the volume for their microphones turned up and it was difficult to hear them. Sadness. This
picture shows the operatic woman who sang (she’s the one in the green) and she was easy to hear because she had such a powerful voice. Anyway, the concert was nice but could have been better with better sound. Afterwards we went outside and looked at the lights around Temple Square. I forgot to mention that we had four tickets for this concert so we took Sam and Sharon with us. We got back to the apartment and I drove Sami home. I got back in time to watch the ending of the Georgia/Georgia Tech game. Wow, 8 overtime’s to decide this one. One shy of the record.
Saturday I got up and went down to check out the new gym in our apartments. They have had it finished for over a month, but were waiting on some lights in another part of the project to complete the final inspection. They have a
Proform stationary bike in there so I decided to try it out. I learned that I love the screen they have that has a video of the ride you are doing and you are “guided” on the ride by a guy on a bike just in front of you that tells you about the inclines and declines and the resistance level you
should be on, but none of those levels change on their own like the
Proform Tour de France bike they have in the COB gym. If I could get what I want I would add the screen and video from the bike downstairs to the one in the COB. That would be the best of both worlds. After my ride I got ready for the library. We worked from 10-5 today. It was still very slow and quiet when we got in there, but just around 1pm we suddenly got about 4 or 5 groups that came in. Lots of German research requests and one Estonia. I didn’t do any of them, I just helped get microfilms for guests and was the floor lead and worked on finding Eric Holmberg’s and Lena Andersdotter’s parents. I may have found Lena’s birth record in 1778 instead of
1774 which is what was indicated in all of the household records, but I can’t prove it yet. I also learned that in October, someone added a father to
Andrew Jackson Brooks’ pedigree…
John Brooks. I had searched quite a bit to try to find him, but found nothing. Unfortunately John Brooks was added without any sources so I have no idea how this persons knows he is Andrew Jackson Brooks’ father. Ugh. We closed at 5pm and I spent the rest of the evening watching football. The BYU game was agonizing, but that onside kick return was amazing.
This morning I got up and read through the Ether chapters again for
Come Follow Me because I was teaching the Gospel Doctrine class today. I then tried to send a pacemaker reading off to my doctor, but the machine wasn’t working, I think the batteries in the thingy that you put over the pacemaker to take the reading aren’t charging correctly. I tried calling the tech people, but of course there isn’t anyone there on Sunday, so I’ll try again tomorrow. Church was nice. My lesson went well. I started it by asking if anyone felt that they really understood
faith and could explain its definition and how it works to rest of us? Nobody raised their hand, so I then asked if they would take a moment and search for scriptures or quotes that could teach us
what it is, or
how it works, or
why we need it and then we would discuss their findings. That took the whole time and was great! One of the best things I learned from my study and was
confirmed by the findings of others in the class, is that faith is connected harmoniously with hope and charity and that they bring us to a more complete and enduring relationship with our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ. Also, this quote stood out to me…
"Preparatory faith is formed by experiences in the past--by the known, which provides a basis for belief. But redemptive faith must often be exercised toward experiences in the future--the unknown, which
provides an opportunity for the miraculous. Exacting faith, mountain-moving faith, faith like that of the brother of Jared, precedes the miracle and the knowledge. He had to believe before God spoke. He had to act before the ability to complete that action was apparent. He had to commit to the complete experience in advance of even the first segment of its realization. Faith is to agree unconditionally--and in advance--to whatever conditions God may require in both the near and distant future” (Jeffery R Holland, Christ and the New Covenant [1997], 18–19). Faith is power that comes from acting on hopes, beliefs and trust in God. I have faith in Christ. I know He lives and that His atonement brings me grace to accomplish anything He needs me to do so that I can learn what I am supposed learn about myself during this mortal existence. I am trying to act upon that faith every day and it brings me peace and hope.
Well that is another week gone. Only three more of these to go.
Love you all! BE GOOD!!
Sister and Elder Phillips
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