So today was a totally fun day. I worked with Brother Heaton who served his mission in Argentina, I’m going to have to ask him where he is from again. And Brother Hewlett who is from Centerville. Oh boy, they are all running together, I will double-check my facts tomorrow. I am alone now in a classroom with these guys so opening exercises of a hymn (all verses), thought and prayer is a bit nerve-wracking. I’ll get used to it. But for example, hymn – I sing alto, and they were singing one of the men’s parts so the hymn was lovely. I tried to sing soprano but it was morning and I hadn’t even talked out loud yet. Ha ha. Oh well.
So Brother Heaton had me get on a computer. He asked me if I could create a folder in documents – I did it. He had me find a conference talk and copy and paste it to a Word Document and save it in my folder. He had me do a few other things like that which I did quickly. Then we watched a power point and I got into the Mission Office software which put me right into the Scotland Ireland area in a play mode. But everything was accurate and only a week old. So I was able to find myself, look at my companion etc. It was great. I learned how to look up, run and download reports, how to pay bills, add vendors, houses etc. Then we got into Excel and they had me re-create a few spreadsheets, show them how to fill, create some formulas etc. I love this stuff. I was having so much fun. Anyway, at 11:30 they looked at me and said – well you have finished everything we had that was supposed to last until 5:00 today. What do you want to do? So I took a two hour lunch (they had classes they had to get to and the afternoon teachers don’t come until 1:30). I got back and we did Tuesday this afternoon.
My afternoon teachers were Sister ??? from Reno, Nevada who served in Mesa, Arizona and Brother King from Indiana who served in Ogden, Utah. We had a great time going into greater detail in the office software and finding a bug and reporting it (not part of the curriculum) and also finding some conflicts between the handbook and the Frequently Asked Questions so we took the time to call Global Services to point that out. We also talked about Sister ??? Astronomy class because she had a test at 5:00 that she had to get to and she was studying some neat stuff about how stars are formed. I wish I had the actual words from her syllabus but basically a star is formed when one force (gravity) is pushing inward to get it to a point and another force is pushing outward to get it to burst. The star is determined by the mass that is created from these opposing forces. We thought about that and applied it to our own testimonies. Our testimonies are determined by which force we allow to push the most. Anyway, it was a really neat thought when all the words were right.
I called my granddaughter, Avery on the way home from the MTC to see how her second ever violin lesson went today. She still hasn’t been allowed to actually play a note but she is super excited anyway. She can now hold her violin without using her arms. I’ve never been a string player…I hope this is really going somewhere!! I have always used my arms to hold my flute, and I’ve never hung onto my bassoon with just my teeth. Ha ha. We will continue to find out how she is doing each Monday.
The weekend was awesome. Conference was full of great missionary messages and I enjoyed it all. Also, I put my car up for sale on Friday night on KSL and that night we got a call from someone wanting to come see it between conference sessions. They showed up, test drove it and gave me my asking price which was more than the dealership would have given me and as much as my neighbor said I would be lucky to get for it. They called the bank to see if they could get a cashier’s check and they had 10 minutes before the bank closed so they hurried off. I called a car rental place in American Fork to see if I could get a car for the week to get me to the MTC and back and they had 30 minutes before they closed. I hurried off. I got back and the buyers were sitting in my Mazda listening to the first conference talk of the afternoon session. They handed me the check and I handed them the title and that was that. Talk about missionary blessings already in action.
Well, it’s bedtime. So I better get to it.
We really enjoy reading your blog Lori, and got a chuckle out of your frig experience. Reminded us of trying to get our internet service connected in the Dominican Republic; it took from December to April!!! While we served in Spain, we often said to one another, “If there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, the Spaniard will always choose the hard way.” It is mostly traditional, because they are very traditional, especially in Northern Spain. It just takes living abroad for a while (as you know, living in a place is far different than visiting) to really appreciate what we have here, and to appreciate American ingenuity. It is real. We found that Switzerland was more like what we are used to. We adopted some of their traditions into our lives, and other countries and their cultures have many things to offer as well, and our lives have been richly blessed by them. You also learn to love the wonderful people as true brothers and sisters, and the gospel is what they need in their lives. We are so very grateful for the opportunities we have had to serve missions. They have truly blessed our lives in so many ways.
It sounds like you are happy and doing a great job Lori; keep up the good work. We pray daily for your success and your welfare.
Love,
Clair & Marcella