Mission: Great Week!

So many things happened this week.  The best came at the end of the week:  On Saturday we went to the Portland Temple with the brother for whom we taught the Temple Preparation class.  He is such a nice man.  It has been a joy to meet with him and so lovely to attend the temple with him when he went for the first time.

At the end of the session, after changing into street clothes again, I stopped at the Family Card counter.  Our cards were not there so I sat down to wait for them and for Dear One who seemed to be taking forever to change.  That did not bother me because as I was sitting there on the couch waiting it occurred to me that maybe there was a reason for the wait beyond Dear One and the family file cards.

Eventually the sister came with the recorded family cards.  When I stepped up to the counter as she was filing the cards, she asked my name.  Our sister card was right on top!  I thought for a moment that that was the reason for my wait...that I could save her a few moments of filing.  Since is was fifteen minutes since I had come out I thought maybe I had misunderstood where I was to meet up with Dear One so I went closer to the lobby to check.  He was not there so I decided to just sit on that couch.  Moments later, and I mean, MOMENTS,  in walks Misty B!!!!  It was so glorious to see her. So very wonderful.  It has been years since she and Chad moved on from medical school at Dartmouth.  It could have been yesterday.  She lives an hour south of the temple.  Maybe we will be able to get together again, or at least send more frequent emails since we are in such close proximity.

Later that day we went to the stake center to attend the baptism of a woman in our ward.  There were quite a few people there and the baptism went well.  She brought her darling little daughter and her mom.  Afterwards there were plates of cookies. I managed to sneak by the cookies without any of them reaching out to grab me.  Of course, I appeared pretty anti-social but in this case, I needed not to get into the sweets, and did not mind passing up the socializing.

This week one of the office-y things I have been doing is working on a beta test of the Correspondence module of the IMOS (Internet Missionary Office System or some such thing) system.  It has been somewhat  taxing as it really is a beta test and not everything works right.  The thing that I personally use it for most is to make forwarding address labels for missionary mail.  That part of the module works very well.  They only have one size of label usable currently but it is the Avery 5160 which is an easier size for me to work with to put on letters, cards, and packages.  The only glitch, and it is a minuscule one,  is that I have to put a second "Please Forward" label on the envelopes.  The old way of doing this used a very large label that I had to cut up a lot to get on small envelopes and post cards without obscuring the recipient already on them..

Letter templates are a way of life in our office for the other two sisters. I am trying to create some new templates so they are ready to go when the data loss problems are fixed.  I typed in three or four letters for Sister J to check over.  She has a good editing eye so I was able to correct many errors I had made in field placement.  When those were done I went back to IMOS and put in the correct salutations for the missionary parents...very easy when the missionaries have intact families but more taxing when there are multiple parents...also multiple languages. I have learned that Irmao or something like that is the word for Sister in Portuguese.  As you can see, I really have not learned it yet...!  Anyway, this week I have quite a few more salutations to complete.

Christmas packages are coming in hurrah-boys!  So many packages come in each day. We asked families to put Christmas stickers on the packages so we would know if they are Christmas packages or regular ones.  Apparently lots of people just go to Amazon for gifts.  They do not say they are gifts so we have to guess.  I have called a few parents to ask.  Since we asked for them to arrive before Thanksgiving I am expecting a ton more this week. The store room is beginning to fill.  Knowing how to categorize the boxes for easy dissemination at our Christmas party took some time but then I thought...why not just put the first letter of the surname on the end of the box?  That would be easy.

Pansies at the end of their ropes, though Thanksgiving pansies don't exist in Vermont.  Most years, anyway!

These pansies are so cheerful even though you can see they are mostly spent.  They are in front of the building across the parking lot from us.  One day soon I will do a post on all kinds of cool wildlife around here.  I can tell you these pansies and the beautiful roses that are still in full bloom here and there in the area are a real shot in the arm for a Vermont girl. (Well, girl is probably not the right word, but....)