Mission: Changes at Church

We will miss hearing from President Thomas S. Monson but are glad he has gone home to heaven to be with his wife, Frances, and other family members.  We were so happy to start our week on Tuesday with an announcement from the new President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The new First Presidency will carry on the work that Heavenly Father directs them to do.  All of us are happy to do our part.  One of the blessings of being in an all-volunteer church is that everyone can help with the work in whatever way they can and we all fit together beautifully.

Later this week the office missionaries (with an out-lying missionary couple coming into the office to help) put the screen protectors on all the new smart phones. On Friday the assistants to the President and the technology elder and sister technology leader came to the office to be trained on the new phones.  At the Missionary Leader Council next week the zone leaders will be trained and receive their phones.  The final roll-out will be at Zone Conferences in February.  Each area/companionship will have one of these phones with the number from their current phone and all the data from the current phones being ported over to the new phones.  I, for one, will be happy because I am expecting the new phones to have better audio quality.  When some of the older phones call into the office I can barely hear what the missionaries are saying.

As far as ourselves, this was the week we were going to start meeting with both our Spanish Coach and our Spanish Tutor.   As it happened, I flubbed up and scheduled both at the same time so had to do some fast fixing of times so we had them both on Friday.  We have learned that we have to be explicit as to time because the MTC time is one hour later than Pacific/Oregon Portland Mission time zone!

It turns out we might be pretty old dogs learning new tricks, vis-a-vis Spanish language learning, but we are really going to try. I think I have said that before.  We are so happy to find that our sweet coach is married to the son of some of our favorite people from Maine!!  Small world.  Truly small world. I love the connections.

Only one problem with the two hours of watching the computer screen:  I was leaning forward and concentrating so completely that I managed to bother a nerve in my neck and shoulder.  By Saturday I was in such misery that I had to take pills.  I also went onto YouTube to see if there were any physical  therapists with suggestions on what to do to fix neck pain.  There were!  Now, Sunday night, the pain is almost totally gone.

Two things I started this week, in fact, this weekend, were that I finished the prototype of the financial box, making dividers to put inside as well as putting the metal strip and magnet on the flap, then spending an hour entering all our sales receipts into Excel and filing them in the proper place.

The second organizational thing we did this weekend was to get some banker's boxes to start picking up clutter and putting it away so the public area of the apartment is tidy and nice and the rest of the "stuff" is in neat and labeled boxes...though the boxes are not yet labeled...  It may come as no surprise that there are four knitting boxes already!  I cannot really believe that myself but, there you have it.  (I am stopping the blanket again to knit up a sweater for a girl at church who is having a baby in 6 weeks or so.  When done, I will talk more about it.)

Do you think I will ever get organized?  Do you think I will ever have a less crazy life?  Do you think I can learn fifteen to twenty new Spanish verbs every week?  (Dear One has a different learning style than I but we work together nevertheless). Do you think I can really swim three days a week?  We shall see how many admirable goals we can achieve.  Prayers on our behalf are welcomed!