4 Devotionals, 3 days with slacks, 2 Christmas Parties, and 1 Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang

The Sister Singing Christmas Carols

Last Sunday we did the Live First Presidency Christmas Devotional. I hope you all had the chance to watch it. It was wonderful. I loved the little 6-year-old girl who played the violin. She did an amazing job. I also enjoyed all the wonderful talks. It is the best way to begin the Christmas season.

Monday was the first slacks day. We left early that day so we could prepare our dish for our first Christmas party. I also finished up work at home. That night we went to our first of four Devotionals. It was our monthly evening Mission Devotional on the first Monday of every month. They usually have a special speaker for that Devotional. We heard from Elder Mark Pace, The General Sunday School President. He gave a wonderful talk and shared some of the beginnings of the first Sunday School in the Church.

The front of our Apartment Complex

Tuesday was a very busy day. It started with our 2nd Devotional of the week. This was are weekly Zone Tuesday morning devotional. Our Branch President presented on Tuesday. He some interesting things he and his wife do in their mission assignment. They review all the Church magazine in all the different languages they are produced. They check for broken links in the online version of the magazine. They talked about how many languages they work with. Some of the languages we don't even interpret yet.  We cover over 90% of the population with the top 10 languages we do. The other 10% is the other 80 plush languages we do. They Church does a wonderful job to get the Word of the Lord to ALL of Heavenly Fathers children in their own tongue. I'm so grateful we get to be a part of that work.

We had our Team meeting followed by our potluck luncheon and first of two Christmas Parties. We were missing Jeanpierre  and Eunlan from the team. They joined us via Teams for our meeting. Both are supposed to be next week sometime so we can see them before Christmas. We have such a wonderful team. After our party we worked for about an hour before we got ready for the Post Recordings for the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. We were supposed to have almost the same number of people as we had on Sunday; however, Curtis forgot to tell me that three languages weren't going to be there. Bottom line is we had so much food left over it was ridiculous. Needless to say we have dinner for a while now. And that was after we sent home lot of food with our Interpreters.

Front Row Left to Right:  Baptiste, Sister Petty, Ljiljana, Aaron
Back Row: Elder Wilcox, Sister Wilcox, Sara, Elder Linford, Sister Linford, Daniel Curtis
Missing: Jeanpierre and Eunlan

On Wednesday I had another slacks day. It was also getting colder. I spent most of my week working on writing the new PLUNET Operations manual.  Elder Hansen had written a 50 plus page manual before they left. I cut it almost in half.  I also rewrote the instructions for the Interpreters to use when creating and submitting their invoices. I'm happy to report that one of sisters who has never successfully submitted her invoice on her own before has now submitted two of them all on her own!!! I guess the new instructions worked.

That afternoon we had the third devotional of the week.  Our Publishing Services Department meeting was a very nice Christmas devotional by Bishop Waddell of the presiding Bishopric. He shared some really nice stories. We also heard from Brother Isom who is our PSD manager. Wednesday evening Sister Linford and I went to see Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang at the Hale Theater in the Round. It was so fun. We got free tickets so that was nice. The special effects were incredible. The music was great. The acting was so fun to watch. They did a great job of making the car float and then fly. It was very believable. 

On Thursday morning we had our fourth and final Devotional for the week.  Our Zone leaders had to fill in at the last minute because the scheduled presenters had an emergency they had to go home for. I sure hope everything is OK.  They shared several little famous Christmas song videos. It was really nice. I continued my work on the PLUNET manual. I also worked on several more complicated PLUNET orders. Elder and Sister Linford are doing most of the PLUNET orders now. It is good in one way because it leaves me free to work on the manual and other projects I have had on the back burner. However, it is hard in another way; because I don't know what is going on anymore. I used to know when all the events were taking place and now I haven't got a clue. I also helped several other Interpreters get invoices submitted so they can get paid.  I sent them the new instructions to help them in the future. Hopefully I'll start seeing a decrease in requests to fix invoices.

Thursday evening we attended our Zone Christmas party. We had a nice catered dinner on the 26th floor. We got to visit different missionaries we don't usually get to see. It was very nice. We also sang longs of Christmas Carols after dinner.  Sister Checketts is a younger senior missionary. She is her 40's and is a emigration lawyer. She decided to take a year off work and serve a mission. She works for the law offices in the Church.  He is also in our FHE group. We love her.  Anyway, she has tons of energy and loves to sing so she organized the sign along.  It was so much fun...especially when we said the 12 days of Christmas where each table was a day and had to act out what we were while we sang it as loud as we could.  Our table was 6 geese a laying.  I'll leave that to your imagination on what we did. Needless to say we had a lot of fun.

Thursday also brought SNOW.  The morning was so foggy we couldn't even see out the windows on the 28th floor. We were literally in the clouds. If we went right up to the window we could look down and see but that was it. Just looking straight out the window was very eerie. 

Friday was my last slacks day. Technically it shouldn't have been a slacks day because we actually had an event that day. We are supposed to where dresses or skirts for events. However, because I know longer know what is going on we all spaced the event until that morning when the Linford's were doing their review. Luckily, it was snacks only so we were able to cover our bases. Also, luckily I was wearing very nice slacks so it didn't look too bad. The event was for Roots Tech in March 2022. We have pre-recording lots of segments for the event. We only had our Portuguese team and no one even noticed I wasn't "properly" dressed. It was still so cold and we were walking so I'm glad I had on slacks. Originally, we were supposed to have a Mandarin and a Portuguese team; however, we had problems populating the Mandarin team. Two of the interpreters were not in PLUNET and we can't use them if they are not in PLUNET. (One of those projects on the back burner I need to work on.) Finally, Aaron, our Supervisor, called Taiwan to see if they could cover for us. They agreed to get up early and be prepare to interpret at 5:00 AM to help us out. Well, as the event was getting setup, Aaron finds out that they really wanted Cantonese and not Mandarin. Apparently, they just said they needed Chinese and that usually means Mandarin. So we were scrambling to figure out what to do when we found out the brother that needed the interpretation speaks fluent English. He served his mission in Washington State and it attending BYU Hawaii. So we told the Mandarin interpreters "thank you very much, but we don't need you after all". Luckily we still paid them for their willingness to serve and because they got up early to help us out.

Saturday was a real day off. I did some work for HawkSoft, I also updated our Zone SharePoint site before we went out to run some errands and get haircuts. Just as we were leaving to run our errands we opened the door to find out we had been Stocking'ed. Someone left a big red Christmas Stocking filled with lots of goodies at our door with instructions to enjoy our treats and then fill up the Stocking and drop it on someone else's door within 48 hours. So we picked up some treats on our errand run and dropped the stocking off this morning on our way to an early morning event.

Today, Sunday, we have been able to "attend" the Mesa Temple Rededication sessions. We didn't think we were going to do this event because it is for ASL only; however, we were asked to help out. The ASL team usually works in the Conference Center. They wanted to try a smaller venue so they asked if they could use our 28th floor and if we could help out. Of course we jumped at the chance. It has been so fun to get to know this team of amazing interpreters that we haven't worked with before.  They like the venue and think they may be doing more events with us in the future. What surprised me the most is that some of the interpreters are deaf themselves . They can do text interpretation...meaning they have a script. There is a coach with them in case the speaker goes off script. but other than that they can interpret the script. We had a wonderful lunch with them today and got to know several interpreters. Some have partial hearing, some can't hear at all and some have full hearing. Their stories are cool to listen to as well. I hope we can do more events with them.

Well that about covers it. We did have 4 devotionals, 3 days of slacks, 2 Christmas parties and 1 Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang this week. 

I hope you have a wonderful week and are filled with the Christmas Spirit in your home and in your life.

All our Love and Prayers,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox