Training Meetings and the Sistine Chapel

I'd like to say this week was a little easier, but that isn't the case. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Monday was pretty normal. We started with our normal Monday Morning Mission Devotional. I can't remember any specifics because of everything else that went on. I did a little training with the newbies and talked with Curtis about some problems we were having with our ITI program. Last week we were exploring an SQL solution. We were having lots of problems trying to get Curtis connected to my SQL Express server. No success. I did manage to get Elder Linford to connect to my server so that is a big PLUS.

Later that evening we held our Family Home Evening. The Burgoynes were supposed to lead the discussion, but they attended a granddaughter's concert in Kaysville instead. So we came up with a last minute topic that turned out great. We decided to use a potion of President Nelson's General Conference Talk entitled "The Power of Spiritual Momentum". He gave five suggestions on how to maintain Spiritual Momentum. I focused on his fourth suggestion which was "Seek and Expect Miracles." We talked a bit about the kinds of miracles most people think of. Then we talked about the more personal miracles in our own lives. We didn't share anything too sacred, but all had miracles they saw in their lives and why they were miracles. A couple of them saved their lives. Others were very specific answers to prayers in very profound ways. It was a very spiritual evening and no one wanted to go home. It was nearly 2 hours before everyone was done. We finished the evening with frozen berries and ice cream. So yummy!

Tuesday morning we had an event called Teaching in the Savior's Way - Pre-recording. Our morning session was Tieline; however, we had one Italian show up in the COB so we supported the event. Later in the day we had the SLC teams for the evening session. We had about 56 interpreters for dinner that night. Before the morning event was over I had to go upstairs and do a training with Jeanpierre and Russell on PLUNET. I talked with Curtis several more times as we tried to decide what we were going to do. With each passing day things kept getting worse.

Wednesday brought more of the same. I had been trying to get some monthly reports done, but never had time because of our ITI problems. Our evening event was Australia Area Leadership Meeting. We only had 1 interpreter from Marshallese. The rest were all Tieline. I was on a video call with Curtis through the whole event so I didn't get to see or hear anything. By this point, Curtis had been instructed to extract ITI from our main Documents library into it's own library. Apparently some of our problems were because the Documents library was WAY to big. So Curtis moved ITI out of the Documents library. He also created an Archive library and started moving a bunch of old files into that library. At one point he started getting error messages that said there were too many changed files. No real changes in ITI were getting synced so we had to rely on emails for all our changes. NOT GOOD.

By Thursday morning we realized two things. One, the local copy of ITI needed to be moved to the root directory of the C drive on each computer. We had it in the Documents folder; however, almost everyone's documents folder was synced to our personal files on OneDrive. That syncing was causing problems of their own. The second thing we discovered was because everyone was still connected to SharePoint and syncing we had overwhelmed the system and bogged it down so much nothing was syncing. We decided to unlink everyone from SharePoint and HOPE that when we synced everyone back it would all work the way it was supposed to do. We had another event on Thursday evening. New Mission Leaders Webinar - Final Q&A.  Elder Wilcox pretty much covered it himself. Sister Linford was in Georgia for a granddaughter's graduation and her daughter's birthday. Elder Linford was at the Temple. And I was upstairs working on as many of the computers as I could get access to. I had to move all the OLD synced files to another location. Curtis didn't want to delete them just yet so we moved them to a folder that we will delete next week or so. I had to sync the new ITI library and make sure the local version of ITI was set up on the ROOT C drive folder. I brought it up, checked a few events that I knew were new, and verified everything was all right. Then I went to the next computer. 

By Friday morning things were looking good. Curtis had been running some performance tests and so far so good. We finished up setting up the rest of the computers and laptops until everyone that was in town was all set up. We were all seeing new events show up and no one was running into any syncing issues. I was done setting everyone up by noon. I was finally able to work on my monthly reports. I think I have a few more to do but I have a quit weekend to work on them if needed. 

On Friday, Elder Wilcox finally got tickets to see the Sistine Chapel Exhibition in Salt Lake City. It had been a very frustrating experience. We had a very poor user experience on their website. Later that evening I did some work on HawkSoft to free up the rest of the long weekend. We didn't have any events over the holiday weekend.

After several days of absolutely beautiful weather we had rain on Saturday and Sunday. It was just a light drizzle. Getting to the exhibition we parked in the underground garage, but had to walk several blocks in the drizzle to exhibition hall. The exhibit was incredible. They were full size pictures of every panel of the Sistine Chapel. An advantage of seeing the exhibit is that you can see the pictures up close and personal, rather than 60 feet away. I'm sure we could see more details than we could ever see in person in Rome. 

Sunday was pretty laid back.  We got to be greeters at the main door to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building before Sacrament meeting.  Out talks were about how all things are possible with God. It reminded me of our past Family Home Evening. Sunday School covered how we are to remember all the things the Lord had done for us and how He will continue to fight for us.  

I want to bear testimony about the truthfulness of the teachings we have received in our meetings and in the scriptures.  I am always amazed how we are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecies about the last days in the scriptures. Even though the scriptures were written over 2000 years ago,  we can read them as if we are reading current newspapers articles.  I know the scriptures are true. 

All Our Love,

Mom and Dad 

Grandma and Grandpa 

Steve and Leslee 

Elder and Sister Wilcox