Conference Reports, MSW, and Area Emails!

John Benbow Farm in England

Monday was the official Pioneer Day holiday so we didn't have work. Surprisingly we didn't hear from any of our Supervisors. We just lazed around all day. We did go out shopping for a little in the afternoon. We also had our Family Home Evening group that evening. The Beech's led the discussion. Elder Beech created a PowerPoint presentation of the Wilfred Woodruff's mission to England.  I knew of the basic mission as I taught it when I was teaching Seminary; however, Elder Beech shared a lot more interesting facts. He also shared pictures of the country side and shared personal stories of several places he had experienced since he is from England. It was a wonderful presentation.

Zupas - One of the Restaurants
we got food from

Tuesday was our Zone Devotional. Normally I go to the office before the devotional; but Tuesday, I decided to watch from home. Since we have been so slow, we have been sleeping in a bit everyday. We headed to work after the devotional. Last Friday, Eunlan called us letting us know that even though our three events (Disabilities Resources Videos - Cebuano and Tagalog) for this week were tieline and we normally didn't have to do anything other than the computer work, the producer requested meals for the engineer, supervisor, producer, and of course the missionaries for all three days. Elder Wilcox spent much of the day trying to organize the meals. The producer didn't want meals from COB Catering. She wanted to go off campus, meaning restaurants.  So, on Friday Elder Wilcox chose three different restaurants and sent menu links to each person that was scheduled to come. Most had put their menu requests in the spreadsheet we sent out. Then on Monday several changes occurred. First the producer who request the meals and the restaurants couldn't come. Her mother tested positive for Covid and the mother lives with the producer. Second we were told the engineer had changed. It took several hours to track the engineer only to find out that it was the original engineer after all. 

Hip Exercises

Right after lunch, we walked home and picked up the car so I could go to a therapy appointment. My hip has been hurting a lot lately and I was hoping to get another shot to make it better. Instead of the shot, I got exercises to do. Much, much slower process to get any relief. I'm trying to be diligent with my exercises in hopes I will feel some relief soon. For the most part it is only bad when walking up the hill to our apartment. After the appointment we headed back to work. Around 5 Elder Wilcox went to pick up dinner. He gave the engineer his dinner and then Eunlan, Elder Wilcox, and I had dinner together. Technically, we could have left right after dinner; however, Eunlan has a way of keeping us there for a while. We don't mind. We love serving with her. We left around 7. Poor Eunlan had to stay until 10 that night.

Diagram of a Blood Clot

Wednesday, we worked from home in the morning as Steve had a follow-up appointment from his emergency room visit last week. Normally we get right in; however, on Wednesday they were very behind schedule and it took us an hour before we saw the doctor. The visit went well. The doctor asked a bunch of questions trying to determine what might have triggered the blood clot. We left with it still undetermined. She said she would talk to a specialist to see if there were any other questions she should ask and to see how long he will need to take the blood thinners. The original prescription was for 90 days; however, the specialist said with his history of several other blood clots, he recommends he stays on the blood thinners for the rest of his life.

October General Conference 2019

Wednesday afternoon was spent in our Team Meeting, which went 30 minutes overtime again. Elder Wilcox also had to deal with similar problems with the engineer for that night's tieline event. Again we were told it would be a different engineer. At that point he didn't have a meal picked for the engineer. Again, the engineer we thought was going to be there said he wasn't going to be there and in the end he was there after all. lol  Eunlan asked if there was a way I could give her a report of all the Interpreters we used for the October 2019 General Conference. That was the last conference before Covid. So I took about an hour to create the report for her of interpreters by language and session. Then we went home around 7:30. That night Eunlan had to stay until 10:30.

My Mass Email Power Automate Flow

Thursday the Linfords left for Casper for the weekend. We watched our Zone Devotional at home again and then headed into the office. I had been working on trying to finish up my mass emails to the areas. I finally got approval for the new email subject I wanted so I was ready to go. The text worked perfectly. I changed my input list to use the area emails and let it run. It crashed. Before I could look into it, I got a call from Eunlan wanting me to modify the report I gave her the day before to break out the interpreters by those in SLC and those in the AREA. So I spent the next couple of hours extracting what she wanted. I also realized that with the Linfords gone I needed to do their work too. Needless to say, I didn't get to everything very quickly. I finished the Linford's work in the morning and started on Eunlan's report. In the meantime I kept trying to tweak my mass email job. At 11 AM we had a Teams meeting with the Sacred Materials part of our new section. It was a "get to know you" and "what do each of you do" kind of meeting. We all enjoyed it very much. It took over 1 1/2 hours to cover everyone. We still need to meet with our Operations Managers part before our next full section meeting on August 11th. I already love everyone in our new section and look forward to working more closely together. 

By the end of the day I still had not sent out my mass emails so I set up an appointment with Jeff (the tech guy) to help me first thing on Friday. I finished Eunlan's new report, but had a slight problem with one of the formulas in the spreadsheet. This day all the meals for the evening tieline event went off without a hitch. After we ate, I did some final tweaking on the formula and was able to give Eunlan exactly what she wanted. She is in charge of General Conference again this conference. We will be having a full compliment of interpreters in the COB and she wanted to get a handle of how many that would be. This report will help her a lot. Again, we didn't leave until around 7:30.

Friday morning, I connected with Jeff and within a few minutes he was able to identify the problem. He changed one little thing and it worked perfectly. I only had one error come up when it ran and that was an invalid email address. I corrected that address and manually sent that one out. All the rest went out without a hitch. I was amazed at how many responses I got back right away and throughout the rest of the day. We deactivated a TON of people in Event Central that were no longer doing interpretations. I'm sure I will receive more in the next week or so. After talking to Sara we decided to put together an email and send it out to the new people over the finance department as well as Greg who is over our new section about the new proposed process for invoicing. I have been trying for so long to go up the chain to get approval, but have not got any response. Sara and I decided to go over the chain and work down instead. I explained briefly the problem and the proposed solution. I then proposed a meeting with them so we can show them what we are proposing. Greg wrote back and wanted to make sure we have done our due diligence in talking to others in our division that use the same process. I have briefly mentioned it to everyone involved over the course of several months and received positive feedback; however we have never done anything formally. So Sara suggested we set up a Teams Meeting on Monday. We are a GO! I am very excited about this and hope it will be the final step in getting approval to move forward. After this meeting, Greg said he would be ready to meet with us along with the people over finance. Wish me luck. I have been working on this since a month or so after arriving on our mission. Friday evening we went to the Bountiful Temple. It felt good to be in the House of the Lord again. We missed last week.

Saturday I didn't even leave the apartment. Steve did some shopping. I worked on HawkSoft as well as processing a few more responses from the areas. Then I watched movies just because I could. lol

Sunday was a good day. We started the morning by attending Music and the Spoken Word. It is such a beautiful way to begin our day of worship. I usually work on the blog after that. Church starts at 1 so we leave around 12:30 or so. Our talks are always so uplifting. When you are surrounded by the caliber of people who are serving missions, the talks are always good. Same thing with our Sunday School, Priesthood, and Relief Society classes. The lessons or discussions are always so enlightening. I learn so much. We are so very blessed to be here at this time. If you would like to know more about why we feel so blessed, we invite you to "come and see". 

Bountiful Temple

I'm excited about next week. We are starting preparations for the Temple Leadership Seminar. The live meeting will be the first week in September; however, we have several events leading up to that in August. The first one is some pre-recording videos that we will be doing Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings (for tielines and French), as well as evenings for SLC teams. They are always so spiritual. I am really looking forward to them.

Sorry we didn't have any "real" pictures this week. We'll do better next week.

All our Love and Prayers,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

Goodbyes, Hellos, Emergency Room, and a Rodeo

One of gals that works in the 
kitchen. We eat lunch with her.

We didn't have a single event this week. We finished up a few Language Coaching jobs, but those are all done in studio or via zoom so they don't involve us. I spent the week working on preparing my reports for all the areas in the world. I have everything in place except one thing. I am waiting on the Power Automate tech group to give me a new email "subject" that I can use in my bulk email to the areas. Power Automate is a Microsoft tool that makes it easy to set up apps to make tasks much easier. Before last General Conference Jeff Wood, one of the techs, worked with me to do a mass email that will automatically attach unique spreadsheets to each email. It works really slick. I ran into a problem, however, when some of the email addresses were not in the Church network (i.e. a gmail.com account). After they evaluated what I was doing they granted me permission to send mass email outside the Church network. To do that they used my Subject to determine if the email could be sent. Everything worked beautifully. Well, I am doing it again for this General Conference; however, my subject is completely different. I am making the subject more generic this time so we won't have to change it again next conference. Hopefully I'll get it by Tuesday as I want to send these out before the end of the month.

President and Sister Larsen

Monday morning we had a wonderful Mission Devotional where we said goodbye to President and Sister Larsen. They were the 2nd Counselor in our Mission Presidency. They have become great friends as they live on our floor so we have a lot of interaction. They helped us last General Conference and loved it. Elder Wilcox made brownie points when he made them a sign to hang in front of their apartment. He is making signs for everyone on the floor. Everyone LOVES it. He also provides a big envelope for them so they can take their signs home with them. It was sad, but that is the nature of missions. As Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) says, "Life is made up of meetings and partings." These missionaries have become like family to us. We love them and will miss them very much.

Later that night we had our FHE group again. Our Zone leaders were our discussion leaders. Being so close to Pioneer Day, we all shared pioneer stories. It was interesting and fun. We also had new missionary couple join us. They shared a little about themselves and it was great fun to learn about them. Elder Ure is quite funny. I love our Family Home Evening group. 

Audrey Bever Thornton

Tuesday was uneventful for most of the day. We started with our Zone devotional. We heard from President Parker, 1st Counselor in our Mission Presidency. Actually we heard from Sister Parker. She talked about her ancestor, Anson Call (who, by the way, is also related to Brent Call.) She shared some fascinating stories about him. She also shared a short video about pioneers. It was an awesome devotional. At lunch we ran into one of my old Seminary Students, Audrey Bever Thornton. She just started working at the gym on the 7th floor two days a week. I guess I no longer have an excuse not to go work out once in a while.

President and Sister Boushley

Tuesday evening our Zone had an optional Games Night, with a bring your own meal, held at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building lunch room. We don't usually go, but with no events and saying goodbye to the Boushleys and Sister McCullough. These are also dear friends to us. President Boushley was our Branch President. They also helped us with last General Conference. We had enjoyed a dinner and theatrical play with them early on in our mission. We have been good friends ever since. We played a fun game after we ate. It was like charades but sound was allowed and even recommended. Sound did NOT include words. For example if part of you phrase had the word "bacon" in it you could make the sound of a pig to try and get someone to guess the word. I would have snorted at the same time of acting out frying bacon. Anyway it was both fun and funny.

A couple of weeks ago, Elder Wilcox was complaining about his leg hurting. He has complained periodically ever since he fell on the ice last December. Apparently it was hurting worse and he decided to call for a doctor's appointment. He didn't tell me what was going on, so I didn't know how bad it was hurting. I heard him on the phone asking for an appointment as soon as he could get in. He didn't care who he saw. They scheduled him for the END of AUGUST! He asked to let him know if any cancellations occurred. I guess a couple cancellations had been texted to him; but, by the time he signed in to request the appointment, it was already filled. On Wednesday he got another cancellation and again missed scheduling it. Finally he said something to me, so I told him we could go online and see if we can find an earlier appointment. Sure enough there was one for the following Wednesday, so we booked it. He had to write a description of his problem. As I watched him write the description, I became more concerned. This was NOT the problem from the fall in December. Once the appointment was booked we went about the rest of our activities. After lunch we went to our Team Meeting on the 27th floor. Near the end of the meeting Elder Wilcox got a call from the nurse. She told him the doctor wanted him to go to the Emergency Room, NOW! He told me we needed to go to the Emergency Room right after the meeting. It ended shortly. I take the minutes so Steve thought I needed to finish before we left. 

So after the meeting we left immediately to go to the ER. They took him in for triage right away and said they would get a room as soon as they could. 3 1/2 hours later they took us to an ER room. Once there, they were very attentive. They sent in a vascular specialist to do an ultra sound on his leg. We all suspected he had a blood clot and the ultra sound proved that to be the case. He explained what exactly a blood clot is and what it is not. He also explained when they are dangerous and when they are not. A blood clot is NOT a blob that blocks the vein. Instead, it is a long snake-like clot of blood, not a ball. If the clot is in the outer or superficial veins it is not as serious. The problems occur when it moves into the deep veins and is called a DVT or Deep Vein Thrombosis. Once in the deep vein, the clot can break off and travel to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, or the brain and cause a stroke. Steve had a double pulmonary embolism over 15 years ago. The ultra sound showed his clot was mostly in the superficial veins and not a risk; however, just at the knee it turned to join a deep vein. That is where his leg started hurting a lot. Apparently the bulk of the clot has been there for a while with no real problems. So now that it is in the deep vein, they needed to treat him. They gave him some blood thinners and asked him to follow-up with our doctor in a week. We already had an appointment scheduled. We didn't get out of the hospital until nearly 11:30 that night.

Thursday started with a Zone Devotional. Elder Stevens (our Zone leader) wanted to test to see if the setup he did for our Zone meetings would still work even if he was not online. He asked me to "run" the meeting and said they would join after 8:00 to see if everything went well. To add to his reason for the test, Xfinity was doing an upgrade that day. Many of us have Xfinity as our provider and ran the risk of no internet in the morning. So I went to the office to make sure I could get on the Zoom call. Everything worked great, so when the Stevens are gone, for a few days in a week or so, everything will work just fine. The Stevens decided to go to their office to join the call; but, ran into several problems trying to get on, so it was a good thing they asked me to cover for them. 

The rest of the day was uneventful. Elder Wilcox went home around 2:30 as he was still tired from the lack of sleep the night before. 4 hours is not enough. I told him I was right behind him, and I would have been if Curtis hadn't called me wanting to talk. He had just received a call from an Apostle from the reorganized Church (now called the Community of Christ), wanting to share information on a new daguerreotype that they claim to be of the Prophet Joseph Smith. You can read all about it here. I think he was enlisting Curtis's help to authenticate it since he had spent two years of his life proving that the remains of the Prophet Joseph and Hyrum Smith were properly identified. Curtis had already enlarged the photo that was found in a small pocket watch size locket and was overlaying it on his 3d image of the death mask of Joseph Smith. Early findings look like it may be an authentic daguerreotype (early photo) of the Prophet. There is an article about the finding in the Deseret News found here. After almost an hour he got another call and let me go.

Once home we were ready for a quiet evening. We put our pajamas on and were just about to get dinner when there was a knock on the door. I opened the door to an excited Elder and Sister Stevens. They had two extra tickets to the Days of 47 Rodeo and wanted to know if we wanted to go. Elder Wilcox said "why not". So we quickly changed back into our clothes and headed for the "trax" to take us to the fairgrounds. It was hot! There were a total of 8 missionaries. We got to wander around for about 30 minutes or so before we headed to the stadium. We went to a large tent with animals and got lots of pictures. Some of them were so cute. We had GREAT seats. Pretty much in the middle and not too far up. Best of all it was on the SHADY side of the stadium. Neither one of us had ever been to a rodeo before. The closest we had come was watching Heartland. lol It was a lot of fun.

We slept in on Friday because we have been so slow at work and we had been out late for several nights in a row. We were planning on being at work by 9 or so, but before that I started getting emails, chats and even a teams call so we worked from home until almost 10. Sister Linford texted me and said we could probably just work from home, but I told her I didn't put makeup on and do my hair just to stay home. lol. I finished up all the preparations for my General Conference email to the areas. Just waiting for the approval of my new subject so I can send them out. By 2:30 we were all ready to go home. And we promised each other we weren't going to go ANYWHERE that night. We needed to just stay home.

Saturday morning I did some work for HawkSoft. It has been a while since I have had any work from them. I also did a little work on a spreadsheet Aaron asked me to look at. Then we went to get some much needed hair cuts. After that we went to Ogden to visit Roy and Vicki again. Roy looked much better and is improving all the time. Vicki said they are hoping to move him to a facility near Bountiful by next Friday. That will make it easier for everyone. We had an enjoyable visit with them. It was good to hear Roy talking again. At our previous visit he slept most of the time. His right side is gradually improving. He was able to push the physical therapy machine with his right foot which he couldn't do before.

Sunday morning I went to Music and the Spoken Word again. Steve slept in and watched it on TV. It is just different in person and I like being there. Once again, it was a beautiful program. They honored pioneers today. As I got up to leave, our aisle got a little clogged up. When I looked to see what the problem was I saw Elder Gong greeting people in the aisle. When I got to him he shook my hand and greeted me. That was cool. Church was great as usual. It was the first official meeting of the Salt Lake City Headquarters Mission Branch. All the sisters met together for the first time in Relief Society. It was awesome. We practically filled the room we met in. And we enjoyed a wonderful relaxing afternoon. That evening we went to the Tabernacle for The Mormon Battalion: A Symphonic Saga. It was a nice performance. We did get to hear a message from Elder D. Todd Christofferson. NOTE: The guy sitting next to Elder Christofferson in the picture is his brother. He happens to be heavily involved with the Mormon Battalion organization that has been putting different programs on all over the United States in celebration of the 175th year of the Battalion enlistment.

Have a Wonderful Week!

All our Love and Prayers,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

Music, Music, and More Music

Most of my week was spent working on special reports for Daniel and helping Interpreters with their invoicing. I asked again how close we were to getting the new invoicing process approved and in place. Still no answer. We have been waiting on one guy in Finance to sign off on it. The problem is he is retiring and doesn't want to make the decision for the next finance guy. The BIGGER problem is he keeps postponing his retirement...for months! I talked to Caleb (the tech guy who is working with me on this) to see if we can either get our guy to make a decision so we can move forward, or let us know one more time that he won't make the decision so we can go over his head to our new director. The thing is, the new process won't change a single thing in the way they handle invoices. They only difference they will see is in the way the invoice looks. Instead of getting an RTF, they will simply get all the SAME information from the RTF in the body of the email. The MAJOR change will be for the Interpreters who have to create the invoice and then jump through a bunch of hoops to email a copy of the invoice (RTF) to finance. They hoops they have to jump through are not easy for many of our interpreters who struggle with English and Computers. They generally can create the invoice and click the "logical" button that says "Submit for Approval" and figure they are done. And THAT is exactly the way it should work. That is the way it was DESIGNED to work. It is our finance department that can't seem to work with that process and insist that they have to download and save the RTF and then email it to a very LONG email address (subject to typos) to send it to finance for payment. The problem is, once they click the "Submit for Approval" button they can NO LONGER download and save the RTF to email it. That is when I have to step in and help them and that usually occurs after two or three months when they realize they haven't been paid yet. I may be going to our new director this week. OK, I won't talk about my "work" anymore in this blog post. 😊

Monday night we had a mission devotional. Our very own Elijah Choir (that rivals the Tabernacle Choir haha) presented their Pioneers and Patriots Choir Concert. It was really quite good. Our new Mission President, President Holmes, even authorized us to applaud after the concert. Normally we can't do that in the Chapel. They sang a new rendition of "Come, Come, Ye Saints" that I have never heard before. It was beautiful.

We had no events other than Language Coaching and ASL the whole week until we got to Saturday, so there wasn't anything for us to do on that front. We do have some cool events coming up after our July slow down. The Temple Leadership Seminar will start in August. Actually, the Seminar doesn't start until September, but we are doing pre-recordings starting the first week in August. I'm really looking forward to that. We will have three events the first week. We were going to divide the events between the Linfords and us, but we all want to attend all three days. Since we are allowed to attend any event we want to it works out just fine.

Wednesday we had our normal extra long Team Meeting. It is supposed to end at 3. I normally have a 3 o'clock PLUNET meeting every other week; however, we are always over at least 1/2 hour so I haven't attended the PLUNET meeting in months. Since I have to keep the minutes of the team meeting I can't exactly leave. Curtis also goes to the PLUNET meeting, but he hasn't been able to go either. I'm trying to get Daniel to either change the day or the time. We'll see what happens. The main thing that came out of the meeting was more modifications on one of the reports I'm doing for Daniel. 

It has been nice going home a little earlier all week...that is until Daniel calls with more requests on either research or report changes. He has two pet projects right now and he only seems to work on them after normal working hours. I'm hoping both of them will go away soon. I've been trying to get all the data cleaned up in SQL so I can start running my General Conference reports for the areas again. I want to get those emailed out before the end of the month. We are in MUCH better shape then we were before last General Conference so that is a GOOD thing.

On Thursday I approached Curtis again about our "reader" board. We have been using a white board hung on the wall by all four of our cubicles that Sister Linford puts all our upcoming events on so we can see them at a glance. It is very helpful. Sometimes it is a pain because we will get a new event pop up before several others we have on the board. If the event is the next day she may just put in on the bottom since it will be over soon. However, if it is in the middle of some several days out, she erases everything below the date so she can add them all back again in date order. Especially since the purpose of the board is to help us see what is coming up in order. We don't list events we don't need to support like Language Coaching events, which is why we don't just use our Event Central program to keep track. Anyway, several months ago I approached Daniel about getting a big monitor that we could hang on the wall at the front of our cubicle hallway. We have a bunch of monitors on our floor that hang from the ceiling and display news from the COB. I wanted to confiscate one of those for our events and replace our white board. It has been approved and Daniel assigned Curtis to get trained so he could program what we wanted on the board. Well Curtis has been really swamped with several events so I didn't bug him about it. Finally on Thursday I asked him if he would have time now since July was so slow. As we talked I told him all I really wanted was just a large monitor we could display a spreadsheet on. We don't need to see other announcements, just our spreadsheet. He agreed that would be much easier and suggested we "borrow" one of the very large monitors we have in our of our language booths that hardly ever gets used. So I grabbed the large monitor on a roll around stand and rolled it to the wall near the end of our little cubicle hallway. We grabbed Sister Linford's laptop that she doesn't use and was sitting on her desk and hooked it up to the big monitor. We also grabbed a connection  cable from Curtis's desk to connect the laptop to the monitor. And voila, we now have a beautiful Reader Board that we can update on the fly and it will sort automatically for us.

Friday, Curtis came in unexpected. One of his old Missionary Companions was in town so Curtis was giving him the grand tour. He saw the new reader board and was very happy. He didn't even mind we stole his monitor cable. Elder Wilcox was getting a replacement cable so we could give Curtis's back to him before he every would have know, but he surprised us. hahaha. 

We went home early so we could get to bed early because we had a VERY early Temple appointment on Saturday morning in Payson, Utah with the Linfords. Well, so far so good until Daniel called and Ljiljana wanted something and then Sara wanted something. Sister Linford stopped by to let us know the roads were blocked off early for the concert on Friday and Saturday and perhaps Elder Wilcox should let the Interpreters know of an alternate route to get into the COB for the Saturday event. With all the interruptions we didn't get to bed until our normal after 11! It was a short night.

Saturday we were up by 4 and out the door by 5 am to head to Payson. Venky came with us and we all piled into the Linford's car. Traffic was good so we got to the Temple around 6 am. Plenty of time to take some pictures. We did two Endowment sessions. One at 6:40 and one at 8:40. Venky did some Initiatory and then a session so we didn't see him for a while. We all met at 11:00 for sealings and had a wonderful time. We actually had two Sealers. Elder Condie was our first sealer. He had served as a Mission President in Germany and pronounced my German names AWESOME. It made me want to study German. After he did a few sealings he left to do a Wedding and Elder Rife had served as a Mission President in Korea. The extra cool thing about both of them is they had been in law school together over 40 years ago. Both had gone their separate ways with their lives. Then one day they ended up serving together as Sealers in the Payson, Utah Temple. They were both pleasantly surprised. They were fun too. We had a wonderful sealing session. After the Temple we went to lunch before heading home.

Saturday night, the Linfords were supporting the Pioneer Day Concert - Love They Neighbor event so we got tickets to attend the concert. We had great seats. It was very nice. One of our engineers was working the concert and came and talked to us before the event. That was fun. They had several Choir members act as narrators during the presentation. Earlier in the day I had to calculate the words that our interpreters had to translate and add those jobs to the PLUNET order. The Spanish team had sent their translations to me so I could take care of that. The guest soloist was Shea Owens, a beautiful baritone singer. If you get a chance I hope you will watch in on You Tube. Just search for Tabernacle Choir and key in "Love Thy Neighbor" for the whole program.

Sunday morning started with "Music and the Spoken Word". Shea was a guest soloist again and did two of the songs he had done the night before. We got to sit a little closer than the night before. Once again, they were great seats.

Church was good, although I'm NOT crazy about 102 degree weather. 😒 Our meeting was a little different today.  We have two branches in our mission.  Our current Branch President is going home the end of this week so we were expecting a change in leadership.  President Holmes got up to make the change.  Instead of changing the Branch Presidency he released both Branch Presidencies and dissolved both branches.  He then organized a single new branch called the Salt Lake City Headquarters Mission Branch.  For short it is just the Mission Branch. He also said our branch is only one of two or three branches in three entire Church that is completely made up of missionaries. Our direct leader is our Mission President and not a Bishop or Branch President.  Therefore,  he assigned new Branch Leaders.  Jami Beech is the new Branch Relief Society Leader. I'm excited for these changes.  I like the idea of all of us being in the same branch. It was nice to come home and enjoy a quiet afternoon and evening.

Love ALWAYS,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

4th of July, SQL, and Music and the Spoken Word

This has been a very slow week. We didn't know what to do with ourselves. Monday was the 4th of July. We thought we would be spending it with Katie Sue and family, but they were in Oregon for the blessing of Cali's baby. It was hot so we didn't want to really go anywhere. I spent much of the day working on some SQL reports that Daniel wants so we can try and even out the work load of our Interpreters. We have a few in our top languages that do most of the work and Daniel wants to give others an equal opportunity. It is tricky because we have producers requesting those top interpreters and Daniel wants to limit that too. So I created not only a number of jobs percentage report but an Hours report too. We have Language Coaching jobs that not only are increasing our events, but also require more hours than normal events go. Anyway, more about this project later.

Venky

Venky called us Sunday night and asked if he could bring dinner over for us on the 4th of July. He is a very good cook. He called the Linfords too. He was just going to drop the dinner off; but we told him we wanted him to stay and eat with us. We called the Linfords and scheduled a nice little dinner party. He made traditional food from India. He made it mild for us as none of us are into real spicy. It was different but really pretty good. It was very sweet of him to do that for us. I think the 4 of us have adopted him. He is very far from home and the only member of the Church in his family.

Later that evening we went with the Linfords to the COB to watch fireworks. It wasn't quite dark enough at 9 or 9:30 and we almost gave up and went home because we couldn't see that much. But when it got fully dark the sky lit up with fireworks all over the valley. We walked all over the floor looking out the windows. Some had better shows than others, but it was all good. The baseball park seemed to have the best show of all. I think we finally walked home around 11. Last year because of the heat wave they banned fireworks in the valley.

Tuesday morning we had our Zone Devotional. I spent most of the day cleaning off my computer. I was trying to install an update for my SQL Management Studio, but I ran into a problem. I tried several things, but nothing worked so I finally called Global Support. After the tech tried to help me he finally escalated me to the next level. Near the end of the day the tech called and scheduled to help me the next morning. That worked for me as we were ready to go home.

Wednesday was a VERY busy day. It started with the tech guy calling and helping me get the SQL Management Studio installed. We ended up doing what I thought we were going to have to do which was delete a registry entry. I didn't want to do that without going through Tech Support. They agreed. We deleted it and then the install went just fine. Next we headed to our New Global Coordination Section meeting over at the Conference Center. Daniel called me the night before and asked if I would give a spiritual thought for 4 to 5 minutes based around unity. As I thought about it, I had two things come to mind. The first one was a few verses from Ephesians chapter 4 where it talks about coming to a "unity of faith". The second thought I had was my "Lost in the Forest" story and how I couldn't get out by myself. I needed the help of others. I meshed the two ideas together and came up with "Spiritual Thought" (by the way, to me spiritual thoughts are no more than 1 or 2 minutes long.) This was a talk. lol. I felt good about it, but had no idea if it met with Daniel's expectations or not. Then our new Section leader gave his presentation. When he started making reference to things from my Spiritual Thought, I figured I did it right. Daniel later told me it went beyond his expectations. 

Henrique and Ana De Agostini

The meeting went well. Greg laid out the vision for our section and we had some great discussion. It was fun to meet our new team members. I was especially excited to have Baptiste and now Ana De Agostini, who recently joined Baptiste's team. She is also one of our beloved Portuguese Interpreters and I absolutely love her husband, Henrique. We will have a monthly Section meeting and I am hoping we will develop some smaller subsections joining members from all three teams that now make up our new section. I think there is much we can do to further the work. 

After our Section meeting we had lunch and then went to our regular weekly Team meeting. We talked more about the new reports that Daniel wants and I received further direction. That meeting went overtime, as usual. Several of us then went into another meeting with Sara about another aspect of this same project of spreading out work among more interpreters. It had to do with accessing the Supervisor's dashboard so we can see Language Coaching projects that specifically request interpreters even before the event gets assigned to a Supervisor. I'm not really sure how all this is supposed to work.

Some of our new Section

Then after the last meeting we had the last Area Videos event for Sharing the Gospel. It was just the Ukrainian team. We covered this one since the Linfords did the Russians last Friday. Because they are such a new and inexperienced team we had to do several retakes. It wasn't too bad and we got out of there by 9.

Thursday I worked most of the day on the 'Hours by Quarter' report for Daniel. I thought I was done until I started putting the detail behind the summary and found I was missing some detail. I also have some errors in the data. For example we have a couple of jobs where we count words instead of hours. PLUNET then converts those words to hours using a formula that equates 218 words per hour = x number of hours for the ITL job. That is well and good, except occasionally it doesn't do the conversion and instead puts the total number of words IN the hours field. So when I had someone with over 800 hours in the first couple of days of July I knew I had a problem. Long story short, I have been doing a lot of research over the last several days trying to identify all the bad data errors. 

Daniel, Ljiljana, and Ana

We left early so we could go to the Temple. We did a 4:30 session at Bountiful. After the session I checked to see if we could do some sealings and they said yes. So we did a sealing session too. It was so good to be back in the Temple. We are going again next Saturday morning with the Linfords to the Payson Temple. We haven't been there yet.

Friday was more of the same. I continued work on the reports. Linfords left early to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary. Their son was taking them to a ball game. I got some more information about the hours report through a chat I was added to. We all thought Daniel came up with the annual number of hours off the top of his head; however, it appears it is a legal issue. Our contractors cannot work more than 1000 hours per year or the Church has to offer benefits. We were asked by finance how we were tracking that. I told them I had recently created a report to track just that. Then I found out if they also do Translation work we need to include those hours in the total hours we are tracking. That meant I had to change my report. What it really meant is I had to get the Translation jobs and not just Interpretation jobs into SQL. We went home around 3, although I continued working at home. Daniel called me around 4:30. He had been in calls with higher ups that also wanted to even things out between our Interpreters. It is a good thing we had already started on this project. Daniel wanted to take it a step further. He doesn't just want to track hours and how many they have left before they reach 1000, but he wants me to limit the available hours left for those interpreters that are more than 5% ahead of the nearest person on their team. So that is the formula I am working on now. Wish me luck.

Amy (sitting), Michelle (in red), 
Venky, and Amanda (in blue)

Saturday I continued to work on the reports. We also went to visit Roy and Vicki. Roy has been moved to a rehabilitation center in Ogden. I took my laptop along so I could work in the car. It worked pretty good. Roy was having a pretty bad day. He was extremely tired and his blood pressure was really low. When we got there he was in the "gym" for his therapy, but they quickly moved him back to bed because of his blood pressure. He slept most of the time we were there so we visited with Vicki. Steve gave Roy a blessing before we left. Once home I worked a couple more hours identifying and fixing all the data errors. At least I HOPE it is all the data errors. I put the fixes into my import script so when I get new data each week it will automatically fix the errors I have identified thus far. My base numbers look much better now. On Monday I will start working on the new formula to calculate the available hours per person. 

Sunday morning we went to the Music and the Spoken Word. We had fantastic seats. The music was wonderful. We actually heard the program twice. They went through the whole program about an hour before the actual broadcast. They took a short break and then did the live performance. We have to be perfectly quiet during the recording. When it was over and they stopped the broadcast we were able to applaud with a standing ovation.  After the performance they re-recorded one of the songs again so we got an encore. Then a sister came out to thank everyone for coming and invited people back. And "until we meet again, may God be with you." At that cue the choir, orchestra, camera men, and anyone else on stage started singing "God Be With You".  It was so beautiful and touching. I cried.

We had our first Sunday with President and Sister Holmes. We had a wonderful Sacrament meeting and Relief Society lesson. Both our speakers were great. After they spoke we heard from President Holmes. He is a tender hearted man and bore a sweet testimony. He and Sister Holmes are already loved by all. Our Relief Society lesson was on Elder Gong's conference talk about how "We all Have a Story". We talked about the value of stories and how they connect us and can even strengthen our testimonies. Several sisters were asked to share one story from their life. Each story touched me deeply and I connected with them in a way I never expected. Today was a little emotional for me as the Spirit touched me so many times. We have a sweet Korean couple serving in our mission. They speak very little English. We usually sit near each other in Sacrament meeting. It just works out that way. Sister Lee has a beautiful voice. I love to sit in front of her and listen to her sing the hymns. She also sings in our Elijah Choir. Elder Cho, the husband (the wife doesn't take the husband's name), blessed the Sacrament today. He spoke with such reverence and love, I couldn't help but feel he truly was in the presence of our Heavenly Father. It was a wonderful day.

I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Love Always,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox

Tokyo Japan Temple Rededication

President and Sister Randall

This has been a little slower week, although we managed to stay pretty busy. As much as we wanted to sleep in on Monday and take a P-day, it just wasn't going to work. We had our final Mission Conference with President and Sister Randall. They gave wonderful talks that focused on the Prophet Joseph Smith since it was the anniversary of  the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. That piggybacked on our fireside the night before by Cutis. After their talks, we had the closing song and prayer. No one moved. Suddenly someone started singing "God Be With You 'Til We Meet Again." There wasn't a dry eye in the Chapel. When we finished several of our island missionaries pulled out a ukulele and started singing Aloha Oe. They changed the words a bit to reflect our mission. Many of us tried to join in the chorus. I was close enough to the front of the Chapel to be able to go up and give them a hug and tell them how much we love them and appreciate all they did for us. Lots of tears were shed as we all said good bye.

The Island Sister Missionaries
singing to President and Sister Randall

At work we found out that many of the talks that were scheduled for the New Mission Leaders Seminar last week were not translated as they should have been. Others were missing the talks entirely. As a result, I needed to completely redo nearly all the hours I had delivered for the week. I pulled back what I had previously approved so they couldn't invoice until I fixed the hours. A couple interpreters had already invoiced so I had to add corrective jobs to make up the difference. It took me two days to go over every job for every interpreter to make sure the hours were now correct. I could have done it in a day, but there are always interruptions throughout my days, so I didn't finish it until Tuesday evening. I wanted Aaron to review everything before I approved them again so we didn't do that until Wednesday after our meetings. So far we have no further problems.

Mount Timpanogos Temple

Monday we had a small Family Home Evening group. Just the Stephens and the Durrants joined us. We had three couples out with Covid, one visiting a family activity, and one who has been released from their mission. Elder Wilcox lead the discussion on the Temple and how Covid and the recent changes have affected us. We had a great discussion and a lot of fun. Refreshments were watermelon and some cookies that the Durrants brought. A fun evening was had by all.

In front of the Mount Timpanogos Temple

We scheduled an appointment to go to the Temple Tuesday night since we didn't have any activities until Saturday. Around 9:30 am Curtis called me to add another language to our Tuesday night event. "What event", I asked. He proceeded to tell me that he emailed everyone on Friday that we were going to finish the area videos for the Cantonese, French, Portuguese, and Portuguese Euro teams. He was adding Portuguese to the event. I informed him that we never received an email and had no knowledge of the event, but we would get right on it. Since it was too late to get dinner from COB Catering, we decided to go offsite. So we spent much of Tuesday scrambling to put the event together. We sent the Linfords on to the Temple and we worked the event. Unfortunately we still needed Russian and Ukrainian to be completely done. Anyway, everything went well. With that event we passed our total number of sessions for June for every previous year. We had 112 events.

Last Picture with our old team

Wednesday was busy with a fun potluck luncheon to say goodbye to four of our team members who were being moved to a new division for Temple Work. We had a great time. Not long after the potluck we had our Team Meeting. That went very well. After that Aaron and I went over the Seminar jobs and released them to be invoiced. I also started working on a new report for Daniel that I need to have done by next Wednesday. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. I will probably work on it on the Fourth of July since we are technically off.

The Linfords, Venky and Wilcoxs in front
of the Mount Timpanogos Temple

On Thursday morning we arose at 4:30 so we could go to the Mount Timpanogos Temple. Aaron works there on Thursday mornings and he was officiating for the 7:00 am session. We took the Linfords and Venky with us. When we got there we also saw Aaron's wife and his father. It was so fun to be there with them. Back at the office I had to update several jobs. We also found out that Curtis scheduled Russian and Ukrainian to do their area videos on Thursday night. Once again it was last minute and rush rate. Ljiljana worked like crazy to populate both languages. She managed to get 3 Russians but was unsuccessful getting any Ukrainians. When Curtis showed up for the event I informed him we only had Russians. He rescheduled the Ukrainians for next Tuesday. Finally, not a rush rate! The Linfords did the Thursday event and we went home.

President and Sister Holmes

Friday was a fun day. Our new Mission President and his wife want to meet all the missionaries in their different zones over the first two weeks of their mission. Our Zone was scheduled for Wednesday, July 6 at 10:30 am. We thought that was going to work our perfectly. We had a new Section meeting tentatively scheduled for 11:00 am that morning so we figured we could meet the President and his wife and then head over to our section meeting. Piece of cake! Well, at our Wednesday Team meeting, Daniel informed us that our Section meeting was going to be from 10:30 am to noon. It just so happens that we are good friends with the new executive secretary to the Mission President, Elder Adrian Beech. So we called him, explained our situation, and asked him if there was anything he could do for us. Elder Beech said we could piggyback on the Family History Zone who was scheduled to meet with them on Friday morning around 10:30. We all got to take a field trip Friday morning as we walked over to the Family Search Library. With all the construction going on it was quite an ordeal to get there. We all got to spend a few minutes with them and everyone enjoyed meeting them. We invited them to visit us sometime n the 28th floor for a nice tour.

Ljiljana with the Portuguese Team
Left to right: Ljiljana, Fernando, Henrique,
Clay, and Sabrina

Friday afternoon, Elder Wilcox had a little scare with his vision. All of a sudden his vision got very blurry and he saw something like flashing lights to one side. I had him call my eye doctor to see if he could get in and get checked out, especially since we were heading into a long weekend. They scheduled him for 3:00 pm. Within a half an hour everything was back to normal and he was tempted to cancel the appointment. I encouraged him to keep the appointment to find out what caused it. After his exam, Dr. Masihdas told him he probably had some plaque in the blood vessel to his eye. The blockage caused blurriness and once the plaque worked its way through the blood vessel his vision cleared up again. He said he probably won't ever experience it again, but if he does to call him immediately so they can run some more tests. He also scheduled a follow-up visit for October. We went home after the appointment. 

Sunset on Saturday night

While I was working on some jobs, Eunlan contacted me to tell me she went to update a language coaching job with hours so she could deliver and approve it when she discovered that all the jobs for that event were canceled! I started looking into it to see if there were any notes as to why it was canceled. I couldn't find anything. So I decided to check the change log for the event. Imagine my surprise when I saw the name of our financial manager on all the jobs that were canceled. I contacted him to see why they were canceled and if it was all right for me to un-cancel them and update hours so our people could get paid. He apologized and said he was trying to clean up very old orders so they could close them out. However, he accidently put in 2022 for the year instead of an older year and ended up canceling all of our current jobs. He and the IT guy were working like crazy to reverse the process. I started getting emails from different interpreters who couldn't find any of there jobs to invoice. I had to send out a brief explanation and told them to try again in a day or two.  By Saturday night they had fixed the problem!

Saturday we headed to the hospital in Bountiful to visit Elder Wilcox's brother, Roy. Vicki contacted us Friday night to let us that Roy had a stroke. So we visited him in ICU. He is doing good and they will probably kick him out of ICU today. He was in good spirits and we had a very good visit. They only allowed 2 in the room at a time so we didn't get to visit with Vicki other than on the phone. 

Tokyo Japan Temple

Saturday evening/night we had a very nice treat. We got to support the Tokyo Japan Temple Rededication Event. We didn't think we were going to get to participate because the whole thing is being done in country. They we found out that we were going to have Portuguese interpreters here in the COB. I had no idea they have a huge Portuguese population in Japan. Our Portuguese interpreters are so fun and funny to be around. They shared great stories and get us all laughing between session all night. Henrique is one my absolutely favorite people. He is the one who lost his daughter a couple months ago. His wife recently started work for our Translation department and actually works right next to Baptiste. With the creation of the new Section we are now on the same team. We will have our first Section meeting next Wednesday. We had three rededication sessions Saturday night. The first one was at 6 pm to 7:30. The next one was at 9 to 10:30. And the last one was from midnight to 1:30 am. It is awesome to get to be a part of that. We love it!

Sunday was a wonderful Fast and Testimony meeting. After Church we had our Break the Fast with our apartment floor. We were fewer in numbers because so many people have left in the last couple of months and they haven't replaced them yet. We currently have 4 empty apartments. And with the holiday weekend we had several others that were out of town. Despite the fewer numbers we still had a great time with great food. 

July is supposed to be our slowest month. We have anywhere from 12 to 30 events for the month compared to 60 to over 100 for the other months. If we are going to do any sightseeing we need to do it in July. We talked about trying to go to several of the Temples are much further away. That should be fun.

Love,
Mom and Dad
Grandma and Grandpa
Steve and Leslee
Elder and Sister Wilcox