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