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