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