Meetings, Temple, and Mission Party

We started the week with our Monday morning Mission Devotional. I spent much of the day working on more Event Central clean up from several more areas. I also worked with a few people on their invoices. And we called Laila to sing Happy Birthday to her. We had to leave a message.

Monday evening, we had a fun Family Home Evening. Elder and Sister Ure were in charge. After our discussion we played a version of Mafia we called Gadianton Robbers. Elder Ure kept getting the instructions wrong. We were laughing so hard. I finally looked up the instructions on google and we proceeded to play the game. We had a lot of fun.

Tuesday started with our Zone Devotional. Not long after the devotional we had a Translation Division meeting. We had a nice report from one of our area supervisors. I spent part of the day trying to get someone to work on the continual problem we have been having with our Interpreters not being able to take their annual training. This has been going on for months. They keep telling us it is fixed and then the next month they get the same error message that won't let them take the course. I've got at least 5 specific interpreters I've been working with. I know there are a lot more with the same problem. Anyway, I've opened a new ticket to get the ball rolling to fix the problem. We'll see if we can get any results this time. Later in the afternoon we had our first General Conference meeting. We went through our checklist to make sure we are on track to get everything accomplished. We will have a full complement of interpreters and support with up to 300 people for each session. It will be very exciting.

Yummy Food at our Mission Social

Wednesday was full of meetings. At 9:00 am I participated in a Power Apps meeting. I was interrupted in the middle of the meeting and missed most of the rest of the meeting. At 1:00 we had another New PLUNET Invoicing Process meeting. We decided to run another test. In our last test at least one of the interpreters couldn't send the email automatically. That is why we are still testing. I am compiling data to see how many of the invoices created over a three day period were manually sent to TRLInvoice, as well as automatically sent to our test email address, as well as how many didn't get sent at all. I'm still waiting on data from our test email account. Caleb was out of the office on Thursday and Friday, so he hasn't sent me the last of the list. Hopefully I'll get the rest of the data on Monday. Later that afternoon, we had our normal Team meeting. Daniel and Sara were both gone and our meeting was almost done on time for a change.

Elder Wilcox and the original
Joseph Smith daguerreotype

Thursday, we had another Zone Devotional. I spent time working on trying to match the OLD Event Central table that has LDS Account names in it with the NEW Event Central table that no longer has LDS Account names. I was able to match the majority by matching names. However, I have a couple hundred where the OLD Event Central table shows question marks instead of the characters and Cyrillic alphabets that I was able to bring in with the NEW Event Central table so that the names would not match. Those had to be done mostly manually. Not fun! We left early on Thursday so we could go to the Temple. We had a nice session. We managed to get there earlier than our appointment, so we were able to go on an earlier session.

The daguerreotype with 
Elder Wilcox's face merged

Friday was another quiet day. I continued working on Event Central most of the day. I had a meeting at 2:00 thinking it was going to be pointless; however, it may have turned out to be a very promising meeting for me. I mentioned last week about a new reporting program called Tableau that I was hoping would be valuable for me, only to find out it wasn't going to do what I needed it to do. Another member of the Tableau team scheduled another meeting for Friday. I met with two of their developers and told them what I had hope to get out of Tableau. I also told them about my problems with connecting PLUNET, Event Central, and ITI together. I honestly didn't expect anything to come from it. When I finished my explanations, they started talking. I had mentioned that I was hoping to get a report out of Church Finance that would allow me to check if invoices have made it to the Church Finance system. I was told last week that I couldn't access the Church Finance data without special permissions. Well, Ben and David both said creating the Invoice report for me would be no problem at all. They will work on it during their next sprint (NOTE: sprint is for Sean. A sprint is a two-week period where the team works on specific projects. New projects have to go on the next sprint.) I was very excited. We talked more about the connections between Event Central and PLUNET and they think there may be something behind the scenes already in place, but unused for several years. I'm not holding my breath on that; however, they did say they would work with both the Event Central people and the PLUNET people to create a link between the two systems. I know it won't happen right away, but at least it is now on somebody's radar. 

The walkway leading to the Mission
President's home.

On a side note, I was tasked with cleaning up Event Central to sync with PLUNET. They are unaware that I have already been working on this for months. Anyway, Baptiste called me on Friday to tell me that he and I are going to be working on the clean-up. He was actually tasked with the problem, and he told them that "Sister Wilcox is probably already working on it." So now I'm part of the team. We will meet next week. 

Enjoying good company at the
Mission Social

After my meeting, I got to give a nice tour for one of our Sacred Materials Music translators and his family. It was a lot of fun. Just as we were starting the tour, Curtis was getting ready to leave. He knew the translator, so he jumped in and shared his findings on the new Joseph Smith daguerreotype. He is so very excited about that. He even took a picture of Elder Wilcox because he said he has some of the markings of Joseph Smith. He threw the picture into his software and did all the same tests on Elder Wilcox that he did with the Joseph Smith daguerreotype. His final piece was to overlay Elder Wilcox over the death mask and the daguerreotype. The results were amazing. Curtis is convinced that Elder Wilcox is related to Joseph Smith!

This was in the front 
yard of the house 
next to the Mission
President's house

After work on Friday, the Linfords went with us to the home of our mission president, President and Sister Holmes. They have an absolutely BEAUTIFUL home. They had a wedding that week and decided to have a mission party since it was still all set up for the reception. The weather was cooler than it has been and threatened rain; but, other than a few drops, it was a perfect evening. They had Café Rio cater the event. We had a wonderful time.

We were planning on visiting Roy and Vicki on Saturday, but they both have COVID so we didn't go. Hopefully, they will feel better soon. So, we stayed home. Steve did manage to do a little shopping. I worked a bit on HawkSoft and then spent the rest of the day working manually matching over 400 interpreters from Event Central to PLUNET. We were able to match almost 300. Elder Wilcox helped me.

Sunday morning, we went to Music and the Spoken Word. It was very nice. They sang The Sound of Music. It is one of my favorite songs. I always enjoy Music and the Spoken Word. Church was good. We studied some of the Psalms in Sunday School. We listened to a Psalm by the Tabernacle Choir. We also recited a chant or song that one of our missionaries put together. It was an interesting way to study Psalms today.

I hope you have a wonderful week.

Love Always,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox