It's a Small World

Monday morning started with our weekly Mission Devotional. We heard from a couple of people who are working on a major Humanitarian project called My Hometown. It kind of reminds me of our old Neighbor to Neighbor projects we did for several years in the Oregon City Stake, only this My Hometown is an ongoing project in various communities. They were hoping to illicit help from our Senior Missionaries when possible. We have about 800 full time and Senior Service Missionaries in our mission. Many of them are looking for opportunities to serve outside of their normal missionary responsibilities and this will be a perfect opportunity for them. For a lot of us, we don't have much "free" time available. Our schedule is so hit and miss, feast or famine we can't commit to anything "extra curricular". We may be able to attend once in a while, but not regularly. Lots of missionaries also work many hours and even 6 days a week and on holidays. The Family Search Library with the Discovery Zone is open all the time except Sundays. And they will even open on a Sunday for special occasions like General Conference weekend. Sometimes I think they are busier than we are. Anyway, it should be a good fit for many of our missionaries and those of us who cannot commit should not feel guilty. 

Later that afternoon, Elder Wilcox and I went in for follow-up eye appointments. Both of us are doing good and they don't want to see us again for 6 months. I just need to keep on keeping on. As long as I continue with my drops and gels, there is nothing else I need to do. My eyes are doing great and I only have a problem in the evening when my eyes are tired and a little dryer. Elder Wilcox has a touch of dry eyes too, and was counseled to use some "tears" drops twice a day. His knee has been feeling better, although it still hurts him. He has an appointment with an orthopedic specialist on Monday. The x-rays showed some calcium build up in the joints along with some arthritis. 

Monday evening we had our wonderful Family Home Evening group. I wasn't sure we would have very many people as I knew several couple were going to be gone. Our Mission President and his wife are hosting a special Family Home Evening with each of the Zones in the mission. Since our floor is made up of several different zones we had several that were going to be at the Mission President's house that night. Our turn is next week. Anyway, I was surprised when we had a full house. I led the discussion. I chose the Sunday morning October General Conference talk by President Nelson called, Overcome the World and Find Rest". We had a great discussion. I love hearing all the insights and experiences of our fellow missionaries. I learned so much and I think we all came away strengthened and edified.

Not much happened this week. We didn't have any events that we had to support. We have 5 events that we did, but all were either Language Coaching, Zoom, in Studio, or in person with one of the General Authorities. We got a few new events that the Linfords set up. I tackled a few invoice problems. 

Not my list as I need to protect names and such.

Mostly I worked on the new Microsoft list that we are hoping will replace the program we call ITI, at least the interpreter portion of the program. There are several advantages the MS list will handle. The first and probably biggest advantage is a MS list is web based so it is available on our phones or any other device. That also makes it scalable for those devices. With ITI, if a supervisor needed a phone number of an interpreter while they were on location for an event, they would have to contact one of the missionaries to look it up and send it to them because ITI is only available on a Windows PC. With lists they can look it up easily from their own phone. Another advantage is if we want to capture any new information we can simply add a new column to the list and begin using it immediately. With ITI, Curtis would have to program it to add the new information.

One CURRENT huge disadvantage right now is interacting with Event Central and the the Events in ITI. Curtis has programmed ITI to be able to send out emails to the team leads and coordinators over the different languages that are in a new event to let them know about the event and what is expected. I am hoping to be able to have ITI send the information needed in a API to MS lists and we can trigger the email from the API. I have to learn a lot more about MS lists before that can happen. We are also hoping to have PLUNET send an API to MS lists with any status changes so our statuses will match and be up to date immediately. The big problem with that has been the major problem I have been dealing with for almost the whole time I have been here. That is matching PLUNET people with both Event Central people and ITI people. There is NO common field they all have that we can match with. I have created lots of workarounds in SQL; however, that will not be sustainable when we are released from our mission so I need to find a better solution. So currently, we are maintaining yet another system to keep our people up to date. We are not ready to replace the people portion in ITI yet, but we do want to make use of the advantages the new lists will provide. So what we update in one system, we also need to update in the other.

Tuesday we had a very nice Zone Devotional. It is always the perfect way to start our day. It was pretty quite in the office. There was no one besides the missionaries. We stayed busy and actually left at a normal time.

Wednesday was a little busier as many of our team came into the office. It is always good to see them. I worked hard on the MS lists so I could demo it at our afternoon team meeting. We also made an appointment at the Temple to go with the Linfords. Our team meeting went way over as usual. I had just a couple of minutes at the end to show the new lists. Curtis pointed out why we couldn't use it yet because it didn't do everything ITI does. I agreed, but said we have to start someplace and it will take time to get all the functionality we need. One other major problem we have with ITI is syncing with SharePoint. SharePoint was never designed to have a working program using it. It is a place to store files and share things like documents and spreadsheets. ITI is so much more and SharePoint can't keep up. Needless to say it causes us pain when we are not all in sync.

As soon as our team meeting was over, we headed to the Bountiful Temple. It was so nice to walk in those beautiful doors and leave the world behind. I didn't think about ITI, lists, or any problems pertaining to work. We were surprised when we were asked to be the Witness Couple. I think it was just what I needed. I felt more engaged in the session than I have for awhile. It was so nice. When we left the Temple we were greeted with the most beautiful Sunset!

Thursday was more of the same. My list was looking pretty good. I had added some triggers to change the color of expiration dates for those that had expired to make them easier to see. I want to add another color for those that are about to expire in the next two months. I added triggers and colors to several other fields to make it easier to identify information quickly. I decided it was time to add the area leaders and coordinators to the list. I spent most of Thursday working on that. I first downloaded the list from ITI and dumped it in a spreadsheet. Then I manually looked up each area person in PLUNET and included additional information to the list so I could match as many columns as I could in my current MS list. That pretty much took up most of the day.

Friday was a treat. Sister Petty dropped by for a quick visit. She was having her exit interview and luncheon with the Mission Presidency. She said she had come for her hugs! It was so nice to see her and give her hugs. We visited for a while before she had to go in for her interview.

I tried finding a way to add my area records from the spreadsheet into my Microsoft List with NO success. You can create a NEW list from a spreadsheet, but you can't import records into an existing list from a spreadsheet. I spent a lot of time on Google. Finally I contacted a guy who I will be working with on these lists to see if he knew a way. All his suggestions I had already tried, so I ended the day very frustrated. I had 104 records that I needed to add and I did NOT want to add them one at a time manually.

Saturday I started with a short HawkSoft project. It took a total of about 15 minutes. Then I started on the MS list problem again. Elder Wilcox went shopping. I can't believe he was gone for over 4 hours! But that is what he likes to do so he was happy. I, on the other hand, spent that 4 hours trying everything in the book (actually in google) to try and automatically add those 104 records to my list. Finally, after many failed attempts, I came up with a manual process that worked. It wasn't one at a time, but it wasn't completely automated either. I ended up copying one column at a time. That sort of worked, although it had its share of problems. Sometimes I would get a message that it couldn't copy it because the data was not compatible. Other times it was a different message equally untrue. In the end I made it work by coping only a few cells at a time from the column. Sometimes I could copy as many as 30 before getting the bogus message. Other times it was one at a time for a while before I could copy and paste multiple cells again. In the end I got them all entered into the list. Hopefully, I won't have to enter anymore in mass. The best part of Saturday is I didn't have to leave the apartment all day!

Sunday I started the day reading the wonderful newsletter I get each week from our dear friends Larry and Debbie Draper. They are currently serving a humanitarian mission in the Adriatic North Mission, MONTENEGRO. They share such wonderful stories about all the lives they touch and the people they help. I love reading about their adventures. In the current newsletter they posted a picture from their Senior Conference. Normally I just glance at the names, because I don't ever know anyone; however, this time one name stood out to me. I thought, "I know that name." It is an unusual name so I went to PLUNET and looked up the name. Sure enough there was the brother and his wife's name in our list of interpreters in country. I now have faces to go with those names.  Meet Davor and Stanka Majc, two of our interpreters. It is a small world.

Church was great, as usual. I always enjoy the feeling of peace and love I feel when I go. It is also so wonderful to see so many faces I love and visit with our friends and fellow missionaries. Elder Linford spoke and did a great job. That made it even more special. In Relief Society we discussed Elder Renlund's General Conference talk A Framework for Personal Revelation. It was also very good. Sunday afternoons are always so nice. It truly is a time of rest and relaxation. 

Have a GREAT week.

Love you!!!

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox