Elijah Choir Concert, Temple Leadership Pre-recordings event, User Stories, Dinner with the Burgoynes, and the Movies

With that title, there isn't much else to write. Hahaha. I started Monday at the Wellness Center and then headed up to the cubicle to work on Dataverse. I had a meeting scheduled with Matt and I hadn't touched it for at least two weeks. While I was mapping some fields so I could import data from PLUNET, I emailed Matt a few questions I had. After I shared the fields, I thought we needed to capture and he shared the fields they had already decided they wanted, I told him I would get right on adding the fields to the Contacts table so I could import the PLUNET data. He wrote back and told me not to worry about adding them. He was going to do that. And ICS was going to be doing some of the programming. I responded with "What am I supposed to be doing?" Don't get me wrong, I have felt this whole project needs to be done by employees and not me since I will be leaving before it ever gets close to being done. Long story short, I don't need to worry about all the things I THOUGHT I was supposed to be doing. I will be writing up User Stories of what Interpretation needs in the new system. FINALLY, something I can do that won't require me to learn a brand-new system that I will never use again. YAY!!! 

Monday evening, we went to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building for the Elijah Choir Pioneer Day Concert. It was nice, but some of the songs were a little different. I wasn't crazy about them. Several Choir members shared pioneer ancestor stories and that was really good. I think I liked the music from past years better.

Tuesday was a very long day. We started with the morning session of the first of three days for the Temple Leadership Pre-recordings event. It was supposed to be Tieline, but France couldn't do it, so our SLC French team had to come in. We had other Tieline languages recording as well. We were able to watch our Zone Devotional with President Jackson. He gave a great devotional. He showed us how he had marked 2 Nephi 31. It was AWESOME. I think I want to do that in one of my Scriptures Study times. 

At 10:00 I had my video meeting with Matt. That is when I learned about doing User Stories and such. I felt better after that meeting. The morning event ended just at noon, so we headed for lunch. I spent whatever time I had during the rest of the day between meetings and our evening event working on by Blog/Book. I'm making good progress. If I can find time, I could be all caught up in a few more weeks. 

Cattle Drive down North Temple

We had our Team meeting at 2:00. Baptiste went over the new language model we are launching on August 14th. It involves the areas taking over managing the 22 languages that have teams in both the Areas and SLC. This will make for a more cohesive team experience. There will be lots of bugs to be worked out so that General Conference will run smoothly. At the same time the full-time employee will start taking over the PLUNET jobs from us. There will be even more bugs to work out on that front. Hahaha. In the long run this will be much better and easier for our team and more especially allow us to add more and more languages to our team without having to add more employees. I think it is a good thing and I'm glad they are starting now so we can work out the bugs before General Conference and before we leave. Tuesday evening, we had the second event for the day. It was the local languages and two Tieline Area Pacific languages for the Temple Leadership Pre-recordings event. We had 3 brothers from the Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai teams. We also had Samoa and Tonga on Tieline. We finished a little after 9:00 that night. It was so fun to interact with the brothers during dinner. I was not familiar with the Thai brothers at all so that was very nice.

Wednesday was an easier day for us. The Linfords did both Temple Leadership Pre-recordings event sessions for Wednesday. We worked in the morning and then went to the Temple in the afternoon. We had a miracle experience before the Temple. Our appointment was for 4:30, but since things were slow, we decided to go right after lunch. We needed to go the apartment before heading out so I could change. When we got to our elevator, we rode up with the Alders. Elder Alder just had surgery on his foot and was still a bit groggy from the procedure. He had crutches and Sister Alder had a walker for him. Neither were set appropriately for his height, and he was struggling. After almost falling on the crutches, he switched to the walker. That wasn't working very well either. Elder Wilcox then adjusted the crutches. About that time, Elder Bailey came up behind us and together Elder Wilcox and Elder Bailey had Elder Alder put his arms over their shoulders and they pretty much carried him to his apartment. They are almost as far as we are down the hall. When we got to the apartment door, we had Sister Alder get the office chair with wheels on it so Elder Alder could sit. We then rolled him into his room and put him to bed. 

As we were going our separate ways, Sister Alder thanked us for being there to help her as she said there was no way she could have done it herself. Elder Bailey, who lives between the Alders and us, told us how he just happened to be there. He forgot his phone that morning and tried to go the day without it. After lunch he was bored with what he was doing and looked for a way to escape. Then he thought about his phone and realized he may need it if he had to get into some programs that required two step verification, so he headed back to the apartment for his phone and some chocolate. We told Sister Alder that we were headed to the Temple, but our appointment wasn't until 4:30. We decided to see if we could catch an earlier session and just happened to be there at the exact time she needed help. Was it a coincidence that we all just happened to be there at that exact time? I don't think so. Sister Alder said it was a miracle and we all agreed. Heavenly Father knows each of us and will put people into our lives at the exact time we need them. We are happy we listened to the promptings to go to the Temple earlier that day.

Our Portuguese Team

Thursday was kind of a repeat of Tuesday, minus the extra meetings. We did the final two Temple Leadership Pre-recordings event sessions. One morning and one evening. This time we had all sisters for both events. In the morning we had one German sister to help the German Tieline team as well as our French team. The session went great and we finished just before lunch. I spent part of the morning after the Zone Devotional working on some User Stories.

Curtis in France

Curtis was back from his two-week France vacation, so he decided to get a jump start on General Conference. He is in charge this conference. We had a short General Conference prep meeting. Our evening event went much longer than expected. Two of our Thai sisters were brand new. This was their very first event. Elder Wilcox was able to get their badges and parking passes ordered so they were able to pick them up. He was unable to get their picture credentials. Hopefully they will be here by General Conference.

Dessert for our Event

The sisters' meetings were difficult in several ways. Even our very experienced French team in the morning took about 45 minutes longer than expected to do retakes. Our poor Thai sisters didn't have a chance. The two main problems were 1) The sisters that were speaking tended to talk very fast. Sister Yee is currently one of the fastest speakers we have. Fast speakers are NOT easy to interpret. 2) two of the sisters that were in the panel discussion had very heavy English accents. I even had trouble understanding them. And they both answered a lot of questions and made lots of comments. 

Portuguese and Spanish finished up around 9ish, which was the expected time. They may have done a miner retake or two, but all-in-all, they were done on time. Our poor Thai sisters had to redo the panel discussion several times. I think we finished at 11:00 PM. We told them not all events were that hard and to not give up. They were all so very nice. I look forward to working with them again. We have two other Temple Leadership events so I'm sure we will get to work together again.

We slept in on Friday because we were so late on Thursday. We managed to get to the office around 10. We did some work, but it was really slow. The Linfords left at noon. I think we left at 2. We lounged at home for a while before we went to the Burgoyne's house for dinner and games. It was SO MUCH FUN to see them again and visit with them. I couldn't believe how fast the time went and it was after 9 when we finally went home. They invited their next-door neighbors over for dessert. We enjoyed meeting and visiting them too. It was a great evening.

Saturday, I was up by eight. After doing my scripture study, I started on HawkSoft. I had three certifications to do. Testing everything for both version 5 and version 6 and comparing them to each other takes some time. I put in nearly 4.5 hours. We finished just in time to head to the movies to see the first feature film from the original Studio C cast called "Go West". It is only open in Utah and Idaho for now but should open up in a month or two around the country. It is a funny spoof on traveling on the Oregon Trail. We enjoyed it. 

On morning Sunday, we spoke in Sacrament meeting. They had three Senior missionaries speak. Sister Smith spoke first and talked about pioneers. She shared several pioneer stories from her ancestors. She gave some fascinating statistics about crossing the plains to Utah. I shared how for years I thought I was the Pioneer in our family being the first to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Recently I found out that I actually have some pioneer ancestors that came from Sweden in the 1860s and crossed the plains to Utah to be with the Saints. However, I didn't talk about them. I shared how I learned to "Hear Him" through many experiences throughout my life, but especially since being on our mission. Elder Wilcox talked out July. He said 19 days ago we celebrated the 4th of July, our country's independence. Then 9 days ago was the French revolution celebration of Bastille Day that he celebrates with a couple of our French co-workers. And then tomorrow is our own celebration for religious freedom as we celebrate Pioneer Day. He shared two of his favorite poems. He read "Ode to Oregon" by Garrison Keillor at the beginning of his talk. He then read “Ragged ‘Old Flag” by Johnny Cash at the end of his talk. Between the two poems he talked about several experiences in our lives where we could see the hand of the Lord leading us where we needed to be at particular times in our lives. He tied everything together beautifully.

I hope you have a wonderful week. Please know how much we love you. We will let you all know as soon as we receive our new mission call. We expect it to come in the next couple of weeks. 

All our Love and Prayers,

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Great Grandma and Great Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox