This was a most different Sunday. I have been asked to teach the investigator/new member lessons in Sunday School. Today’s lesson was on Eternal Marriage. One of the students had previously said that she was not coming because marriage was not her forte (she has had a very bad experience with it) and a subsequent boyfriend was not a good experience either. My classroom was packed with people and I did not know what to do with them all. I used my powerpoint program to put things up on the board because I do not like the smell of the markers that they use on the whiteboard. The lesson went over pretty well I think. Next week the lesson is on the Law of Chastity. People always assume that this means moral cleanliness or lack thereof, but how about mental cleanliness? Can we have chaste thoughts as well or are we not higher than the animals and resort to only physical actions that can lead to being morally unchaste? This might be a way for the discussion to go because there are some people in the class who struggle with moral issues and I do not want the class to ‘get away’ from me and discuss things that can and should only be resolved in the Bishop’s office.
We came home to eat lunch and then we prepared to go to the Spanish members’ home to celebrate the birthday of Silvia. When we got there the table was filled with food – all kinds of Spanish food – read that it was groaning under the weight of all the food she had prepared. I do not know how many days she had been cooking but it was more than just this afternoon. We had been summoned to be there at 4pm but at that time we and the young elders were the only ones there. I wondered to myself just how was I going to get out of eating until I reached bursting point and would have reached bursting point if the four of us missionaries and Silvia and her husband were the only ones eating. Pretty soon a few other people showed up and then more came and it was just unbelievable how many people they fit into that apartment to eat this dinner. One man there must weigh over 300 pounds and he is only very young – about 16 years of age.
The eating part of the evening got underway around 6.30pm and then they let the dog loose. It is a small brown Dachshund and is overweight and very active and spent the time begging for food. By about 7.15 only a small dent had been made in the mound of food on the table and people had gone back for seconds and thirds. Silvia kept on cooking and pretty soon the beef on the table had been rolled into taquitos and deep fat fried. I don’t like taquitos that much and to be deep fat fried definitely put them off the list of edibles for me. Then Silvia started packing up food into portions to give to people as they left. We made the excuse that our fridge was small and was already stuffed to the gills because we had just gone shopping – which we had - and truly there is literally no room for anything else. To not take stuff home would have been offensive, but the Bishop’s wife speaks fluent Spanish and she said she would try to explain so that feelings did not get hurt.
I do not like to go shopping on a daily basis because it is such a bother to get to the nearby grocery store near the rotary (roundabout in the road) and to go to Walmart is tortuous – to get to it we have to cross town and fight with the traffic and it is not much fun. The Walmart here is super gigantic and I cannot find anything because they have the stuff all over the store. You might think a certain item (in this case I was looking for magnets) would be in a certain place. I did not want refrigerator magnets because they are so weak and do not hold papers to the fridge and they fall off easily, but I wanted the strong industrial strength magnets like the ones I had in Arizona. I asked in the hardware dept and they said that they did not carry magnets and to look in crafts. Well they only have the wussy kind that does not hold much if anything and is commonly used for “ ‘fridgy magnets” type of stuff that they hand out at Relief Society in our home ward in Arizona as visual aids to be put on your fridge (and pretty soon they lose their magnetism and fall on the floor also.) As I was going up and down the aisles looking for magnets, I found lots of the really expensive wussy kinds and became quite disappointed that I could not find what I needed in such a large store. Once more Walmart is deciding what we will or will not be able to buy and in what quantity we will buy it, or not. Guess I will have to go to Home depot or Lowes.
An amazing thing has happened to us. Many members have said that they want to have us to their home for a meal. I suppose it is because we are missionaries and not just regular members of the ward. In all the wards we have been in over the years, you can count on one hand how many times we were invited out…..and we have been married now for 37 years and lived in 6 wards. It is nice to be invited out but we had to become missionaries on a one year mission for the invitations to be issued. I wonder how many friendships we could have had if the people we had invited to our home had in turn invited us to their home for a meal? Eating seems to be a part of being friends and cementing friendships. The meal at Silvia’s home was a way of cementing friendships and making new ones…and it was good.
This weekend is the time change and I wonder how many people got to church one hour early? If there were many, they did not admit that they had forgotten to change the time on their clocks. In the missionary meeting on Thursday last week, the clocks had already been changed over in preparation for the time change this weekend and it was quite confusing. I think they need a very long ladder to reach the clock on the wall in the chapel because it is almost up to the top of the wall – away from the reach of the teenagers who love to change time on clocks to confuse people.
Yesterday after we left the craft show, we went looking for a place to eat lunch. We tried to get into the Olive Garden, but at 2.30pm in the afternoon, they were jammed with people and the wait was about 30 minutes. They have call ahead seating and I think we will use that next time. So we drove up the hill to Ruby Tuesday’s and ate lunch there. This was the first time we had been at Ruby Tuesday’s and the food was quite good. Some years back David had called up and said that he had eaten at Ruby Tuesday’s and he was raving about the food. Good going David!
We are still having problems with the heating of this apartment. The window’s leak cold air a lot and help to keep the place cool – along with the thermostat that does not seem to work. So Bill bought a space heater at K-Mart. (If it was not for the Mart Brothers, Wal and K, we would have nowhere to shop now would we?) This heater is particularly vicious in the amount of heat it puts out – makes me wonder why we went out and bought an electric blanket – but I suppose that when it gets really really cold here, we will appreciate the heater and the on-again/off-again heating system on the floor of the apartment, as well as the electric blanket. I was noticing that the windows are gathering moisture and that means only one thing – In Pennsylvania we had windows that leaked air and we found that the condensation that gathered on the windows soon left us with frosted window panes when the temperatures dropped. These windows are double hung windows but someone has cut the cords in the channel so now they won’t stay up if you open them unless you have something to prop them open with. It is sad that someone cut the cords. When I was in Hawaii, the first Christmas there someone got spray snow to put on the windows to make them look frosted from the cold weather and condensation. I did not understand what it was all about and thought it was a rather silly practice. In Laie on the Island of Oahu, Hawaii, it hardly gets cool enough to wear a sweater let alone have snow or frost on the windows. It was not until we lived in Johnstown that I saw frosted window panes for real and then I understood that the frosting came about because of (a) poor window glazing or (b) broken seals in the windows that let air escape or enter and form condensation. Well, at least we do not have to buy a spray can of fake snow to represent frosted window panes……we will have the real thing.
Oh, and in Australia, during the hot December Christmas season, we dutifully sent Christmas cards – and the card of choice was Currier and Ives snow scenes from “Olde England”. Now, just how did that all get started? We are now seeing Summer Scenes from Australia with Santa on a surf board or his sleigh being drawn across the sky by 6 white Kangaroos……………….got to be culturally specific in this day and age.
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