Food, more food and intercultural experience

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.

Begins with Exercise and ends with two craft shows - all in one day too!

 This is my husband exhibiting his impressive physique on one of the machines at the YMCA.  The brown area on the floor behind him is where I walk.   21 1/2 times around this track is one mile.

 These are the rest of the machines he visits while at the YMCA

 The leaves in  the morning sunshine through the YMCA windows....they are almost gone.

 These next photo's are of woven masks at the Main Craftsmens Guild show at the Atrium of the Main Archives  building where we are doing digitizing during the week days.

 Some woven earrings at the same booth.

 There were about 3 potters at the show and one stained glass worker as well.

 These Lamp Shades look a lot better in person than in print.

 This was another Potter who did lamps.

 These are blown glass vases and Christmas tree balls.  She also had slumped bottle glass baubles on chains for necklaces.

 At the last show we went to, it was in a greenhouse - and you had to walk through the Green house show room to get to the craft show - smart marketing there.  These Orchids were spectacular.

We started out the day at the YMCA doing exercising.  Aren't you impressed by that?  Bill does the machines while I walk around and around the little track they have there, or I ditch the building altogether and walk in the neighborhood and hope that the wind is in the other direction so that I do not get the smell from the sewage plant.  Althought today turned out rather nice, it was pretty chilly this morning.  At the second craft show, there was a person exhibiting Alpaca yarns, hats, gloves, toys, shawls, neck scarves............and they were spectacular.  I bought a hat - my head gets really cold here when I wear hats from Prescott that are rather hot to wear there but no match for the cold here.

It is getting colder here and I am feeling the cold.  I guess my Arizona conditioned body is not up to the point where it will survive very well if I do not put on lots and lots of clothes to the point that I will not be able to bend my arms or legs……………Our kids used to look like this all rugged up in their snowsuits when they were little.  Invariably one of them would need to go potty as soon as I had struggled with the outfits to make them look like stuffed spuds.  No sooner would I get one taken care of, than the other wanted to go potty too – for a while there I thought it was “catching”.  Found out that other parents also encountered this phenomenon.

In the morning, when we are home to experience it, the sun comes into our front room and bedroom and it is wonderful.  The heating system in this apartment is not very diligent and so the added warmth of the sunshine is quite welcome.  The sun plays hide and seek with the apartment through the wonderful old trees that grow in the front of the apartment.  So that means that from time to time we are in shadow and then the world moves on its axis and the sun invades our rooms again.  I do  miss not seeing the sun each day.  We leave early in the morning before the sun comes up and we go home in the late afternoon when it is beginning to set.  This weekend is the time change so I wonder how things will change as well.  The clerk at the library informed us that we will have an extra hour to sleep on Sunday but I am smart enough to know that we still have 24 hours each day no matter what the clock says is time to get up.  I do hope that I will not suffer with seasonal affective disorder – that is a hard one to shake.

Life on a mission is quite different from what we had in Prescott.  Bill no longer has to go to work at Safeway, I do not have Andrea to walk with each morning, I do not have quilt guild to attend or to take care of any quilt guild related business, Bill does not have  loads of Ward Membership clerk work to do, I do not have the Family History Center shift on Friday’s which is something I have done every Friday since the beginning of September 1999, I am not the neighborhood watch person, I do  not have beading group each Wednesday and I don’t have to do the watering system in the back yard among other things.  What I do have is a shift at the Archives from 8am to 4pm doing digitizing of archive records, Monday through Friday.

Another thing that has happened  - rather gradually or more secretively than I suspected -  is that all the things that are going on in the world and in our family are not part of my thought patterns.  Oh, yes, I still pray for Jacob to be healed if possible, pray for Sara to get through her school work ok and achieve her goal of a Masters Degree in Library Science, and I hope that the children will be resilient enough to be supportive of their mother as she tries to accomplish this, and yes, David is still on the road to moving, but all these things do not bother me.  I thought they would be a constant worry and threat to keeping me away from giving my whole attention to the digitizing, and they aren't.  It is amazing to note this happening in my life.
I know all these things are happening, but I am not worried about them.
This is a whole new experience for me.

Last leaves for the leaf peepers..................

Most of the leaves have fallen off the trees by this time of the year but I found the above tree and photographed the leaves before these also fall on the ground.
I have thoroughly enjoyed being out here to see the beautiful leaves

Two days worth of posts

The count of books that we have digitized is now up to 24 and each has well over 300 pages in them to digitize and some of them are up to almost 600 pages.  There are 5 books of indexes that we have digitized as well.  It may seem to be a dull and repetitive job to do this work, but the staff at the archives are most appreciative of our efforts to preserve the court records.  I have noticed that the quality of the paper has changed appreciably.  The older books of Oxford county which date from about 1827 have heavy paper that has a high rag content.  There is no bleed through of ink but in these later ones, dating about 1870+ the paper is thin and does not have high rag content, if at all, and there is bleed through of ink from the page before.  This casts a shadow over the writing on both sides and I hope that our efforts to digitize the books, yields a readable record for those who will eventually research in these court records.  The writing in the books remains a subject of excitement to me to see the uniform hand and the clarity of the penmanship.

From time to time words jump off the page – words like disgraceful, vicious, ungentlemanly, cruel, intoxicating liquor, libel, wanton, disregarded his/her marriage vows and went after lewd women/men and many other disquieting words.  I guess the parade of human misery is all written here for anyone to see.  It is quite surprising to me to see so many court cases where divorce was granted and the decision to leave the children with this parent or that parent after the ‘dirty washing of the marriage’ had been paraded for all to hear.  I guess my perception of the colonial era of this part of the country was idyllic with husband and wife working together to eke out a living in the harsh environment and that they worked for the good of the marriage and children.  However, it has become apparent that there is not much difference between the people of former generations and those of today – the same temptations exist and people succumb at approximately the same rate, but in today’s world, people do not get a jail term for adultery or for selling intoxicating liquor.

While Bill was at the YMCA I decided to go walking in the community because the weather was so nice.  Oh yes, it was cold, but the sun was shining and the opportunity to walk outside, rather than round the small track at the YMCA was what I wanted to do most.  As I left the dressing room at the Y, I saw a sign that said “Please no aerosols – Lungs at work here”.  This refers to not using aerosol perfumes and body sprays or deodorants etc.  Well, the sewerage plant for Augusta is right next to the YMCA and even though they have covers over the tanks, the sewer gas was very evident…………….and it spoiled the whole atmosphere.  I wonder if the YMCA objects to the smell of sewer gas and I also  wonder how the lungs respond to the malodorous gas?  My lungs are not too happy about having to breathe this stuff. There were young men practicing their football in the field next door and I wondered if they were affected by the sewer gas smell.    I guess not because they were running and jumping and chasing the ball which was quite wet from being on the ground that was still trying to dry out from the last snow storm.

I made a discovery as I was walking – the curbing in Augusta is made of blocks of granite.  Apparently there is a lot of granite in this area and it has been cut for use as foundations for homes, curbing for streets, decorative granite boulders for lawns (and to prevent cars from plowing into homes and front lawns if they slide off the road during winter), as well as the state capitol seems to be made of this pretty gray granite.  I noticed also that they seem to have used ground up granite in the paving materials for the sidewalks and roads.  Across the river from our apartment there is a granite pit.  At first I thought it was a boney pile similar to the boney piles of Pennsylvania.  They call it boney pile in Pa when in fact it is a slag pile made by separating the coal from the rock.  The granite machine works all day and it makes quite a racket.  At the side of the road just a little way from our apartment, one can see where they cut through granite to make way for the road and with just a thin layer of soil and grass on top of that.  They built the house close to the road and its base sits on this grass topped knoll, and it has granite blocks for its foundation.  Talk about building on a solid foundation!!!!!

The Occupy Augusta crowd seems to have settled in for the season.  They have strung up lights and they have a grill going t o cook their food and the city even supplied them with porta-potties.  I do wonder about their needs being met – physical, emotional, social, psychological.  They seem to have bonded into a sort of community and I wonder what will take place in their lives when their “camp-in” is over.  It is slated to be over on November 5.  At the disbanding of any group there are mental and relational gaps that develop and this affects the individual for the rest of their lives.  The same sort of thing happens at the end of a mission – for a specified length of time we are part of a group of missionaries and then at the end of the time, we are released and left to mull over what happened during the time of service and a feeling of loss of that camaraderie.  Group Process has always been an interesting topic for me and this particular group process of people who are protesting Wall Street etc. present a hazard to life in the park (their tents are blocking out the sun on the grass where they are living, and when they move, the grass will be quite dead and very yellow) and they are living there without heat except for the bottled gas  grill and vagrants are starting to gather with them.  Makes for an interesting mix and crime is sometimes the by-product of such a group.  In the local paper a lady was featured as being afraid to let her two small daughters out into her yard to play while this ragtag bunch was living in the park just across from her home.

Thursday, 3^rd November, 2011

We spent all day today in a missionary conference.  This is the first missionary conference Bill has ever been to and he did not know quite what to expect.  I, on the other hand, have been at many missionary conferences when I was on a mission in Japan and when I was Relief Society President in Johnstown, when it was my responsibility to provide the food for the missionaries at lunch time (and clean up afterwards.)  The sisters of the ward helped cook the food and set the tables and when the missionaries had eaten lunch and gone back into the meeting, our job was to clean up after them.  Today the ward members had prepared homemade Chicken Cordon Bleu, mashed potatoes, green beans and corn with gravy, and the members of the wards had provided cakes etc. for dessert.  Really delicious food.

The theme for the conference was “Lift where you stand” meaning that our job is to lift those around us to help them have better lives and find hope in the teachings of Jesus.  The churches around here have notice boards out front usually quoting a scripture or voicing a cute saying to catch your attention.  Recently a church in the city had a sign out front that said, “not praying for seven days tends to make one weak”.   The one that caught the attention of someone here said “Don’t pray about the Book of Mormon, That’s how they get you.”  I guess it is evident that religious intolerance has not gone to hibernate for the winter or left for warmer climates etc.  Joseph Smith was born in Vermont, up here in New England - two states west of Maine, and in 1820 the religious fervor was at fever pitch with ministers warmly (sometimes more than warmly) contending with each other for proselytes to their various systems of belief.  There is room for everyone in this world,  and it is a blessing that they have not tarred and feathered anyone for a while.  They used to tar and feather anyone who was in a different belief system than the run of the mill preacher’s circuit. 

We had a very good experience at the mission conference and it has bolstered our resolve to do our very very best to digitize the records which is our main focus while on this mission.

Planning and practicing will do the trick................for sure.

All it takes is planning – plus luck plus remembering that we no longer have the luxury of a garage for the car overnight.   The snow had pretty much melted but there was so much moisture in the air and it was below freezing that we went out to see that we had a white car and white windows and we were running late for being at the Archives and with one scraper between us (Bill said do not take the scraper we have at Prescott – we probably will not need it in Maine  - OK you can stop laughing now!)  We set the defroster going full blast but it takes time for the engine to heat up enough to send hot air into the interior of the car and into the defroster……………..so as soon as it looked like we could see out of the front and back window we jumped into the car and drove off to the archives – arrived there about 5 after 8am.

We found that one of the Rozewell external drives has arrived from Salt Lake City and that is exciting.  We loaded it into the computer to see what goodies they may have for us, and all it contained was a virus update.  At least it did not contain any requests to re-work some of the books.  That does not sound like fun at all.  I guess we are so paranoid about getting a re-work order that Bill was stressing out over the bleed through from the previous page to the one we were digitizing.  I tried to explain to him that we would not get a re-work if the main problem was bleed through because there is nothing we can do about that but he stressed out anyway.   At this rate, he will go home either totally bald or completely white haired.   It is not worth aging so suddenly for a bleed through problem.

At lunch we eat at the same time as Nina and Ann.  It is a delight to talk to these two ladies.  Today they were asking about Australia and I told them about eating Kangaroo Tail Soup.  They were amazed.  I did not tell them that I ate it on Quantas Airlines on my way to Hawaii in 1966.  My dad never went hunting Kangaroos so we never had ‘Roo meat to eat at home.   I did tell them about the man from Holsopple Pennsylvania who complained in the local paper about the “Australians killing off their national animal” but the thing he did not know is that there are times that it is declared open season in an attempt to cull the herds much like they cull the herd of Deer in Pennsylvania during the winter because if they did not do that, the deer would starve to death due to not enough food.  When the Kangaroo mobs get to be more than the land can support, they declare open season.  Culling the herds is better than the kangaroos starving to death due to lack of forage.   It is my guess that the man from Holsopple has not been further west than Pittsburgh and no further east than to Harrisburg.  Lets face it, Holsopple is not a bustling burgh but rather a collection of clapboard homes and a few pubs  and a few dogs and if you blink when you drive through it, you will miss is.

One would think that the Archives would not be a well attended place but it is.  The sign in sheet is filled every day.  They stress that the important date to remember is 1892 because that is when the state began to keep better records for the vital statistics.  They do have records dating back to the 17^th century.  Before 1892, records were kept at the town level and the information on the records was generally sparse.  However, for some people any record is better than none and any mention of the ancestor is very welcome, especially if one has been searching for that person for a long time.

I took my recipe book from the Universalist Unitarian church and it was a hit with the staff.  Ann knows the artist who did the still  life paintings for the book and Nina knows many of the people who contributed recipes.  I think it was a wonderful time for all and Jeff even copied the recipe for Moroccan Carrot soup because he spent time in Morocco when he was in the military.  I guess today was recipe day because Art came in and told us of his special recipe for pot roast.  He seemed pretty proud of his cooking abilities.

I went walking this afternoon on the northern part of our street.  I cannot believe the number of objects that are on the side of the road – it looks like parts of people’s cars just fall off here and there and they litter the road way.  While I was walking, in my mind I was reviewing the Sunday School lesson I am to present on this coming Sunday.  The lesson is on Eternal Marriage which is a doctrine peculiar to our church and performed in the temple.  The marriage bond when performed in the Temple seals both husband and wife together for time and all eternity.  This is made possible due to the Atonement made by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and the atonement takes a lifetime to begin to understand.  In the class I have some members of the church, some people who are investigating the church doctrines in preparation for being baptized and we also have some people who just cannot make up their mind if this church and its doctrines are for them.  My job is not to convince them of anything – they have to search out the truth and make up their own minds.  I have some older people and some just barely out of their teens and it is hard to gear a lesson to accommodate all comers.  So, I just have to present the concepts ‘as is’ and leave it up to the class members to listen or not.  Forgiveness is what we all seek and through the atonement we can receive forgiveness, and  first we need to forgive in order to receive forgiveness.  Faith in the Atonement of Christ precedes the miracle of forgiveness.  Our goal in life is to so live that we can be counted worthy to enter the temple and there participate in the blessings it offers to our lives.  Further, Verse 12 in the book of Alma chapter 7, it states “And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people: and he will take upon him their infirmities that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.   Verse 13 Now the Spirit  knoweth all things; nevertheless the Son of God suffereth according to the flesh that he might take upon him the sins of his people, that he might blot out their transgressions according to the power of his deliverance and now behold, this is the testimony which is in me.”  So the atonement takes over in helping all persons become clean to enter the temple.  For many people, to be free of their sins and transgressions, it is a long and arduous road, but once accomplished, they can enter the temple and participate in the blessing of eternal marriage.  I just hope that I can get this message across to them but not knowing what level of understanding they have, it presents a real challenge to me.

The lesson next week is even more difficult.  It is on the Law of Chastity.  In this day and age this is a concept that is laughed at and ignored completely but it is very much one of the basic laws of the church.  I just hope I can to a good job.

At the archives, we have done almost 5,000 images in two days.  I guess we are getting more used to the process of the dCam-X camera and system for digitizing.  I am still in awe of the writing in the books and the fact that they are well over 100 years old and still in good shape is testament to the wonderful book-bindng job that was done to keep all the papers together.  They do not do such wonderful bookbinding in this day and age.  However, I am finding that the paper they are using in these books, circa. 1890-1892 is of poor quality compared with the paper in the earlier books circa. 1830 etc.  I can tell this because there is more bleed through from the ink on the other side of the paper.  In these present books there are some Rorschach blots…………..fun to think what they could represent.