Hong Kong

It has been a very busy week (but I guess we say that every week). Mom and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. We continued our celebrating throughout the week as you will soon see.  But first, the work. Mom spent the  bulk of her week doing the organizing and paperwork for nine return missionaries from Cambodia to go to the temple in Manilla. She was up to her eye balls getting everything put together on time. I spent much of my time working on real estate issues in India. I also spent all day Saturday (and into the evening) working through legal problems associated with running the patron housing for the Hong Kong temple. This is the housing used by groups throughout Asia when they come to the HK temple. I was figuring out registration and permitting issues associated with running a "guest house" next to the temple under HK law.  Well, on to the pictures. Mom and I celebrated our anniversary with a dinner at the Butcher's Club. (AJ and Kels, this is what is left ...

 Dear Family, How are all my loved ones at home? We saw a darling little girl tonight on our walk home from the park. She was probably Violet's age and she was posing for her dad while he took pictures of her with the skyline in the background. It was the happiest thing to watch, but it made me miss all my posers at home! It's been another great week here in Hong Kong full of assignments and the stress that comes with them. It was my turn to speak in the Everyday Branch and speaking in church is always stressful even if the congregation is small. They don't hold meetings on Mondays and on Tuesday I practiced, reviewed and prepared only to get bumped at the very last minute because there was a visiting General Authority who wanted to speak that day! Of course this was a great blessing for the women who were overwhelmed that someone like that would want to visit them. They took tons of pictures and couldn't stop smiling.  I don't generally get too anxious over speakin...

  Dear Family,  This was another very busy week. We worked every day till 6:30 or 7 pm. Both Greg and Steve (the two Area Legal Counsel) have been out of town the last week and a half and it seems that a lot of the extra work has found its way onto my plate. But no complaints from me. I really enjoy what I'm doing.  Even with all that I visited a professional table tennis (definitely not referred to as ping pong) store this week. I couldn't believe all of the different paddles, table tennis shoes, clothes, balls, etc. Paddles ranged in price from $25 to $500 or $600 USD each. Incredible! Another one of the missionaries here has befriended one of our Chinese neighbors. He and his wife and young daughter are from Beijing and they love to play table tennis. We've now all become friends and table tennis is in our future. So we are serious about this. We start taking lessons (once a week) from the owner of the store next week. He is a grand champion whose dad was the national ...